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Canada and the United States
Save for Christopher Lasch, in his masterful and aggravating The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an
Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), it seems that no
one has thought very deeply about the 1970s. Most of
what has been proffered are pop culture studies that
treat the period as an interim decade between its more
activist predecessor and successor. Viewed as a decade
without a philosophy, the 1970s have been marginalized
to the point of trivialization. Thus, Edward D. Berkowitz’s book was met with some excitement by this reviewer. I hoped that it would, as was promised in the
introduction, “contain more details about politics, economics and public policy than do previous accounts of
this period” (p. 10). Alas, it does not. This book, the
newest addition to the ranks of trivial treatments of the
period, is a disappointment.
Berkowitz is not without some game. He resurrects
health care as a major concern of the 1970s, and his
detail on this issue is the best of any subject in his book.
He does, on occasion, offer provoking conclusions, but
he stumbles in their articulation, offering them more in
the manner of poking with a sharp stick. While I found
myself innately disagreeing with Berkowitz (Watergate
being paralleled to McCarthyism; “the economy was
the factor that gave the seventies its distinctive character” [p. 54]), at least he mentions significant phenomena.
However, the negatives found in this book far outweigh the positives. Richard Nixon’s domestic policy is
virtually ignored. Watergate is treated as nothing more
than the break-in, with the crimes of the Nixon administration going unnoticed. There are only four and a
half pages on Nixon and Vietnam in a book on the
1970s. There is no depth of analysis of Gerald Ford, or
a serious use of the available literature on his presidency—indeed, there is nothing on his domestic policy,
save for a brief treatment of the New York City fiscal
crisis. Jimmy Carter fares a bit better, but even this
treatment is trivialized by more space being given to the
president’s encounter with a killer rabbit than to his
domestic policy. In terms of popular culture, movies are
synopsized without any real analysis. With the exceptions noted above, Berkowitz strains when he attempts
to generalize or draw conclusions about the decade,
failing to offer either evidence or thoughtful discussion
of several key themes. Indeed, errant conclusions like
his assertion that Henry Kissinger experienced “none of
the taint that other Nixon staffers received from Watergate” (p. 35), his labeling of the gay rights movement
as “undoubtedly reflect[ing] a view of life from the relatively rarified vantage point of Manhattan’s upperWest Side” (p. 149), and his observation that “Italians
played better than African-Americans at the box office
in the seventies” (p. 191) will be challenged by every
thoughtful reader.
As important as its historiographical limitations is
the fact that this book is not particularly well written.
Sections are short, choppy, and uneven; paragraphs are
massive; typos abound. This is particularly true in the
several sections on economics—according to the au-
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thor, the foundation upon which the decade rested. His
treatment of the dismal science mirrors the epithet:
they are dry, wordy, and completely inaccessible to the
generalist. Berkowitz does attempt to engage the
reader in other sections of the book, but his trivial
phraseology, such as describing Nixon’s leaving Washington in 1974 as “like the Wizard of Oz . . . [he] got in
a flying machine and returned to civilian life” all too
often falls flat (p. 30).
Should you be an instructor looking for a book on
the 1970s to supplement your class discussion of the
decade, look elsewhere (truth in advertising—I have series edited such a book on the 1970s). Should you be a
specialist looking for well-written, thought-provoking
observations on an underexplored time in American
history, re-read Lasch.
JOHN ROBERT GREENE
Cazenovia College
HOWARD BRICK. Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a
New Society in Modern American Thought. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 324. $39.95.
Howard Brick’s two previous books are Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s
(1998) and Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual
Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in
the 1940s (1986). His purpose in the book under review
is to remind us that capitalism is not a timeless universal. He wants us to remember that many social scientists in the United States and in other modern nations
from around 1900 until the 1970s saw capitalism as a
momentary phase in world history that was being superseded by a more humane society. These economists,
political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists
were prophets, therefore, of a “postcapitalist” society.
Although influenced by Karl Marx, they rejected his belief in the need for violent revolution. They also envisioned a new world with both public and private property.
Brick’s book, then, is an intellectual history of a postcapitalist vision that almost disappeared in the 1990s.
For him the crucial weakness of this tradition was its
faith in spontaneous transformation that did not require political organization and a systematic plan of
transition. Nevertheless his book is a labor of love. Postcapitalism, for him, provides a usable past in spite of its
weakness. And so he declares, “For those of us who
wish to turn the table on the capitalist triumphalism
that grips U.S. social and political life at the end of the
twentieth century, it is useful to survey the heritage of
the postcapitalist vision in hopes of building on its insights and moving ahead to a real, rather than imagined,
transition beyond capitalism” (p. 249).
In his introduction Brick discusses the development
around 1900 of a transnational concept that capitalism
is a time-bound phase of world history. But he does not
place this concept in dialogue with the nationalisms that
were so powerful in the bourgeois countries at that
time. Most political and intellectual leaders in each
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Reviews of Books
bourgeois nation assumed the autonomy of that nation.
It was the purpose of each nation’s historians to demonstrate the isolation of their homelands. It would be
heresy for any academic historian to suggest that his or
her country was part of a transnational pattern. Each
bourgeois historian’s nation was the end of history.
It was the heresy of Marx to deny that bourgeois nations were autonomous and eternal and instead to claim
that they existed within a transnational and time-bound
capitalist experience. Brick discusses how a variety of
social scientists in the United States participated, between World War I and World War II, in projecting this
postcapitalist vision. However, he does not point out
the continuing nationalism of most historians and literary scholars, whose vision of an isolated United States
did not weaken until the 1940s.
In his analysis of social scientists from World War I
to World War II, Brick does not discuss the possibility
that these academics might hold simultaneous, contradictory commitments to both internationalism and nationalism. Institutional economists, for example, borrowed concepts from anthropologists to criticize the
belief of laissez-faire economists in an autonomous
individual making only rational decisions. In their criticism of what they saw as the false universalism of laissez-faire economics, the institutional economists insisted that the marketplace was defined and sustained
by institutions that were particular to their nation.
In his subsequent chapters on the 1940s and 1950s,
Brick continues to underestimate the significance of nationalism. President Franklin D. Roosevelt defined
World War II as a revolution in which Americans renounced their commitment to a national economy and
embraced an international economy. This moment
marked the highpoint of optimism among the social scientists discussed by Brick. Now the transition from an
old competitive to a new cooperative world seemed to
be taking place. But what these social scientists failed
to see was that this commitment to internationalism by
political and economic leaders was really to international capitalism with the United States as its political
and intellectual center. The national destiny was to
spread American capitalism to the entire world. Capitalism was not the past; it was the future. When Ronald
Reagan became president in 1980, social scientists finally realized that their postcapitalist prophecies had
failed.
This richly informative intellectual history reminds
us that the social sciences have been segregated from
the humanities. It also reminds us of the even greater
segregation of the humanities and social sciences from
the physical sciences. Brick does not inform us, therefore, that while criticism of capitalism seems to have
reached a high point among social scientists in the
1940s and has declined since then, criticism of capitalism by physical scientists has been growing. But unlike
social scientists who, while critical of capitalism, accepted the capitalist faith in perpetual prosperity, physical scientists reject the promise of such plenitude. They
deny the possibility of endless economic growth be-
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cause they see a nature that is unstable and that has
limits. Because of those limits capitalism will collapse.
It will be interesting to see if social scientists critical of
capitalism will enter into dialogue with these physical
scientists.
DAVID W. NOBLE
University of Minnesota
CARIBBEAN AND LATIN AMERICA
SUSAN KELLOGG. Weaving the Past: A History of Latin
America’s Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press.
2005. Pp. x, 338. Cloth $74.00, paper $19.95.
In this book, Susan Kellogg masterfully weaves together
Latin American indigenous women’s threads of energy,
of ambition, of heartbreak, and of silence, creating a
highly important—if often torn—quilt of indigenous
women’s lives. The subtlety of the quilt can be found in
its multiple “patches.” In fact, Kellogg’s secondary research into a very broad range of mainly anthropological studies stretches throughout Latin America, although she mainly focuses on indigenous women’s
experiences in Mexico and Peru during the colonial period.
During that era, Kellogg tells us, Latin American
women engaged in numerous tasks, ranging from weaving, to selling pulque, to working in or even (certainly
very occasionally) owning mines. Everywhere (and here
Kellogg’s geographic range is astonishing) indigenous
women found themselves relegated to positions of relatively little social regard, virtual public invisibility. Perhaps the occupation most revealing of the cultures’ limited regard for female health and welfare was carrying
all manner of goods. Although Kellogg does not comment on this, in many places indigenous women’s labor
proved structurally crucial to the functioning of Latin
American societies.
Kellogg’s book also focuses with great subtlety on indigenous women’s abilities to experience and at times
overcome centuries of mistreatment. Yet on the whole
her work reminds us that indigenous women, more than
men, experienced poverty—poverty so serious that
women went hungry far more often than men. Although
Kellogg does not express it quite this way, her findings
amply reveal that men could never be certain that
women would not resist their demands. To diminish
such resistance, indigenous men, themselves impoverished and mistreated, often brutalized their wives or
their girlfriends.
In this otherwise very fine book, Kellogg specifically
avoids entering the intellectual worlds where scholars
have developed gender theories. She does so, perhaps,
because she wishes to include multiple approaches to
gender. Perhaps, too, she remains unaware, as many
scholars continue to be, of gender theories developed
through complex and physically dangerous ethnohistorical work. These theories nonetheless enable historical actors, researchers, and writers to experience,
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