Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2020
The idea of a “new gilded age” depends on a model of history in which the tension between inequality and solidarity takes the form of a binary oscillation (often resting on a positivist social scientific form of reasoning), in turn creating the appearance of basic similarity between separate unequal periods. Under this view, however, it is difficult to make sense of the fundamentally different origins of inequality prevailing in 1890 and 2010. Instead, this article argues, historians ought to treat history cumulatively—that is, historically—finding the origins of inequality not in the previous unequal period, but in the previous solidaristic period, and tracing the connections between one period and another rather than viewing them as ideal-typical opposites.
1 For a very early occurrence, see the 1981 editorial in The New Republic opposing Reagan's tax program: “The New Gilded Age,” The New Republic, Aug. 15, 1981, 5–6. A landmark in social science is Goldin, Claudia and Margo, Robert A., “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 107 (Feb. 1992), 1–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The New Yorker published a collection of essays entitled The New Gilded Age in 2001, but it did not contain the word “inequality”—its contents described wealth, but largely ignored its concomitant poverty. Remnick, David, ed., The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at an Age of Affluence (New York: Random House, 2000)Google Scholar. Similarly in 1995, Thomas Frank sounded off in The Baffler against the “new Gilded Age,” but the critique targeted capitalism's supposed corruption of the culture industries (Rupert Murdoch as the new William Randolph Hearst, etc.), rather than the widening social divide. The essay is reprinted in Frank, Thomas and Weiland, Matt, eds., Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age—Salvos from the Baffler (New York: Norton, 1997), 23–28Google Scholar.
2 Alan Greenspan, “Income Inequality: Issues and Policy Options,” Aug. 28, 1998, at symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, WY; Posner, Richard A., “Equality, Wealth, and Political Stability,” The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 13 (Oct. 1997), 344–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. James Livingston surveys this history in “The Myth of a Second Gilded Age,” Chronicle Review, Jan. 31, 2016.
3 See for example Ehrenreich, Barbara, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 216Google Scholar.
4 Paul Krugman, “For Richer,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 20, 2002. Krugman's essay cites a then-recent book by Kevin Phillips, which used the phrase “new Gilded Age” to describe the 1980s and 1990s. See Phillips, Kevin, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 147Google Scholar. Krugman's stature as a respected social scientist, however, made him the more effective popularizer than Phillips, an idiosyncratic, if perceptive, former Republican operative turned progressive social critic. Krugman gives the argument full expression in his The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: Norton, 2007)Google Scholar.
5 Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal, 177.
6 Bartels, Larry M., Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1–2Google Scholar. Robert Dahl's “pluralistic democracy” of 1950s New Haven, of course, was a center of intense racial segregation and hierarchy. See Jackson, Mandi Isaacs, Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
7 Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Race between Education and Technology: The Evolution of U.S. Educational Wage Differentials, 1890 to 2005,” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper no. 12984 (Mar. 2007), 1.
8 See for example Massey, Douglas S., Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007)Google Scholar; John Edwards, “The Two Americas Problem,” The Atlantic, Nov. 2007.
9 Cowie, Jefferson, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 10–12Google Scholar.
10 Howell, David R., The Great Laissez-Faire Experiment: American Inequality and Growth from an International Perspective (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, Dec. 2013), 19–20Google Scholar.
11 Cowie, The Great Exception, 16.
12 Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal, 182.
13 Cowie, The Great Exception, 220. For an alternative model, see Fraser, Nancy, “Behind Marx's Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism,” New Left Review 86 (Mar.–Apr. 2014), 55–72Google Scholar.
14 Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 16–17, 34, 53CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
15 Ibid., 442.
16 Cowie, The Great Exception, 9, 232.
17 Sewell, William H. Jr. “The Temporalities of Capitalism,” Socio-Economic Review 6 (July 2008), 518CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Cowie, The Great Exception, 29, 220.
19 Ibid., 222.
20 Ibid., 223.
21 Key readings among many include Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944)Google Scholar; Moore, Barrington Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Mayer, Arno, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981)Google Scholar; Riley, Dylan, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)Google Scholar: Traverso, Enzo, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945 (New York: Verso, 2016)Google Scholar.
22 Althusser, Louis, For Marx, trans. Brewster, Ben (London: Verso, 2005), 104Google Scholar.
23 Sewell, “The Temporalities of Capitalism,” 519–21.
24 Postone, Moishe, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 294CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Fraser, Steve, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2015), 11Google Scholar.
26 Didem Tüzemen, “Why Are Prime-Age Men Vanishing from the Labor Force?” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Review 103 (First Quarter 2018), 5–30.
27 Brenner, Robert, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn (London: Verso, 2006)Google Scholar; Tooze, Adam, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018)Google Scholar.
28 See Field, Alexander James, “Land Abundance, Interest/Profit Rates, and Nineteenth-Century American and British Technology,” Journal of Economic History 43 (June 1983), 405–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maggor, Noam, “To Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists: Eastern Money, Frontier Populism, and the Politics of Market-Making in the American West,” American Historical Review 122 (Feb. 2017), 55–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Benanav, Aaron and Clegg, John, “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Endnotes 2 (Apr. 2010), 20–51Google Scholar; Summers, Lawrence H., “U.S. Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound,” Business Economics 49 (2014), 65–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Murakawa, Naomi, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Hinton, Elizabeth, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Roberts, Dorothy, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1997)Google Scholar; Mittelstadt, Jennifer, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chappell, Marisa, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Self, Robert O., All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill & Wang, 2012)Google Scholar; Cooper, Melinda, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2017)Google Scholar.
32 Sugrue, Thomas J., The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Self, Robert O., American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
33 Klein, Jennifer, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
34 Windham, Lane, Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)Google Scholar.
35 Winant, Gabriel, “A Place to Die: Nursing Home Abuse and the Political Economy of the 1970s,” Journal of American History 105 (June 2018), 96–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 Krippner, Greta R., Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Phillips-Fein, Kim, Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017)Google Scholar.
37 See Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
38 Cowie, The Great Exception, 29.
