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Contents
Background
Content
Key Terms
Dialogue
References
External Links
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Background
American cultural historian T.J. Jackson Lears is a professor of history at Rutgers University (New Jersey). A prolific author, Lears also serves as editor in chief of Raritan, a journal directed toward the “common reader in everyone” which engages a variety of cultural texts. Lears’ first book, No Place of Grace examines the roots of American antimodernism in the years 1880-1920. Lears’ interest in this project was sparked by a contradiction he perceived between the popular portrayal of this time period as an “age of confidence” and an undercurrent of doubt, anxiety and despair for which he found evidence in a diverse range of primary sources. No Place of Grace demonstrates Lears’ interest in interpreting American history through a variety of disciplines including religion, anthropology, psychology and sociology.
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Content
In No Place of Grace, Lears argues that a sense of anxiety, weightlessness and helplessness emerged among American intellectual elite in the face of a rapidly developing industrial capitalist society in the late nineteenth century. Provoked by an economy increasingly focused on maximum productivity and personal achievement and the resulting reduction of nature and self to mere objects of manipulation, antimodernists lamented the loss of a sense of authentic meaning and resisted the tendency toward rationalization and secularization.
At the center of Lears’ argument is a curious irony largely unexplored by many prior accounts of this time period: antimodern resistance among the educated bourgeoisie unintentionally hastened and deepened precisely that which it protested. Against the common portrayal of antimodernists as mere escapists, Lears demonstrates the physical, moral and spiritual longings at play among these dissenters and the way in which they served as a complex matrix of both protest and accommodation. In their quest to recover meaningful experience, ambivalent antimodernists creatively appropriated selective aspects and symbols of the past (turning to medieval and Oriental cultures, the arts and crafts movement, the martial ideal, among others) to quell their individual internal struggles in such a way that served to ease the cultural transition to modernity rather than pose a significant challenge to it and, in the process, unconsciously solidified their own domination and planted a firm foundation for a therapeutic consumer culture which endures to the present day.
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Key Terms
cultural hegemony
weightlessness
determinism
therapeutic worldview
rationalization
neurasthenia
soft/hard militarism
ambivalence
repression
domestic realism
embourgeoisement
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Dialogue
Three figures and concepts are particularly crucial to Lears’ project. Max Weber’s concept of rationalization enables Lears to explore the profound longing for liberation among the intellectual elite. Sigmund Freud’s understanding of ambivalence and repression allows Lears to examine the tensions at work in the antimodern psyche. Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony introduces a complex understanding of the way in which power is sustained not only through force, but also through garnering loyalty to a set of common values.
Lears’ central methodological aim is to read Gramsci in light of Freud: to demonstrate the way in which changes in cultural hegemony are not always the result of deliberate strategies among the dominant class but are often far from conscious and produce unintended results (xvii).
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References
Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.