Jackson Lears’s lifelong quarrel with the meritocracy that produced him
Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians: The Off-Modern in American History by Jackson Lears, edited by Charlie Riggs. Yale University Press, 2024. 504 pp., $35.00
This book is a revealing document of the historical profession as it’s played out at the elite level. Jackson Lears is an academic aristocrat with degrees from the University of Virginia, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Yale. He is a longtime professor at Rutgers, a major state university. He is the author of five books, all by prestigious trade publishers and brokered by A-list literary representation. He is a commentariat member in good standing at The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and other highbrow publications.
This volume of previously published work, issued by Yale University Press, is not of a commercial genre, but Lears had access to subvention funds dating in one case back to the eighteenth century. His has been a career of the sort that ambitious and talented graduate students—like his protégé, Charlie Riggs, who edited this collection—dream about. And, for the most part, only dream: The odds of getting a tenure-track job at an R1 university, much less access to platforms like these, are now about as likely as careers as a professional athlete or movie star. This is not to say that Lears is undeserving of the honors he has received. He’s an intellectual thoroughbred whose attainments are hardly accidental—even if, as his landmark study of gambling Something for Nothing affirms, outcomes always involve chance.
And yet for all these achievements, Lears has occupied a somewhat heterodox position in the academy. Yes, he holds a prestigious Board of Governors Professorship at Rutgers, but New Brunswick is no Madison, Ann Arbor, or Berkeley. He does not have the outsized presence in the profession of a predecessor like Lawrence Levine, or the mainstream media prominence of a successor like Jill Lepore. He is perhaps best understood as a cultural historian’s cultural historian—a wraithlike figure with sharp edges, whose work is admired more than cherished. This book is a useful compendium of it.
There’s a bracingly quarrelsome air about Lears’s oeuvre, most of which is directed at the technocratic elite and the culture of self-actualization that it spawned. The arc of his work spans the emergence of this culture in the late nineteenth century to its fullest flowering in the Baby Boom generation, of which he (born in 1947) is an elder. Lears has been preoccupied by—perhaps more accurately exasperated by—a dialectic he has explored in a series of domains, namely the ways a procession of figures has rebelled against this elite only to find their handiwork accommodating to it, resulting in a state in which “the cultural individualism of the left mirrored the economic individualism on the right.”
So it is that aesthetes like William Sturgis Bigelow or Van Wyck Brooks sought alternatives to industrial capitalism, ironically paving the way for a therapeutic sensibility that itself could be commodified. Lears explores this with great insight in “Get Happy!!!” the final piece in this book, whose title is an allusion the Elvis Costello’s sardonically named 1980 album of the same name.
Art critic Clement Greenberg led a movement of elliptical resistance to consumerism, only to have that ethos co-opted by Madison Avenue. Gambling, which for much of American history offered the promise of subversion from the iron cage of the work ethic, ends up commercialized in Las Vegas. Lears availed himself of the opportunity to write gigantic book reviews in places like TNR and NYRB, which allowed him to rehearse ideas that would later end up in No Place of Grace (1981), Fables of Abundance (1994), Something for Nothing (2003), Rebirth of a Nation (2009) and Animal Spirits (2023), all of which take up different facets of this theme. Lears is also the co-editor with Richard Wightman Fox of two landmark anthologies, The Culture of Consumption (1983) and The Power of Culture (1993).
The relatively long gestation of these projects is indicative of their craftsmanship: Lears wields his rapier adeptly. Editor Riggs makes a valuable contribution in his foreword by characterizing his mentor’s work as “off-modern”—a sensibility that strives to break outside the modern/anti-modern dialectic in a quest to locate authentic alternatives to modern life. The book’s twenty-two essays, spanning 1977 to 2021, are subdivided into the conjurers, cranks, provincials, and antediluvians of the title—iconoclasts whom Lears, sometimes with difficulty, finds ways to celebrate.
They are a motley crew: Lears’s stable of heroes includes William Jennings Bryan, Henry Adams, and Seymour Hersh. But his arguments are always careful and his profiles intricate, in part because he is well aware of, say, Bryan’s racism and Adams’s antisemitism. He chisels his portraits pragmatically, foregrounding what he regards as most admirable—and salvageable—in their lives and work. One 1998 omnibus review makes an avowed defense of nostalgia (or, perhaps more accurately criticizes those who use the term as a political tool). Though it can sometimes be hard to imagine this gallery furnishing the basis of a coherent, living oppositional tradition, Lears would surely argue this says more about us than it does about them. In any case, he’s always on the lookout for magic in the most regimented machines.
Lears is at his most provocative—and entertaining—when he rains his scorn down on those he regards as the worst personifications of the modern temper. A product of the Vietnam generation (he left the Navy as a conscientious objector in 1968, a tale he tells in the introduction of the book), Lears belongs to an intellectual lineage that includes William James and William Appleman Williams, as well as an antiwar counterculture whose self-indulgent excesses he’s willing to overlook in the fight against the imperial tradition in American life that stretches from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama, whom he regards as a major disappointment.
At his most scabrous, Lears attacks figures like Sam Harris (whose atheism functions as a form of bigotry that justified disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan), Anne Applebaum (a similar apologist for foreign adventurism in Ukraine), and George Packer (whom he regards as an armchair warrior, which seems a little unfair given the first-hand reporting Packer did in his 2005 book The Assassin’s Gate).
He has little patience for the crudities of Donald Trump but understands the visceral appeal of America First, both as a manifestation of an isolationist strain in American culture that he regards as too long dismissed, and as part of a long tradition of resistance to a Best and Brightest elite that can scarcely hide its contempt for the masses in its parlance of expertise and merit.
But even putting aside the somewhat quixotic quality of Lears’s vision, there are times when he seems out of touch. Though he occasionally expresses conventionally feminist sentiments, his subjects are almost entirely white and male; his avowed leftism can seem like inverted snobbery rather than exhibiting intimacy with the working class, a sensibility reminiscent of Gore Vidal. Lears has relatively little to say about the race and gender controversies that have raged in our time—certainly nothing that would trouble readers of The Nation, to which he has contributed—and rarely strays far from the precincts of the elite culture with which he has such a vexed relationship.
A 2000 essay on the state of the academy, one that frames a left-right divide that has not fundamentally changed in the quarter-century since, sidesteps ideological conflict in favor of making an all-too-familiar faculty complaint about administrative fecklessness and ineptitude. Lears repeatedly cites warmongers at their keyboards; amid his rages against various managerial states, you find yourself wondering if he’s actually run something larger than an academic department.
Given that he’s almost seventy-seven-years-old, that’s not likely to happen. There’s an inevitably valedictory air about Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials and Antediluvians that documents a worldview that is itself rapidly becoming an artifact. But Lears deserves appreciation on the terms he has spent a half-century articulating: the patrician as populist. There are a number of times in this book in which he tosses bon mots that could easily be applied to him. He ends a clear-eyed essay on Christopher Lasch, a kindred spirit, this way: “There is still nourishment to be had from his ideas. He was one of the most original and courageous thinkers in the history of American social thought.”
And so too, Jackson Lears. Thank you.
Jim Cullen teaches history at Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich Connecticut. His books include The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation and Bridge & Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century.
Really nice review (though clearly you’re no mathematician; that’s ok, I don’t come to these articles expecting math).