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Published by EH.NET (April 2003) 
 
Robert William Fogel, _The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of 
Egalitarianism_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 383 pp. $25 
(hardcover), ISBN: 0-226-25662-6; $19 (paperback), ISBN: 0-226-25663-4. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by John Murray, Department of Economics, University of 
Toledo. <[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
It is probably best to think of this book as a wide-ranging, speculative 
think-piece. It is not a finely honed argument for a particular explanation 
of historical patterns. Instead, Robert William Fogel proposes to 
synthesize a wide range of historical analyses -- including much of his own 
work -- to accompany the historical development of social policy. On a very 
basic level, Fogel emphasizes the importance of religion as a causal factor 
in historical analysis, and his attempt to synthesize political, 
technological, and health related issues is admirable. Sound impossibly 
large? It is and it isn't. In the end, this reader was not persuaded that 
there were in fact four Great Awakenings or that the fourth was coherent 
enough to influence social policy. In a way, though, that may be beside the 
point. I was in awe of the range of evidence at Fogel's command, and I 
found the tack of his argument engaging. Since this book offers an explicit 
use of history in the service of policy analysis, perhaps its success 
should be determined by whether the reader accepts the importance of 
history for current policy making and if the reader goes on to wonder how, 
in particular, popular understandings of what the good life is lead to 
particular policies to enable more people to follow that good life. 
 
It might be easiest to break the book down into roughly three component 
parts: the religious history, the economic history, and the policy 
recommendations. The religious history, while provocative, is built on 
shifting sands. The notion of Great Awakenings around which this book is 
organized has had a varied career. The term, Great Awakening, is a 
construct of a much later period, coined, it appears, by Joseph Tracy in 
his book _The Great Awakening_ of 1841 (Jon Butler, _Awash in a Sea of 
Faith_, Harvard University Press, 1990, pp. 164-165). It generally is taken 
to refer to revivals associated with the 1739-42 preaching tour of the 
magnetic George Whitefield. But what exactly happened to deserve the term 
"Awakening" is unclear. The sociologists of religion Roger Finke and Rodney 
Stark illustrate in _The Churching of America_ (Rutgers University Press, 
1992, pp. 87-108) that the success of Whitefield's revivals was a function 
of how hard his advance people worked to stir up interest. That is, the 
people were not slumbering in spiritual terms and then awakened as much as 
Whitefield in particular shook them awake. The success of his labors was 
less due to the spiritual _Zeitgeist_ than to one man's vision -- much the 
same could be said for Charles Grandison Finney's preaching during the 
Second Great Awakening. 
 
And here the difficulties of periodization emerge -- difficulties familiar 
to scholars who have struggled with the idea of identifiable cycles in 
history, whether financial or religious. How do we define the beginning, 
the end, and the content of an Awakening? Fogel employs William 
McLaughlin's typology (_Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform_, University of 
Chicago Press, 1978), but it is never clear to this reader what demarcated 
the First from the Second Great Awakening, especially if the greatest 
single revival of all was the Cane Ridge revival of 1801 in central 
Kentucky, right in the middle chronologically. (Unless you count that as 
the beginning of the Second Great Awakening, which some scholars do.) But 
whether these were cycles, bumps, or the most publicized events in the long 
term, monotonic growth of American Christianity is never quite resolved in 
this book. 
 
Theological differences between the first two Awakenings seem tiny compared 
to those between them and the last two Awakenings, which, it should be 
noted, are not standardly recognized among religious historians. The 
difference between the second and third Awakening is critical because the 
gap, in Fogel's formulation, is entirely due to a kind of secularization 
that is also not resolved here. As the Awakenings cycled through their 
lifespan, one trend that should be obvious is that the Third had little to 
do with religion, at least in the sense of human awareness and response to 
God, and the Fourth seems to be entirely concerned with what might best be 
called social work. Why they would all be grouped under the rubric 
"Awakening" is not really clear. The religious examples used as evidence, 
by the time of the Third Great Awakening, consist largely of elite efforts 
at social reform conducted almost independently of the more classically 
Christian questions of the first two Awakenings. The result, I believe, is 
a misreading of what comprised much of American Christianity of the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ironically, for a book on 
egalitarianism, political concerns inferred from the commentary of the 
marginally Christian elite of the later nineteenth century probably did not 
reflect the interests of most of those in the pews. That is not to say 
there was no relation between the secularized, nominal Christianity of the 
elites and political reform because there probably was, to the extent that 
it was those elites who had the most political influence. 
 
The economic history enlisted by Fogel to elaborate his argument is clearly 
presented and well known to those who have kept up with the astonishing 
range of his work over the last two decades. He makes entirely reasonable 
hypotheses regarding the way exogenous shocks, often due to new 
technologies, can disrupt ordinary politics and allow for the influence of 
new, reformist policy proposals. And one source of such new proposals, he 
notes, are these cycles of spiritual activities. Thus, he motivates the 
reader to see the importance of  
his policy proposals for the present and foreseeable future by describing 
research by himself, Dora Costa, and joint work by both, as suggesting much 
longer life spans than we now enjoy. These additional years will likely be 
lived by many who are in a position to change current policy, and so he 
offers his proposals as a way to get ready for what will likely be one of 
those exogenous processes that will soon change the way we all live. 
 
A particular concern for Fogel is the political importance of 
egalitarianism. Essentially, he seems to be saying, the vision of J. M. 
Keynes that some day the economic problem would be solved and we could 
concentrate on the question of how to be fully human, is close at hand. In 
average terms, income is so high in the West that the economic problem is 
nearly solved -- subject to problems with distribution of that income. The 
question of becoming fully human, then, is somewhat merged with the 
distributional question to produce the issue of variation in the ability to 
deal with the human condition. That ability, summarizes Fogel, is produced 
by one's "spiritual" resources. While these are unequally distributed now, 
he proposes that they should be more equally distributed in the not too 
distant future. These spiritual assets seem to be only tangentially 
religious. They are rather more closely akin to pop-psychology concepts as 
self-esteem and to deeper issues of "resilience," which psychologists use 
to describe the ability of some people to withstand psychic blows 
(unemployment, death in the family, and so on) and continue functioning at 
a high level. (For a widely cited recent review, see Luthar, Cicchetti, and 
Becker, "The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines 
for Future Work," _Child Development_ 71 (May-June 2000), 543-562). 
 
Let's assume that these spiritual resources are unequally distributed, and 
surely they are. Some people cope under pressure, some thrive, and others 
crack. That would seem to be one of those unfairnesses of life -- the 
distribution of burdens in this vale of tears is not equal, either. But 
Fogel's policy recommendations to redistribute these resources are on the 
one hand provocative but on the other almost certainly unworkable. If 
spiritual resources are a form of human capital, we might speculate that 
there is no depreciation of them over time, so that they can be accumulated 
and transmitted by those who have to those who haven't at relatively low 
cost. That is, in one of Fogel's formulations, the elderly who have some 
perspective on life can volunteer to pass on to young folk who lack 
confidence in the future how to accept some of their troubles, how to deal 
with others, and as they say, the wisdom to know the difference. In fact, 
Alcoholics Anonymous would seem to be a model for some of what Fogel 
proposes. This is intriguing, but if volunteer work is to be converted into 
a kind of policy, why it isn't happening already -- is this a social policy 
version of the twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk? 
 
Other programs would require an expansion of government. A suggested source 
of such spiritual resources is higher education. One way to even out the 
problem of maldistribution is to get more young people into college. The 
problem here is that a defining characteristic of the American system of 
higher education is that, essentially, the bar is set so low for 
admissions, curriculum, and costs, is that nearly everyone who already 
wants to go to college can do so. If we already are at a Pareto optimum, I 
am not convinced that coaxing even more young people away from low-skilled 
labor, the military, trade apprenticeships, or general slacking into 
college would do much for their spiritual resources. To take this a step 
further, it seems to be that the particular content of a university 
education that might be expected to influence the student's lifelong 
worldview most directly and positively are the liberal arts, and it is 
these subjects that marginal students tend to shy away from. 
 
So this reader is left skeptical about the wisdom of Fogel's particular 
recommendations. The idea of spiritual resources that do not explicitly 
involve religion seems to be all well and no water, and he nearly gets the 
critical nature of the traditional family without explicitly advocating 
pro-family policies. Still, to get to that skepticism I needed to think 
over some big questions that Fogel, to his great credit, doesn't shy away 
from addressing. What do needy people need most, and what do they want? The 
notion of spiritual resources may be a valuable approach to the interior 
psychology of particular exterior circumstances. Why are people at the 
bottom rung of a rich society there, and what can we do about it? I don't 
know how to solve this problem, but if someone asked me, I would direct him 
or her to Robert Fogel's book to begin assessing what possible approaches 
might look like. 
 
 
John E. Murray is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of 
Toledo. His articles on religion in nineteenth century America have 
appeared in _Bulletin of the History of Medicine_, _Explorations in 
Economic History_, and _Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion_. 
 
(Dr. Murray graciously agreed to take on this review after the original 
reviewer was unable to complete the assignment.) 
 
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