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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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