Relocating the Vital Center

Abstract

I am indebted to all five commentators for deepening and extending the issues raised in my essay. I express particular appreciation to Professors Diggins and Lears for their willingness to hear me out, then to respond, each in his own thoughtful way. There are only a few matters that require further ink on my part. Jackson Lears possesses a powerful capacity to envelop diverse elements within his own original synthesis. In his article on cultural hegemony, arguments for and against use of that concept are presented in a delicate pas de deux. Perhaps, as he suggests, I stumbled at one point on his fancy footwork. In any case, I think we do share a sense of what the big problems are. He is right, for example, to identify oppositional culture in the twentieth century as a topic that desperately needs further analysis. While not entirely disagreeing with his initial skepticism regarding the potentialities of mass culture, I have wondered (elsewhere) whether part of our problem in the search for resistance does not arise from a recent tendency among social and cultural historians to overdramatize the traditionalism of earlier protest, thus leaving the modern era denuded of all capacity for radical transformation., The feisty reply ofJohn Patrick Diggins, my favorite pessimist, requires a bit more intervention. In my view his learned, if somewhat dyspeptic, commentary contains two very helpful points. First, those of us who invoke labor republicanism as a category of nineteenth-century analysis must more carefully distinguish it from the more formal tradition of classical, civic republicanism from which it derives. Whether the vulgarity of the laborite version nineteenth-century workers did not, after all, have the advantage of reading Hannah Arendt, Adam Ferguson, J. G. A. Pocock, or Diggins on the subject -really detracted from their political message is, of course, another question. Second, Diggins's questioning of the assumed ties between individualism and capitalist culture is provocative. No doubt he is right for the long haul, but I would suggest that there are moments, such as the late nineteenth century, where capitalist and individualist logic appear to coincide. In such moments, otherwise disparate brakes on possessive individualism -the nation, the workers, the community, the ethnic group, the family-may be summoned into service by the political opposition. In the case of the Knights of Labor, the family, for example, was heralded less as an inherent bastion of anticapitalism than as a