Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History. By James Livingston. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. 232 pages. $85.00 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). James Livingston's Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy mounts apowerful and polymathic challenge to the narrative vision that has dominated academic historiography for the past century. Animating that vision is the tragic decline of the modern subject, more specifically, the small producer steamrolled under by corporate capitalism and the "trust movement" around the turn of the century. According to this influential, even hegemonic, narrative, the heroic and class-based populism that was this figure's political idiom has, barring the progressive paroxysms of the 1930s, withered in the national imagination. The legacy of this enervation (and cooptation) of populism is a political economy of bureaucratic liberalism and corporate caprice to which there increasingly appears no alternative. Corporatization and proletarianization laid waste to the "commercial vernacular" of nineteenth-century production, and in so doing took away the means for constructing a nonalienating system of work and a sustaining communal politics. Moreover, these developments displaced the steadfast "moral personality" of an earlier entrepreneurial capitalism and constituted in its stead a more mercurial, tractable self—the desiring subject of consumer culture. Drawing on an unconventional reading of the often-maligned "consensus" or "counter-progressive" historians of the mid-twentieth century, Livingston opens by expressing the conviction "that the area inhabited by the American Left is larger than Populism, and therefore [End Page 121] that the twentieth century represents something more than the non-heroic residue of the tragedy staged in the 1890s" (2). With these acknowledgments begins the difficult task of "coming to terms with the third American republic, the one that resides in the emergence of corporate capitalism" (1). Such a rapprochement will require, for those Left historians who remain committed to a usable past of artisanal values and class-based politics, no little amount of sympathy for the Devil, as Livingston asks us to see in corporatization "the condition of a passage beyond parochial renditions of political obligation, exclusionary principles of social organization, and limited notions of genuine selfhood" (2). Some of his audience will find in his assertion that we "treat the historical fact of corporate capitalism as the source rather than the solvent of a social-democratic promise" (2) vital inspiration for new work; others will find evidence of his affliction with a neoliberal variant of Stockholm Syndrome. While Livingston salutes the critical energy that scholars in U.S. history, American studies, literature, women's studies, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and related disciplines have expended in what he sees as "an attempt to retrieve the modern subject from the wreckage of nineteenth-century proprietary capitalism" (17), he would rather that we adjourn the conversation about the loss of the autonomous individual. It's time, he argues, that we get on with the pressing business of constructing our own engine of social democracy, one that will employ but also transcend the Enlightenment ideal of autonomous or "natural" selfhood and the political vectors it was built to fly. Scholars' desire to resuscitate this figure "blocks the search for alternatives to the 'man of reason' who served as the paradigm of self-determination in the modern epoch, and thus blinds us to the political, intellectual, and cultural possibilities of our own postmodern moment" (17). Livingston's search for alternatives involves a certain ideological risk, as the figure of the possessive individualist has provided a crucial ethical pivot around which various modern emancipatory projects have coalesced and mobilized. American publics generally respond with outrage when sufficiently and officially convinced that some oppressive force or institution—racism, say, or sexism or big business—attenuates the potentials and freedoms of the monadic modern subject. Nineteenth-century factory workers, farmers, and their political allies instrumentalized this figure to resist the decline of agency in shaping the experience of Taylorized work and guiding the byzantine credit [End Page 122] economy, both of which were requisites of large-scale...