The Age of Acquiescence, Steve Fraser
The Age of Acquiescence, Steve Fraser
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The Age of Acquiescence
The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

Author: Steve Fraser

Narrator: Pete Larkin

Unabridged: 16 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/17/2015

Synopsis

A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished.

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why?

The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is provocative and fascinating.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Bryan

How did Americans react to economic inequality in the past? Why do we not rise up in the present? Answering those questions is the task of The Age of Acquiescence. The first two-thirds concern that first question. Fraser surveys how Americans perceived and often organized against economic inequality......more

Goodreads review by Socraticgadfly

Age of Acquiescence First, Steve Fraser has a word for us to learn: “Precariat.” You can probably see the word from which this portmanteau derives, in turn riffing on “proletariat.” Yes, we are the class of the precarious. So, why didn’t more Americans join Occupy Wall Street a few years back, or star......more

Goodreads review by Beverly

The first book in a long time to actually scare me....mandatory reading.......more

Goodreads review by Victoria

I picked upAge of Acquiescence because it was recommended as a companion work to Capital in the 21st Century. Age of Acquiescence is also certainly worth the long read although its focus is narrower. Its author, Steve Fraser, asks a basic and important question: Why isn’t there an American movement......more

Quotes

"Provocative....A perceptive reading of the current zeitgeist."—Michael Kazin, Slate

"Fraser offers a sweeping, forcefully argued comparison between, on the one hand, the economy, ideology, and politics of the first Gilded Age and, on the other, the contemporary political scene."—Kim Phillips-Fein, Atlantic

"Sweeping and ambitious....Fraser weaves together a rich tapestry of history, statistics and barely suppressed outrage."—Maura Casey, Washington Post

"Fascinating....As Fraser forcefully shows, during the first Gilded Age American elites were threatened with more than embarrassing statistics."—Naomi Klein, New York Times Book Review

"Delivered with real verve....Like Marx in the Communist Manifesto and Thomas Piketty's Capital, butfrom an American perspective, Fraser writes majestically if not almost poetically about the making of capitalism."—Harvey J. Kaye, Daily Beast

"Fraser is particularly passionate and penetrating in his analysis of our present state of submission and surrender. His intention is not just to chronicle the change but to explain why it happened."—Jon Wiener, Los Angeles Times

"A sharp-edged, completely fascinating look at American history and the contemporary politics of the haves and have-nots."—Vanessa Bush, Booklist

"Fraser's work shines as an angry but cogent denouncement of America's growing wealth disparity. Highly recommended."— Library Journal

"An absorbing, vigorous account of class politics....an excellent, very readable recreation of an authentically American form of working-class militancy and its eclipse."—Publishers Weekly

"No one writing history today does it with the power, passion, insight, and rigor of Steve Fraser. In The Age of Acquiescence, Fraser reaches back a century to the first Gilded Age and then pushes forward into our own Gilded Age, providing his readers with a history that matters, that informs, and that, most critically, raises essential questions we should all be asking about wealth, power, and inequalities in America today."—David Nasaw, author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy

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