Book Review

James Livingston attempts a 'rewriting of American history' attacking the last forty years of revisionism, especially the work of radical historians, whose version of the past he considers 'hegemonic.' American historians, he argues, must learn to cultivate a 'comic frame of acceptance,' a narrative convention that recognizes that 'we can treat the relation between corporate capitalism and social democracy as reciprocal rather than antithetical.' The reason they have been unable to do so is that historians, dominated by the anticorporate 'American Left,' 'have proudly identified with the good old lost causes' of Populism and artisanal republicanism, stubbornly adhering to the 'modernist' and individualistic subject position of pre-corporate, proprietary capitalism. Having 'navigated a passage' from proprietary to corporate capitalism at the end of the last century, pragmatism and feminism, Livingston argues, will, if we take them seriously in the way he prescribes, alternatively enable the long-delayed birth of a 'third American republic,' realizing a postmodern subjectivity in social and cultural spaces opened up by new forms of work and leisure constituted in consumer society.

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