There is much to recommend this learned and brisk political history of the last century. Rise and Fall joins a growing body of historical work that abandons (or at least interrogates) the stale categories of “liberal” and “conservative,” decenters the New Deal in our understanding of modern American political history, and takes seriously the market imperatives underlying our policy and political choices.2 At the same time, it is a frustratingly elusive and imprecise account. In many ways, it is a staunchly traditional political history, its focus rarely wavering from the actions and ideas of national political figures. The analysis is further narrowed by disciplinary blinders: in narrating the rise and fall of these political orders, Gerstle makes no effort to engage the considerable work in political sociology, political science, and Marxist state theory that assesses the same historical developments and asks the same questions.3 Why do governments in capitalist democracies do what they do? Under what conditions do they change what they are doing?
The explanatory limits of this kind of history are a symptom of its blow-by-blow fascination with the ebb and flow of national partisan politics and its relative neglect of the structural conditions and constraints under which policy choices are made. In capitalist democracies, political attention is routinely and reliably confined to policies that sustain the infrastructure of private markets (property rights, central banking), ensure the conditions for profitable economic growth, resolve conflicts and collective action problems among or between market interests, and defang any political threat posed by those getting the short end of the stick. Political deference to market relations is locked down by the disproportionate influence of “business interests,” which are uniquely positioned to make demands of the state and to assume that those demands will be met. All this effectively confines or imprisons the autonomy of political actors, political parties, or “political orders.”4 Those political orders may disagree on the details and on the social division of rewards and benefits, but they are still inescapably handmaidens to accumulation.