U.S. Intellectual History Blog

A Quote for Tuesday

“Pieces of the old and new social paradigms filled the air, full of promise and full of danger. They formed the fragments out of which the new century’s debates would be constructed. The disaggregation of the block categories of mid-century had run its course. The age of fracture had permanently altered the play of argument and ideas. The pieces would have to be reassembled on different frames, the tensions between self and society resolved anew. But how that would be done, amid the anger and the confusion, the liberations and the anxieties, still hung in the balance.”

Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 271.