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PARTISAN REVIEW
Americans: The Democratic Experience
(1973) because of its
formlessness and its ultimately ahistorical mode of discourse.
It
is cultural history lacking a grounding in theory, and it is with–
out interpretive form.
All of this is unfortunate, because Trachtenberg's notion of
incorporation does have interpretive possibilities that are unnec–
essarily obscured in this book.
If,
instead of trying
to
embrace
everything (however selectively), he had undertaken a series of
disciplined and interconnected forays in a prismatic fashion, he
might have succeeded in illuminating the inner dynamics and
meanings of one of the period's major themes. By thinking of in–
corporation, as Trachtenberg occasionally does, as the transfer of
the social distribution of knowledge, authority, and power
upward into large, hierarchical structures, we have a way of nar–
rating, interpreting, and judging a process of delocalization and
delegitimation that reconstructed the form and structure of
American culture across a wide spectrum of experience.
What he says happened to knowledge and power in
the
work process under corporate, capitalism can be extended to
other dimensions of culture. Knowledge was consolidated in
management and power was gathered into hierarchical struc–
tures organized for economic warfare. This new form replaced
the pattern of mutuality and cooperation sustained by the tradi–
tional culture of the work place and, probably, the working-class
community. But
to
develop such a theme one must go more
deeply into the historical process of change. There must be some
explanation of the dynamics or, more precisely, the dialectic
V '
hereby conflicts in the older pattern of culture generated the
new one.
In
many of the areas of culture and society discussed by
Trachtenberg one finds analogous developments.
It
is apparent
in the cultural battle between town ways and metropolitan ways,
as well as in the changes in the meaning and location of knowl–
edge associated with the professionalization of competence and
in the building of museums and other major cultural institu–
tions, which, in Trachtenberg'S words, represented an "infra–
structure which monumentalized the presence of culture, of high
art, and learning." Works as diverse as those of Samuel P. Hays
on political parties and reform, of Lawrence Goodwyn on Popu–
lists, and of David Rothman on the Senate all suggest ways in
which this theme could be developed in respect
to
politics. And
Trachtenberg'S fine discussion of Thomas Edison and electrifi-
