Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong (review)

In 2004 I served as a member of the program committee for the annual meeting of a major historical association. The committee’s first task was to draft a call for papers. The association had already chosen a broad theme for the meeting, but wanted us to signal that proposals on topics other than that theme were acceptable. I suggested something like proposals on “other important topics were welcome,” but several committee members immediately objected on the grounds that the adjective “important” implied normativity. I then offered alternative language—proposals on “other important and unimportant topics were welcome”—but that didn’t fly either. I start with this story because the profession was then smack dab in the middle of a long, drawn-out battle against (flight from?) concepts such as objectivity, critical discernment, and judgements regarding value. Syntheses were ipso facto considered imperializing/hegemonizing, and thus increasingly frowned upon. Grand narratives were pretty much out altogether. For the most part, mainstream history at the time was about disaggregation, about smaller parallel stories, micro-histories, and multiple perspectives, indeed, even multiple conceptions of “truth”—whether personal (“my truth,” as it was sometimes put), or, alternatively, what Shelby Steele later called “poetic truth”, i.e., a distorted partisan version of reality espoused in order to promote a preferred ideological outcome.1 Fortunately, the worm has turned, as it were, and of late things have begun to change, to which Slouching Towards Utopia attests. Syntheses and grand narratives, while not exactly in, are no longer endangered species. To be sure, it still takes considerable chutzpah for someone to attempt one, but they are no longer rarae aves. If it is possible to generalize about a group qua group, the tribe known as economists, for better or worse (possibly both) can be said to be imbued with chutzpah, few more so than J. Bradford DeLong, a distinguished economic historian at the University of California-Berkeley. And I say this not