Jackson Lears’ “Something for Nothing” is an interesting and thought-provoking work written in the vein of social and cultural history, much like his “No Place of Grace,” now some thirty years old. It looks at a wide swath of subjects from gambling, the rise of the market, and various Native American and slave folk traditions related to chance and luck.

According to Lears, two contradictory forces have always been at the heart of American experience: that of the speculative confidence man who has his eye on “main chance rather than moral imperative” and the other which “exalts a disciplined self-made man whose success comes through the careful cultivation of Protestant values” (p. 3). He calls these two instincts the “culture of chance” and “culture of control” respectively. Even though the growth of Protestantism and especially Puritanism damaged a vernacular culture of luck (by trying to impose a Providential reason and rationality upon it, instead of allowing for the free flow of play embodied by Fortuna), the split between the elite idea that Providence was superior and the more popular, demotic idea of divination persisted throughout the culture. Lears looks at the cultural importations of African slaves and Indians that created complex social relations with whites. As John Greenleaf Whittier asked rhetorically in 1847 “Is it not strange that the desire to lift the great veil of the mystery before us should overcome, in some degree, our peculiar and most republican prejudice against color, and reconcile us to the necessity of looking at Futurity through a black medium?”

By the late eighteenth century, luck had become less providential and more secularized, and the idea that “misfortune fell upon the worthy as on the licentious” became more widespread. This is related to the American idea of secular reinvention, or as Martin Buber put it, “the grace of beginning again and ever again.” But as chance was secularized, it was simultaneously driven into the underbelly of society. There were gentlemen who took pride in their flirtation with luck for luck’s sake, while sharpers (that is, swindlers, gamblers, and confidence men) would cheat the game for a dollar. The bourgeois ethic of what Lears calls “evangelical rationality” demonized gambling, thereby giving rise to the “masculinity of moderation” and the domestication of gambling.

The last couple of chapters cover the increasing trends in Taylorism and bureaucratic rationality that Lears claims were always at odds with the cultural idioms of chance and fortune; still another covers how various thinkers, artists, and musicians used these ideas during the rise of Modernism. While Lears clearly roots on the side of chance for the entire book, he is intellectually honest enough to admit that neither side has definitely won a victory. In fact, our age, much like any other, might be ruled by the uneasy co-rule of both luck and control.

Lears is a superb historian and a professor at Rutgers who has gained considerable mastery over his sources; the body of scholarship that he draws from is impressive. However, the one major complaint I have about the book is that some of it is very repetitive: it seems like the idea of “luck versus control” pops up over and over again, sometimes with so little variation that it doesn’t really need recapitulation. This makes the first two-thirds of the book move very slowly, even though the last third picks up, though this may just have been because of the shift toward cultural toward a more narrow kind of intellectual history.

A note on my rating: for someone only passingly interested in this kind of history, I would only give it three stars; for someone with a less casual interest, I think it deserves another star. Most people will probably not enjoy this as beach reading; it’s not a popular history that the cover might have you think it is. However, if you’re interested in the topic, Lears handles it with a scholarly, thorough care that he has fostered throughout his career. ( )

Lears is no chump. He's the Board of Governors Professor History at Rutgers, editor of Raritan, a keen observer of American culture with six books to his credit (and he teaches an undergraduate seminat "Luck and the American Imagination", making him my kind of professor) and he has published many insightful short works online, works which prompted me to buy this book, but I don't think he quite got the job done this time.

The book describes the conflict between "the culture of chance" and "the culture of control" in American history from the colonial period to the present, a conflict in which, in this telling, the culture of control constantly envelopes its adversary by mutating to accommodate the prevailing mind set -- so, for instance, when fundamentalist Christianity asserts itself, the culture of control becomes "evangelical rationalism" (which, though an apparent oxymoron to some is a clever insight and one of the best parts of the book), the point being that the culture of control always asserts itself into dominance and thereby reinforces the power relationships of the status quo.

The first part of the book clips along fairly well as the author, though clearly rooting for Chance, assembles historical references to describe the ups and downs of the core conflict, but then he shifts methods at the beginning of the modern era, relying on the cultural critic's technique of scrying entire worlds out of a few texts. His texts are initially Joyce and Proust first, and it's hard to figure what they have to do with modernism in America except that they do contain worlds and so are suitable for scrying. He then moves on to James (William, not Henry) and Harlan Ellison, and though his criticism is well done, I felt like the historical log had been dropped and the literary one picked up in it's place, and I was standing there wondering which end to grab.

Near the end, Lears writes: "What I have tried to do here is reconstruct that culture {of chance}, revealing its centrality to the American experience of history. The pursuit of grace in what often seems a graceless world has created a powerful alternative tradition, a countervailing force against the dominant American ethos of control."

I admire the goal immensely, but he just didn't pull it off very well. The reconstruction is episodic and desultory and we end up with an understanding of the culture of chance as something that just pokes its head up above the dominant culture every once in a while only to be whacked down immediately, though continuing to operate unseen and underground. My disappointment will not keep me away from his other books. ( )