Axis Point of American Industrialism

Abstract

The 1820's constituted a watershed in United States life. By the end of that decade, about ten years after the last of the English Luddite risings had been suppressed, industrialism secured its decisive American victory; by the end of the 1830's all of its cardinal features were definitively present. The many overt threats to the coherence of emerging industrial capitalism, the ensemble of forms of resistance to its hegemony, were blunted at this time and forced into the current of that participation so vital to modern domination. In terms of technology, work, politics, sexuality, culture, and the whole fabric of ordinary life, the struggles of an earlier, relative autonomy, which threatened both old and new forms of authority, fell short, and a dialectic of domestication, so familiar to us today, broke through. The reactions engendered in the face of the new dynamic in this epoch of its arrival seem, by the way, to offer some implicit parallels to present trends as technological civilization likely enters its terminal crisis: the answers of progress, now anything but new or promising, encounter a renewed legitimation challenge that can be informed, even inspired, by understanding the past.