The central premise of this scholarly work is, in many ways, an obvious one that lies at the heart of liberalism: “As Hobbes realized and Locke made central to liberalism, once society was established, voluntary adult compliance had to be based on something other than consent extracted from the fear of disorder at the time of the founding.” Yet Block's thesis about how this premise was played out in American history and its legacy for contemporary American culture and politics is less obvious and certainly thought-provoking. For, as he argues, while the “fantasy of a society of self-created individuals cannot, for obvious reasons, be taken seriously, the wish for this idyll to be true … can and must be” (286).

Block's rich historical excavation of the discourse on adult–child relationships, child rearing and education in post-Revolutionary American is intended both to illustrate the force of the aforementioned wish and to provide an account of the “something other than consent” that sustained it. Yet while it succeeds in the first task, I found it frustratingly unsatisfactory as an explanation of exactly what this elusive something consisted of, at the institutional, cultural and psychological levels. The book is, in many ways, an attempt to recover the historical memory that has been lost – or wilfully obscured: “What was lost is how, beginning with the earliest colonial experience, the consenting liberal will has been systematically – and invisibly – conditioned in ways not even Jefferson's expansive rhetoric in the Declaration could obscure forever” (12).

It is refreshing to read a book about liberalism that moves beyond theoretical debates about legitimacy and consent to an acknowledgement that these concepts are embodied in and constituted by social institutions and processes. Given Block's statement that “American liberalism after the revolution placed the future of its national project in the hands of the institutions of childhood socialization” (19), I expected the ensuing pages to describe, in some detail, the nature of these institutions; to depict, that is, the material conditions that actualized the consent to which his thesis refers. Yet such descriptions are strangely absent from the book. Block quotes, often at great length, writers, preachers and statesmen whose words eloquently evoke the American liberal project, at the heart of which lies “the notion of the self-made individual” which, as he says, “would dominate post-Civil War discourse and mainstream culture” (192). The theoretical discussion around this notion is profound and fascinating; the analysis of the work and influence of G. Stanley Hall, for instance, is particularly illuminating. Yet at no point do we get any clear account of the actual institutions and social processes which were, presumably, shaped partly by such political rhetoric and psychological theory-building. What did the early schoolhouse look like? How was its curriculum designed? What form did teacher training take? What evidence is there, in terms of first-person accounts by parents or forms of official intervention in family life, to support the idea that the rhetoric of authors and politicians on child rearing was anything but that?

The most impressive feature of this book also, unfortunately, detracts from the experience of reading it. It is a work of breathtakingly detailed scholarship. Yet the range of literature cited creates a text so dense that the flow of the author's prose is constantly interrupted by numerous quotations. I found that the fact that it was often impossible to read more than a line of text without a phrase in quotations made for a frustrating reading experience.

Another frustration arises from the author's assumption of some familiarity with the details of US history. Non-US readers will struggle to keep track of the distinctions between Jeffersonians, Federalists and sectarians, and will be puzzled by the frequent use of unexplained terms such as “Yankee pragmatism” and “organizational society.”

Indeed, much of the analysis in the latter part of the book remains at an infuriatingly abstract and general level. The following sentence is typical: “Both the maturation of liberal institutional processes and the increasing power of bureaucratic organizations to control economic access and mobility resulted in a decreasing institutional flexibility” (290). I for one would have liked a concrete example of the “institutional processes,” the “forms of control,” referred to here.

Yet whether or not one is convinced of Block's central thesis, his analysis offers a powerful illustration of the essentially political nature of our views on child rearing. The historical discussion provides a timely reminder that the idea that child development is “far ‘too important to be left to the vagaries of the teaching and examples of parents’” (121) is not just characteristic of current popular literature and government policy on parenting – but was around at least as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. As Block's examples demonstrate vividly, the same tenets of child-rearing advice reappear in different guises throughout different periods of history, in line with whatever cultural and sociopolitical script is in the ascendancy. It is interesting, for example, to reflect on the way in which current suggestions that parents should act as trained psychologists, attending to the “emotional intelligence” of their children and exercising what Diane Hoffman (2009) has described as “emotional control and disengagement,” echoes the nineteenth-century advice to parents to “Govern your own accents, your countenance, your whole deportment” (177) in forming the moral character of their young child. The moral language may have been replaced by psychological jargon, but the message that there is a “scientifically” right way to bring up children remains the same.