In his widely read 1976 book America in Our Time, Godfrey Hodgson articulated the concept of the liberal consensus, which described an ideology that saw free-enterprise capitalism, under the careful control of government technocrats, as a beneficent force that could create social harmony, solve social problems, and offer an international alternative to communism. This ideology undergirded a substantial, bipartisan agreement among American elites about policy aims from roughly 1954 to 1963. Over the decades, historians have debated the merits and shortcomings of this concept, and this book presents a nice overview of those debates, as well as fresher interpretations of the concept's usefulness for historians today.

The volume begins with an introduction and four essays about the idea of the liberal consensus and the historiographical response. The next four essays examine the liberal consensus in relation to key policy areas: Keynesianism, social welfare, internal security, and the Cold War. The remaining six essays further illustrate the problems or inapplicability of the concept with regard to the South, conservative Republicans, liberal Democrats, evangelical Christianity, gender, and the civil rights movement. Most of the essayists find that the liberal consensus doesn't describe – or, worse, obscures – what is really important about their particular topic. A few find it useful if it is kept in mind that “liberal” means a conservative sort of centrism and “consensus” means general agreement among white elites, which was how Hodgson originally presented it.

For those familiar with this topic, there is little that is new here, although the essays are very thoughtful and smart. There are two standouts. Hodgson's essay not only gives him a chance to clarify what he meant and did not mean by the concept, but also allows a reflection from the perspective of our current political world. Despite the arrogance, elitism, and conservatism of the liberal consensus, he writes, it underwrote a sense of common purpose that fended off the paralyzing extremes we see today and enabled legislative activism such as the Great Society. Without that sense of national purpose, he concludes, the American polity “drifts like a Mississippi barge whose skipper is drunk at the wheel” (26). Gary Gerstle, who was one of the earlier challengers of the existence of the liberal consensus, returns with a useful reframing. On questions of foreign policy and political economy, Gerstle writes, a consensus did take form among national elites; on matters of religion, race, and sexuality, which were still largely under the control of states, it did not. This framework provides a structural explanation for the “dissensus,” which happened at the local and state levels, as well as the consensus that existed among national elites in power. As the “local” made more demands on the federal government in terms of school prayer and civil rights, the consensus fell apart.

There are at least two things missing from this volume. The first is a conservative perspective, which would remind readers how really liberal the liberal consensus was. While not universally embraced, the idea that federal government could manage the economy and promote social progress permeated the major political and economic institutions, the media, and universities. Certainly conservatives thought so. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer and Robert Mason (in their respective essays) see Goldwater as evidence that the liberal consensus did not exist. But Goldwater's epic defeat suggests otherwise. The second absence is an engagement with historians like Jefferson Cowie and others who have seen the postwar years as the most economically equitable in US history, due to the New Deal, a strong labor movement, high marginal tax rates, and the relative absence of religious, ethnic, and racial divisions in national politics (due to immigration restriction and Democratic acquiescence with Jim Crow). The contributors to this volume focus on what unions lost in the postwar years, rather than on what made them a viable counterweight to capital. They bemoan the rampant inequality that has marked American society since the 1980s, but they blame it on the shortcomings of the “liberal consensus,” rather than considering why the years of the liberal consensus were ones of relative economic equality. They are almost universally of the opinion that these years were fundamentally “conservative.” The absence of any real counteropinion makes the project seem somewhat narrow, a mostly familiar conversation among like-minded historians.