Claude S. Fischer

On his book Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character

Cover Interview of April 25, 2010

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“How we became the secure, independent, yet group-joining Americans we are.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“The availability and expansion of material security and comfort enabled the expansion and solidification of a distinctive American culture. That culture rests on the notion of community voluntarism: each individual is free to join or leave communities, such as congregations, but while a member of such groups, the individual is bound to be loyal.”

On the second:

“I mean this book to speak to such classic interpretations of America as The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart. Yet, Made in America challenges many of their conclusions.”

history / polemics / america / sociology / social mobility / lincoln abraham / community / volunteerism / lincoln mary todd / social history /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009