Getting Inequality Right: A Zunzian Perspective on the Reformulation of the American Promise

This essay draws on Zunz’s major works to show how the reformulation of the American Promise between, roughly, 1870 and 1960 established a new relationship between inequality and solidarity. I argue that Zunz’s analysis demonstrates that the emerging white-collar middle class responded to the crises of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries with three cultural innovations— recodifying status, engineering social harmony, and formalizing voluntarism—intended to reconcile the country to the inequalities of urban-industrial life. Through the construction of corporate bureaucracies, the development of “human engineering,” and the creation of the nonprofit sector, members of the new middle class attempted, with considerable success, to get inequality “right” by adapting their traditional expectations about inequality to new institutional circumstances. By linking large-scale changes to the agency of a specific social group, Zunz’s contributions to historical research illuminate how the American Century emerged from historical circumstances and why it has fallen apart.