Junior-high history classes and cable-TV retrospectives have long hammered it into the head of anyone under 50 that the Soviet launch of the world's first satellite on Oct. 4, 1957, was both an epoch-making event and a national trauma for the United States. Well, maybe you had to be there. At 184 pounds, Sputnik was scarcely larger than a basketball and did nothing except emit beeps out of a battery-powered antenna. That beep brought on the only direct hardship America suffered from Sputnik: It reportedly activated electric garage-door openers from coast to coast. Post-Sept. 11, Americans may find it hard to credit contemporaneous comparisons of the Sputnik launch to the Pearl Harbor attack.

Freelance writer Paul Dickson shows why Americans of the 1950's were so freaked out. Relying on government records declassified only in the last half-decade, he has reconstructed not just the military stakes of the launch but also the Cold War society it so rudely roiled, giving a straightforward and snappy account of a crisis in American politics, science and self-esteem.

It's hard to imagine a time when America was worse equipped to absorb evidence of Soviet superiority in space. Political concerns, such as they were, were domestic. President Eisenhower, who would see his poll numbers drop 22 points in Sputnik's wake, was about to deploy federal troops to get Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus to desegregate Little Rock's schools. Most Americans didn't even know the word "satellite," referring instead to artificial "moons." Leave It to Beaver premiered the night Sputnik went up.

Mr. Dickson further sets the scene with a few where-they-were-when-they-heard vignettes. James Michener was on a plane crashing into the Pacific. Ten-year-old Stephen King was in a movie theater watching Earth Versus the Flying Saucers. Doris Kearns Goodwin was making out in a park with a high-school boyfriend. ("I didn't give Sputnik another thought," she recalls.) When Little Richard saw it pass during an outdoor concert in Australia, he walked off the stage, quit music and became a Christian evangelist. A panicky Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Senate majority leader, said of the Russians, "Soon, they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses."

His fears were well-founded. The Russian space shot came less than a year after Nikita Khrushchev's shoe-banging "We will bury you!" tirade on the floor of the United Nations. C.I.A. chief Allen Dulles called Sputnik part of a "trilogy of propaganda moves": Russia had fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile six weeks earlier, boasting of its ability to direct rockets "to any point on the face of the Earth." And it would announce the successful test of a hydrogen bomb three days after Sputnik went up. Russia's rockets were indeed advanced: The R-7 used for Sputnik was still the country's standard model for space shots in the mid-1970's.

What's more, all the Soviets' cosmonautical moves were carried out by military personnel in extreme secrecy from bases in Kazakhstan. It would be years before the world heard of Russian failures, from the half-dozen aborted and exploded missions preceding Sputnik to the multiple flops of Sputnik III in 1958, to the launch-pad blast in 1960 that left 165 people dead. In the eyes of the world, the Soviet space program looked invincible, a harbinger of the radiant future, while unrest in Little Rock made America look reactionary and backward. When the United States' first publicly announced satellite rocket fizzled and fell to pieces before liftoff in late 1957, the U.S.S.R. mischievously introduced a U.N. motion to list the United States as an underdeveloped nation eligible for technical aid.

It was in this atmosphere of humiliation that Wernher von Braun became a folk hero. The brains behind Hitler's rocket program (his V-2's had blown whole London neighborhoods to bits), von Braun was then the design director at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Ala. Mr. Dickson shows von Braun to have been neither particularly political nor particularly militarist, more an eccentric scientist than an ideologue. He had become a rocketeer for the German government under Weimar, was more interested in satellites and space stations than missiles, and quit the Army for NASA once it became apparent that the civilian agency would control the moon shots. Nor was the American space program more beholden to Nazi Germany's than the Russian one: The U.S.S.R.'s Pobeda rockets, too, were simply rejiggered V-2's designed by captured German scientists.

Von Braun had bragged in 1954, "Give me five years and $5 billion and we can land on the moon." But he'd been blocked-due, he thought, to a rivalry between the country's military branches, which had built a space program consisting of 119 different half-completed missile projects. In January 1958, von Braun's team finally launched America's first satellite. But even then, he would use the press to wage a P.R. war on his bosses, letting it be known that, a year before Sputnik, one of his Jupiter rocket launches had been meant to contain a satellite. (Eisenhower's Defense Department had intervened, replacing the final, satellite-bearing stage with a dummy capsule.)

Persistent rumors at the time-much like the ones surrounding F.D.R. and Pearl Harbor-held that Eisenhower had wanted the U.S. defeated in the space race. Mr. Dickson's bold conclusion is that those rumors were largely correct. The President worried about two things: first, the alleged Soviet ICBM buildup and, second, the ability of the U.S. to monitor it. In 1955, the Soviets had rebuffed his offer of an "Open Skies" policy that would have permitted satellites to orbit anywhere. Once Sputnik crossed the United States without incident, that principle was established de facto. Eisenhower then poured American resources into spy satellites that quickly outstripped the Russians. The CORONA program-revealed only in February 1995, when President Clinton declassified the work of first-generation spy satellites-allowed the United States to count Soviet missiles with such precision that, at arms-reduction treaties in the 1970's, "U.S. negotiators often knew more than their Soviet counterparts about the exact contents of the Soviet arsenal."

For Mr. Dickson, then, Ike was "the quiet unsung hero of the Sputnik crisis." He kept his cool. There was speculation in American newspapers that the Soviets would set off an atomic bomb on the moon as a propaganda display, and many suggested that the Americans should beat them to it. Eisenhower preferred perfecting the surface-to-surface rockets already in development, however, on the grounds that "we didn't have any enemies on the moon."

The U.S. space program was probably not inevitable. John F. Kennedy, for one, was bored to tears by it. (The "challenge" Kennedy issued to Congress in May of 1961 to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade was Lyndon Johnson's idea.) Grant that, and Sputnik appears indeed as a founding event of our world. It led to NASA, to certain wild excesses in the nuclear-arms race (the U.S. staged 77 aboveground nuke tests in the year after Sputnik) and to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which would spawn the Internet.

Sputnik changed the culture, too. It is responsible for the words "beatnik," "neatnik" and "refusenik." It killed the gaudy, three-tone Ford Edsel, which in crisis times was viewed as an embarrassing symbol of American materialism ("A higher standard of living, seen as prima facie evidence of American pre-Sputnik superiority over Russian communism," Mr. Dickson writes, "now became an emblem of national inferiority.") And it led to the National Defense Education Act, that monument of Cold War liberalism, which established college loans, subsidized the new math, shoehorned Darwin into podunk curricula and recruited women for the sciences. (It even promised to promote "independent thinking." Win some, lose some.)

The satellite's great legacy, however, was a healthy fear. Describing himself as one who'd had "the dubious privilege of living and working under a totalitarian government for many years," Wernher von Braun used to warn that expertise and morality were independent variables. Americans were indulging in dangerous nonsense if they thought there was anything inevitable about the victory of "free" science over "totalitarian" science. That Sputnik helped prove him right is as worth remembering today as it was then. In fact, more so.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Before he became Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich wrote an early analysis of the New Economy, The Work of Nations (1991),which gave many Americans their introduction to the globalized labor market, vagabond capital and the gap between rich and poor. It has been hard to improve on. The last decade's worth of New Economy books are of liturgical predictability; only the homilies differ. In all of them, you're asked to "imagine a world" where "at the click of a mouse" you can "go to" (i.e., buy stuff from ) Paris or Tokyo or Abidjan. They cover the same themes (the vanishing of distance, the triumph of intellectual over physical capital), promise the same gadgetry (mobile EKG's, "smart" refrigerators), rehash the same anecdotes (America Online's debate over closed versus open systems, the outsourcing of back-office work to India and Ireland) and lay out the same statistics (2.8 million Web sites, 1,500 television channels, executive compensation at 538 times that of the average worker). What's particularly depressing is that both left and right, yea- and naysayers–from John Heileman to Dinesh D'Souza to Ken Auletta–agree that the big payoff of the Internet Age will be an explosion of choice and variety. You certainly can't tell it from their books: If it's Tuesday, this must be George Gilder.

Mr. Reich, now at Brandeis University, still thinks choice a topic worth harping on. In The Future of Success , he argues that it has created a windfall for consumers–even an "Age of the Terrific Deal." The 4-foot-10 Mr. Reich now orders bespoke suits on the Internet. In a few minutes online, you can find airline tickets for a fraction of what you paid a decade ago. The hitch is that we don't live our whole lives as consumers. "The easier it is for us as buyers to switch to something better," he writes, "the harder we as sellers have to scramble in order to keep every customer, hold every client, seize every opportunity, get every contract." In other words, hunt hard for those bargains, because your boss is looking just as hard for ways to replace you with something cheaper. The result is an anxiety amidst plenty that has reshaped, in dubious ways, both the workplace and society at large.

Americans now work harder than any people on earth, besting even the work-drunk Japanese. The poor, of course, need to scramble to keep up. But the rich are logging more hours than anybody, and there are two interesting reasons why. First, at a time of increasing income stratification, they're taking in money hand over fist, making the opportunity cost of slacking off intolerably high. Second, the proliferation of choice confuses the public and creates a desperate need for quickwitted people to do the choosing. "In the emerging economy," Mr. Reich writes, "buyers often don't know what they want, and use the brand-portal as a means of discovering it." (A more cynical view is that, while other peoples shop to find what they want, Americans shop to find out what they want.)

Increasingly, what the New Economy's winners bring to the marketplace is raw brainpower, particularly of the creative sort. Data is so universally available that it has become virtually worthless. Wall Street analysts no longer sell research; they sell advice, i.e., intelligence. The rich, in general, work harder because high-paying jobs are more interesting than they used to be. The idea that today's nouveaux riches are "particularly adept at using new information technologies," Mr. Reich notes, is a gross misperception. Telling someone to study computers as a means of getting rich off the new technology is about as sensible as telling a bright boy of 1925 to become an auto mechanic. If Mr. Reich is right, the class implications are profound. Elite universities will likely turn back into the mills of class differentiation they were in the Gilded Age. Nobs will once again spend four years studying poetry and music before going off and employing all those classmates majoring in business and computer science.

Mr. Reich devotes far too much of his book to the question of how to get those plum jobs. The short answer is self-promotion, although Mr. Reich delivers it through a rather complicated metaphor: He suggests that young men and women on the make "brand" themselves. (This strategy is urged, albeit in more business-guru-like fashion, by Tom Peters in his recent The Brand You 50 , which Mr. Reich can be forgiven for ignoring.) "Even if you're called a full-time employee, you're becoming less of an employee of an organization than you are a seller of your services to particular customers and clients, under the organization's brand name," Mr. Reich writes. "The incentives are on the side of investing in one's personal brand rather than devoting time and energy to the organization." In such a world, loyalty changes from an obsolescent asset to an outright liability. Stay in a job for five years or more and the job market will look at you as a dud, a loser, dead weight. One corporate recruiter tells Mr. Reich that he no longer interviews straight-A students from the Ivy League schools; he assumes they're conformist hoop-jumpers.

Big inequalities in the workplace are multiplied by cultural changes, the greatest of which is feminism. Since rich and poor tend to marry their own kind, more women in the workplace means family incomes diverge even faster than single ones. But marriage itself is faltering, in Mr. Reich's view because men, minus their monopoly on steady earnings, "are nowhere near as good a deal for women as they used to be." (Surely Mr. Reich is not implying that your average working woman is some kind of marital prize?) Even where marriage is contracted, it's a weakened institution. Couples delay childbirth (in Massachusetts, more babies are born to women over 30 than under) or skip it altogether. More and more family functions get "outsourced," as they would in a corporation cutting fixed costs. Already, households spend less on groceries than on meals or restaurants. And the subcontracting of caregiving that began with nursing homes has spread to day care. Not all "outsourced" children are alike, as Mr. Reich points out. Some receive the equivalent of private tutoring, while others are yoked together with ropes and herded through cities in conditions of squalor and boredom that would provoke the pity of a Bosnian P.O.W. In this, they are merely sharing in an adult reality of the Information Age: There's a domino effect to workplace inequality.

Mr. Reich is at his strongest when describing a new mechanism of class stratification that has become almost feudal in its reach. Linked to information technology, money does vastly more than it used to, sorting people into virtual castes (Mr. Reich doesn't use the word) entitled to different levels of service, attention and even citizenship. Now that computers can gauge with actuarial precision a customer's prospective value to a business, there are areas of the economy where life has improved for the richest and taken on a Third World flavor for everyone else. Air travel is one instance, but so are practically all businesses accessed by telephone, which will soon "figure out how to separate their better customers, who want and are willing to pay for more personal attention, from lower-paying customers served by automated and Internet devices." Already at Merrill Lynch, any caller with an account under $100,000 gets routed to a nuisance line. (There's no such thing as free common courtesy.) Meanwhile, now that banks can figure out to the penny just how much credit a prospective home-buyer can carry, neighborhoods are more than ever sorted by minute gradations of income–and with them schools, and with them retail services.

Already society's institutions are hardening to codify such inequalities. Taxes are shifted away from income and capital gains and onto gas, cigarettes, alcohol and lotteries, which disproportionately hit the poor and other sitting ducks. If you're mobile enough, you can avoid many of them. The very wealthiest are granted subsidies, whether in the form of tax waivers or bond issues for new stadiums.

Robert Reich is an acute diagnostician of the New Economy. And so it's strange that he continues to use the old one as the hammer that makes everything look like a nail. He says he knows that the Industrial Age is gone, that New Deal remedies won't mitigate today's dislocations. But his specific policy suggestions–replace unemployment insurance with "earnings insurance" so that people who get fired can have a guaranteed income; give every 18-year-old a $60K "nest egg"; encourage (or even "require") flex time; subsidize day care and require low-income housing to be built in upscale communities–belie him. He's much less interested in discarding the old industrial model than in reconstructing it, piece by piece, in the heart of the information economy.

It's not just that such solutions are authoritarian; it's also that they heap kindling on the very fires Mr. Reich wants to damp. It's no paradox that some of the most enthusiastic proponents of New Deal-style social programs are to be found among those New Economy companies that use the programs to hamstring their more traditional competitors. What look like "liberal" measures designed to help working people actually lend competitive advantages to the giants of the New Economy. Take the tax moratorium on Internet sales, which amounts to a subsidy that your corner bookseller pays to Amazon.com. Or the Family and Medical Leave Act, which Mr. Reich admits is not too useful to his family, and which works well only for two-big-earner families working for heavily capitalized, highly flexible white-collar firms. He recognizes, too, that his own investments and pension funds lead to union-busting. As Labor Secretary, Mr. Reich had a reputation for being disproportionately tough on Old Economy companies–mills where workers fell into vats of molten steel, that kind of thing. His liberal credentials and his hand-wringing notwithstanding, he has found it hard to avoid taking the side of the real powerhouses of the New Economy, in a way that ought to make us question what it actually means nowadays to be on the "left."

What's best about this book is not particularly new, while what's new is not particularly good. Mr. Reich remains an admirably independent thinker (as evidenced most recently by his rage-inducing abandonment of Al Gore at the height of the Florida re-count crisis). But there's something bromidic about this book, more typical of Mr. Reich's epigones than of Mr. Reich himself, almost as if he wanted to pick up where he was interrupted when he left the academy for politics a decade ago. As Henry Kissinger warned, everyone who goes to Washington spends down his intellectual capital, and Robert Reich is only partially recovered from having done just that.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

"Just go in," a friend once advised when I got called for jury duty, "and say, 'I cannot be rational.' Say, 'I hate criminals, and if they're arrested they're guilty as far as I'm concerned.' And they'll let you go." Most upper-middle-class people pull stunts like this. D. Graham Burnett notes in his account of jury service that 80 percent of his own juror pool asked to be excused when, during voir dire, the judge mentioned sequestration. Roughly half of them waved their hands when the clerk asked-in English-if they were unable to understand English.

Mr. Burnett, a Princeton University historian of science, refused to crap out on his civic duty, even though his profession is one in which concepts like "reasonable doubt" routinely get shot full of epistemological holes. He wound up as the foreman of a jury sitting on a murder trial. Several days of testimony and four days of sequestration (which he describes as "the most intense sixty-six hours of my life") turned him into a sobbing wreck with some strongly held ideas about the on-the-ground workings of our justice system. He lays them out in a slight but snappy book called A Trial by Jury , the gist of which he squeezed into a recent New York Times Magazine cover story.

In August 1998, a gay African-American man was found dead in his West Village apartment with two dozen stab wounds to his chest and back. (Mr. Burnett, who has changed the names of all the case's principals, calls this man "Randolph Cuffee.") The NYPD did what it always does after a stabbing death-it canvassed the city's emergency rooms for patients with hand wounds. They found "Monte Milcray," a young Bronx man who'd nearly severed one of his fingers. His alibi stank. Milcray, who was black, claimed to have used a knife to fend off a gang of white racists during a chase that covered 25 city blocks and left him suspiciously close to Cuffee's apartment. When police tested the overalls Milcray had been wearing, they discovered a mix of his and Cuffee's blood.

So Milcray changed his story to the one he'd more or less stick with for the rest of the trial. He claimed a woman in Union Square had called him "sexy" and invited him to her apartment. When the "woman" disrobed, there was a Crying Game moment. "What the fuck is this?" Milcray said. Cuffee allegedly replied, "Once it gets in, it's not gonna hurt"-and was doing his level best to rape Milcray when the latter reached for the blade he kept strapped to his ankle. Milcray, who was engaged to be married, backtracked on one aspect of the story: He admitted that he'd met Cuffee not on the street but on a dirty-talk phone line. Phone records backed him up; Cuffee was shown in testimony to have run "a small gay escort service." Prosecution and defense differed over whether he himself had ever solicited clients in drag.

Mr. Burnett and his fellow jurors were sent off either to convict Milcray for second-degree murder or to acquit him on grounds of self-defense. There was no middle ground: Either Cuffee had been a rapist or Milcray was a liar. The risk of a not-guilty verdict was that a cold-blooded murderer would be set free, rewarded for a homophobic tall tale. The risk of a guilty verdict was that a law-abiding man would be robbed of his liberty simply for having defended himself against a violent pervert.

Mr. Burnett didn't have much to work with: The other 11 jurors included one egotistical television addict who used deliberation time to discuss how Jews call all the shots in the Dominican Republic, and who was under the impression that the defendant would serve a long jail sentence no matter what verdict they reached; one woman who argued for a compromise verdict because she had a friend who was raped in police custody in Turkey; one interior decorator who argued for a more "sensual" approach to the law; and one "emotionally volatile" control freak who had to be hospitalized when her meds ran out.

To many of his fellow jurors, Mr. Burnett was no great shakes, either. He looked like a snot, reading Wallace Stevens on breaks and taking his notes with a fountain pen that "contained a foppish, tobacco-colored ink." He was an inveterate food sissy, eating only the fruits and nuts and breads he'd stuffed into his knapsack and barely touching the meals served at the hotels near Kennedy and La Guardia where the jurors were bused for the night. And he had, as he himself realizes, a tendency to bloviate and to condescend. "In different circumstances," he wrote in his notebook, "I can imagine having a certain kind of conversation that could bring me around to reject the justification of self-defense. But there are some jurors here who are such idiots, so thoroughly oblivious to good judgment, or so thick (regardless of their intentions), that it seems improper to aid them in depriving a man of his liberty." He began deliberations hoping for a hung jury.

Many readers will be inclined to compare Mr. Burnett's book with that other brief examination of courtroom "truth," Janet Malcolm's The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999). They'll find a paradox. Ms. Malcolm, a more "literary" interpreter of legal narratives, assumes jurors are intoxicated by logic: "Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit," she writes, "and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain for appearances, has chosen as her uniform."

But as a juror, the presumably more "scientific" Mr. Burnett was drawn to illogic and loose ends. The great argument for the truth of Milcray's account, he thought, was its sloppiness. According to Milcray, Cuffee didn't threaten him and didn't even have a weapon. "If he had invented this tale of attempted anal sodomy in an effort to dodge prosecution for a cold-blooded murder, why didn't he have the good sense to embroider his account of the attack in order to make it more obviously life-threatening?" Mr. Burnett asks. "Milcray's story was weak, weaker than it needed to be, weaker than a calculated lie would have been. It was, in the end, improbable enough to leave the distinct impression of truth."

Still, it was not just truth's shapeless housecoat that made Mr. Burnett's fellow jurors vote unanimously for acquittal on the fourth morning of deliberations; most of them still suspected that Milcray had done something wrong. It was, rather, the annoying experience of sequestration that showed them the rationale behind the notion of "reasonable doubt." They had been put off by the cops who "exuded a palpable sense of armed delight" as the courtroom cleared; by the overzealous prosecutor, whose idea of a question was: "And didn't you then-like this!-stab him? And then-again!-like this? As he tried to crawl away? And-again!"; and by the blowhard judge, who dressed down Mr. Burnett for stretching his legs and threatened another juror with contempt of court for not looking at him while he was speaking, before concluding his performance with a sneering lecture about how jury duty "was by no means a service comparable in scope to that which had been demanded of the men of his generation."

Doing his duty taught Mr. Burnett a sobering lesson: "[T]he burden of proof was so high exactly because the state was so powerful ," he writes. "[T]he state could take control of your person, it could refuse to let you go home, it could send men with guns to watch you take a piss, it could deny you access to a lawyer, it could embarrass you in public and force you to reply meekly, it could, ultimately, send you to jail-all this, apparently, without even accusing you of a crime."

And it could withhold evidence. It's easy enough to find the actual case Mr. Burnett is describing-the killing of the 36-year-old Fitzroy Green by 21-year-old computer programmer Eric Carolina in the wee hours of Aug. 18, 1998. The Carolina/Milcray story is backed by plenty of evidence that the jurors were not permitted to hear. Green/Cuffee was indeed a transvestite prostitute-and with a record of violence. In 1997, according to the New York Post , Green "was accused of cutting off a john's pinky finger after the customer got angry when he discovered Green was only masquerading as a woman."

It was, in short, a narrow escape from a miscarriage of justice. It is to Mr. Burnett's credit that he leaves out this clarifying material. The reader passes through the book blinkered in the same way a jury is blinkered-and finishes it with gratitude to Graham Burnett for having brought his fellow panelists around to his own anti-authoritarian intuitions.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at the Weekly Standard.

"By its nature," writes Michael Lewis in Next , "the Internet undermined anyone whose status depended on a privileged access to information." Mr. Lewis means doctors whose patients arrive for treatment having just downloaded the last dozen issues of the Journal of the American Medical Association , and investment analysts barked at over the phone by clients who've read earnings reports published 10 minutes before. But journalists have been similarly undermined. When everyone has the "facts," those who gather them become mere technicians. The journalist's value-added now comes from brio or brain power, and Mr. Lewis, who catches on quick, has always been hell-bent on piling both into everything he writes. He may not have been the first writer to gape at the monomaniacs of 1980's Wall Street, but he was surely the first–in Liar's Poker (1989)–to dub them "Big Swinging Dicks." The dorkier the information, the more likely he is to impart it in wowie-kazowie prose.

In Next , he clumsily braids together a half-dozen magazine stories about some wacky characters who have crawled out of the Internet-age wiring. This is not Mr. Lewis' most ambitious book. In his high spirits, he seems not to notice when he uses "thwart" to mean "flout," or "impunity" to mean "ease." His metaphors have a tendency either to come apart ("There's a moment when the center feels in its bones that the ground beneath its feet is moving, whether it likes it or not") or to importune the reader for a laugh ("Frankel's code was the commercial equivalent of a fart joke at a formal dinner party"). But to the cliché-strewn field of high-tech, Mr. Lewis brings both a businessman's rigor and a dyspeptic independence, and those gifts carry the day for him. Next is an uneven book, annoying at points, but it's consistently smart, and its high points are among the high points of Mr. Lewis' writing life.

One of these is a visit to Jonathan Lebed–the 15-year-old from New Jersey who used the Internet to "manipulate the stock market." After Jonathan finished fourth in a children's stock-picking contest sponsored by CNBC, his parents opened an Ameritrade account for him. In a year, he turned an $8,000 savings bond into $28,000. By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission caught up with him, he'd turned that stake into three-quarters of a million dollars by investing in stocks he'd talked up on Yahoo.com.

It initially puzzled Mr. Lewis that the S.E.C. let Jonathan Lebed keep two-thirds of his booty. The reason? The S.E.C.'s case against him, Mr. Lewis shows, was extremely weak, and they were scared he'd talk. The boy was not misleading people; he traded and pontificated under his own e-mail names and exposed himself to the same risks as those who relied on his advice. That the advice was good–so good that his schoolteachers routinely begged him for tips–is not particularly surprising. According to a 1999 Bloomberg study, fly-by-night stock analysts are on average 21 percent off-target; their competitors at the Wall Street firms are off by an average of 44 percent. When Mr. Lewis describes how brokerage houses collect commissions from the companies whose stock they're selling, or how J.P. Morgan Chase sends advance warning to companies they're planning on downgrading, the reader cannot but come around to his populist view of the case: that, in the eyes of the S.E.C., Jonathan Lebed's crime was that he was too lower-class to engage in what all stock advisers do.

Mr. Lewis cannot disguise his bemusement that his Internet reporting keeps leading him to teenagers. If there is a technological revolution going on, it's being led by a children's army. Fifteen-year-old Marcus Arnold, child of Belizean immigrants, gave such good legal advice on AskMe.com's criminal-law page that he wound up ranked first on its panel of experts, ahead of dozens of criminal lawyers. In England, 14-year-old Daniel Sheldon parlayed his role as a guru of Gnutella (a file-sharing code that, unlike Napster, bypasses central servers) into another role, as a guru of anti-capitalism. Young Daniel thinks all intellectual property ought to be free. "We're out to make a network," he says, "that benefits us all and isn't governed or monitored or censored by anybody else, just us, and we're in control of the network."

Mr. Lewis is cynical about the kind of adult Daniel Sheldon will turn into, since "[i]nside every alienated hacker who thinks he stands for the 'good things that ultimately don't matter to most businesses,' there is a tycoon struggling to get out." But he takes very seriously the way the Internet has "redistributed the prestige and authority" away from adults and toward children. "[W]hen capitalism encourages ever more rapid change," he writes, "children enjoy one big advantage over adults: they haven't decided who they are." He quotes economist Paul Romer of Stanford University, who thinks the very idea of filial piety may be collapsing in the face of technological change: "It may be that we are moving to a model where the peak earning years occur before a person is thirty years old," Romer says, "after which he effectively retires. It's the pro athlete model, extended to everyone."

Halfway through the book, Mr. Lewis takes up what adults are doing with computer technology. The answer is: mining data. As the chief executive of a company called DoubleClick notes, "personal information is the oil of the twenty-first century." Knowledge Networks is offering free WebTV and Internet access to a quarter-million Americans of all backgrounds in return for a semi-permanent opinion-polling relationship. This, eventually, will allow politicians to understand voters' needs almost perfectly. As Mr. Lewis points out, Americans tend to ask only one thing of democracy–that it become more "direct" and less parliamentary. The likely outcome, he is right to fear, is a "world in which politicians become so well informed about public opinion that there is no need for direct democracy."

The commercial implications are even more powerful than the political ones. Two Silicon Valley companies–TiVo and Replay Networks–have sold a few hundred thousand black boxes that, a decade from now, will allow you to store an entire Blockbuster video outlet's worth of movies and programs for about 100 bucks. The catch is that the box will record everything you do with your television, so that networks can more effectively target ads at you. Commercials can be slipped in at the moments you're most glued to the box–and for products your viewing behavior has shown you like. This data is so valuable to corporations that it "has created terrifying economic incentives for people to abandon their charming old attachment to their privacy." In so doing, it ought to change the way we look at the economy in general. "The means of consumption, not the means of production," Mr. Lewis writes, "are the engine of modern economic life."

As far as television is concerned, he's right. As far as society is concerned, Mr. Lewis could use a bit more of the Marxian ideologue in him. For one thing, he's constantly losing track of what he thinks he believes about the free market. He insists at one point that capitalism has been inevitably softened since the Berlin Wall came down. (Gnutella "fell under the heading CAPITALISM AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF SERIOUS ALTERNATIVES. So long as capitalism was opposed, there could be no truck with experiments in human liberty such as this one.") Twenty-five pages later, he insists just as firmly that capitalism has been inevitably hardened since the Berlin Wall came down. ("From that moment there was no need to flavor the free market with a dash of something else …. Little pockets of socialism that had been tolerated when socialism posed a threat now, overnight, seemed horribly retrograde.")

Mr. Lewis insists, for some reason, that technological conditions, including the Internet, change nothing profound–they just give people tools to get what they already desire. "The events I investigated," he writes, "had occurred because the Internet filled some kind of social hole. If the hole didn't exist in the first place, the filling up of it never would have happened." This would seem as wrong–or at least as meaningless–as asserting that the atomic bomb merely "filled some kind of social hole."

The belief that we use the Internet, rather than vice-versa, is not technological optimism. On closer examination, it looks more like the worst kind of misanthropy. Because it's tough to think of a harsher accusation to level at humanity than to say that the world of the Information Age–solipsism and shopping for kids, pornography and surveillance for adults–is something we actually wanted.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

The Harvard-educated novelist Robert Ellis Gordon spent the 1990's teaching fiction-writing in Washington state's toughest jails. He seems to have learned more from his students than they learned from him. "My first day in prison," writes an armed robber serving eight years, "a dude a few cells down cut off his testicles with a razor blade and threw them out onto the tier." Mr. Gordon himself writes of an inmate so annoyed by his tablemate's eating habits–"I can't stand the sound of mushy bananas. I hate that fucking sound!"–that he gouges out the fellow's eye.

Mr. Gordon is not happy that the American prison population has quadrupled over the last two decades, thinks that most policy discussion of prisons is ignorant, and bemoans the vogue for "no-frills" incarceration, which dooms both the creative-writing classes he teaches and the degree-equivalency programs that have been shown to lower recidivism rates. But this hodgepodge of a book, made up of Mr. Gordon's desultory reminiscences and his own and his students' short stories, is neither a sociology of prisons nor a political tract. It aims instead to open a window into the minds of prisoners and prison workers.

That's a good and necessary thing, because these people don't tend to get heard from. The American prison system is one of humanity's ongoing human-rights catastrophes. The United States, as is well known, incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other country and subjects its inmates to unspeakable barbarities. Black Americans make up 0.4 percent of the people on Earth, but account for fully a tenth of the world's prisoners. Underpaid prison guards supplement their income by conniving with inmates to permit mammoth drug rings. Judges who may have done drugs with impunity in their youth today sentence recreational drug-users to years of getting gang-raped. For one class of criminal–sex offenders–the "debt to society" never gets paid. Every state in the country now has a law permitting either the reincarceration, the public shaming, or the official hounding of child molesters and other deviants once they leave jail.

The penal side of the American justice system shows every evidence of unaccountability and bureaucratic hubris. There are certainly understandable impulses for its policies, and there may even be reasons for them: Blacks commit more crime, molesters have high recidivism rates, and we "didn't know" how bad drugs were when today's middle-aged drug warriors were getting high in their youth. But these "good reasons" are seldom good enough to relieve us of the worry that our prisons may be evidence of a wider societal sickness. And whether these reasons are good or bad, what's shocking is that no one is held accountable for providing them. The most fascinating thing about American jails is that so few people are fascinated by them. If The Funhouse Mirror serves one purpose, it will be to convince readers that every single last instant of scrutiny which our jails receive from international human-rights groups is merited.

"Welcome to the Steel Hotel," written by one of Gordon's inmates who was released after serving 12 years for attempted murder, lays out the rules of prison life. Most of these are perversions of rules that obtain on the outside. Make no eye contact because meeting a person's glance is always taken as a challenge. Never loan anyone anything because, if you don't get back what you've given away, you must either respond with extreme violence or become prey to the inmates who want the rest of your stuff. And never snitch because the guards you snitch to will betray you to other prisoners.

New arrivals in prison get slotted into a preexisting hierarchy based on the crimes they committed. The crimes most "worthy of respect" are (in descending order) murder, assault, armed robbery, kidnapping and drugs. The plebeians in this twisted class system are the "rapos," the sex offenders of all categories, who are subject to virtual enslavement as "punks" (or permanent girlfriends) to the more violent offenders. There is plenty of sudden and unpredictable sexual violence as well. Prison toughs not infrequently show up, armed with homemade knives or "shanks," at rapos' open cell doors. "Shit on my dick or blood on my shank" appears to be a common icebreaker. What is most bizarre is that all prisoners–rapos and their predators alike–assume there's some ethical logic to this treatment. "I beat up sex offenders," writes one, "because it was my right to do so, my right as someone who was in prison for an 'honorable crime,' mine being armed robbery. Sex offenders are the worst kind of criminals, the only bad kind, really." But it will be crystal-clear to the reader that sex offenders are singled out for sexual mistreatment out of sheer opportunism: They are the only class of prisoners who, as a rule, have no expertise in defending themselves against man-to-man violence.

Mr. Gordon's students, in other words, could tell you some stories. But there's a bit of false advertising here. Like a vain academic who lards the anthology he edits with his own poetry, Mr. Gordon has stinted on the cons' writing and made this book a showcase for his own. As a prose-writer, he suffers from the besetting flaw of most literary tough guys: floweriness. This is a book in which "oft-" is an oft-used prefix, and "all-too-" is used all too frequently. Mr. Gordon doesn't just say that all prisons are different; he says, "To reiterate, then, prisons vary. But pronounced and obvious as these surface differences are, I think it is only after you have spent a bit of time inside a few institutions that you begin to develop an appreciation for the distinctive varieties of pathology and pain that a particular prison generates."

Such passages leave the reader doubtful whether a creative-writing class is the best lens through which to pass judgment on our prison system. In the end, some political or at least societal context would have been welcome. The brutality of the inside of a prison is not only familiar but also numbingly one-dimensional. A 100-pager like The Funhouse Mirror is sufficient to convey it. Exposing the failures outside of prison that permit such brutality to persist is a more complicated task–and, arguably, a more important one.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

Deep into middle age, New Yorker senior editor Jeffrey Frank has squeezed out a short, clever novel. Readers might expect two things from it. First–since Mr. Frank spent years at The Washington Post and the Washington Star , and since the book's protagonist is an arrogant and substanceless D.C. pundit–that The Columnist will be sociology in disguise, a send-up à clef of The Way Washingtonians Live (or pretend to live) Now. Second–since Simon & Schuster has blanketed the dust jacket with preemptive raves from Susan Orlean, Christopher Buckley, Kurt Andersen and others who owe a big part of either their livelihoods or their reputations to the magazine Mr. Frank serves–that the book will stink.

Wrong on both counts. The Columnist is a parody of sorts, following the "Great Men I Have Known, Including Myself" model of Washington autobiography. Narrator Brandon Sladder may have George Will's bow tie, Sidney Blumenthal's habit of lauding in print the speeches he has secretly written himself, and Lloyd Bentsen's belief that a single handshake allows one to say one "knew" "Jack" Kennedy. But Sladder is more (and worse) than that. He's a kind of maleficent Candide, who blackmails, lies, betrays, cheats, fucks, namedrops, marries and blunders his way to the top–and assumes no one will notice. This rare combination of megalomania and naïveté vaults The Columnist right out of the Washington-book genre, so that the capital winds up as little more than the setting for a spectacularly realized English-style humor novel.

The humor arises from Sladder's unreliability. His dishonesty is so thoroughgoing that he lies even to himself, pompously recasting his sleaziest misdeeds as acts of moral bravery, and mistaking his immediate desires for categorical imperatives. He makes his name at a Buffalo, N.Y., paper with an article on arson that he "researches" by stealing records from his father, an insurance agent. ("I respected my father as the sort of white-collar personage who forms the spine of America," Sladder recalls.) The act costs Dad Sladder his job. Worse, it condemns him to a penurious old age that embarrasses his social-climbing son. So when Brandon marries into a horse-y Virginia family, he doesn't invite his parents to the wedding: "I wanted to spare them the strain of a major social event far from home–or, for that matter, the strain of having to decide whether to attend such an event."

Sladder's road to national fame starts when he catches his editor in flagrante during a reporting trip to Washington. "When I gave notice," he recalls, "I had but two small favors to ask: a letter of credential and a few months' salary to tide me over." That gets him to D.C., where he interviews a deputy secretary and–oops!–drops the name of a prostitute they both frequent. The classified information he gathers wins him the kudos of publication in New Terrain magazine. He gets his column in the Washington Telegram through his wife's family, and runs roughshod over the journalists who work there. Sladder reflects, bemused, "I did not develop many lasting friendships in my first year or so in Washington."

To the habit of condescending to those who are worth 10 of him, Sladder adds a weakness for stupid, self-satisfied, wrong bons mots. He recalls that one beat reporter in Buffalo "had been drafted after high school and had gone to Korea, an experience that certainly shaped his view that the unexamined life is greatly to be preferred." His cruelest attacks are for those who see through him, like the literary editor Lionel Heftihed, "whose shoddy book about journalism will forever embarrass the critics who praised it and the Pulitzer board that dishonored itself." Sladder inflicts this mudslinging even on his own family. When his teenage son Branny turns to drugs, he complains that his wife "would accuse me of alienating my son. But it was my distinct impression that the reverse was true–after all, Branny had been alienating me for fifteen years."

Sladder lacks every evidence of humanity. He has no pity. He sees J.F.K.'s assassination as a chance to get his byline into New Terrain again; when the editor's daughter wails, "I'm so upset, I'm so upset," he assumes she's referring to her unrequited love for him. Like most prudish people, he has no vision of sexuality beyond the pornographic. These pages are full of "peachlike breasts" and "heated hurryings" and "nature's urgent grip" (and a good thing, too, since "to leave out the firm breast, the moist coupling, the soft descent of lips, would be unfair to readers"). He has no ear: To impress a plain-spoken editor, he laces his conversation with misplaced profanities ("My fucking talents might lie elsewhere …. You see right the fuck through me.") He has no political curiosity and no reportorial instincts (his idea of a probing Vietnam War question is: "It sounds as if you still believe there is light at the end of that tunnel"), and has so little writing ability that he causes editors to burst out laughing. ("I loved to watch her pencil," he writes of one, "homing in on the poor phrase, the flawed metaphor, giggling merrily when she saw that it pleased me.") And finally, he has no irony. "In this community," he says of his Georgetown set, "I became ever more persuaded that rewards naturally fall to the most accomplished."

Brandon Sladder, in other words, is a monstrous kind of anti- mensch . Whether Washington creates such people or merely attracts them, all Washingtonians know a Brandon Sladder (or a dozen) and will recognize the crud-rises-to-the-top world he inhabits. Mr. Frank includes enough detail to show he knows this world cold. There is, for instance, Sladder's bizarre belief, almost universal among Washington writers, that the measure of one's importance is how many neologisms one can coin ("Gretchen, to my regret, did not … notice when I called for a 'cathartic consensus' and introduced that phrase to the language"); the prissy solemnity that baseball seems to elicit in Washington pundits ("the World Series, that autumnal ballet"); the tendency of all Washington memoirists to include one "stunning revelation" (in this case, L.B.J. pulling out his privates and saying, "Brandon, tell me: What is Charles de Gaulle against this?") that is neither stunning nor a revelation–nor even, in all likelihood, true.

But The Columnist is not really a Washington novel. Sladder's hypocrisy is a matter of generic human vanity, not of ideology. His politics are vaguely conservative, but basic doltishness, rather than opportunistic inconsistency, is their great failing–as when he urges a politician friend to present himself to poorer constituents as "an ambassador from the nation of learning." This is not really even an American novel so much as a Victorian satire. Its humor–like that of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (1889) or George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody (1892)–lies in tone and misdirection. Mr. Frank doesn't strain to be "major." He makes no clumsy attempts to sneak big truths in through the back door. And he has managed a feat that few besides Kingsley Amis have pulled off in recent decades: He has written an extremely funny book around a character who is, down to the very pith of his being, a bore.

Christopher Caldwell writes a weekly Washington column for the New York Press and is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

"We were about halfway through another interview," writes the Boston College sociologist Alan Wolfe early in Moral Freedom, "before it became clear that the respondent did not know what the word 'virtue' meant and had been too polite to ask." To find out how Americans think about right and wrong, Mr. Wolfe took a poll (recently published in The New York Times Magazine) and held focus groups in eight communities: from blue-collar Fall River, Mass., to the farms of Tipton, Iowa; from San Antonio's Lackland Air Force base to San Francisco's gay Castro district. Mr. Wolfe's method has obvious drawbacks: It elicits banalities (60 percent of Americans agree that "lying is sometimes necessary, especially to protect someone's feelings"); it's captive to fads; and it asks you, the reader, to spend hours with people who, if they sat down at the next barstool, would prompt you to pay your tab and leave. But at its best, his method has its advantages, too, stripping away ulterior agendas to give us a look at the raw material of the American conscience.

At first glance, that conscience is a muddle. True, some people still have firm convictions about the virtues Mr. Wolfe is most interested in loyalty, self-discipline, honesty and forgiveness. These convictions can give rise to dramatic clashes: the teenage girl whose fundamentalist Christian father, when she began sleeping around, "would go to the drawer and pick out the biggest knife in the drawer and put it on the table in front of us and say, 'Why don't you just stick this in your mother's heart?'" Or the gay man describing the moment he chose to come out to his parents: "He recalls coming home on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated and finding his parents wealthy conservative Republicans celebrating." (Bet they'll never forget where they were when they found out their son was gay.) But what's surprising shocking, even is that, nowadays, such moral showdowns are rare.

It's not that morality has ceased to be a big deal, Mr. Wolfe says; it's that no one can agree on who should impose it. So we've come up with a compromise: Today's American carries into all walks of life a "distinction between personal and impersonal authority." Personal always wins. The result is a free market of morality in which the moral consumer can choose for himself between competing moral codes and sources of authority. That, and not hedonism or impunity or the belief that anything goes, is what Mr. Wolfe means by "moral freedom," and he is giddy with delight over its appearance. "The old adage that America is a free country has, at last, come true," he writes, "for Americans have come to accept the relevance of individual freedom, not only in their economic and political life, but in their moral life as well."

But there's a problem that Mr. Wolfe recognizes only intermittently. Morally, Americans now expect to live in a world of heads-I-win, tails-you-lose. "Both Victorian and contemporary moralists tend to think that self-discipline is a virtue and self-indulgence is a vice," Mr. Wolfe writes. "Americans told us that they agreed with the first half of that sentiment but not the second." This moral free market is one in which the customer is always right, and Americans have become alarmingly adept at rationalizing their misbehavior post facto. They defend their divorces by drawing parallels to the way their bosses treat them in an era of downsizing, and then cite (implausibly) the damage they'd do to their kids by not abandoning them. They engage in "fine-tuned moral accounting" to decide when loyalty is appropriate, rejecting "blind loyalty" in favor of "earned loyalty" forgetting that a loyalty based on a calculus of one's own interest is no loyalty at all. Thus, an Iowan says: "If you're in a bad marriage, you're being loyal to yourself if you take steps to get out of it, and maybe that's loyalty too." No, it's not.

This is a common pattern. Mr. Wolfe astutely sees that today's morality owes much to the 1970's. Many of his respondents, the born-again Christians very much included, "find themselves more comfortable with the language of psychology than they do with the language of sin." And Mr. Wolfe himself sometimes gets trapped in the same shallows where his interviewees plash, as in San Francisco, where he opines: "Because one cannot be honest while living in the closet, coming out of the closet represents a painful affirmation of the truth. For all of the efforts of its residents to avoid the language of virtue (and vice), San Francisco is a zone of honesty." No, it's not! Or, at least, this is a very different kind of honesty than the kind that keeps people from, say, embezzlement or slander. This honesty, like the "rigorous honesty" espoused by 12-step addiction programs, aims instead at self-actualization, at identifying one's own needs before building rules to live by. It's the honesty espoused by André Gide in everything he wrote, a 20th-century Promethean, supplemental morality. It can be usually is, in fact admirable. But it's not grounds for saying the gays of the Castro are any more "honest" than the parents back home in Podunk who disowned them.

Alan Wolfe is deeply interested in sexual freedom more interested, in fact, than practically any of his interview subjects, two-thirds of whom consider sex overrated. (His Castro gays are the exception.) He takes feminism as a wellspring for the new morality and sex as the central moral battleground of our time, and hails Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse as prophets. "All questions of moral freedom," he writes, "finally come down to questions of sex." If he's saying that sexual freedom has become so important to your average American that no moral code which fails to guarantee that freedom will go far, then he may be right.

He's also playing with fire. If Mr. Wolfe's vision is a mere system of sexual freedom, it will leave you liable to follow your libido which is fine, and nobody's business. But as a system of morals, it will leave you liable to follow an evil government, say, or a peer group of violent high-school sickos, or a few friends planning a securities fraud. Like all moralities, this one is organized around minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure only here the pain to be minimized and the pleasure to be maximized are, as often as not, one's own. "Morality defines our duties to self and others," Mr. Wolfe writes. Again, that's fine but his interview subjects keep failing to see that duties to self and duties to others are different. Considering the self merely another "other" turns virtue inside-out and leaves us with the Golden Rule reversed: Do unto yourself as Christianity used to enjoin you to do unto others. It's an ad hoc morality, a path-of-least-resistance morality, even when it's accompanied by phony moral anguish. As it often is, since a defining and ominous attribute of Mr. Wolfe's interviewees is that every moral principle they espouse comes equipped with its own built-in escape hatch.

Take the case of Karla Faye Tucker, much argued in the press during Mr. Wolfe's interviewing and vexing to his subjects. Tucker was the Texas woman executed three years ago for murders committed a decade and a half before. In the interim, she had become a born-again Christian and reformed her life. Mr. Wolfe's subjects argue the importance of forgiveness till they're blue in the face, but they have none to offer Tucker. Fry the bitch! is the general consensus. And that's fine, too. But when asked to justify it, practically all of them go scampering back to the codes of moral dependence they profess to have outgrown: It's God's will; it's the government's will; Tucker has to be held responsible for her acts. Mr. Wolfe understands this hypocrisy perfectly, and is troubled by it. ("If people are to be held responsible for their acts," he asks, "then shouldn't those who think that Karla Faye Tucker's life can be taken by the state be held responsible for their beliefs?") He sees it, however, only as an isolated, well-meaning confusion, not as something that undermines his whole thesis.

But it does. As surely as the (rapidly evaporating) sentiment that the New Economy has abolished the business cycle, Alan Wolfe's idea of "moral freedom" is boom-time wishful thinking. Note that when Mr. Wolfe describes the moral order we're in the process of replacing, he repeatedly resorts to the adjective "Victorian," which suggests to us a comic and arbitrary list of injunctions against everything from whacking off to wearing a hat indoors. Had he been looking for an argument rather than a straw man, he would have confronted the firm but flexible, commonsensical side of the same moral tradition like that of Macaulay (if one requires a Victorian), who held that the measure of a man's morals was best taken when nobody was watching. The Victorian implication is that virtue kicks in when push comes to shove; if we're deaf to that kind of reasoning, it's because push hasn't come to shove for a while. Moral negotiability, rather than moral freedom, is the proper description of the American moral system that Mr. Wolfe extols. And maybe he's right to extol it. For now.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

At the 1964 Georgia state Republican convention, the worst Presidential candidate in modern American history was offered a sip of the soft drink named after him (Gold Water–"the right drink for the conservative taste!"). "This tastes like piss!" he winced. "I wouldn't drink it with gin!" Barry Goldwater's public-relations outrages were nothing compared to his ideological ones: He called for withdrawing diplomatic recognition from the USSR, scrapping the progressive income tax and making Social Security voluntary, and mulled using atomic bombs in Vietnam. He wasn't exactly courting controversy when he told a Chicago reporter, "Doggone it ... I'm not even sure that I've got the brains to be President of the United States." Lyndon Johnson drubbed him with 61 percent of the popular vote.

Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm sees the Goldwater debacle as a lost battle in a won war. In 1960, John F. Kennedy had 22,000 donors, Richard Nixon 44,000. Goldwater gathered more than a million–along with a record 3.9 million volunteers. The Goldwaterite Young Americans for Freedom recruited 5,400 new members in that campaign summer, as against 1,500 for Students for a Democratic Society. Ten new Republican governors (including Ronald Reagan) would come to power in 1966, and Republicans would win five out of the next six Presidential elections. What had happened? Other historians have noted that democracy went into the streets in the 1960's, but Mr. Perlstein is the first to suggest that Republicans got there first.

This was not simply a triumph of reactionaries. By the time of Goldwater's Presidential run, the conservative movement had been wrested from the control of the John Birch Society and delivered to the young activists around William F. Buckley Jr., who sought "to articulate a position on world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism." Easier said than done: General Edwin Walker was lecturing his troops on the treasonous tendencies of Truman, Acheson and Eleanor Roosevelt. Birchers were blaming the "loss" of China on American Civil Liberties Union subversion and fretting over fluoridated water. California Republican Tom Kuchel was taking to the Senate floor to vent his alarm that "African Negro troops who are cannibals" were training in the Georgia swamps for a Russian-United Nations takeover of the U.S.

Mr. Perlstein's politics are firmly on the left. But here, rather than gloat for the millionth time over right-wing hubris, he introduces a new villain into the plot. The Negro-cannibal rumor may have been appalling, he grants, but it "spoke volumes about the psychological paradoxes of running a democracy in a Cold War. In America citizens are charged with making sense of the world around them. But they are refused the information to do so by Cold War secrecy. So they do what they can with the facts available."

The America of the early 1960's, Mr. Perlstein thinks, was a society in which few such facts were available. A "doctrine of managerial expertise" offered comfort and security to those who graciously left problems to the experts. For Southern blacks, of course, the doctrine was a prima facie fraud. But technocratic ideology (which passed itself off as no ideology at all) soon began to fail others. Small businessmen were unable to compete with corporations that had carved out special protection from Washington. Crime rose, blacks rioted, neighborhoods changed (Berkeley, as liberal then as it is now, voted down an open-housing law in 1962), the semi-secret war in Vietnam escalated and practically everyone worried about getting blown up in a nuclear war. All sorts of previously apolitical people, from all walks of American life, came to see their elites as unaccountable, their democracy as shallow, their freedom as imperiled. Against an Eisenhower-Kennedy liberalism that, when push came to shove, had little to say to its supposed beneficiaries beyond Shut up and listen to your betters , Goldwater set his own motto: Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice .

Goldwater himself (like today's Western Republicans) was a fair-weather friend of limited government. The New Deal had provided Arizona with $342 million in projects for just $16 million in taxes. The Central Arizona Project (providing the state with a water supply) was peeling $1 billion out of Washington even as Goldwater proposed selling off the Tennessee Valley Authority as a boondoggle. And Goldwater benefactor Walter Knott had made his millions by cultivating boysenberries (developed by the USDA) and selling them to Orange County daytrippers (enriched by Pentagon contracts). But Goldwater was a libertarian more than a conservative. He had ended legal segregation in Phoenix schools and later remarked, "If I were a Negro, I don't think I would be very patient either."

What made Goldwater a most unlikely Republican champion is that his own party was arguably as paternalistic as the party he opposed. Nelson Rockefeller, Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, Michigan Governor George Romney and Vietnam Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge all held their noses at the participatory democracy swelling around Goldwater. It was a class thing. Lodge complained at the San Francisco convention, "What in God's name has happened to the Republican Party! I hardly know any of these people!" When it became clear Goldwater had won the nomination, Scranton and Rockefeller sabotaged his convention with the help of a sympathetic press. They destroyed the party to save it.

The visionaries of the campaign were not its ideologists (Robert Bork, Richard Kleindienst and William Rehnquist, among others) but its strategists. Never was a candidate more "made" by a behind-the-scenes operator than Goldwater was by Clif White, the Cornell-trained political scientist turned Machiavelli. Modeling his operation on Communist cell organization, White had been running Goldwater for President for months before even Goldwater found out about it. White theorized that Goldwater could win the Republican nomination without its traditional base in the Northeast, and rigged a dozen ballroom coups at state conventions to prove it.

Goldwater may have thought like a rebel, but he campaigned like an establishmentarian. "Above" politics, he pushed White out in favor of a few "young, bright-eyed incompetents" from Arizona. In Montgomery, Ala., they misplanned a pageant so that 565 Southern belles had to sit in the mud in their formal dresses. Goldwater took aim at General Dynamics in its hometown of Fort Worth, and chose impoverished West Virginia for his attack on the War on Poverty. By the time of Goldwater's campaign-closing whistlestop tour, people were lining the railroad tracks with signs reading: "DON'T STOP HERE, WE'RE POOR ENOUGH."

Meanwhile, L.B.J. worked with J. Edgar Hoover and R.F.K. to gather dirt on Republicans. After a men's-room sex scandal brought down his chief of staff, he trolled for similar material on 16 Goldwater aides. He used E. Howard Hunt, the C.I.A.'s head of domestic covert actions, to place spies in the Republican National Committee, and employed his aide Bill Moyers to run what Mr. Perlstein calls the first "full-time espionage, sabotage, and mudslinging unit."

The campaign turned Goldwater into a caricature. He claimed at one point that Kennedy had staged the Cuban missile crisis for votes. He grew more sympathetic to Southern segregationists. By November, his speeches were often "sheer extrusions of rage." And the press slaughtered him. Media references to Goldwater's belligerency outnumbered references to Johnson's 100 to one–at a time when Johnson was planning the massive bombing of North Vietnam as soon as the election was over. Goldwater himself opposed the mutually-assured-destruction doctrines of Robert McNamara's State Department and attacked Johnson's Vietnam policy: "Does he hope that he can wait until after the election," Goldwater asked a roaring crowd in Cincinnati, "to confront the American public with the fact of total defeat or total war in Asia?" In the end, L.B.J.'s hand held only two cards–J.F.K.'s martyrdom and Goldwater's craziness. They were enough. L.B.J. won, Mr. Perlstein thinks, as "the true conservative in the race–the calmer of fears, the bringer of order, the preserver of peace." A failure to realize that would deprive Democrats of the White House for most of the next three decades.

Clif White and his guerrilla followers had built Goldwater a sophisticated ideological and tactical machine that required only a politician sophisticated enough to use it. With a week to go in the campaign, he showed up. Over the kicking and screaming objections of his Arizona cronies, Goldwater let the washed-up actor Ronald Reagan give a televised campaign speech for him, and the effect was stunning: Mr. Reagan began to harvest hundreds of inchoate and unnamed legitimate grievances into a political program. As Mr. Perlstein puts it, Goldwater "presumed you already knew what he meant. Mr. Reagan showed you. How the government was cheating you: the foreign aid money that bought Haile Selassie a yacht, Greek undertakers dress suits, Kenyan government officials extra wives, and … a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity."

Mr. Perlstein has a very human–you could even say very literary–sense of politics. Details provide the texture of the time: Networks cutting away from black speakers at national conventions to avoid offending their Southern audiences, advertisements for "Foam-ettes–the Toothpaste Tablet You Can Use ANYTIME, ANYWHERE ... even in a family fallout shelter."

Occasionally, as in its minute-by-minute account of the Berkeley free-speech movement's clashes with university brass, the book seems too detailed. But it's not. For at Berkeley, Mr. Perlstein explains, "a core of a few hundred activists told a story about the hypocrisies of consensus liberalism, and it rang true for the thousands of new allies who had never given the matter any thought before. They contemplated The Story–that America was fundamentally decent through and through, its citizens content, their differences resolved through reconciliation and persuasion and compromise–and they refused it." Goldwater–in his own half-cocked, right-wing way–was just such a refusenik.

In lumping Goldwater with Martin Luther King, Michael Harrington, Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan and others for whom activism was "a theater of morality, of absolutes," Mr. Perlstein gives us the real world of politics, in which idealism and ideology are not merely polysyllabic synonyms for good and evil. Writing with the authority of an academic historian and the dash of a journalist, Mr. Perlstein manages to break free of the partisan idées reçues and doctrinal laziness that typify so much writing on recent history. There is something independent, un-bought-out and, in the best sense, radical about this book.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century , by Norman Birnbaum. Oxford University Press, 432 pages, $35.

The "socialism" Norman Birnbaum extols in After Progress is what most Americans would call communism. Mr. Birnbaum, Georgetown University law pro- fessor and founding editor of the New Left Review, distinguishes between "a socialism of ideals and a socialism of material gains." The latter may have triumphed through the European welfare states and the American New Deal, to the extent that it is now a near-universal ideology in the advanced world. But "idealistic" socialism the toppling of monopoly capital, the reconfiguration of society from top to bottom, the "religion of redemption" is what fires Mr. Birnbaum's imagination. Such socialism has been repudiated by all the world's peoples in the last two decades, and globalization has raised the question of whether it would be practicable even if people wanted it. To Mr. Birnbaum, these are merely "contemporary forms of recurrent dilemmas." Revolutionary utopianism will be back, he thinks, if only because the Western world is so hopelessly screwed up.

Mr. Birnbaum stands Dr. Pangloss on his head: Nothing satisfies him. The "primary problem remains the domination of capital," and despite appearances the 20th century has been one long story of defeat at capital's hands. In France and Austria, socialist governments may have brought higher living standards, but these have led to "a renunciation of ideological rigor." (Such rigor being self-evidently a good thing.) Germany's postwar stability which brought with it the world's highest wages "had its price: an obvious public reluctance to consider large-scale projects of reform." (Yeah, those "large-scale projects" that everyone has always wanted from Germany.) In America, the rhetoric of a "nation of shareholders" is "absurdly exaggerated. Less than 50 percent of households have holdings in the stock market." (A mere quintupling from 35 years ago.) And everywhere, the information economy threatens "work as the deepening of learned technique … as changes in production demand frequent relearning." (Apparently, after decades of deploring the dehumanization of industrial work, the left has come to deplore our liberation from it.) The welfare state beats unbridled capitalism, Mr. Birnbaum says, but it "most definitely does not extend to a coherent emancipatory project."

For Mr. Birnbaum, the great enemies of the coherent emancipatory project have been American politicians of both parties. Starting with Harry S. Truman, who bore an "implacable hostility to the Soviet Union," there has been no dark design of which Mr. Birnbaum believes the American power structure incapable. Even that juggernaut Senator Joseph McCarthy was "eliminated" by Republican elites, "lest his demagoguery threaten the elite itself." Mr. Birnbaum speculates that John F. Kennedy was murdered for envisioning coexistence with the USSR in a June 1963 speech. ("To what extent that speech may have occasioned a plot against his life is an open question.") Jimmy Carter is taken to task for admitting the ex-Shah to the U.S., an action that "provoked" (Mr. Birnbaum's word) the "occupation" of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.

Soviet Russia, by contrast, appears to have acquired its Gulag in a fit of absentmindedness. Mr. Birnbaum accuses Brezhnev only of "ineptitude" in crushing the Prague Spring. (His skepticism in the face of American propaganda is matched by his credulity in the face of Russian propaganda: "The handful who protested in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia," he writes, "were attacked not by police, in the first instance, but by ordinary Soviet citizens.") The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was merely a "moment of abysmal imperial judgment." Anyhow, repression under Brezhnev was "increasingly ritualized, an implicit acknowledgment of the increasing ideological importance of alternatives." What a consolation.

Mr. Birnbaum, in other words, is an ideological hard guy, a real egg-breaker-and-omelet-maker, deploring "the compulsive celebration of a sterile liberalism by many traumatized by the historical conjuncture of fascism and Stalinism." (Those wussies.) His idiom is an underground intellectualese that has not been heard, except in parody, for decades: America as a "plebiscitary democracy of consumption," the Third World as battling "metropolitan chauv inism," and so on to the "American police state" and "capital's intellectual agents in the media."

To be sure, Mr. Birnbaum proclaims his outrage at the crimes of Stalinism, and rues the obedience of French and American Communists to Moscow. He sees that Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Mao created "new systems of oppression." His heroes are those who, like the Italian Communist Enrico Berlinguer, balked at doing the Soviets' bidding. But Mr. Birnbaum's anti-Stalinism is of a rather nuanced kind. He is so desperate for a big, authoritarian politics of "solidarity" that he is willing to risk Stalinism (and fascism) to get it. If he considers the Nazi-Soviet pact "devastating," it is not least because it spurred American conservatives to roll back Communism at home.

For Mr. Birnbaum, capitalism is all stick, no carrot. Its "inexhaustible powers of resistance" frustrate him. But it's never quite obvious what Mr. Birnbaum thinks capitalism is, or what he dislikes about it. At times, he means the entire system of liberalism, with its emphasis on property rights and individual autonomy. His ridicule of Isaiah Berlin's ideas of liberty and Tony Blair's is a frontal attack of the sort few leftists were willing to make back when the USSR was a going concern.

At times, however, Mr. Birnbaum uses capitalism to mean something even larger. "For a century and a half," he writes, "the movement inspired by Marx had sought a profound transformation of human nature and society by transcending the market only to be defeated time and time again by chauvinism, ignorance, possessiveness and servility." In other words, by human nature itself. As long as everyone votes for that other kind of socialism the kind with the 35-hour week, the seven-week vacation, the health plan and the COLA Mr. Birnbaum's kind of socialism will never be freely chosen, only installed through coercion and murder. So Mr. Birnbaum is left at the same impasse as all utopian radicals: cursing mankind for its barbarism and frailty.

In the end, it's hard to say just what After Progress is about. Though his subject is broad, Mr. Birnbaum's field of vision is stiflingly narrow: He discusses F.D.R., Mitterrand and Mr. Blair as leaders of their parties, not of their nations, and World War II for its impact on class "solidarity," not for its reshaping of both Europe and the Western moral universe. A klutzy prose ("constern" as a verb), mangled clichés ("the Gordonian knot") and repetitions make this march through the institutions a very long one.

The central problem, though, is that Mr. Birnbaum is an atavist, still applying the Marxist classics to the problems of heavy industry as they existed 45 years ago. The persistent failure, in the global age, of Mr. Birnbaum's favorites Michel Rocard in France, Oskar Lafontaine in Germany, Jesse Jackson in the United States makes his proposition that there are no new challenges to socialism less and less tenable. Unlike Eric Hobsbawm, whose world view his much resembles, Mr. Birnbaum has not adjusted his politics to embrace the new actors and issues of the last decade environmentalists, multiculturalists, feminists. He knows they're out there, but distrusts them all as pleaders for crumbs from an untransformed power structure. Even the 1960's are not quite on Mr. Birnbaum's radar screen, and he remains bewildered that the New Left didn't try harder to make common cause with the American union movement even a quarter century after All in the Family turned Joe-Sixpack-meets-the-nuclear-freeze-activist into a comic cliché.

Mr. Birnbaum is an elegant thinker, a man of erudition, at home in many European cultures. He is aware that his kind of "socialism" failed because it "presupposed the kind of human nature it was intended to make possible." At a certain level, he knows history has passed his movement by. So how does he continue to hold out hopes for it?

Because Mr. Birnbaum is a sort of religious fanatic. He has long been fascinated by parallels between the "solidarity" practiced by certain Christian churches and the social cohesion revolutionaries envisioned. "Socialism at its beginnings and for much of its history," he writes, "was a secular religion." Utopian is for Mr. Birnbaum a term of praise, since utopias provide "a standard against which redemptive measures in an unredeemed world may be judged." (So, of course, did the Spanish Inquisition.) Radicalism's failure and Mr. Birnbaum's abiding faith in it thus have the same source: The less intelligible the revolutionary socialist project to non-communicants, the less redeemed the world. The less redeemed the world, the louder the men of faith holler in the desert.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.

Before he became Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich wrote an early analysis of the New Economy, The Work of Nations (1991),which gave many Americans their introduction to the globalized labor market, vagabond capital and the gap between rich and poor. It has been hard to improve on. The last decade's worth of New Economy books are of liturgical predictability; only the homilies differ. In all of them, you're asked to "imagine a world" where "at the click of a mouse" you can "go to" (i.e., buy stuff from ) Paris or Tokyo or Abidjan. They cover the same themes (the vanishing of distance, the triumph of intellectual over physical capital), promise the same gadgetry (mobile EKG's, "smart" refrigerators), rehash the same anecdotes (America Online's debate over closed versus open systems, the outsourcing of back-office work to India and Ireland) and lay out the same statistics (2.8 million Web sites, 1,500 television channels, executive compensation at 538 times that of the average worker). What's particularly depressing is that both left and right, yea- and naysayers–from John Heileman to Dinesh D'Souza to Ken Auletta–agree that the big payoff of the Internet Age will be an explosion of choice and variety. You certainly can't tell it from their books: If it's Tuesday, this must be George Gilder.

Mr. Reich, now at Brandeis University, still thinks choice a topic worth harping on. In The Future of Success , he argues that it has created a windfall for consumers–even an "Age of the Terrific Deal." The 4-foot-10 Mr. Reich now orders bespoke suits on the Internet. In a few minutes online, you can find airline tickets for a fraction of what you paid a decade ago. The hitch is that we don't live our whole lives as consumers. "The easier it is for us as buyers to switch to something better," he writes, "the harder we as sellers have to scramble in order to keep every customer, hold every client, seize every opportunity, get every contract." In other words, hunt hard for those bargains, because your boss is looking just as hard for ways to replace you with something cheaper. The result is an anxiety amidst plenty that has reshaped, in dubious ways, both the workplace and society at large.

Americans now work harder than any people on earth, besting even the work-drunk Japanese. The poor, of course, need to scramble to keep up. But the rich are logging more hours than anybody, and there are two interesting reasons why. First, at a time of increasing income stratification, they're taking in money hand over fist, making the opportunity cost of slacking off intolerably high. Second, the proliferation of choice confuses the public and creates a desperate need for quickwitted people to do the choosing. "In the emerging economy," Mr. Reich writes, "buyers often don't know what they want, and use the brand-portal as a means of discovering it." (A more cynical view is that, while other peoples shop to find what they want, Americans shop to find out what they want.)

Increasingly, what the New Economy's winners bring to the marketplace is raw brainpower, particularly of the creative sort. Data is so universally available that it has become virtually worthless. Wall Street analysts no longer sell research; they sell advice, i.e., intelligence. The rich, in general, work harder because high-paying jobs are more interesting than they used to be. The idea that today's nouveaux riches are "particularly adept at using new information technologies," Mr. Reich notes, is a gross misperception. Telling someone to study computers as a means of getting rich off the new technology is about as sensible as telling a bright boy of 1925 to become an auto mechanic. If Mr. Reich is right, the class implications are profound. Elite universities will likely turn back into the mills of class differentiation they were in the Gilded Age. Nobs will once again spend four years studying poetry and music before going off and employing all those classmates majoring in business and computer science.

Mr. Reich devotes far too much of his book to the question of how to get those plum jobs. The short answer is self-promotion, although Mr. Reich delivers it through a rather complicated metaphor: He suggests that young men and women on the make "brand" themselves. (This strategy is urged, albeit in more business-guru-like fashion, by Tom Peters in his recent The Brand You 50 , which Mr. Reich can be forgiven for ignoring.) "Even if you're called a full-time employee, you're becoming less of an employee of an organization than you are a seller of your services to particular customers and clients, under the organization's brand name," Mr. Reich writes. "The incentives are on the side of investing in one's personal brand rather than devoting time and energy to the organization." In such a world, loyalty changes from an obsolescent asset to an outright liability. Stay in a job for five years or more and the job market will look at you as a dud, a loser, dead weight. One corporate recruiter tells Mr. Reich that he no longer interviews straight-A students from the Ivy League schools; he assumes they're conformist hoop-jumpers.

Big inequalities in the workplace are multiplied by cultural changes, the greatest of which is feminism. Since rich and poor tend to marry their own kind, more women in the workplace means family incomes diverge even faster than single ones. But marriage itself is faltering, in Mr. Reich's view because men, minus their monopoly on steady earnings, "are nowhere near as good a deal for women as they used to be." (Surely Mr. Reich is not implying that your average working woman is some kind of marital prize?) Even where marriage is contracted, it's a weakened institution. Couples delay childbirth (in Massachusetts, more babies are born to women over 30 than under) or skip it altogether. More and more family functions get "outsourced," as they would in a corporation cutting fixed costs. Already, households spend less on groceries than on meals or restaurants. And the subcontracting of caregiving that began with nursing homes has spread to day care. Not all "outsourced" children are alike, as Mr. Reich points out. Some receive the equivalent of private tutoring, while others are yoked together with ropes and herded through cities in conditions of squalor and boredom that would provoke the pity of a Bosnian P.O.W. In this, they are merely sharing in an adult reality of the Information Age: There's a domino effect to workplace inequality.

Mr. Reich is at his strongest when describing a new mechanism of class stratification that has become almost feudal in its reach. Linked to information technology, money does vastly more than it used to, sorting people into virtual castes (Mr. Reich doesn't use the word) entitled to different levels of service, attention and even citizenship. Now that computers can gauge with actuarial precision a customer's prospective value to a business, there are areas of the economy where life has improved for the richest and taken on a Third World flavor for everyone else. Air travel is one instance, but so are practically all businesses accessed by telephone, which will soon "figure out how to separate their better customers, who want and are willing to pay for more personal attention, from lower-paying customers served by automated and Internet devices." Already at Merrill Lynch, any caller with an account under $100,000 gets routed to a nuisance line. (There's no such thing as free common courtesy.) Meanwhile, now that banks can figure out to the penny just how much credit a prospective home-buyer can carry, neighborhoods are more than ever sorted by minute gradations of income–and with them schools, and with them retail services.

Already society's institutions are hardening to codify such inequalities. Taxes are shifted away from income and capital gains and onto gas, cigarettes, alcohol and lotteries, which disproportionately hit the poor and other sitting ducks. If you're mobile enough, you can avoid many of them. The very wealthiest are granted subsidies, whether in the form of tax waivers or bond issues for new stadiums.

Robert Reich is an acute diagnostician of the New Economy. And so it's strange that he continues to use the old one as the hammer that makes everything look like a nail. He says he knows that the Industrial Age is gone, that New Deal remedies won't mitigate today's dislocations. But his specific policy suggestions–replace unemployment insurance with "earnings insurance" so that people who get fired can have a guaranteed income; give every 18-year-old a $60K "nest egg"; encourage (or even "require") flex time; subsidize day care and require low-income housing to be built in upscale communities–belie him. He's much less interested in discarding the old industrial model than in reconstructing it, piece by piece, in the heart of the information economy.

It's not just that such solutions are authoritarian; it's also that they heap kindling on the very fires Mr. Reich wants to damp. It's no paradox that some of the most enthusiastic proponents of New Deal-style social programs are to be found among those New Economy companies that use the programs to hamstring their more traditional competitors. What look like "liberal" measures designed to help working people actually lend competitive advantages to the giants of the New Economy. Take the tax moratorium on Internet sales, which amounts to a subsidy that your corner bookseller pays to Amazon.com. Or the Family and Medical Leave Act, which Mr. Reich admits is not too useful to his family, and which works well only for two-big-earner families working for heavily capitalized, highly flexible white-collar firms. He recognizes, too, that his own investments and pension funds lead to union-busting. As Labor Secretary, Mr. Reich had a reputation for being disproportionately tough on Old Economy companies–mills where workers fell into vats of molten steel, that kind of thing. His liberal credentials and his hand-wringing notwithstanding, he has found it hard to avoid taking the side of the real powerhouses of the New Economy, in a way that ought to make us question what it actually means nowadays to be on the "left."

What's best about this book is not particularly new, while what's new is not particularly good. Mr. Reich remains an admirably independent thinker (as evidenced most recently by his rage-inducing abandonment of Al Gore at the height of the Florida re-count crisis). But there's something bromidic about this book, more typical of Mr. Reich's epigones than of Mr. Reich himself, almost as if he wanted to pick up where he was interrupted when he left the academy for politics a decade ago. As Henry Kissinger warned, everyone who goes to Washington spends down his intellectual capital, and Robert Reich is only partially recovered from having done just that.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.