Illinois Authors

Secker & Warburg, London : 2001.

In this work, social critic Thomas Frank examines the morphing of the language of democracy into the jargon of the marketplace. He traces the notion that markets are, in some transcendent way, identifiable with democracy and the will of the people.

University of Chicago Press, Chicago : ©1997.

While the youth counterculture remains the most evocative and best-remembered symbol of the cultural ferment of the 1960s, the revolution that shook American business during those boom years has gone largely unremarked. In this fascinating and revealing new study, Thomas Frank shows how the youthful revolutionaries were joined - and even anticipated by - such unlikely allies as the advertising industry and the men's clothing business. In both areas, each having also been an important pillar of fifties conservatism, the utopian, complacent surface of postwar consumerism was smashed by a new breed of admen and manufacturers who openly addressed public distrust of their industries, who recognized the absurdity of consumer society, who made war on conformity, and who finally settled on youth rebellion and counterculture as the symbol of choice for their new marketing vision. The Conquest of Cool is a thorough history of advertising as well as an incisive commentary on the evolution of a peculiarly American sensibility, the pervasive co-optation that defines today's hip commercial culture. By studying the devices and institutions of co-optation rather than those of resistance, Frank offers a picture of the 1960s that differs dramatically from the accounts of youth rebellion and sell-out that have become so familiar over the years. The Conquest of Cool forsakes the stories of campus and bohemia to follow the Dodge Rebellion, chronicle the Pepsi Generation, and recount the Peacock Revolution - by so doing, it raises important new questions about the culture of that most celebrated and maligned decade.

Sound Library, [North Kingstown, R.I.] : 2008.

Frank examines the political, social, and economic consequences of several decades of deliberate and lucrative conservative misrule, revealing how Washington has been remade into a world of economic disparity, lobbyists, and incompetence.

Frank argues that conservatives have taken pains to enshrine the free market as the permanent creed of state, selling off the government, deregulating some industries, defunding others, but always turning public policy into a private-sector bidding war.

Frank answers questions by examining the conservative revolution in his home state, of Kansas.