Against all odds.

Something for Nothing Luck in America Jackson Lears Viking, $27.95, 392 pp.

Whether bitten by the gambling bug or not, who hasn't been mesmerized by the virtuosity of the card shark, the mystique of the high-stakes dice-roller, the heart-stopping exhilaration of a horse race? Whether or not you partake, who can ignore the proliferation of state-sponsored "gaming" and lotteries over the past twenty years, not to mention the vaunted democratization of the stock market? Betting on the future, gauging one's probable chances, the sheer magic of dumb luck--these gambits on the mysteries of fate have seen something of a revival in recent years, and not alone among working Joes and Josephines. Scholars, too, have taken an interest in such matters as the role of probability theory in the development of the American philosophy of pragmatism, the social rituals of play, gift versus market economies, and the survival of the occult in folk culture and popular healing practices.

In his fine new book, Rutgers University historian Jackson Lears takes readers on a high-spirited yet serious journey through this history. The editor of The Raritan Quarterly and author of two previous books--one on antimodernism, the other on advertising--Lears once again engages both popular and intellectual sources to get hold of a broad defining theme in American life. This time his subject is gambling, not only as a pastime, but as an entire view of the world--even the cosmos. Even those who'd rather open a savings account than risk losing on the slot machines will find Something for Nothing, despite its sometimes arcane vocabulary, surprisingly compelling.

Throughout American history, a vibrant "culture of chance" has rivaled various official "cultures of control," Lears argues. According to this narrative, from the time of the ancients, who honored the goddess Fortuna and the trickster god Hermes, occult divination (extracting spiritual powers from inanimate objects), amulet-wearing, and otherworldly spirit homage thrived throughout European history. This enchanted view of the cosmos was imported to the New World by Protestant and Catholic settlers alike, and reinforced by similar animistic practices among Native Americans and African slaves. From voodoo to the occult books that lined the shelves of any self-respecting gentleman's library to the "recreational divination" of gambling, the colonists preserved something of what historian Johan Huizinga has called the "sacred significance of luck," in spite of the New England Puritan leadership's efforts to demonize magic. In contrast with the Puritans' belief that God alone had the authority to dispense grace in an otherwise obdurate material world, many settlers observed a form of "spiritual bricolage" in which spirit interpenetrated the tangible world. For most, neither "gambling for grace" nor "conjuring mana," Lears insists, was incompatible with the teachings of Jesus.

By the mid-eighteenth century, dualistic cultures of scientific and Protestant evangelical control began facing down magic in ways Cotton Mather could only have dreamed of. Though Jonathan Edwards himself engaged in the "rhetoric of fortune" by insisting on the mystery of grace, the evangelical movement he helped foment--the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s--attributed great powers to the human moral will. Human influence over fate found further support in Enlightenment rationality. The game of gleaning one's chances in the random draw of the cosmic lottery appeared doomed by the forces of Progress and Providence alike, which now reserved special favors for the deserving.

The culture of chance was derided as superstitious, but it did not die, according to Lears. Rather, it became commercialized and secularized in both speculative economic enterprises and alehouse amusements such as horseracing, cockfighting, and an endless variety of cards and dice. By the antebellum period, the American icons of the self-made man and the confidence man were locked in fatal embrace. In the face of the booms and busts of the capitalist economy, the confidence game of shrewd deception and cool risk taking was often what was required--and secretly admired.

Central to the culture of chance, Lears claims, was the notion that real gamblers were not professional "sharpers" (though their theatrical self-satire was roundly appreciated), but the amateurs of the sporting crowd who didn't seek to fix the game. They kept alive the "ethic of fortune" that grounded the culture of chance, the pagan values of stoicism, wonder, hope, resignation to one's lot, and generosity of spirit: paradoxically, the real gambler doesn't take money all that seriously. Think of the character Maverick from the TV series and movie. As Lears reminds us, "the play's the thing," "being in the game"--as true of life as it is of three-card monte.

In the late nineteenth century, as the culture of control increasingly resembled an elaborate fix--with its tyrannizing corporate monopolies and its leaders' iron-clad moral certainty--William James emerged as luck's philosopher-champion. Here, Lears uncovers a rich vein of "accidentalism," beginning with the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. James's concept of a "pluralist universe" engaged through "pure experience" availed one of unpredictable truths about the nature of God and human reality. "Chance was a stench in the nostrils of both the moralist and the manager," Lears writes. But for James it was a portal of possibility--a gift from the cosmos.

That may be true of James, but Lears gets on shaky ground when he extends his understanding of chance to the modernist movement in the arts, which emerged at the precise moment real gambling was suppressed by Progressive-era vice squads. Where "accidentalism" illuminates, say, Dadaism and the work of Jackson Pollack and Louise Nevelson, that of others, such as John Cage, is surely just as nihilistic and formally unengaging as earlier critics said they were. Likewise, Lears persuasively views Paul Tillich's idea of "holy waste"--of acting with "reckless generosity" in an uncertain world--as a way of reckoning with the absurdity of chance. Less compelling is his treatment of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, whose main character testifies to the invisibility of black singularity in white America at least as much as he discovers that "the acceptance of arbitrary fate is the beginning of wisdom."

If Lears tends to conflate too many styles and sensibilities into the culture of chance, the opposite is true of his characterization of the culture of control, whose preoccupations with such things as redemptive love and moral accountability receive no attention here. Which is why, in the end, for all this book's rich allusiveness, it doesn't quite allay the suspicion that today's gaming frenzy and yesterday's obsessive stock trading may be mere addictions after all, beholden to another culture of control altogether: corporate business.

Catherine Tumber is the author of American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Self, 1875-1915 (Rowman and Littlefield).