------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (August 2006)
Nelson Lichtenstein, editor, _American Capitalism: Social Thought and
Political Economy in the Twentieth Century_. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. vi + 377 pp. $50 (cloth), ISBN:
0-8122-3923-7.
Reviewed for EH.NET by J. David Hoeveler, Department of History,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
_American Capitalism_ makes its way within the long shadows of
Francis Fukuyama's _The End of History and the Last Man_. Two
considerations define its purpose. First, it recognizes, and
generally regrets, that capitalism has enjoyed a late ascendancy,
almost unchallenged around the world and, furthermore, enjoys its
high status in part because of the acquiescence of intellectuals in
that ascendancy. Second, it wants to show that nonetheless a viable
critique of capitalism once did flourish among American thinkers.
Herein lay both the uses and the problems of this anthology. The
various essays in the collection derive from a conference at the
University of California, Santa Barbara in 2005. They highlight some
familiar thinkers, "key writers and intellectuals, from across the
political and aesthetic landscape" (p. 3) -- John Kenneth Galbraith,
C. Wright Mills, Talcott Parsons, and others. But the book enhances
interest by locating for its chapter subjects some fresh and less
familiar individuals, too. Editor Lichtenstein hopes that the
thirteen essays here will help awake the twenty-first century from
its dogmatic slumber. "Historical consciousness," he writes, "remains
one of the intellect's most potent subversions, which is why it is
our hope that an historical understanding of twentieth-century
capitalism can unsteady a few twentieth-first-century verities and
provide a glimpse of a possible future that is something more than a
return to the political economy of a pre-New Deal era that we once
thought long-buried" (p. 17).
The book has four parts. It opens with two essays, by Howard Brick
and David C. Engerman, which set theoretical frameworks for the other
sections. These parts divide into the topics of "Liberalism and Its
Social Agenda," "A Critique from the Left," and "The Rise of the
Right." Part II on liberalism brings essays about Clark Kerr (Paddy
Riley), Galbraith (Kevin Mattson), and Peter Drucker (Nils Gilman).
Part III on the Left offers pieces on Mills (Daniel Geary), C. L. R.
James (Christopher Phelps), Oliver C. Cox (Christopher A. McAuley),
and three historians of feminism (Daniel Horowitz). The section on
the Right looks at Friedrich von Hayek (Juliet Williams),
Congressional investigation committees (Alice O'Connor), Lemuel
Ricketts Boulware (Kimberly Phillips-Fein), and Ayn Rand (Jennifer
Burns).
Brick's essay speaks to one of the considerations addressed in this
volume. Titled "The Post-Capitalist Vision in Twentieth-Century
American Social Thought," it seeks to recover a not-so-distant past
when an array of American thinkers anticipated a transition away from
the dominant capitalism in American history, with the expectation
that the advancing twentieth century would supply new models of class
and power. That vision, Brick concedes, was "largely limited to
left-liberal intellectuals" and he includes among that company John
Dewey, the progressives of the early _New Republic_, some of the New
Deal intellectuals, and others, such as members of the Frankfurt
School. This introduction suits the next two parts of the book quite
well. What struck me about several of the essays in these sections on
liberalism and the Left was their authors' efforts to place their
subjects within a larger complex of social criticism, to have us see
how they derived from and expanded on larger currents of American
thought. Brick supplies the lead by constructing the "post-capitalist
vision" from native American roots that yield a sustaining,
non-Marxian heritage of dissent serviceable for current use amid the
intellectual malaise forged by triumphant capitalism.
To illustrate the pattern, Mattson's essay on Galbraith recognizes a
major contributor to the critique of capitalism who led in fashioning
an "aesthetic" or "qualitative" liberalism. But we should not
understand Galbraith as simply a brilliant or idiosyncratic
dissenter. Mattson traces connections to Thorstein Veblen, Dewey,
Adolph Berle, and Gardiner Means, thus rooting Galbraith in a
tradition of American progressivism. We see similar efforts in
Geary's essay on Mills. Recognized as a major early voice of the
American New Left, Mills often appears, in historians' depictions of
him, as the bold rebel from Texas, the intellectual on a motorcycle,
an iconoclast even among the liberals at Columbia University. Geary,
however, makes it the burden of his essay to show how Mills' whole
intellectual trajectory came out of, and from within, the currents of
American academic sociology in the 1940s. Mills drew on and expanded
the discussions of modernization theory, contributed significantly to
the debates about Max Weber in this decade, and ultimately gave a new
and more radical application to very topical subjects in the
discipline.
Taken together then, the essays, at least in several key cases in the
volume from Brick's opening through Part III, have the effect of
presenting the critique of capitalism as a kind of intellectual
Popular Front. The individual subjects, however special and personal
their contribution, relate to, draw from, and altogether enrich a
viable native tradition of dissent. They are in the American grain.
We have a different story when it comes to Part IV on the Right.
There are interesting essays here, to be sure, but I believe that
somewhere an opportunity was missed. Williams cites Hayek's current
status as "a Cold War hack" and seeks to redeem him by showing that
has was really not that dogmatic a defender of laissez-faire
economics. So actually he's sort of liberal. O'Connor's essay
describes the congressional investigations led by B. Carroll Reese in
1953 against the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and Sage foundations,
accusing them of "un-American subversive activities." In this
instance, the defense of capitalism is exemplified by anti-elitist,
anti-intellectual populists. Phillips-Fein's essay on Boulware, the
union-buster for General Electric, describes another zealous
ideologue for the free market and the rights of business to run its
own affairs. The last three subjects in this section appear in a
rather unsavory light, and not unfairly so, in my judgment. But their
inclusion raises questions about capitalism and the conservative
movement.
Burns's essay on Rand does the best job of relating pro-capitalism to
that movement. She recalls the intense warfare Rand had with William
F. Buckley, Jr., at _National Review_ in the late 1950s. The Catholic
Buckley and others at the journal recoiled from the efforts of the
atheist Rand to defend capitalism on the ethical grounds of pure
self-interest, liberated from any altruistic standards or any notion
of a social morality. Whittaker Chambers joined in the attack on her.
With the exception only of a brief discussion of Garry Wills and a
mention of Russell Kirk, the section on the Right leaves the
overwhelming imprecision that conservatism is synonymous with an
uncritical defense of capitalism. Even Rand and Buckley, after all,
were simply debating on what grounds capitalism merits its defense.
Readers here would thus have not a hint of a whole tradition of
American conservative thinking that has registered a profound
skepticism toward capitalism. I would have suggested placing Brick's
essay in the section on liberalism, as it recognizes only leftist
thinkers in the "post-capitalist vision." Then I would have offered
an essay that showed the larger dimensions of the capitalist critique
by bringing into the dissent any number of thinkers representing "the
Right." For there is a kind of conservative, a partisan of history,
tradition, and social continuity, that is inherently uncomfortable
with the dynamics of capitalism, with its destabilizing social
impact, with its erosion of the organic community, with the hedonist
culture it generates, with its reckless individualism. Here one could
include the prolific conservative writer Kirk, who often recalled
with bitterness the ugly inroads of industrialism into his beloved
rural Michigan; one could look at the essays of George Will in the
1970s ("Capitalism undermines traditional social structures and
values; it is a relentless engine of change, a revolutionary inflamer
of appetites, enlarger of expectations, diminisher of patience"), or
Irving Kristol ("Godfather of Neoconservatism"), who, in his _Two
Cheers for Capitalism_, presented a trenchant critique of
capitalism's moral legitimacy. The American grain is not only a
left-liberal one.
J. David Hoeveler is professor of history at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His most recent book is _Creating the American
Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges_.
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