------------ 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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