By Nelson Lichtenstein
Nelson Lichtenstein (ed.)
At the sunrise of the twenty-first century, the legitimacy of yank capitalism turns out unchallenged. The hyperlink among open markets, fiscal progress, and democratic luck has develop into universal knowledge, not just between coverage makers yet for plenty of intellectuals besides. during this example, even though, the earlier has rarely been prologue to modern self assurance within the unfastened industry. American Capitalism provides 13 thought-provoking essays that specify how quite a few contributors, many fashionable intellectuals yet others partisans within the combative global of commercial and coverage, engaged with anxieties concerning the seismic monetary adjustments in postwar the US and, within the approach, reconfigured the early twentieth-century ideology that placed critique of monetary energy and privilege at its center.
The essays ponder a huge spectrum of figures—from C. L. R. James and John Kenneth Galbraith to Peter Drucker and Ayn Rand—and subject matters starting from theories of chilly warfare "convergence" to the increase of the philanthropic correct. They research how the shift clear of political economic climate at midcentury cleared the path for the Nineteen Sixties and the "culture wars" that undefined. participants interrogate what used to be misplaced and received while intellectuals moved their concentration from political financial system to cultural feedback. the quantity thereby deals a blueprint for a dramatic reevaluation of the way we should always take into consideration the trajectory of yankee highbrow background in twentieth-century United States.
Reviews:
"The highbrow heritage of capitalism eventually will get its due during this quantity of clean, arresting essays. This e-book marks the willingness of a brand new new release of students to open up concerns infrequently addressed by means of the exertions and company historians who formerly were our prime historians of capitalism."—David A. Hollinger, writer of Postethnic the United States: past Multiculturalism
"American Capitalism is a crucial contribution to our knowing of postwar American suggestion and tradition. it is going to strength historians to revise their pantheon of vital thinkers for the interval. This e-book reminds us how, within the postwar period, the triumph of a capitalist worldview remained open to severe wondering and alternatives."—George Cotkin, writer of Existential America
"An notable and thought-provoking compilation of essays from political and nationwide figures on fresh and carrying on with American social and fiscal issues."—MBR Bookwatch
Contents:
ntroduction: Social idea and Capitalist truth within the American Century
PART I. THEORIZING TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN CAPITALISM
1 The Postcapitalist imaginative and prescient in Twentieth-Century American Social Thought
—Howard Brick
2 To Moscow and again: American Social Scientists and the concept that of Convergence
—David C. Engerman
PART II. LIBERALISM AND ITS SOCIAL AGENDA
3 Clark Kerr: From the economic to the information Economy
—Paddy Riley
4 John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique
—Kevin Mattson
5 The Prophet of Post-Fordism: Peter Drucker and the Legitimation of the Corporation
—Nils Gilman
PART III. A CRITIQUE FROM THE LEFT
6 C. Wright turbines and American Social Science
—Daniel Geary
7 C. L. R. James and the speculation of country Capitalism
—Christopher Phelps
8 Oliver C. Cox and the Roots of worldwide structures Theory
—Christopher A. McAuley
9 Feminism, Women's background, and American Social suggestion at Midcentury
—Daniel Horowitz
PART IV. the increase OF THE RIGHT
10 the line much less Traveled: Reconsidering the Political Writings of Friedrich von Hayek
—Juliet Williams
11 The Politics of wealthy and wealthy: Postwar Investigations of Foundations and the increase of the Philanthropic Right
—Alice O'Connor
12 American Counterrevolutionary: Lemuel Ricketts Boulware and normal electrical, 1950-1960
—Kimberly Phillips-Fein
13 Godless Capitalism: Ayn Rand and the Conservative Movement
—Jennifer Burns
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Additional resources for American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Politics and Culture in Modern America)
Example text
L. R. "Not only did this m o d e o f thought d e e m conservative faith i n "private enterprise" o u t o f touch ~ v i t ht h e currents o f change i n m o d e r n society; it also trumped more traditional left-~vingarguments that t h e lineaments o f hourgeois society had survived t h e constant alterations o f modernity and t h e stresses o f twentieth-centusy Trars and depressions intact. '" But insofar as the renewed dissent o f t h e 1960s shared a sense o f inhabiting a new order ~ v h i c hold categories o f social analysis failed t o grasp, it is reasonable to inquire into the h i d d e n sympathy between postJvar liberalism and radicalism-and even to imagine that t h e neJv radicalism arose n o t merely i n opposition to new forms o f social control i n an overorganized age ( t h o u g h that impulse undoubtedly gave t h e S e w Left m u c h o f its distinctive spirit), b u t also ~ v i t hhopes aroused by t h e potential that postcapitalist reformers hailed, t h e i m m a n e n t forces o f change i n an order o f life pushing against and beyond t h e bounds o f capitalism.
Such ongoing processes greJv f r o m the prevalence o f self-conscious individuals ~ v i t hflexible ego boundaries ~ v h owere o p e n to change and fello~vship (another echo o f t h e inter~rarsocial-psychological critique), and f r o m the gro~ving capacities o f centralized government t o control resource use and social development. According to Etzioni, particularistic economic interests Jvere bound to play ever less o f a role i n governance, and t h e trend o f t h e future moved to~rarddeclining inequalities o f wealth and income as bounds o f inclusion i n social citizenship ~ v i d e n e d .
Any s u c c e s s f ~ issue ~l f r o m t h e current crisis T h e Postcapitalist Vision ~ t o u l dalmost inel itnbh b e talzen t o rep1 esent n damentalh ti ansformed 35 a\ o f life somehon fun- By t h e early 1940s, Talcott Parsons Jras able to bridge t h e two lzey elements o f t h e inter~rarreformist imagination (socioeconomics and psychoanalytic a n t h r o p o l o g ~ )and , hence furthered t h e course o f t h e postcapitalist vision. Parsons had entered t h e social sciences as a college student i n t h e early 1920s, trained by institutional economists at , h h e r s t College.