Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought 9780801454295

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: To Name a New Society in the Making
1. Capitalism and Its Future on the Eve of World War I
2. The American Theory of Organized Capitalism
3. The Interwar Critique of Competitive Individualism
4. Talcott Parsons and the Evanescence of Capitalism
5. The Displacement of Economy in an Age of Plenty
6. The Heyday of Dynamic Sociology
7. The Great Reversal
Conclusion: On Transitional Developments beyond Capitalism
Notes
Index

Citation preview

TRANSCENDING CAPITALISM

Transcending Capitalism VISIONS OF A NEW SOCIETY IN MODERN AMERICAN THOUGHT

* * *

Howard Brick

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ithaca and london

Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from Washington University in St. Louis. Copyright © 2006 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2006 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brick, Howard, 1953– Transcending capitalism : visions of a new society in modern American thought / Howard Brick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-2590-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8014-2590-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Sociology—United States—History—20th century. 2. Economics—United States—History—20th century. 3. Capitalism—United States—History—20th century. 4. Social change—United States— History—20th century. 5. United States—Social conditions—20th century. 6. United States—Economic conditions—20th century. I. Title. HM477.U6B753 2006 306.3'4209730904—dc22 2006019345 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of Julius H. Brick

Contents

*

Acknowledgments

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ix

Introduction: To Name a New Society in the Making 1 Capitalism and Its Future on the Eve of World War I 23 The American Theory of Organized Capitalism 54 The Interwar Critique of Competitive Individualism 86 Talcott Parsons and the Evanescence of Capitalism 121 The Displacement of Economy in an Age of Plenty 152 The Heyday of Dynamic Sociology 186 The Great Reversal 219 Conclusion: On Transitional Developments beyond Capitalism 247 Notes

275

Index

313

vii

Acknowledgments

*

This book has been in progress so long that my thanks would be longwinded indeed if I was able to remember all who assisted me over many years. Thanks begin with a graduate school colleague, Karl Pohrt; my teacher Alan M. Wald; and the cordial subject of my first book, Daniel Bell, whose work, and letters to me, always kept me thinking. I am indebted too to the memory of John O. King III, who first told me I should read Talcott Parsons and try to figure out what to make of him historically. Work on this project began with a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, obtained with the support of the College at the University of Chicago, and a year as Andrew Mellow Faculty Fellow in History of American Civilization at Harvard University. Academic leave was provided by the University of Oregon, in the form of a term’s fellowship at the university’s Humanities Center, and by Washington University in St. Louis. The Warren Center for Studies in American History provided a stimulating milieu for research, conversation, and writing. I have also benefited from a number of excellent research assistants: Christopher Phelps, Mike Boles, Jenny Slosar, Michael Brick, Rachel Davis, and Ethan Arpi. Archivists provided indispensable help at the Pusey Library, Harvard University; Yale University archives; Library of Congress manuscript collections; the Tamiment Library, New York University; and the University of Chicago. Along the way, I was lucky to receive comments, advice, and encouragement from Fred Block, Jeffrey Alexander, Bernard Barber, Richard Swedberg, Eileen Boris, Linda Nicholson, David Ciepley, Julian Bourg, Miriam ix

x / Acknowledgments

and Benton Johnson, Donald Levine, Susan Henking, Meg Jacobs, Victor Lidz, James Mohr, Judith Stein, Eli Zaretsky, Thomas Bender, Robert K. Merton, Lewis Coser, Casey N. Blake, and Michael McGerr. Daniel Borus, Alan Wald, Nelson Lichtenstein, Lewis Perry, Dorothy Ross, Jeffrey Sklansky, J. T. Isaacs, Joseph Fracchia, Daniel Geary, Christopher Phelps, and Larry Schneider read the entire draft of the book and patiently advised me on sharpening the argument and presentation. As I culled the recommendations made by friends and formal reviewers of this book’s manuscript, I gained a renewed sense of why authors always profess their responsibility and absolve their advisers. So much wise advice, and never enough time or talent to make the most of it! My choice of what pieces of it I could follow, and my decisions on how to follow it, inevitably made the final product mine, warts and all, no matter how much I owe to those who corrected errors, warned me of oversights, and urged on me signal reformulations of ideas. Portions of chapter 6 appeared previously in my book Age of Contradiction, copyright 1998 by Twayne Publishers, and reprinted here by permission of The Gale Group. Portions of the introduction and conclusion appeared previously in different versions in American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Anonymous reviewers for American Quarterly and Journal of American History of articles that were early versions of some material here—and editors Gary Kulik, David Thelen and David Nord—played an important part in pushing me to new ideas and revisions of old ones. Editors Peter Agree and Alison Kalett at Cornell University Press nursed this project along, over a distended period of time, with confidence, indulgence, and good humor. I deeply appreciate John Raymond’s copyediting and pointed recommendations for revision. I also benefited from excellent editorial advice by Karen Hwa of Cornell University Press. None of this would have helped, however, without the constant support and love of Debra Schwartz and the wonderful company of my children, Michael and Jessye, who have all tried to keep me attuned to the practical life. With them, I am most fortunate indeed. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Julius H. Brick, who grew up in the interwar years and through the Second World War, coming out of the Popular Front to remain a left liberal for the rest of his life as well as an engineer who knew the romance of “what man can build.” A man of peace, integrity, and love, he left to me a memory representing the best of what the midcentury spirit stood for.

TRANSCENDING CAPITALISM

introduction

To Name a New Society in the Making

*

What’s in a name, when it comes to judging the nature or character of a society, or determining the type of society it is? Such concerns count for more in modern social theory—and modern politics—than practical people might think. Perhaps we could dispense with debates over type names—over what “feudal society” or “modern society” really means—and move on to address concrete problems of real, always particular societies as they exist and change at definite times. Surely some names or classification schemes are less illuminating than others, and the invention of new labels for the contemporary human condition (from “the technetronic age” to “the floodlit society”) can turn into a parlor game, or the characteristic pastime of what one American writer several decades ago called “the self-conscious society.” Still, almost any attempt at systematic social analysis depends on terms of comparison and contrast that require some kind of classification, and any effort to address the peculiarities of a special case will call for differentiating criteria that mark one society off from another. That is, the venture will depend to some extent on type. At times, such questions go far beyond the realm of punditry or the academy and seem to carry some urgent political weight. At a memorable antiwar demonstration in 1965, a young radical leader, Paul Potter, asked his audience, “What kind of system is it” that fosters U.S. military escalation in Vietnam, Southern segregation, new forms of bureaucratic domination in everyday life, and a soulless materialism? “We must name that system,” he concluded. “We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it, and change it.” In this sense, naming can be a con1

2 / Introduction

tentious claim, and it may involve much more than a denotative convenience (assuring that speakers know they refer to the same, or different, things). Names imply an analysis or evaluation of things; they condition how we act toward, or what we expect from, a given state of affairs; and they carry with them a history of such ideas and sentiments. In social affairs, naming the system may be a scientific matter of defining the form and the dynamics of a society—but it is also likely to consist of fighting words.1 In this book I examine some of the lively discussions throughout the twentieth century regarding the appropriate name for the kind of highly developed industrial or postindustrial societies that flourished in North America and Western Europe during that time. I examine writers, scholars, political advisers, journalists, and activists ranging from Thorstein Veblen and his followers to the American New Left and beyond, including social scientists with a popular audience, such as Margaret Mead and Daniel Bell, and those best known for arcane theory, such as Talcott Parsons and Kenneth Arrow, aspiring power brokers like the New Dealer Adolf Berle, an outsider-turnedinsider like psychoanalyst Karen Horney, and, in the aftermath of the main story, a Democratic Party strategist amid liberal decline, Robert Reich. I focus on the emergence and persistence of what I call “the postcapitalist vision,” a way of looking at contemporary Western societies and their logic of development that advanced one or more of the following arguments: these societies could not be understood, adequately or fully, as “capitalist”; they had assumed a new form, no longer limited to the characteristic structures and processes of capitalism; the social salience of capitalist institutions was steadily declining, including the determining force of market processes, the authority or potency of business wealth, or even the efficacy of economics as the best way to understand, or act on, social affairs. The boldest form of this vision asserted that Western society had passed or was about to pass a boundary, taking it beyond capitalism to a profoundly different order—one hard to define but likely to be more organized, more social, more service oriented, and probably more egalitarian than a market society founded on accumulated private property. Not all of the writers or approaches I discuss here went that far. Only a few explicitly used the term “postcapitalist society,” and others sought to dissociate themselves from so definite a diagnosis. Still, I propose that under the rubric of the postcapitalist vision we can class varied arguments of the midtwentieth century suggesting that something new and immanent in contemporary social development escaped the category of capitalism. The fact that the definition of capitalism was so contested, applied so variously by both its proponents and its enemies, only made the judgment of its obsolescence that much more complicated and debatable. Nonetheless, my aim here is to demonstrate that this kind of vision underlay or infiltrated a broad range of mid-twentieth-century social thought, and that it persisted over sev-

A New Society / 3

eral decades, across the divide we customarily see between the 1930s and the 1960s, to constitute a recognizable stream of thinking tied to left-liberal visions of reform. In so doing, my argument will challenge the consciousness of our own day, which doubts that modern life can persist for long apart from capitalist standards and assumes too readily that modern social thought, especially since World War II, led inevitably toward the mood of capitalist triumphalism marking the dawn of the twenty-first century. The twentieth century was shaped by the problem of the color line, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, but it was also preoccupied with the problem of capitalism.2 The term capitalism had barely come into widespread use before the beginning of the twentieth century, and it flourished from the 1910s onward—precisely as socialist and communist movements, wars, and depressions cast some doubt on the survival of the social order it described. At midcentury, following the paroxysms that afflicted the developed world in the 1930s and 1940s, it was unclear whether the capitalist order had weathered the test to prevail in the postwar world, or whether it had endured those challenges only by mutating into something else, indeed a new order, no matter how hard it was to define. For another quarter century many observers believed that such mutations continued to recast Western society into some new, unheralded form, inspiring both liberal confidence in the existing order (for the sake of what it was becoming) and radical hopes for great changes to come that would yet transform that order utterly. After three quarters of the twentieth century had passed, however, the ambiguity that had prevailed for decades over how to define the socioeconomic character of modern society gave way to a greater consensus that capitalism in fact governed the age. Radical critics who had long doubted liberal confidence in the evanescence of capitalism might agree with the defenders of capitalism that this conclusion marked a victory for clarity and realism, though the critics could hardly rejoice in the sense, deeply ingrained by the century’s last decade, that capitalism not only governed the age but also fixed the future. It is the thesis of this book that the turmoil beginning in the 1910s set off the germination of a postcapitalist vision that persisted through a long period of ambiguity in social analysis following World War II. Hence the broad middle of the twentieth century—from the 1910s through the early 1970s —shows a measure of continuity in the imagination of social and political observers and theorists quite at odds with the view that thoughtways changed utterly in the wake of totalitarianism, war, the atomic bomb, and the onset of the cold war. Taken together, these torturous events marked a breach in modern experience, but they also provided a medium that funneled interwar conceptions of the twentieth century’s “new order” (however tempered or altered by the traumatic years) into the postwar sensibility. The years from the 1920s through the 1960s were knitted together in lib-

4 / Introduction

eral and radical thought by a conviction that a new age in social organization, for good or ill, had just dawned or was in the offing. For some observers, this sensibility helped explain some of the dread features of modern disasters, but for the most part it sponsored an optimistic view: even the catastrophe of the 1930s and 1940s, once past, was understood to clear the way for the promise of the new. To grasp its tenor, we should understand the postcapitalist vision as rooted in a discrete phase of modern social theory and as being shaped largely by a distinct political current. If we have become familiar with the notion of a “classical” period of modern social theory identified with Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, and more or less commonly devoted to understanding the rise of capitalism, we might identify a “postclassical” modern social theory that built on the work of those writers and others to grasp the rise of what came to be called the “welfare state.”3 That is, much of twentieth-century social thought, at least until the last few decades, sought to understand the ways, apparently quite different from laissez-faire industrial capitalism, in which political and economic realms were integrated and the question of social justice assumed some legitimacy as a paramount goal of social organization and political will. A postcapitalist construal of those trends stemmed largely, at least in the United States, from a fusion of liberal and social-democratic dispositions—a new social liberalism—that dwelled on the left side of mainstream reform politics and held sway in intellectual circles concerned with the shape of things to come in society and politics, until it was marginalized by the right turn in American politics of the 1970s and 1980s. If I succeed in demonstrating the congruence of these forces—postclassical modern social theory, the postcapitalist vision, and social-liberal politics—it will suggest a new way of periodizing the history of twentieth-century social thought.

Discerning the Postcapitalist Vision “Postcapitalist society” was the name proposed by a handful of writers in the 1950s as they tried to define the postwar social order of reconstructed Europe—particularly Anthony Crosland, intellectual leader of the British Labour Party’s “new right,” and the liberal German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf. Although I am borrowing their term, I propose that the postcapitalist vision embraces a wider group, American as well as European, that were active over a period of time stretching well beyond the moment of Crosland and Dahrendorf in the 1950s, rooted several decades beforehand and reaching forward another twenty years. When he adopted the term after five years of Labour Party government in Britain, Crosland meant to identify a new “statist” order that had displaced “capitalism.” Given partial national-

A New Society / 5

izations and a substantial measure of social provision, Crosland saw an end to “the absolute autonomy of economic life.” Furthermore, he wrote, “the dominant emphasis ceases to be on the rights of property, private initiative, competition, and the profit motive; and is transferred to the duties of the state, social and economic security, and the virtues of cooperative action.”4 Such claims provide something of a touchstone for the current of thought at issue here. Still, I include in the postcapitalist vision a considerable range of ideas that provided some perspective on, and prognosis of, the development of modern society, a view that assumed the obsolescence of the concept of “capitalism” or forecast the transmutation of capitalist reality into a new social economy (beyond the strict centrality of free markets and capital accumulation) or even into a “posteconomic” society. We now live in a time that, once again, takes capitalism for granted as the way of the modern world. We typically look back at the mid-twentieth century, particularly the period from the 1940s through the 1960s, as a “golden age” of capitalism in which war-sparked growth resurrected the repute of private enterprise and (with the crucial assistance of the cold war crusade against Soviet Communism and the domestic red scare) crushed all pretenders to collectivist futures.5 Yet a quite contrary notion—a sense that capitalism, as a concept and in reality, was growing obsolete—filtered through academic and public discourse after World War II. Writing in an American magazine in 1953 on the alpine sanatorium, the Berghof, depicted in his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann cast capitalism—in fullest health identified with an old bourgeois way of life—as a fading order: Such institutions as the Berghof were a typical pre-war [World War I] phenomenon. They were only possible in a capitalistic economy that was still functioning well and normally. Only under such a system was it possible for patients to remain there year after year at the family’s expense. The Magic Mountain became the swan song of that form of existence.

American writers too thought that a “normal” capitalism no longer existed. The leading sociologist Talcott Parsons began his career in the 1920s fascinated by Werner Sombart’s and Max Weber’s work on the nature of capitalism and declared that understanding “capitalism as a social system” was the key to building a modern social science. Yet by the early 1940s, Parsons had concluded that “the capitalism/socialism dichotomy” no longer applied, for U.S. society was not simply capitalist, and that it had, in ways bound only to grow in significance, already begun to go beyond the norms of capitalism.6 Reasons for doubting the relevance of “capitalism” to the contemporary social order varied. Longstanding debates about which traits most essentially

6 / Introduction

defined capitalism—economic individualism; the expansion of market exchange; the concentration of wealth in large commercial, financial, and corporate firms; laissez-faire policy; capital accumulation based on the generalization of wage labor; or an ethic of work, saving, and private investment—struck some observers as fruitless and too weighted with political bias.7 In any case, if it were agreed that capitalism defined an economic system, did it make sense to name a whole society “capitalist,” disregarding the relative weight of different elements—besides the economic sphere, the political, cultural, familial, and psychological aspects—that make up a complex social order? Observers wondered whether the competitive, profit-driven, market mechanisms of capitalism any longer dominated social life as they once had, thus questioning the centrality of capitalism in contemporary society. Others questioned the distinctiveness of capitalism. The cold war coexistence of market and command economies, alike devoted to mass production, suggested to some observers and social critics that a generic “industrial society,” rather than capitalism in particular, had become the most salient object for analysis in the modern era.8 At the same time, and in a somewhat different sense, influential writers thought that the capitalist form of contemporary Western society had itself grown indistinct, blurred both by the advent of “mixed” systems in the West and by the possibility of a worldwide “convergence” of capitalist and noncapitalist orders. Having emerged in the 1930s and 1940s among social democrats eager to combine elements of market and plan, the idea of a “mixed economy” initially meant more than small, prophylactic doses of government regulation in a private-property economy. The term suggested something more like an admixture of distinct economic principles and institutions that created something new. Thus even the hard-nosed realist of French sociology, Raymond Aron, wrote in 1954, with reference to the postwar order encompassing regulation, state enterprises, and limited planning, that “socialism has ceased in the West to be a myth because it has become a part of reality.” As a vision of convergence, on the other hand, a New York sinologist discussing U.S. relations with East Asia in 1964 foresaw an “integrated world” coming, marked by “new world forces—post-Marxian and post-capitalist—twenty-first century, not nineteenth.” George Lichtheim called Western Europe “postbourgeois,” a society marked by a “persistent tension between social and market values, with the former gradually getting the upper hand.” These various ways of doubting the applicability of “capitalism” in contemporary social analysis were complemented by those who continued to use the term but nonetheless saw it as a passing order: in The Limits of American Capitalism (1966), liberal economist Robert Heilbroner claimed that its growth capacity had diminished and new socioeconomic forces pressed beyond its bounds. Earlier, Heilbroner’s well-known survey

A New Society / 7

of modern economic thought, The Worldly Philosophers (1953), had ended with a chapter optimistically entitled “Beyond the Economic Revolution,” suggesting an upcoming time when market calculations of price-based efficiency, as the key to allocating scarce social resources, would lose its lock on modern life.9 The postcapitalist vision did not quite fit the most familiar models of social and political diagnosis. It did not reflect a procapitalist euphemistic impulse, that is, the tendency among defenders of private property and industry, strongest in the late nineteenth century, to reject the term “capitalism” as an invention of left-wing critics who refused to acknowledge the market system as a permanent achievement of modern life. The writers examined here who leaned toward postcapitalist views in the mid-twentieth century emerged after the concept of capitalism had achieved some legitimacy in academic social thought, and they came of age schooled in various styles of criticizing that system. They dispensed with “capitalism” not because they viewed socioeconomic relations as given, fixed, and universal (hence undeserving of a name that implied historical transience), but because they saw those relations profoundly in flux. Even the name “capitalism,” they thought, rendered the indefinite character of present social relations too sharply, rigidly, and statically. On the other hand, the postcapitalist vision was not a socialist one, either: doubt about the significance of “capitalism” usually carried skepticism about the meaning of its customary opposite, “socialism.” There was a good deal of modesty, uncertainty, or hesitation in judging the outcome of present developments, hence the utility of the prefix “post-,” which typically signals a degree of reticence in prediction.10 Yet, the postcapitalist vision did share with the most gradualist of socialist reformers a particular understanding of change: that the present marked a transitional moment where no clear divisions or boundaries were marked. French social democrat Jean Jaurès had vividly captured this conception of change: moderns, he wrote, would experience the advent of socialism as navigators “crossed the line of a hemisphere—not that they have been able to see as they crossed it a cord stretched over the ocean warning them of their passage, but that little by little they have been led into a new hemisphere by the progress of their ship.” For postcapitalist theorists, similarly, gradual changes in degree could usher in world-shifting transformations barely sensed until they had come to pass. Contemporary society perpetually reinvented itself, eluding old labels and practices.11 The postcapitalist vision also possessed a good deal of political lability. So far, in this description, it has figured as a reformist current that welcomed transitional developments for the promise they held of a greater social democracy. A more critical or pessimistic counterpoint emerged as well, imagining a new order of politically regulated markets as an unheralded but

8 / Introduction

oppressive, even totalitarian, regime. Speculation since the early 1940s about a “managerial revolution” ( James Burnham), “administered society” (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno), and the like emerged alongside postwar social-democratic aspirations, and while the pessimistic current countered the hopes of liberal postcapitalist theorists, it shared the assumption that society had passed a watershed that rendered old definitions of capitalism obsolete. In this respect, many of the arguments between “liberals” and “radicals” that first appeared at midcentury and broke out into the open during the 1960s were less decisive than they appeared. The American New Left of young radical intellectuals might be considered part of the postcapitalist vision rather than standing outside it. No one evoked the sense of unsettled social analysis for a coming new age better than Paul Potter did at the 1965 antiwar rally, for when he called on his colleagues to “name the system,” he had no ready label to propose. Later, he remarked on the obsolescence of the most familiar candidate, since “capitalism was for me and my generation an inadequate description of the evils of America.”12 In this respect, although New Leftists harshly criticized the faith postcapitalist liberals had in the promise of the existing order, they shared the sense of inhabiting a profoundly new stage of social evolution. They dwelled, it seemed, in the aftermath of a recent sea change that brought them beyond old capitalist standards of market autonomy and class conflict to a highly organized order requiring a new opposition. The postcapitalist vision was one of the prevalent, and most influential, moods among postwar Western intellectuals. Not included among its adherents were most economists, some unconventional analysts in fields such comparative sociology and economic anthropology, who still emphasized market forces and private property in modern affairs, and Marxist writers, generally conscious of being on the defensive, who sustained the critique of Western society as capitalist. The postcapitalist vision was primarily the province of left-liberal intellectuals and some of their more radical critics, but these circles dominated the newer fields of the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, and social psychology), which were rather closely tied to popular discourse. (David Riesman’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine in 1954 suggested the new public repute of such academic writers.)13 As it seeped into a broad milieu of public discourse, social theory of this stamp exercised a subtle influence on how reformers framed their aspirations.14 Not only did this mode of thought deem conservative faith in “private enterprise” profoundly out of touch with the currents of change marking the modern world, it also trumped more traditional left-wing arguments that the lineaments of bourgeois society had (so far) survived intact the constant alterations of modernity and the stresses of twentieth-century wars and depressions.

A New Society / 9

Rethinking Twentieth-Century American Social Thought The prominence of this discourse in postwar American intellectual life prompts a new look at the social history of ideas in the twentieth century. The greatest concentrated effort in the historiography of intellectual life in modern America has focused on the decades surrounding the beginning of the twentieth century and on the nature of Progressivism and social reform, the emergence of pragmatism, and the foundation of the social sciences.15 It is still customary to bring such studies to a close at the convenient break point of 1920. Although some studies of Progressive Era trends continue beyond that date and other work addresses a variety of episodes or circles among intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century, the history of American thought after the heyday of Progressive reform has lacked an integrative theme—unless it is one of declension. Historians have found it too easy to suggest that developments after the early twentieth-century age of reform manifest primarily a loss of intellectual vitality. Moreover, the abrupt crises that punctuated the twentieth century facilitate a historiography focused on breaks—World War I, the onset of the Depression, World War II, the cold war, and the advent of “the Sixties”—rather than on long-running themes or frameworks. Perhaps the most familiar version of the ruptured, episodic portrait of modern American intellectual history is the assumption that intellectual life after World War II showed a broad conservative drift and a collapse of social criticism, pending an unexpected renewal of dissent around 1960 that cast aside the conformist spirit of the cold war years.16 In contrast, the postcapitalist vision directs our attention to something like a “long wave” in intellectual life. The New Left of the 1960s shared something with many cold war liberal intellectuals—a sense of inhabiting a society whose new shape the old categories of social analysis failed to grasp. Moreover, the postwar reformers harked back to an earlier time when observers had hailed a breakthrough to a “new order,” that is, when U.S. intervention in World War I capped the quickening reform spirit of the late Progressive years and the war’s aftermath unleashed a worldwide labor insurgency that raised both the prospect of “industrial democracy” as well as questions about the perpetuity of private property in modern society. This conjuncture gave rise to influential strains of interwar social thought, such as institutional economics, anthropological culture critique, political pluralism, and a new structural-functional sociology. These strains shared reformist assumptions about the increasingly socialized form modern society was likely to take. These in turn laid the basis for future developments, since the intellectual leaders of the American academy after the 1940s were reared intellectually in the

10 / Introduction

1920s and 1930s and carried that heritage into another “new era” after World War II. Those figures who had clout in the liberal mainstream of postwar academic intellectual life—which ran in a channel somewhat to the left of the nation’s political mainstream—were neither mere conformists nor radical dissenters. The reformist current with which they identified was both friendly toward the present order of society and optimistic about change and social reform (which it understood to have a wider, or farther, horizon than most liberal politicians could contemplate). They defended current society because they believed it opened broad avenues of change to a more social and “modern” economy in the imminent future. Underlying the postcapitalist vision in social thought was the distinctive political disposition or reform ideology that I call social liberalism. It marked the inception of something new in the long, convoluted history of liberal thought, beyond even the “new liberalism” historians have recognized among reformers who advocated government regulation starting in the 1880s or 1890s and that came to prominence in American Progressivism and in the British liberalism of Lloyd George.17 Before, during, and especially after the Great War, liberalism was updated with a substantial admixture of evolutionary socialist principles. This happened not only among those intellectuals who sought a fluid mediation of self and society, the individual and collective, but also in the practical, political form of adding to liberals’ embrace of humanistic individualism, gradual change, and representative institutions a new partisan commitment to workers’ rights and a pro-labor advocacy of collectivist policies in economic control and social services. This leap was undertaken largely as a result of resurgent labor power during the years around World War I and disenchantment with the limits of the old Progressivism; it identified with the project of “reconstruction” after World War I, connoting not only recovery but also the overdue transformation of the “old order.” Social liberalism in this sense, embraced in the United States by intellectual organs such as the New Republic, first, and the Nation, more tardily, marked a breach with the old Progressive antipathy to “class legislation” and its insistence on moralistic rebirth (individual uplift and social purification) as the key to social change.18 This new current cannot be understood adequately as “corporate liberalism,” a label historians and critics have commonly used to suggest that any significant trend on behalf of reform (but not radical transformation or revolution) in the twentieth century must be little more than a mask for allegiance to corporate capitalism and its aspirations to organize markets on behalf of secure profits.19 As social liberalism marked a kind of political fusion of liberals and the moderate Left, it had a variegated character that drew within its orbit a

A New Society / 11

range of political and intellectual figures. As a whole, the current assumed a more radical or a more conservative demeanor at different times, and strains within its ranks grew, by turns, more or less acute. In the wake of World War I, these left liberals often professed sympathy for the British labor movement and the Russian Revolution, yet social liberals generally had a gradualist understanding of change, an affiliation with conservative trade unionism, and an aversion to anything like revolutionary class struggle, keeping them ideologically distant from Communist or other far-left politics. For some, this distinction lost its salience in the 1930s, either due to the shift Communists made by 1935 to embrace liberals in antifascist work or to the sensibility of crisis that led some late Progressive advocates of a new order to see it in the Soviet “planned economy.” Nestled alongside the porous leftward border of New Deal reform in the mid-1930s, social liberalism provided a seedbed for recruits both to the Popular Front and to that left-liberal milieu that later assailed Popular Front Communism. This political milieu was fluid enough to enable actors to move in varied directions, particularly in the splits of the 1940s between Henry Wallace–style “progressives” and social democrats of the Americans for Democratic Action sort. Social ties, however, kept diverse liberals, radicals, and Popular Front Communists more or less in close proximity to one another, which only made the red scare after World War II more anguishing. Those who held to a nonsocialist but expansive view of economic regulation, for instance, might have friends, siblings, or professional associates who had joined the Communist milieu—affiliations that could, a few years later, land a pro-labor liberal in government service on a blacklist.20 The advent of the cold war and the red scare marked a watershed in the course of this near Left, but recent historiography has recognized elements of continuity across that divide and into the postwar world. The banishment of Popular Frontists from U.S. politics and the deep cover assumed by cold war liberals like those of Americans for Democratic Action—who, privately, were willing to affirm a “socialist” ideal as late as 1948—meant that social liberalism virtually lost its grasp on a significant place in the political mainstream.21 Nonetheless, signs of persistence can be recognized in styles of cultural democracy and popular arts of working-class communities that Michael Denning has called the “laboring of American culture,” a long-term echo of the Popular Front beyond the 1930s. It can also be seen in programs of social unionism, in the Reutherite wing of the labor movement as well as in the work of women unionists fighting for a place in the movement, that sought to widen the range of egalitarian access to employment and economic security in ways that intruded on market processes and levied public responsibilities on business.22 A tentative revival of social liberalism begin-

12 / Introduction

ning in the late 1950s, inspired by the civil rights movement as well as a resonant critique of “affluence,” dwelled in a space just to the left of the legislative programs pursued by Democratic administrations. Even as the most ambitious elements of the War on Poverty maintained strict assumptions of economic individualism (reflected in its bootstrap themes of “equal opportunity” and job training), the reformist aspirations of social liberalism entailed aims such as income redistribution and full employment that exceeded the reach of actual public policy.23 The clearest manifestation of social-liberal politics in the 1960s, indicating its return and its continued marginality, lay in A. Philip Randolph’s “Freedom Budget” of 1966, Martin Luther King’s call for a guaranteed annual income in 1967, and King’s failed Poor People’s Campaign the next year.24 Despite the disappointments of those years, however, the energies of protest and dissent, the organization of middle-class professionals around ideals of “social responsibility,” and a growing consciousness of deeply rooted faults in American society led organizers and ideologists to imagine that a “new politics” of social reform— perhaps reaching toward a program of “economic democracy”—would yet flourish in the 1970s.25 The mixed character of social liberalism remained subject to internal stresses. The young intellectuals of the 1960s, who drew inspiration from the refreshingly disruptive protests of the black freedom struggle and from the peace activists who built the movement against the Vietnam War, had difficulty finding common cause with the old intellectuals who emerged from interwar social-liberal traditions. Hence the old social liberals were dubbed “conservative,” a usage that misgauged the elders’ political sentiments (for they certainly had no truck with Barry Goldwater’s or William Buckley’s right wing) but did grasp the temper of their social imagination. For the most part, social liberalism in the United States had always had a cautious disposition in the measured, gradualist pace of change it expected, the suspicion it bore toward social disruption, and the sense it maintained of societies and cultures as complex wholes that mutated over time, always slowly adapting the new to the old. As Louis Menand has shown, it is something quite like this temperament, devoted to measured adaptation, communal harmony, and organic growth in experience, that marked the original spirit of philosophic pragmatism, however much it sought to accommodate the flux of modernity, the plurality of the real, and the course of social reform. In the social sciences of the twentieth century, particularly in anthropology and in the midcentury sociology that borrowed from it, culture and society were understood as functional wholes that underwent metamorphosis, at a pace activists could only consider painfully slow, through a steady accretion of new elements and recalibration of an ordered equilibrium. Society and culture were malleable but each was also a resis-

A New Society / 13

tant or inertial medium. Social liberalism of this sort welcomed change and disdained traditionalist resistance but showed little sympathy for anything that smacked of revolutionary ardor or urgency. Conventional postwar social liberals, such as University of California president Clark Kerr, typically feared that radicals would awaken the monster of reactionary politics; young radicals took the counsels of patience and assurances that gradual reform would achieve their own ends in time as merely an excuse for perpetuating the status quo.26 The other key context fostering the postcapitalist vision and sustaining it over several decades was a change in the character of modern social theory that roughly coincided with the rise of social liberalism. Social theory moved on two fronts, driven by a new set of practical concerns in grasping the contemporary development of modern society (from the classical concern with the rise of capitalism to a postclassical focus on the rise of the welfare state) and by a redefinition, at a fairly abstract level, of what the very concept “society” meant. As the emerging welfare state integrated polity and economy in new ways, basic categories of social thought shifted. At its eighteenth-century origins, modern social science grasped the existence of an independent realm of “society” (or “civil society”) distinct from the state, in terms based on the kind of interactions prevailing in “the market,” which observers construed as (or desired to be) autonomous from government. If society was imagined as a sphere having form and function outside the will of the sovereign, it was typically grasped as being congruent with emerging market relations. The classical theorists who examined the rise of capitalism conceived economy and society as closely wedded. Yet as modes of regulation apparently drew the political and economic spheres together, the twentiethcentury postclassical phase of modern theory disaggregated the meanings of economy and society. Theory moved to redefine the social realm as not only separate from the state but also autonomous from, and even increasingly determinant over, purely “economic” affairs.27 Such conceptual transformations are hard to date precisely. Friction between “economy” and “society” was evident in the nineteenth century: radical utopians and archconservatives, and later social-Christian reformers, saw “society” as a force serving to modify, ameliorate, constrain, supplant, or overcome the communally destructive effects of expanding market relations. Yet major theorists concerned with late nineteenth-century industrialization such as Weber and Veblen still considered economy and society conjoined. Even social-liberal reformers who first set forth a postcapitalist vision in the United States after World War I still put economic issues at the heart of their social consciousness. A decisive distinction between these realms was yet to come. It took Talcott Parsons, a theorist in the 1920s, who like other social-liberal reformers was intent on exploring the interactive re-

14 / Introduction

lation between economy and society, to make the stoutest arguments by the 1940s for prying them apart. The move to distinguish conceptually the sphere of society from that of the economy was evident in the maturation and self-conscious independence of fields such as sociology, anthropology, and social psychology from the methods of academic economics. These Parsons championed as the “new social sciences,” whose growing stature marked “a shift of emphasis away from economics” or the debut of a “social relations” concept that defined society in noneconomic terms, constituted by family, neighborhood, community solidarity, voluntary association, and nonprofit service institutions. Parsons loomed large in the institutional establishment of sociology and the allied fields of the “new social sciences” outside politics and economics—and was a devoted exponent of postcapitalist views; he figures prominently in this book. He is best understood as an intellectual product of those interwar reformist milieus that nurtured the emerging postcapitalist vision and as one key progenitor of a mature vision that was sustained in the post–World War II years. Granting purely “social” phenomena a more central and determinant place in the structure and evolution of contemporary affairs made it easier to imagine a modern society resting on noncapitalist foundations, while it also increasingly ignored the force exercised by aspects of economic life such as property, wealth, competition, patterns of accumulation, cyclical disturbances, and inequality. A gradual move “beyond economics,” both as an empirical description of contemporary society and as the social ethic of those observers who drew that description, became virtually a constant of the postcapitalist vision.28 Placing the postcapitalist vision in the midst of an evolving context, shaped by the reformist politics of social liberalism and the theoretical shift away from economics, enables us to take a long view of twentieth-century intellectual history. We are well advised to avoid reductive explanations of the midcentury postcapitalist vision that tie it directly and solely to the political and intellectual conditions of cold war anticommunism and thus depict it simply as a euphemistic gesture intended to defend the Western status quo. Yes, the postcapitalist vision was able to find an elective affinity with cold war liberal sentiment, but the depth of its past and the breadth of its political and theoretical variants show that it cannot be judged merely as an artifact of the cold war. Rather, the long and broad view that I propound in this book is that the punctuating breaks in twentieth-century experience, each one channeling and transmuting social thought in particular ways, did not necessarily rupture a recognizable stream of left-liberal reform (or American social liberalism) that perceived modern society as a dynamic entity, changing before our eyes into a “new order” beyond the “economic society” of capitalism, in ways first descried in the late Progressive Era and still imagined in the 1970s.

A New Society / 15

The Place of Difference in Intellectual History In arguing for a long view that emphasizes broad associations and fluid intellectual interactions in a prolonged postcapitalist tradition, I do not seek to return to a “consensus” model that insists on continuity, homogeneity, or exclusive (“exceptional”) American traits. There will be many opportunities to consider the transatlantic dimensions of modern and recent intellectual history. My appeal to transatlantic references will often stem from the direct encounter and interchange of ideas, involving Americans whose intellectual lives were shaped by European travels or European immigrants who played a role in shaping such intellectual milieus in the United States as political pluralism, functionalist anthropology, psychoanalysis, and Keynesian as well as resurgent laissez-faire economics. Transatlantic references will also prove useful for comparative purposes, when related strains of thought abroad, set against American dispositions, help reveal salient meanings of theory in the United States that might be overlooked without the illuminating use of the European correlative. The method of analysis adopted here generally approaches social, cultural, and political conditions in the modern United States and Europe, though significantly different, as roughly comparable. On both sides of the Atlantic, the trajectory and outcomes (or issue) of capitalist development preoccupied twentieth-century political actors as well as social theorists. In some respects, however, the postcapitalist imagination in Europe and the United States did diverge. Some visions of European social renewal after World War I fed into those strands of fascist ideology that imagined authoritarian societies beyond capitalism. By the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals drifting to the right across Europe spoke of “intermediate regimes” between or beyond “capitalism and socialism,” offering visions of mixed, “planned economies” guided by a strong state and unbending national unity—a trend either adapting, or ultimately capitulating, to German “national socialism.” Here too was plenty of talk about a coming “new order.” Some historians find the substance of fascism in this ideology, as a movement whose fury was directed at both capitalism and Marxian socialism—even though such rhetoric defined capitalism in a populist vein as “high finance,” while defending private property and profit making, and the movements came to power with the backing of traditional and bourgeois elites, thus preserving the power of big capital. Nonetheless, Nazi talk of “planning” for war mobilization led some German conservatives to identify the suppression of free-market mechanisms as the common denominator of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, and discussion flourished in the early and mid-1940s across the political spectrum about whether Nazi Germany was still capitalist. Along with a critique of the Soviet order by left-wing critics who distrusted

16 / Introduction

its claim to represent socialism, this speculation fueled a host of convergence theories, lasting for some time after World War II, of a postcapitalist cast.29 Whatever strength postcapitalist prophets achieved in European fascist movements, however, such right-wing variants had no comparable purchase on American intellectual or political life. A few intellectual circles, such as the agrarian, “distributivist” conservatism of the American Review in the 1930s, provided a home to writers whose antiliberal, antimaterialist ideology was close to that of some in the European Right. But such currents remained marginal in U.S. intellectual life and played no substantial role in the postcapitalist imagination of the left-liberal circles examined here. While fascist postcapitalism was insurrectionary, antiliberal, and anti-democratic in spirit, the postcapitalist vision of U.S. reformers, although it occasionally also saw a planned economy and statism, was dominated by gradualist and modernist sentiments.30 The kind of culture critique that influenced the interwar postcapitalist vision in the United States shared little of the “obsession with decadence” and deep hostility to modern individualism that historian Zeev Sternhell finds a constant of the European fascist intellectuals.31 The American version tended to be optimistic and committed to fashioning new spaces for individuality beyond the cultural straitjacket of economic individualism. The link between social liberalism and postcapitalist views was stronger and more nearly exclusive in the United States than in Europe, where postcapitalist visions cropped up on the right as well as on the left. Just as the transatlantic dimension of this inquiry does not rule out transatlantic distinctions, the long and broad view advocated here does not obscure differences among social, political, and intellectual actors (or salient groups of actors) in American life. Likeness and difference across social boundaries, however, are always complexly intertwined. The role of women and African Americans in twentieth-century intellectual life illustrates the point. A conventional view imagines a mainstream of consensus scholarship at midcentury—one that denied any significant role to women and black scholars and had to be cracked apart by the reconstruction of the academy in the 1960s and 1970s to liberate the studies of race, class, gender, and sexuality that have flourished since then. As Ellen Fitzpatrick has recently shown, however, at least for history, studies concerning labor, social movements, race, gender, family, and the whole panoply of concerns with “history from the bottom up”—including work by academic minorities of women and black researchers—began not in the 1960s but at the dawn of the twentieth century.32 In a similar vein, without denying the overwhelming dominance of Euro-American men in social thought, women and black scholars were engaged in the social-liberal milieus that remade scholarship

A New Society / 17

through the mid-twentieth century. The noneconomic concept of society that Talcott Parsons championed at midcentury was indebted to early women activists and scholars in the settlement movement, the foundations of academic social work, and so-called social feminist circles that focused attention on the “service” dimension of social relations.33 Indeed, the emerging definition of society apart from economy brought social research closer to that region in which women’s activities traditionally had been circumscribed (family, marriage, sexuality, childrearing, household organization, neighborhoods, religion, and social services) and thus made social science more attuned to the status and role of women in society than the older definition of society, identified with the economy, allowed. As Rosalind Rosenberg has pointed out, women researchers in the academy at the turn of the century were concentrated in “the infant fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology.”34 As these fields burgeoned after World War II, when they broke away from the old social sciences of economics and politics, their preoccupation with culture, personality, and human interaction helped set the stage for the scholarship arising from the 1960s and 1970s that focused on race, gender, and sexuality.35 Yet such phenomena of likeness do not eliminate manifestations of difference. Although studies of race and gender can to some extent be assimilated within the contours of mid-twentieth-century “social relations” theory, black and women scholars may have done more than their white male counterparts to keep a reformist spotlight on economic and class issues than the dominant group of postcapitalist liberals. By studying race relations in the modern United States, where African Americans overwhelmingly occupied subordinate positions in labor hierarchies, midcentury black sociologists perforce attended to class relations. In the early work of Ralph Bunche and Franklin Frazier (and in the quasi-Marxist perspective of Oliver C. Cox), class was deemed more important than race in the status of African Americans. Thus this group may be said to have maintained a more “economic” or materialist standpoint even after World War II than the dominant current of social theory led by Euro-American men.36 Likewise, postwar women sociologists such as Mirra Komarovsky (and her pioneering book of 1964, Blue-Collar Marriage), Marie Jahoda, Rose Laub Coser, and Patricia Cayo Sexton, insofar as they addressed socioeconomic issues of class, poverty, and unemployment along with their studies of family, women, and gender, were an exception to the growing tendency to define the social realm in “noneconomic” terms.37 In this book I primarily focus on large-scale structural definitions of society, relevant directly to the issue of capitalism and postcapitalist transitions, rather than on race and gender in the construction of modern, and American, society. Most of the figures crucially engaged in the construction of the

18 / Introduction

postcapitalist vision were white middle-class males; they dominated the academy through its midcentury expansion and to a large extent still do. A fuller study might examine whether the gendered perspective of Komarovsky or Sexton encouraged them to attend to class difference and inequality, whether such “economic” concerns revealed a dissent from the postwar social relations model of research, or indeed whether the small group of women social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s showed any greater disposition than their male colleagues to adopt such a dissent.

The Genealogy of the Postcapitalist Vision Examined over time, the postcapitalist vision appears as a limited set of themes, motifs, terms, expectations, and arguments handed down from one intellectual cohort to another, at each step replicated, deployed in new ways, or reshuffled, recast, and supplemented by new additions. This discursive set included notions regarding the changing nature of economic organization and of property; so-called “silent revolutions” that were transforming the old order; the cultural malady of competitive individualism and the expanding scope of social solidarity that might check or reverse it; the decay of the old ruling classes; the emergence of new forces of productivity and impulses to economic dynamism; the perpetual reinvention of modernity; a break with economistic standards of public policy and conceptions of social order; the declining imperatives of scarcity; and the coming centrality of social rights in the definition of citizenship. Select arguments or phrases like these echoed each other from 1914 through the 1950s and 1960s, until the 1970s or 1980s, when capitalist triumphalism drove from the scene the postcapitalist confidence of the long “middle” of the twentieth century. In chapter 1 I provide the backdrop and jumping-off point for the narrative. I review the fraught history of the term capitalism, determining when it achieved currency and with what definitions and implications it entered common usage. The chapter covers ideas about capitalist development, its emergence, growth, and mutation, and possibilities that it is making way for another, different order of social life. While recognizing divergent ways of defining capitalism, I rely on a Marxian formulation, and I show how Marx’s approach to understanding capitalism as a developing form of social production already posed many of the theoretical problems entailed in what would later emerge as the postcapitalist vision. Above all else, the postcapitalist vision concerned transitional or interstitial developments in social life, the terms of change between or beyond orders of social life that in themselves appeared to possess a greater degree of definition, stability, or longevity. It is striking how many of the themes of the twentieth-century postcapitalist vi-

A New Society / 19

sion—from the role of the corporation and of science to the shaping of human personality in more collectivized conditions—were anticipated in Marx’s portrait of capitalist development. If these themes became the common property of varied thinkers examining the forces that tended to “socialize” modern life, it will help to recognize the similarities and differences between Marx’s version of such processes and the social-liberal version that developed after World War I. The germination of the modern postcapitalist vision can be located in the decade that ran from the years just preceding World War I to the tentative resolution of postwar stresses around 1924. On the eve of war the reform spirit quickened, with a great deal of talk about a new age or new era dawning, a watershed that seemed both “revolutionary” and yet also gradual, ongoing, even unnoticed or unremarked in common consciousness. A similar sensibility would be redeployed after the war, chastened and modulated but still moving in channels first adumbrated in the early 1910s. Before the war, discussion on both sides of the Atlantic described the ways a high degree of development within capitalism offered possibilities for surpassing capitalism. I examine the work of Austrian writer Rudolf Hilferding, working within Marx’s tradition, and Thorstein Veblen, writing with a keen sense of economic history in a non-Marxist radical vein. Plumbing that sense of epochal change in the making, the American social democrat Walter Lippmann in 1914 offered a premonitory version of the postcapitalist vision. In chapter 2 I describe the coming of the postcapitalist vision in the wake of the war. From the heightening of expectation that accompanied workers’ rebellions and insurrections at the very end of the war, to the suppression of radicalism amid restabilization in the early 1920s, a sense of “new era” openings persisted, although often voiced by the mid-1920s in self-consciously more moderate terms. The measured, subdued tone of a vision founded on making one’s way through the existing order, yet still anticipating the transformation of that order into something strikingly new, characterized an emerging postcapitalist view increasingly lodged in academic quarters. This chapter and the next describe those academic developments, first a current of reform thinking within economics that I call “socioeconomics” and, second, the evolution of American anthropology as the medium for a mild, romantic critique of modern capitalism. These trends, both offsprings of the war, represented some of the most dynamic features of interwar American social science while remaining close to public concerns and public discourse. Through socioeconomics, the reformist cohort intended to remake mainstream economics, moving it away from deductive theories of unregulated market processes toward descriptive studies that would have to include the social context, and social exigencies, of economic development. From this milieu emerged Adolf Berle and Gardiner

20 / Introduction

Means’s Modern Corporation and Private Property, which carried forward the war-era distinction between “economic autocracy” and “industrial democracy,” as it argued for the inevitably socializing consequences of corporate business organization. Chapter 3 adds to socioeconomics the other key formative element of the postcapitalist vision, the culture critique of competitive individualism associated with the “culture and personality” studies of interwar anthropology together with the influence of émigré psychoanalysis on American social thought. Chapter 4 focuses on the early work of Talcott Parsons, whose intellectual career grew out of interwar social liberalism and welded socioeconomics with cultural anthropology to create a mature formulation of the postcapitalist vision, one later transmitted to the postwar, midcentury world. Parsons brought the emerging postcapitalist vision of the interwar years to a refined point of theoretical development and transformed it at the same time. From an expectation that capitalist development had made the transition to a social economy feasible, imperative, and imminent, Parsons concluded that the transition was already happening and that “capitalism” no longer defined the contours of modern society. Furthermore, this shift of perception was accompanied and supported by the “shift away from economics,” a conviction that the preeminent disciplines of social science would no longer be economics and government but those dealing with “social relations” understood in sociological, cultural, and psychological terms. For Parsons, the character and dynamics of modern society were no longer explicable purely in terms of economic concepts or motives. Chapter 5 shows how the postcapitalist vision occupied a prominent place in the postwar American social sciences and how the political milieu that fostered its rise, social liberalism, persisted as a force in social theory even under cold war anticommunism. I address a paradox of postwar social-liberal social theory—how a posteconomic theoretical perspective could sustain itself amid an economic boom and what otherwise appeared a time for the rehabilitation of capitalism’s reputation. Chapter 6 moves to the 1960s, which began with a surge of renewed social-liberal spirit in the late 1950s and sustained renewed confidence among liberal social theorists that modern society had reached a condition of perpetual reinvention—one that depended on the assumed malleability of economic forces subject to moral and political guidance. This was the heyday of the postcapitalist vision: the vision of a society increasingly free of economic necessity, open to dramatic reforms not only in the pursuit of enhanced social provision and egalitarian welfare guarantees but also in the direction of a notably more flexible personality structure, at once more individualized and more socialized. The 1960s saw a burst in self-conscious efforts to name the new society, of which the most potent was “postindustrial”

A New Society / 21

theory. Visionary analyses of contemporary conditions found little need to judge those conditions definitively capitalist, a view shared by a number of social liberals and, at an early point, by the more radical forces of new dissent, recognized then and since as the New Left. This chapter explores the ambiguity of the New Left as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon both within and outside the orbit of social liberalism and the postcapitalist vision. Social liberalism and the postcapitalist vision were destined to meet much more forceful and disabling resistance in the 1970s. Chapter 7 examines the period in which the postcapitalist vision began its decline, some fifty years after its genesis in the 1910s and 1920s. Given the vision’s persistence through the broad middle of the twentieth century, this turn in the 1970s seemed sudden, a great reversal in the tenor of social life, politics, and social theory. A return to characterizing contemporary U.S. society explicitly and unequivocally as capitalist began at this time, stemming from a number of impulses having diverse sources and directions. A consciousness of “crisis,” first understood as cultural and political and very soon compounded by economic dislocations more severe than any encountered since World War II, yielded a reorientation of politics and social thought. The meaning and trend of that reorientation remained up for grabs for some time, as a revived Left mounted a more radical critique of capitalism than had been seen for decades, and a revived Right correspondingly resurrected a vigorous laissezfaire principle that social liberals had long considered obsolete. The conclusion serves as epilogue and assessment. Resurrection of the concept capitalism, the force of a newly virulent economism, and the dwindling theoretical world of social relations as Parsons understood it did not mean the end of postcapitalist visions. In striving both to understand and criticize the long sway of the postcapitalist vision, I note the ways residual elements persisted even into the 1990s and the present and consider how its most salient contributions might better be deployed in coming ventures of critical social theory and political dissent. The postcapitalist vision was a highly ambiguous discourse related to modern capitalist development in complicated, ambivalent ways. We know of other such formations in U.S. history, such as “free labor” ideology. This ideology not only legitimated wage labor in early industrial capitalism but also, by ambivalently sustaining a notion of independent labor, fostered criticisms of industrial-capitalist development and labor exploitation.38 Although it had distinct social bases and historical contexts, the postcapitalist vision ought to be recognized as a diffuse but influential discourse with a similar cast, mingling dissent from and legitimation of contemporary social development. The postcapitalist vision’s forecast of a dawning social economy recognized the latent socializing dynamic of capitalist development: the ten-

22 / Introduction

dency to organize goods and services on a large scale, taking them beyond purely private confines into a realm at least formally defined by open access and in part subject to the planned administration of far-flung resources. Thus it preserved and promoted a critical perspective on contemporary bourgeois society, in pursuit of a social economy or even posteconomic society that was believed to be approaching. Yet in its optimistic reading of development, the postcapitalist vision neglected the ways the growing “social” sphere remained defined by markets and hence shaped to the demands of private wealth accumulation. Although it remained a reformist disposition rather than a watchword of the power elite, it could support both “utopian” and “ideological” dispositions, looking forward to an imagined future different from the present, while vesting confidence in what currently prevailed as the means of getting there.39

chapter 1

Capitalism and Its Future on the Eve of World War I *

While “capitalism” gained currency in the early twentieth century as an apt name for the modern system of economic life, that very social order seemed to some observers ready to pass away—and the label itself seemed too limited to grasp an ever-changing socioeconomic scene. Capitalism was then “a very recent word,” as Fernand Braudel put it, coined a half century before and connoting the historicity of things economic and social.1 Granting a name to a particular order of life marked it as a discrete entity, implying it had a beginning and remained vulnerable to time, especially amid the long depressive swing of 1873 to 1896 and the social conflict accompanying it. A new boom subsequently emerged on the basis of a second industrial revolution in electric power generation, chemicals, and automobiles, innovations strongest not in the first industrial nation, Britain, but in Germany and the United States. These new centers of development also pioneered the distinctive organizational form of the new phase, the great corporation.2 Thus, from the 1890s to World War I, speculation flourished about the nature of capitalism and the import of the latest developments in its form. Consolidation and organization suggested means of overcoming the atomized, competitive, and undirected nature of market-oriented enterprise. Observers debated whether such trends altered the shape of capitalism or promised to transform it beyond recognition. It is impossible to ignore Marx’s legacy in this context. Marx did not coin the name “capitalism,” and he favored instead terms such as “capitalistic accumulation,” the “capitalist mode of production,” and more generally “bour23

24 / Chapter 1

geois society.” We might see a telling distinction here. Great transitions in social order were what really mattered in Marx’s thought, and in the midst of historical flux even the concept of a capitalist mode of production was at best an abstraction. After Marx turned away in the mid-1840s from philosophical speculation toward the study of history, he scorned any notion of “essential” or eternal truths. He was, according to historian Joseph G. Fracchia, acutely aware of the methodological and epistemological problems posed by any “materialist science of history” that forswore the philosophical notion that ideas comprehended real phenomena by penetrating to the (ideal) heart of them.3 Such a new science presumed self-conscious doubt about the capacity of human thought to grasp the essence or whole of things, but that did not lessen the need for concepts to facilitate analysis of social reality. Thus, while insisting on the priority of flux, Marx sought to steady an image of the capitalist mode of production before the analyst’s eyes. Abstraction through such concepts as commodity, capital, surplus value, and so forth was necessary to construct “an anatomy of the capitalist mode of production,” Fracchia writes. “The proper understanding of the structure of the capitalist mode of production can only be gained through theoretical abstraction. But the complete understanding of the history of bourgeois societies demands empirical analysis of the ‘contingent’ which does not correspond to the conceptual model.” In contrast with this careful modeling of capitalistic accumulation, the noun capitalism might mistakenly imply that the whole of a concrete and changing social formation was captured by a single, static concept.4 For Marx and his successors, given such a historicized approach to concept formation, to know the capitalist mode of production was to grasp the patterns of capitalist development, the changing forms of production fostered by the workings of capital accumulation in time. Grasping the course of capitalist development, furthermore, depended on understanding the historical transition from precapitalist to capitalist production—for that shift provided the terms and conditions governing modern economies. Development drew attention as well to the trends and forces that opened the door to a transition from capitalism to a new order beyond it. In ways defined by his revolutionary purposes, Marx was among the first to probe themes—the significance of the modern corporation, science, technology, automation, and the “social individual”—that later figured so prominently in twentiethcentury postcapitalist speculation. The age that made capitalism a salient category in social and historical analysis fostered attempts both to analyze the latest forms of capitalism and to speculate on its coming dissolution. All these elements were entangled in a complex field of discussion occupied primarily by a broad party of change including self-defined reformers and revolutionaries. At an early point,

Eve of World War I / 25

British Fabians remained uncertain whether “capitalism” defined the target of their criticism; they perceived in any case a gradual process of socialization that would remake the modern market system in collectivist terms, a thesis that influenced the leading “revisionist” among Marxian socialists, Eduard Bernstein. Answering Bernstein from a more “orthodox” position, the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding ventured one of the first substantial accounts of the modern corporation, modern finance, and their transitional significance. In the United States, Thorstein Veblen’s work in socioeconomics shared Hilferding’s concern with discerning the shape of a new corporate and financial order; and following Veblen, Walter Lippmann offered an American Fabian prognosis on the coming collectivism of a postcapitalist era. In these milieus, the problems Marx disclosed in defining the course of change and naming social forms amid flux were broached in differing ways, as corporate organization signaled capitalist ascent and the possible supersession of capitalism itself.

The Rise of “Capitalism” Capitalism was an etymological latecomer, following long after terms like “capital” and “capitalist.” In fourteenth-century Italian vernacular, “capital” referred to a stock of goods or amount of money, typically the assets of a trading firm as distinguished from its profits. Used at that time interchangeably with other terms like “principal,” capital drew closer to a modern definition—something having value as a means of production, or money advanced as an investment in production—during the eighteenthcentury beginnings of French and British political economy.5 “Capitalist” had already achieved currency from the mid-1600s on, referring to a big moneylender. By the late eighteenth century, it often pejoratively identified owners of “pecuniary fortunes” intent on enhancing their wealth through finance and speculation. Thus linked to “rentier,” and often deployed in radical middle-class polemics with antiaristocratic animus, the word had not yet clearly identified the capitalist as an industrialist or entrepreneur.6 Lagging behind, coinage of the term “capitalism” is usually credited to the French socialist Louis Blanc in 1850, who defined capitalism as “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.” Proudhon used it within another ten years, but Braudel claimed “the word was still unknown to Marx,” at least when he published Capital.7 By Marx’s later years, capitalism had clearly joined the Left’s lexicon. It appeared very occasionally in Marx’s redrafts of Capital ’s later volumes in the 1870s, and at Marx’s funeral Wilhelm Liebknecht hailed him as founder of the “social science . . . which kills capitalism.”8

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Outside of socialist circles the term entered public discussion slowly, over the several decades leading to the turn of the century. The classical political economists up through John Stuart Mill did not use it; they and their successors were in any case more interested in defining normative “principles” under which a market system would work optimally, than in naming empirical economic systems. In the late nineteenth century, conventional economists found the term “capitalism” superfluous or objectionable, since they generally regarded the given order as if it operated by “natural” laws essentially universal and eternal in application (if freed from artificial impediments). In 1883, William Graham Sumner sneered at those who “have been found to denounce and deride the modern system—what they call the capitalist system.”9 The scholarly eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1911, lacked an entry on “capitalism.” As for “capital,” which received less attention than the variety of capitals topping architectural columns, it was a universal economic category. The anonymous Britannica contributor scorned “much of modern socialist theorizing against ‘capitalism’” for failing to appreciate capital as that excess over “the rate of consumption, with consequent accumulation of resources” that in all human circumstances is “indispensable . . . to any advance in the arts of industry or the comforts of life.”10 Such defenders could assail left-wing radicals for threatening private property, thus endangering progress and the material abundance brought about by modern industry: only the backward, the deranged, the debased, or the alien would rebel against the way of the world. Thus the system of modern markets needed no label. England’s Fabian socialists treated the term cautiously. Examining the emergence of their doctrine in the 1880s, historian Willard Wolfe stated, “It would be erroneous to conclude . . . that systems of property, or economic theories of any kind, formed the essence of the Socialist tradition,” which in Britain was largely indebted to old Radical resentments of aristocratic privilege combined with a new “faith” in ideals of “cooperation,” “association,” and “moralization.”11 Wolfe’s point is well-taken—conceptually, socialism arrived before capitalism—but overstated. In the 1889 Fabian Essays, editor George Bernard Shaw assumed the task of providing an “economic basis of socialism,” relying on doctrines of Henry George and William Stanley Jevons to do so. Impressed by George’s tours of Britain, Shaw began his essay by emphasizing the role that private property in land and the rent that flowed from land “monopoly” played in laying the basis for social inequality. Jevons, the English inventor of marginalism, was important to Shaw for showing, presumably, that the source of “value” could only be the intensity of consumer demand at the margin, an ineluctably “social” phenomenon that gave no warrant to private claims on the sum of wealth.12 On the basis of such contrasts (the “social” versus private), the main target of the Fabian Essays

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was less “capitalism” than “Individualism” or “private ownership of land and capital,” which drew “rents” bearing no relation to effort or merit.13 Criticism of “capitalism” or the “capitalist system” did crop up at a few points in the Essays, particularly in the work of Hubert Bland, who opposed the Fabian strategy of permeation (winning influence among nonsocialist Radicals and Liberals), and William Clarke, who leaned more than others toward Marx.14 Yet for most of the group, the term “capitalism” meant little except perhaps to denote that late phase in individualistic economies in which large corporations (and owners of shares, or “capitalists”) played a predominant role. Intent on separating Fabianism from the Marxists of Britain’s Social Democratic Federation, Sydney Olivier wrote, “The complete Socialist criticism of our economy is, not that it is capitalistic, but that it is individualistic. Capitalism is [only] one among the many forms of exploitation which are the inevitable outcome of the unchecked individualistic struggle.” Using a standard definition of capital as any body of accumulated wealth, Olivier defined socialism as “the replacement of private capital by collective capital” and thereafter referred to “private capitalism,” a locution that would be either redundant or nonsensical in Marxian terms.15 Even the German historical school, which challenged the political economists’ universal laws, did not name the modern socioeconomic order “capitalism.” This school was more interested in examining peculiarly national traditions in economic ethics, comparing “Manchestertum” with German statist norms. It was the historical school’s “younger generation,” namely Werner Sombart and Max Weber, who started to cite “capitalism,” in Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus (1902) and Weber’s two-part essay that made up The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904 –05). Sombart became better known than Weber in the English-speaking world for some time, and he played a key role in legitimating the concept of capitalism, even though he was a controversial figure in the Germany academy. He was idiosyncratic and mercurial, his opinions veering between admiration and loathing for the capitalist order, evolutionary hope and cultural despair. Although he ended his career as a Nazi sympathizer, he was initially a man of the Left, whose youthful interest in Marx started him on the path of diagnosing the rise and nature of “modern capitalism.”16 He was the son of Anton Sombart, a landowner and Bundestag deputy who played a prominent role in the Verein für Sozialpolitik, the renowned association of “professorial socialists” (actually statist reformers of a conservative bent) led by Gustav Schmoller, Adolf Wagner, and Lujo Brentano. Werner liked to recall his rebellious days as a young student, though after graduate studies with Schmoller his first publications of 1888 hewed closely to the association’s interest in agrarian reforms that would resist market

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forces and retain a prominent social role for small farmers and artisans. By 1891 (not long after formation of the Socialist International in 1889 and the lapse of Bismarck’s antisocialist laws in Germany in 1890), the younger Sombart broke with his teachers, criticizing their hopes of retaining artisanal culture in cottage industries and instead welcoming the benefits of industrial development and the growth of a modern working class. From Marx he drew a strong conviction that “the growth of capitalism led inevitably toward socialism” and that industrialism generated not only greater productivity, efficiency, and quality than artisanal work but a beneficent future for a working class whose forms of collaboration (unions in particular) provided new “artificial community structures” that would help lead “the capitalist economic system in organic transformation to higher social forms.”17 His new posture drew notice: Engels praised one of his articles, and Schmoller assailed his adherence to “the materialist interpretation of history.”18 Initially, Sombart held to a strict evolutionary notion of progress, with capitalist development setting the standards (because it laid the foundation) for all social good to come. He insisted on a moderate evolutionary view of socialism. Only the group within the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) that was, by 1899, called “revisionist” earned his approval; all the others were simpleminded, dangerous revolutionists. He accepted Marx’s view of capitalism as a historically distinctive economic order and devoted the bulk of Der moderne Kapitalismus to analyzing the transition from precapitalist to early capitalist society. Furthermore, he emphasized the peculiar Geist or spirit on which capitalism depended, nurturing habits that were not simply, as the political economists supposed, natural to human beings but in fact contrary to the “natural man,” who met instinctual needs by traditional means of work and acquisition. His evaluation of that spirit, however, changed dramatically soon after the 1902 treatise, when a combination of personal frustration and new interest in Ferdinand Tönnies’s work helped swing him toward a far more disparaging view of capitalism. He returned to a romantic glorification of precapitalist artisanal work and reversed his commitment to progressivism. The distinctive Geist now appeared wholly soul destroying. In his second major work on the nature of capitalism, Der Bourgeois (1913), Sombart tried to reconcile his own contradictions by linking the progressive elements of capitalism with the alleged Nietzschean will of creative “entrepreneurs” and its dispiriting elements with the money-grubbing craft of “the Jews.”19 Meanwhile, Weber’s meticulous studies in the “spirit of capitalism” strove in part to rebut any “Jewish” interpretation of the rise of capitalism by focusing on the “psychological sanctions” for capitalistic economic behavior provided by Calvinism. In any case, Sombart and Weber

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shared a key disposition of Marx’s that distinguished their views from that of the Fabians. For Marx, capital was not merely a fund to be used at will for purposes of starting or adding to production but a peculiar entity, which was sometimes embodied in machinery or in hired labor and at other times quantified as a sum of wealth consisting of profits yet to be invested in new assets. It emerged from production and had to be thrown back into production for the sake of self-expansion. In other words, capital was a kind of rotating body of value dedicated to expansion for its own sake.20 And while Sombart and Weber differed from Marx in their idealist view that the system of capitalism had to be defined in terms of its motivating values, they believed that capitalism grew from no constant or eternal principles of economic life as such. The special ethic that Weber described—a demand for ceaseless work, accompanied by the reinvestment of proceeds due to limits on the legitimacy of consumption—matched in behavioral motivations what Marx described as the economic mechanism of self-augmenting capital.21 This fundamental idea of capitalism as a distinctive system of economic life, hence a distinctive order of society, marked a new tack in social thought by the first decade of the twentieth century. It informed the debate that swirled among economic historians. Besides Sombart and Weber, French and English historians commenced analyzing the course of capitalism in a wave of new studies from the 1890s through the 1920s. The English dissenting economist John A. Hobson issued his book The Evolution of Modern Capitalism in 1894, and issued a revised edition of 1910 that relied heavily, Hobson wrote, on “the researches in Professor Sombart’s great work.”22 The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, whose pathbreaking work on the inception of the European Middle Ages leaned “toward social and economic causation” rather than dynastic and religious history, published a short account called Les périodes de l’histoire sociale du capitalisme in 1914, with a second edition in 1922 as a pamphlet issued by a socialist publishing house.23 Pirenne objected to Sombart’s economic history as well as Weber’s theory of capitalism’s Puritan origins. Pirenne argued that capitalism emerged from the independent towns of medieval Europe, once the growth of trade—which revived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—helped produce a privileged bourgeois class. Sombart and Weber responded with disdain for “that Belgian medievalist who knew no medieval economic and social history.”24 Pirenne’s work nonetheless helped inspire the young French historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to found Les Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale in 1929, establishing a tradition of social-economic history leading to Braudel’s own three-volume masterwork, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th– 18th Century, under construction from the mid-1950s until its completion in 1979.25

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The historians were acutely sensitive to the problem of naming, intertwined as it was with problems of definition and historical periodization. When Weber joined Sombart in making “the revolutionary character of capitalism” the key to social science in their time, he knew how much depended on pinning a definition on that moving target. Weber’s insistence that any social-scientific inquiry begin with the preliminary work of constructing a “historical individual”—that abstract model of whatever particular object lay under examination—was peculiarly apt here, since historical arguments about how capitalism arose varied greatly according to traits different scholars deemed central to capitalism as such.26 Nearly half a century later, the British economist Maurice Dobb noted the same problem. One might “dismiss arguments about definition as mere disputation about words . . . an exercise for pedants,” he wrote, but in adopting one or another definition of a concept like “capitalism,” “one is deciding how one will break up the continuum of the historical process, the raw material that history presents to historiography—what events and what sequences are to be thrown into relief.”27 The debate with Pirenne rested on the related issues of definition and timing. He identified capitalism with the practices of the medieval merchant who was “on fire with the love of gain,” who conducted “commerce on the large scale” for the purpose of “extend[ing] his business” and “the constant accumulation of goods.” Pirenne also noted “the essential features of capitalism—individual enterprise, advances on credit, commercial profits, speculation, etc.” Sometimes Pirenne added an imperative “quest of profit” that guided entrepreneurs who also possessed “business sense” and acted as “shrewd calculator[s].”28 His main concern was to combat the view, “formulated with such extreme radicalism by W. Sombart—that the economic organization of the Middle Ages has no aspect to which one can rightly apply the term capitalistic” and that “no trace of capitalism” can be found in “the centuries preceding the Renaissance.”29 Weber of course started from different premises. In the broadest sense of gaining profit through trade, “capitalism” was age-old, though Weber’s interest lay in the specific form of “rational bourgeois capitalism” whose distinctive attributes must be counted as a much more recent innovation. Much of the early, long-term trade Pirenne cited was merely “adventurer’s capitalism,” lacking the insistent rationalization and ceaseless pursuit of work, profit, and reinvestment that could, via intensive and extensive economic growth, change a whole social order and spawn modern, urban, industrial and commercial life.30 Weber’s perspective differed too from other German economic historians who gingerly adopted the concept of capitalism but failed to give it a definition precise enough to identify the contemporary economic system. An elder of historical economics, Lujo Brentano, published The Origins of Modern

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Capitalism in 1916, identifying “capitalism” with “commerce, money-lending, and warfare,” an order that emerged in the era of the Fourth Crusade and “became predominant” in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.31 Since Brentano also claimed to find “the capitalist spirit” of seeking maximum profit in exchange as early as the fifth century, the young Talcott Parsons wrote, “We would like to ask Brentano if he sees no essential difference between the economic life of that time and that, say, of the nineteenth century in the West.” Likewise, Georg von Below’s identification of capitalism with “great enterprises” employing dependent laborers hardly sufficed, Parsons wrote, since this criterion “can be common to several, highly diverse economic systems, e.g., a socialist, a colonial plantation, an ancient slave economy.”32 As a whole, scholarship on capitalism by the 1910s and 1920s tended to follow Parsons’s mentors, Sombart and Weber, as well as Marx—rather than Pirenne or the older German school—in adopting definitions of capitalism that helped account for the specificity of contemporary corporate-dominated market economies and their roots in a peculiar kind of productive dynamism that began in early modern times. Hobson’s The Evolution of Modern Capitalism focused his account on the role of “machine-industry” in driving “capital to group itself in larger and larger masses, and [fostering] the consequent growth of the business-unit,” occasioning as well special attention to “combinations,” “Trusts,” monopolies, and increasingly severe “trade fluctuations.”33 The leading British economic historian, William Cunningham, in The Progress of Capitalism in England, likewise defined capitalism as a “social system” quite distinct from “the use of money and the habit of marketing” in late-medieval towns, and not to be identified simply with the appearance of individual capitalists in trade or manufactures. Rather, capitalism emerged once capital had achieved a special kind of dominance, a society based on giving capital “free scope,” trusting “to the private capitalist for the organisation of economic activities on the best possible lines”— that is, the order brought about by mid-nineteenth-century British reform bills eliminating all sorts of national economic regulation that descended from Elizabethan times.34 In French historical literature, Henri Hauser’s Les débuts du capitalisme (1927) and Henri Sée’s Les origines du capitalisme moderne (1926, with an English translation by two Harvard Business School professors in 1928) both identified this economic system with “the beginning of modern times,” as Sée put it, first in commerce and finance of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and then the dawn of industrial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth. It made little sense, Sée wrote, to talk of capitalism in the ancient world, and even if “the first manifestations of capitalism” appeared in the revived trade that buoyed the Italian republics, “there was nothing [there] in

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any way resembling a capitalistic regime, in the modern sense of the word.” A degree of capital accumulation sufficient to launch capitalism, he claimed, commenced in earnest from the early sixteenth century and would not earn the name of a new social system until it had wrought “a transformation in the whole organization of labor and in the relations between employers and employees,” putting off “the triumph of capitalistic organization . . . until the nineteenth century; and nearly everywhere, indeed, its final triumph awaited the coming of the second half of that century.”35 By the time R. H. Tawney published Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), a rough consensus associated this “rise” with the era of the Reformation and after, culminating in the “large-scale” business system of “modern times.” Although the ascendant definition focused on the character of productive enterprise rather than on trade per se, no one denied that attributes of private ownership, market exchange, and pursuit of profit were also essential features of the late nineteenth-century big-business order. Tawney, in Fabian fashion, emphasized “economic individualism” and, like Cunningham, cited the release of public controls on commerce and accumulation as the key sign of and impetus to the full maturation of the system. It was generally agreed, too, that modern capitalism had a built-in dynamism that gave the economic realm an unprecedented degree of autonomy. Still, given the priority the newer German writers placed on growth, accumulation, and late developments in concentration, it was far from evident that the definition of modern capitalism required “free markets.” The notion of “perfect liberty” that Adam Smith and his successors recognized as the key to effective markets—unregulated exchange and open competition as the sole determinant of prices—was only one way, and ultimately not the most compelling way, to formulate the kind of economic “autonomy” marking capitalism. The autonomy achieved by the economic sphere rested, rather, on a form of wealth whose accumulation did not depend on the direct use of force and political power; the presumption that economic goals were valued in themselves apart from religious, ideological, governmental, or dynastic ends; and the overpowering effects of growth and crisis that seemed impervious to anyone’s will and causally independent of the most traditionally familiar kinds of spurs or disturbances rooted in climatic, demographic, agrarian, epidemic, or military events.36 Utterly “free,” self-regulating markets, in many respects a historical chimera, need not be a definitional constraint implied in “capitalism.”37 The free-market ideal stemmed from classical political economy, while those who sought to describe the empirical socioeconomic order based on concentrated capital and wage labor were not primarily interested in determining optimal or normative market conditions. The tendency to conflate a particular historical definition of social order (“capitalism”) and norma-

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tive standards of market optimality (“perfect liberty”), implying that the latter defined the former, was a later development. It emerged from the tendency of some neoclassical economists to reify their concepts to a greater degree than classical political economists had and on the late adoption of the term by the business community itself. Even though discussion of “capitalism” from Hobson to Tawney still had notable associations with economic dissent and social reform, the conservative economic ideology of the 1920s adopted “capitalism” as a definition of what business advocates sought to defend.38 Not only was this a time when scholarly use of the term gave it some legitimacy but the growth of the worldwide socialist movement and the Bolshevik Revolution also led business propagandists to adopt a combative stance. Thus, in 1925, after the World War I reaction stopped further Progressive “nostrums,” a writer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared, “Capitalism is today triumphant and the American business man, as its most conspicuous exponent, occupies a position of leadership which the business man has never held before.”39 Such usages represent the clearest instance of a conflation of “capitalism” with unregulated competitive markets, or “free enterprise.” Indeed, the latter term served not as a self-conscious euphemism but as a clear definition of the normative principles business advocates imagined the system represented (at least with regard to their own autonomy from unwanted government interference).40 Thus by the 1920s allusions to capitalism were widespread and in the 1930s even commonplace. The old Progressivism—including its paramount voices, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Louis Brandeis, and the like—had not adopted the term, but those intellectuals belonging to what Dorothy Ross calls the “late-Progressive cohort” began to use it. In 1914, Charles Beard devoted a chapter to “the development of capitalism,” and Vernon Parrington used the term easily in the 1920s. Meanings still varied. In writings by Henry Ford, and later Charles Coughlin, “capitalism” or (in Ford’s phrase) “supercapitalism” still carried the old resentful connotations of finance and speculation. By the 1930s, Raymond Moley remarked casually that Franklin Roosevelt had “saved capitalism” through regulatory reform of the banking industry, while Thurman Arnold described “the folklore of capitalism” as a romance of competitive enterprise. In its familiarity at least, “capitalism” had arrived.41

Capitalism and Transitional Developments in Marx The trend indicated by the titles of works by Hobson, Cunningham, Sée, Hauser, and Tawney—terms like “origin,” “evolution,” “growth,” “progress,”

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and “rise”—showed that most new work on capitalism emphasized change in time, innovation, and stages or phases of development. This historicized mentality was most evident in Marx, who analyzed the capitalist mode of production precisely in order to help whisk it off the historical stage. While the dialectical Marx found the notion of a firmly settled social structure problematic, he knew people confront enduring forms of social relations in their historical experience, forms recognizable primarily in inherited relations of production and power, which are further concretized in property, law, custom, and ideology. To examine such forms, Marx too ventured system definitions, even though, Dobb noted, one should not assume “that the frontiers between [socioeconomic] systems are to be drawn across a page of history as a sharp dividing line.”42 Insofar as such “frontiers” and the system definitions underlying them represented, in some respects, historical abstractions, the fuzzy lines indicating epochal change might very well raise acute questions about the attribution of names to transitional moments in processes of change. Marx’s materialist history opened the door to such questions; indeed, his own rhetoric showed considerable sensitivity to this theoretical difficulty. For Marx, the capitalist mode of production (henceforth cited here simply as “capitalism”) was a socioeconomic system resting on a specific kind of class differentiation, whereby one social class accumulates wealth and holds power over another primarily by means of privately appropriating profits accrued through the market exchange of goods and services produced by wage-paid labor. In this context, competitive pressures compel all enterprises to reduce costs and seek a growing market share, posing a demand for productivity enhancements that require reinvestment of profits and expansion of the enterprise. Hence “capital” for Marx was not a universal economic category but a historically specific form defined as “self-expanding value,” that is, accumulated earnings—the real desideratum of production in this mode—that must be plowed back into production.43 The existence of markets is essential to the definition of capitalism, though not simply markets per se. As historian Ellen Meiksins Wood points out, the defining feature is a special kind of market, one which—because all economic actors are dependent on it for the exchange of goods, collection of revenue, and purchase of the means of life—imposes the imperatives of cost reduction, reinvestment, technological innovation, and accumulation on all producers. The emergence of capitalism, then, cannot be identified simply with the expansion of trade and markets, as if a measure of quantitative growth beyond some kind of threshold marked its inception; nor does it follow from a particular policy toward markets, namely the desideratum of exchange maximally freed from political or social regulation. Rather, as Wood argues, capitalism’s birth and maturation stems from

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the appearance of a peculiar form of market pressure, which first appeared in early modern agrarian England along with the growth of wage labor. The expansion of a propertyless working class forced laborers to purchase goods for their own sustenance; thus, not only did commodity exchange become the unavoidable center of material existence but there also emerged a market for cheaply produced food, shelter, and manufactured articles. Such a market reinforced the distinctive role of production in capitalism, for in contrast to traditional commerce, where profit stemmed from “buying cheap and selling dear,” profit under capitalism rests in production as such, namely, in the ability to produce articles for sale more cheaply than competitors. Finally, the character of domination under capitalism is such that property owners use social and political means to protect their monopoly of productive property (and advance their various financial interests as far as possible) while also upholding a market system that subjects them and others to a compulsive logic. That logic lies in the competitive pressure to innovate and maximize profit, as well as in swings of boom and bust, which by making the owners (as well as workers) into objects of uncontrolled forces, qualifies or disguises the social, economic, and political power they hold.44 Marx emphasized both the transparency of and the disguises assumed by capitalist production. When he and Engels claimed the bourgeoisie reduced all relations to the cash nexus, and in scattering the romance and idylls of past ages brought humankind “face to face with its real needs,” they suggested that capitalism made social relations simple and ascertainable.45 Yet Marx’s famed discussion of “the fetishism of commodities” in the first chapter of Capital made an even more striking assertion of the mystification entailed in this mode of production. It was a mystification Marx found integral to the field of political economy, and in tracing the origins of the disguise in the “fetish” of the commodity, Marx outlined the “critique of political economy” Capital was intended to be. According to Marx, the bourgeois economist’s worldview entailed an odd combination of fantasy and reality. Market exchange obscured the concrete labor that produced commodities and displayed the exchange relations between commodities (or price) as something intrinsic to them, rather than directly manifesting relative proportions of collective human labor socially allocated to different branches of production. Thus the value of commodities was, according to Marx, “a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” Yet he also claimed on the same page that “the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.” The apparent contradiction in Marx’s play on what is both “fantastic” and “real” in exchange relations can be resolved by grasping

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Marx’s fundamental critique of political economy. That alleged science of prices, he argued, rested on the fallacious assertion that the market system was a thing of nature, given and eternal, rather than a creature of human history. At the same time, the science of prices accurately pictured the workings of the market system at least in this: that the system really imposed its will on humans as if it were a force of nature. The fluctuation of prices “forcibly asserts itself” in this way, and when farmers are ruined by the fall of commodity prices, that fluctuation has an effect like that of gravity “when a house falls about our ears.”46 Marx’s critique is distinct from any number of superficially similar criticisms of reductionism in the economists’ worldview—that is, criticisms of “economism,” or the isolation of economic action from a broader social context and its analysis in terms of universal laws. Recognizing, as Marx did, the fallacy of economics as a natural science, which portrays a historically distinct social order as if it were an universal feature of given reality, does not belie the fact that the capitalist mode makes economic relations central to human affairs in ways unlike any other mode, and that its naturelike behavior cannot be altered by thinking of it differently, by merely identifying its social and historical character. The above discussion summarizes how Marx identified the peculiar traits he understood to define capitalism, although he knew his model abstracted from all sorts of particulars in concrete societies. He knew—even though he never systematically examined—the ways capitalist social relations mingled with systems of social relations based not on wage labor but on plantation slavery, latifundia, or other forms of coerced work. He knew how he had simplified class structure, given that “intermediate and transitional strata obscure the class boundaries” between owners and laborers. And he knew that the independence of market activity from political control, in principle a feature of capitalist social relations that distinguished them from feudal relations based on the directly political control of serfs by lords, is far from absolute.47 Still, questions of static classification count for less in Marxian modes of thought than preoccupation with development in social and economic structures and hence with transitions from one state of affairs to another.48 Given Marx’s concentration on outlining the workings of the “capitalist mode of production,” transitions within the scope of capitalist development gained greater attention than did the transitions to and from capitalism. In a long section of Capital, Marx sought to show how capitalists, first working in commerce, began to establish their hold over laborers through a “putting-out” system of cottage industry, whereby the worker’s place and technique of work (“handicraft”) remained undisturbed. Subsequent developments worked toward establishment of a “labor process of a specifically

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capitalist type,” whereby all the energy and techniques of the laborer are fixed and determined by capital itself.49 This was a process indicated by stages Marx called the “simple cooperation” of assembled trades, “manufacture” or the specialized division of labor relying still on hand work, and finally the onset of “machinofacture,” or machine industry, whereby capital confronts the worker as a concentrated force in the form of the mechanized factory.50 Marx pointed to further developments too: his remarks in The Communist Manifesto on the concentration and centralization of capital— the emergence of huge enterprises tending to wipe out a multitude of small competitors—was one of his most prescient claims about the course of capitalist development. Marx’s successors developed portraits of “monopoly capitalism,” “corporate capitalism,” or “organized capitalism” to grasp trends that gave the capitalist mode of production a new cast by the early twentieth century.51 In some respects, the most fascinating and troubling transition considered within the Marxist tradition is the transition from capitalism to socialism—a matter so fraught because so speculative. As an advocate of proletarian revolution, Marx was bound to suggest what he thought it meant to go beyond capital and to sketch the outlines of a process moving toward that end. A dialectical method was inclined to find sources of change that led beyond capitalism within capitalism itself. Capitalism produced its own “gravediggers,” as the Manifesto put it, but also it provided many of the ingredients of socialism, so that a new society was not merely imagined but was positively enabled by foregoing social trends.52 Marx thus saw two dimensions intertwined: solvent forces, leading to a crisis in the maintenance of capitalism, and enabling forces, or the evolution of forms suited to a future arrangement of “production by freely associated men . . . consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.”53 The solvent forces combined crisis tendencies and class struggles. The tension between advanced productive forces and retarding productive relations (which revealed itself in various ways, such as crises of overproduction or in the inability of private ownership to develop technological advances fully or put them to humane uses) was accompanied by a polarization of classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, that would fight to uphold or eliminate private property. These, however, would not bring a new society to fruition unless capitalism had already done its work “laying the basis” for it. To some extent, such prefigurative work and disruptive social conflict worked in concert, as in the widening of working-class solidarity and common action, which was fostered by capitalist growth and provided models for future practices of common ownership and management. Other foundation-laying processes were essential too. As industry assumed large-scale form, production became collectively orga-

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nized, small competitive units were largely eliminated, and the practical potential for administering enterprise as a public resource providing abundance became quite real. As Engels put it in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, the central “contradiction” of capitalist development—which yielded the possibility of surpassing it—was the contradiction between “socialized production” and the “private appropriation” of the wealth it created.54 Insofar as capitalism practically “socialized” the conduct of production, the revolutionary goal was to realize in self-conscious and effective form what was already latent in modern life, that is, to establish a regime in which wealth drawn from social production—and hence the means of governing the further development of productive resources—became social property. In the meantime, however, modern capitalist development fostered both collectivizing and individualizing trends, which typically combined and contended with each other in ways hard to disentangle and understand. In the words of one of Marx’s most effective twentieth-century expositors, Ernest Mandel, the form of production over time was “objectively socialised,” though “urged onward only by the capitalists’ thirst for profit.”55 Concrete techniques emerged making socialist society feasible: the idea of planning production across different plants and even branches of industry is no longer a fantasy but a practice of large corporations. “Private property” strictly speaking became obsolete. In the third volume of Capital, Marx wrote that corporations (or “joint-stock companies”) have a tendency to separate the function of management more and more from the ownership of capital, whether it be self-owned or borrowed. . . . Money capital itself assumes a social character with the development of credit, being concentrated in banks and loaned by them . . . while on the other hand the mere manager, who has no title whatever to the capital whether by borrowing or otherwise, performs all the real functions of the investing capitalist as such; only the functionary remains and the capitalist disappears from the process of production as a superfluous person.

Thus Marx saw “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within capitalist production itself, a self-transcending contradiction [and] only a phase of transition to a new form of production. . . . The capitalist jointstock companies . . . have to be seen as transitional forms between the capitalist mode of production and the associated one.”56 In these speculations Marx charted out a territory that would be shared in the mid-twentieth century with non-Marxist postcapitalist theories. “The new society grows up within the old,” as the twentieth-century Marxist C. L. R. James put it.57 In Marx’s large unpublished manuscript of 1857– 58, entitled the Grundrisse by its first editors in 1939, he discussed an ulti-

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mate trajectory for capitalist production, involving the development of machinery to a level of technical refinement and efficiency that later observers called “automation.” To Marx, those technical capabilities represented the near-complete “socialization” of production, though he emphasized how much this technical mode of production stood at odds with outmoded means of living by private payment of “exchange value” or money: To the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed, than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose “powerful effectiveness” is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science, and on the progress of technology. . . . The human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. . . . He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body—it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by largescale industry itself.58

Moreover, according to Martin Nicolaus, translator of the Grundrisse’s first complete English-language edition, these trends reveal the role of capitalism in developing “the level of needs” to a point where individuals have free time to employ social resources and cultivate creativity. Hardly the theorist only of a miserable Victorian proletariat, Marx imagined a working class, Nicolaus claimed, whose consumption has risen “above the level of mere physical subsistence,” a class whose very ability to produce requires “the enjoyment of the fruits of surplus labour,” and thus a group whose typical member is “the well-fed proletarian, scientifically competent, to whom an eight-hour day would presumably appear as a mere waste of time.”59 By treating the development of corporations, technology, automation, a prosperous working class, and the role of scientific intelligence in production, Marx looked beyond the cramped order of nineteenth-century capitalism to anticipate main themes in analyses of twentieth-century capitalism, while insisting that such an advanced order made a transition to socialism, or production based on common resources and collective self-determination, both feasible and imperative. Given the speculative nature of efforts to imagine the transition from capitalism, however, Marxists and others have often examined the transition to capitalism as a means of understanding processes of change in modes of pro-

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duction. Marx frequently addressed the latter question. Extended discussions of the rise of capitalism appear in The German Ideology (unpublished in his lifetime). In it, Marx and Engels discussed the appearance within medieval society of towns and long-distance trade, the growth of “local” consumer markets, the development of town-based craft production for sale, the putting-out system of merchants furnishing producers with materials and markets, and finally the appearance of capitalists hiring workers.60 In Capital, Marx laid some emphasis on the historical moment of “primitive accumulation,” the concentration of capital in the hands of a novice bourgeoisie by means of plundering a newly colonized world and the intense exploitation of slave and indigenous workforces there. This provided the wherewithal for investment in early industrial factories, though he judged the “real primitive accumulation” to consist in the constitution of a wageearning class in the homeland of capitalism, brought about by dispossession of primary producers from the land.61 In any case, the different elements cited in Marx’s empirical forays do not entirely jibe with his more schematic formulations of the materialist conception of history. The general principles declared in his famous preface to his Critique of Political Economy, stating that no mode of production gave way to a successor until it had exhausted its growth potential, a point marked by the acute strain between advancing “productive forces” and retarding “productive relations,” suggests that the rise of capitalism should be regarded as the result of crises endogenous to its predecessor, “feudalism”—that is, when ongoing changes in feudal life brought the system to a dead end and gave way to emergent forces within it.62 The sketch in The German Ideology, however, as well as some of his remarks in Capital surveyed a set of exogenous factors—the growth of trade and towns on the margins of the feudal (or manorial, serf-based) mode of production, or primitive accumulation in the colonial antipodes. Then too, the Manifesto’s statement that all history to date had been a history of class struggles insisted, alternatively, that the contending forces of social classes and the relations they establish between themselves determine the course of change, rather than either purely endogenous “system” strains or political and economic forces acting on settled (feudal) social relations from without. The uncertainty in Marx’s writings on this score helped spawn ongoing debate within Marxian circles over capitalism’s origins, aside from those in non-Marxian circles (such as the Pirenne-Sombart debate). A noted exchange on “the transition from feudalism to capitalism” occurred among sophisticated Marxist scholars in the early 1950s, when the distinguished American Marxist economist Paul Sweezy challenged Maurice Dobb, arguing that the exogenous factor of expanding long-distant trade, rather than the transformation of social relations between lord and peasant, had to be

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credited at least with bringing feudalism down, while the beginning of capitalism had to be treated as another question independent of feudalism’s fall. The transition debate resumed in the 1970s and 1980s, as American historian Robert Brenner argued that class struggle in the English countryside, ending serfdom but averting small-scale peasant ownership, held the key to distinctly capitalist production (conducted by private owners hiring wage-paid workers), first on the land and then in manufacturing, and thus (given a propertyless workforce and competitive production and exchange of subsistence goods) the emergence of all-around market dependence.63 If we set aside the ahistorical impulse to devise schematic models of change, there is little reason why a materialist history should anticipate that a future mode change will follow the form set by a prior mode change. Yet in the analogies and comparisons Marxists have raised between the transition to capitalism and the transition from capitalism, we may recognize the fruitful formulation at least of a problem if not its solution. Debates over the transition from feudalism to capitalism dwelled on assessing the role that trends of gradual or revolutionary change played in bringing about a new society. Transitional developments and halfway forms of property, labor mobilization, and markets (local and long-range) emerged over long stretches of time, constituting a messy historical passage that appears, in retrospect, as a mode transformation. On the other hand, particular events and episodes—political crisis, rebellion, overthrow, and reconstruction—gave mode change a sharper definition. In Dobb’s account, bourgeois development was never fully feasible short of a bourgeois revolution (for him, the antimonarchical revolution of the 1640s). Yet he also showed how dispersed changes in social relations—in town and country, in guild, manufactory, and farm, in trade and production—occurred from the fifteenth-century “crisis of feudalism” onward, pioneering or anticipating capitalistic forms.64 Was England prior to the 1640s, then, still definitively “feudal” or was its social order from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries already vested in a “postfeudal” transition, as yet incomplete? Likewise, in Marx’s portrait of capitalist development, with its solvent and enabling forces setting the stage for socialist transformation, there are both “evolutionary” and “revolutionary” themes.65 His work featured in one respect an emphasis on “socialization” or the steady emergence of collective organization within capitalism that made socialism possible and in another a stress on the historic break that typically marks changes in modes of production, which he expected to accompany the end of capitalism and the initiation of something profoundly new. Subsequent generations of Marxists split over the place of evolution and revolution in the transition from capitalism to socialism. From the principle that the new society grows within the old, is it correct to conclude, as Ed-

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uard Bernstein did, that capitalism would gradually “grow over into” socialism? It was this assertion, most fully expressed in Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism (1899), that sparked the great “revisionist” debate in German Social Democracy. If capitalism “grew over into” socialism, it was time to “revise” Marx, diminish the role played by class struggle and revolutionary upheaval, and instead maintain the conditions that would allow the progressive tendencies of capitalism itself to flower. The answer of “orthodox” Marxists— that those tendencies would never be liberated to foster a genuinely socialist order unless and until the power of the bourgeoisie was overturned—was in many respects truer to Marx. But the dispute was perennial in the socialist movement and rooted in Marx’s work itself. When Marx wrote that “only the functionary remains and the capitalist disappears from the process of production as a superfluous person,” he prefigured the notion of the “functionless shareholder” who, according to revisionists, would be powerless to resist the passing of capitalism. If “revisionists” have latched on to the first (reformist) principle in place of the second, leading them (as revolutionaries charge) to seal an alliance with the status quo, they have also, at least on some occasions, remained more open than the revolutionists to recognizing contemporary changes in the shape of capitalist society and the fruitful potential those changes offer for further social, or socialist, achievements. Revolutionaries have steeled themselves against illusions in the promise of the status quo and remained open to the class struggles that continue to break out in bourgeois society. But they have also tended either to judge capitalism as changeless (at least by insisting, in antirevisionist polemics, that its dynamics remain essentially the same as they have always been) or to interpret the social changes it spawns as wholly exploitative and abusive, rather than—as Marx had it—also promising new means of struggle and new ways of realizing a socialist future. In some respects, a sharp distinction between reform and revolution is far from helpful in grasping the implications of Marx’s work, which presents us with sufficient grounds to ask whether certain periods of social development might indeed be intrinsically “transitional” and thus in part undefined—or at least not finally decided—in terms of a single dominant mode of production. If we take Marx as an exponent of a materialist science of history, which deems system definitions to be necessary but inevitably artificial abstractions from courses of historical flux, such a view is all but inescapable. The Marxian discussion opened the door to a twentieth-century “postcapitalist” vision that perceived reform gradualism as the grounds for expecting the evanescence of capitalism. Even Marxian revolutionists should be able to acknowledge that any particular passage in historical development may combine different forms, muddy unambiguous system designations, and offer undecided possibilities of change. In such cases, the determination of

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what will come forth—that is, the shaping of transitional forms as finally transformative or not—would become a matter of results, yet to be won by the concerted social action of present political forces, rather than a matter of prior definition. Such is the ambiguous legacy of Marx on the problem of social transition.

Whither Capitalism (circa 1914)? Other analysts confronted the same difficulties of defining social types and explaining the murky course of historical change, though rarely with the precise balance of evolutionary and revolutionary perspectives Marx managed to uphold. Despite the historical distinctiveness he saw in capitalism, Sombart in 1900 held to a kind of evolutionism suggesting that boundaries typically blurred. In his 1900 lectures to unionists, he asserted “that we are in the middle of an advance to a Socialist order of society,” noting the examples of protective legislation or municipal ownership of transit and other utilities, and that “capitalism and socialism are no mutually exclusive oppositions, that rather up to a certain degree their ideals can be very well realized in one and the same society.”66 Thus Sombart anticipated the theory we will follow through the twentieth century: that the sharp boundaries of capitalism prove illusory and new societal forms, beyond the old categories, emerge presently. Would the changing form of capitalism smooth the way for a coming postcapitalist transition or did prospects for a new social economy demand a more catastrophic break to revolutionize modern society? This problem was played back and forth by observers who awaited the move toward a new society. We can track some characteristic approaches to this problem in accounts of the corporate development of modern society, written from the centers of the second industrial revolution and the new corporation, Germany and the United States, by Rudolf Hilferding, Thorstein Veblen, and finally Walter Lippmann. All these figures occupied those years just before World War I when theoretical speculation was sustained by a widespread apperception of a “new era” in the offing—a sense of an emerging, dawning order whose promise was to be tarnished, but not defeated, by the outbreak of war. According to Hilferding in Finance Capital (1910), “Modern capitalist development . . . can only be comprehended in terms of the ascendancy of the corporation and its causes.”67 In some sense, Hilferding’s venture marked the beginning of “postclassical” Marxism, a phase of theorizing devoted to twentieth-century developments, based not only on the quantum leap in concentration and centralization of capital but also on the growing interaction of market and state that seemed to qualify the sharp divide between

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the two that characterized nineteenth-century “liberal” capitalism. He was also responding to the culmination of the revisionism debate at the 1904 Congress of the Socialist International. For Bernstein, the development of the corporation helped disperse ownership of capital to a more democratic body of shareholders, and its control over large-scale production would limit the outbreak of crises that followed from the “anarchic” character of the former competitive order of capitalism. The easing of extreme class disparities and cyclical instability would prepare the way for a gradual transition; socialism appeared not so much as the goal or end state of social development but as a regulative ideal guiding the continuous amelioration of the social evils capitalism spawned. These were the propositions Hilferding aimed to challenge in his analysis of contemporary corporate capitalism. Born in 1877 and raised in Vienna as part of an assimilating Jewish family, Hilferding emerged from the socialist students’ organization at the University of Vienna and came to the attention of German Social Democratic leader Karl Kautsky as a skilled and sophisticated polemicist. He joined Kautsky’s current in opposing Bernstein’s revisionism while also keeping at bay the German party’s left wing of revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.68 In 1902, Hilferding told Kautsky he would study the developments in capitalist economy since Marx’s death, “which could best be observed in New York” (that is, in the sphere of high finance).69 Capitalist enterprises, Hilferding explained later in Finance Capital, generated some revenues in their production process that could not be put to immediate use in generating additional profits: banks then assumed the task of ensuring that such “idle” money, concentrated in their hands, was always at work somewhere making a profit.70 As the scale of production increased with the “concentration and centralization of capital,” both the volume of such “idle” funds and the need of corporations for loans, credit, and investment capital grew. Moreover, by “floating” corporate shares that could assume a value in exchange higher than the value of real corporate assets, investment banks realized a new kind of “promoter’s profit,” thus finding an incentive for advancing corporate concentration further. So, Hilferding argued, the scale of industry and of investment banks grew at the same time; indeed, the two became increasingly intertwined, in the form of “finance capital.” Writing at the time of J. P. Morgan’s role in the 1901 combination of 165 American steel companies into the United States Steel Corporation and when German banks played a preeminent role in promoting that country’s steel, chemical, and electric industries, Hilferding had reason to highlight this aspect of capitalist development.71 Hilferding explained the currency of pooling arrangements (cartels) and

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mergers (trusts) at the turn of the century as a capitalist solution to the obstacles that large-scale fixed investments placed before the drive to “equalize the rate of profit,” that is, move capital in and out of different lines of production in pursuit of the highest rate of return. The only way to respond to marked differentials in profit rate, he suggested, was to absorb different enterprises into one, balancing high and low yields within the same, large combine. The most salient innovation in this process, moreover, was the corporation’s access, through finance capital, to funding on a scale far beyond its own accumulation of profits, and hence its “much greater capacity for growth.”72 Here alone was a significant boost in “socialization,” for, as Hilferding put it, “the corporation can draw directly upon the combined capital of the capitalist class” as well as on the savings of the noncapitalist classes gathered by the banks. In fact, to stress the idea of socialization, Hilferding distinguished the corporation from “private” or “individual” property properly speaking. Given the capacity for large investments, and hence quick adaptation to new technologies as they became available, “the expansion of the capitalist enterprise which has been converted into a corporation, freed from the bonds of individual property, can now conform simply with the demands of technology.” The corporation then appeared as one way to seek a resolution of the “contradiction” between advancing “forces of production” (technology) and the limitations imposed by capitalist “relations of production” (private property), and hence one sense in which, for Marx, the joint-stock company “is the abolition of capital as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production itself.”73 The paradox in Marx’s formulation was nicely sustained in Hilferding’s account, for he made it clear that the regime of finance capital remained rife with contradictions. If the cartels and trusts socialize production, he noted, and proclaim the need to overcome the “anarchy” of competitive individuals and their small-scale enterprises, they still represent “the antithesis of capitalism . . . adapted to capitalist society: it is a fraudulent kind of socialism, modified to suit the needs of capitalism.” In a phrase anticipating the title of Louis Brandeis’s 1914 book on the big American banks, Hilferding wrote, “it socializes other people’s money for use by the few.” This kind of socialization, Hilferding claimed, was fraudulent since the corporation did not in fact signal (in a mass of shareholders) the dispersion of ownership. Rather, “the corporations . . . are governed by an oligarchy, or by a single big capitalist (or a bank) who are, in reality, vitally interested in their operations and quite independent of the mass of small shareholders.” This concentration of control over resources drawn from many sources was, for Hilferding, the real meaning of the “separation of ownership and management.”74 Not only did Hilferding thus respond to Bernstein’s benign view

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of corporate development, but he also clearly enunciated a theme that American social-liberal theory, no less than European theory, would chew over for decades to come. Moreover, Hilferding was sensitive to the multiple strains and contrary tendencies at work within this system. He noted that cartels and trusts have the ability and motive to use new technology to cheapen production costs and increase profits, while they also aim first “to restrict production” (to keep prices high); consequently, the system yields either excess goods for “dumping” abroad or excess capital to export. Given their reliance on their nation’s position in world affairs, the new order, contrary to the old liberal ideal, champions the growth of state power. This promises not the kind of control of economic affairs that would benefit the people, however, but a state defined by oligarchy, hierarchy, the “perversion of the national idea” into an aggressive chauvinism, and racism. Imperialism, national rivalries, and very likely the outbreak of world war stemmed from the new regime.75 Like Marx in his claims regarding the naked and mystified form of capitalist social relations, Hilferding suggested that the new corporate order both revealed and disguised the mechanisms by which it worked: “On the stock exchange capitalist property appears in its pure form, as a title to the yield,” Hilferding wrote, and yet at the same time, “the relation of exploitation, the appropriation of surplus labor, upon which it [the yield] rests, becomes conceptually lost.” In the ideology of imperialism, “class antagonisms have disappeared and been transcended in the service of the collectivity,” while on the other hand, “property, concentrated and centralized in the hands of a few giant capitalist groups, manifests itself in direct opposition to the mass of those who possess no capital.” Demonstrating the feasibility of social control over industrial production, finance capital also rendered “the problem of property relations . . . [in] its clearest, most unequivocal and sharpest expression.”76 The point now was to convince the working class to seize control of the state—a task made all the easier, presumably, because the corporate bourgeoisie raised the role of the state for all to see. Moreover, the process of cartelization or combination could continue even to the point of forming within the nation a “general cartel,” whereby “the whole of capitalist production would then be consciously regulated by a single body.”77 But with this assertion, Hilferding drove his argument to the brink of incoherence. His forecast of the “general cartel” fit ill with his insistence (intended to combat Bernstein’s revisionism) that cartelization did not eliminate cyclical crises but worsened them, a claim based on his famous reinterpretation of capitalist crisis tendencies, which he said were due to “disproportionality” between different branches of production rather than overproduction vis à vis consumption.78 In the end, the subtlety of Hilferding’s analysis, foreseeing a process of socialization that drove toward a

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“general cartel” while also recognizing persistent contradictions within the system as a whole, left him somewhat at loose ends. Among the unresolved questions were these: How far did finance capital prepare the ground for socialism? How much did it leave undone or perverted? In American life and letters, Thorstein Veblen appeared as a figure somewhat comparable to Hilferding, a critic of corporate capitalism not only because of its exploitative power and the militarism it sponsored but also for the ways it occluded the present promise of socialization. Veblen, at age forty-two, had burst on the intellectual scene in 1899 amid the great merger wave with his first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. His intellectual heritage was a curious mix of conservative and boldly reformist affiliations. He had studied with the conservative moralist Noah Porter and the Spencerian William Graham Sumner at Yale University, and the strictly classical economist J. Laurence Laughlin at Cornell University, while also holding a debt to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and the U.S. Populist movement. Although he always professed an academic objectivity, Veblen generated a body of argument rightly considered subversive, in line with his lifelong affinity for movements and actions of rebellious workers, including the Wobblies and, in his later years, the Bolsheviks and the British General Strike of 1926.79 Accompanying Laughlin to the new University of Chicago, Veblen taught economics and edited the Journal of Political Economy, where he regularly reviewed accounts of European socialism and cultivated an expertise in the financial structure of the new business corporations. His empirical knowledge of this sphere of activity, and his devotion to scholarly norms, was at this point unquestionable. Veblen did not limit himself to a narrow specialization, however. His intellectual range made him familiar with, among other things, recent anthropology (including Franz Boas’s early papers on the extravagant waste of the Kwakiutl potlatch), and he proceeded to integrate his analysis of economic affairs with a general portrait of cultural evolution, mounting a sharp critique of contemporary affairs and of the methods of conventional economics. He regarded the newer strands of neoclassical economics as a “normalistic” rather than “evolutionary” science, that is, one that focused on normative generalizations about optimal market conditions (namely, the ways markets achieve equilibrium) and confused that ideal condition with the going order of things.80 Moreover, he derided economic presumptions that humans were universally motivated by hedonist or rational principles and challenged the conventional idea that economic growth as such constituted social progress. Conventional economics not only falsely ascribed an illusory efficiency to modern capitalism—or the “price system” as Veblen more typically called it—but also complacently assumed that social equity had been achieved in an exchange

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economy. Quite to the contrary, Veblen asserted that the accumulation of great wealth and its political power (what nineteenth-century republicans called plutocracy) had carried over into modern life practices of hierarchical rank and coercion derived from “barbaric” society, and had injected into the warp and woof of all economic and cultural life the poisons of status distinction and violence. Thus he identified the new role of the financier with the revival of martial values in an imperialist age, the collection of tribute, and the wasteful display of prestige. In his view, private property in production was largely fictitious and in any case obsolete, for technological expertise—for him the real motive force of economic growth and social development—was inherently a collective phenomenon, against which all claims of private ownership were by definition false. Seeing some affinity for technological development in the “workmanlike” inclination of popular consciousness, he scorned the upper classes and “pecuniary” business motivations as backward-looking social forces. Though he never declared himself a socialist, Veblen wondered why socialists did not make more use of his work, since, he said, he offered “very good argument” for their cause.81 In Veblen’s 1914 book, The Instinct of Workmanship, he offered an analysis of the “latest phases of the industrial developments” and “a genetic inquiry into [the] modern business situation.” He had begun his career adapting the conventions of nineteenth-century anthropology (the work of Lewis Henry Morgan and E. B. Tylor) to a scheme of economic evolution from the “savage state” to a subsequent “predatory culture” founded on private property, which in turn yielded to a “secondary or peaceable phase of [that] pecuniary culture.” Now he drew also on recent work in the history of early modern and modern economic development, including Sombart’s. Veblen started his survey with the early modern growth of “handicraft” or smallscale, independent craftsmen producing goods for sale, combined with “petty trade,” which promoted the development of the “price system” and established enduring beliefs in the sanctity of individual rights to property. With the development of technique on a larger scale than was suited to hand tools and personal workshops, plus the accumulation of wealth by traders, there emerged the model of the “collective plant” and the “practice of industrial investments,” which brought about the “disjunction of ownership . . . from workmanship.” Here Veblen noted the rise of “capitalism” or “capitalistic management,” or what he more frequently called simply the “transition to a business regime,” or a “business community” separate from the community at large, particularly from the “impecunious workmen” employed in the shops. He sighted such trends on the European continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but after this development was aborted in the wars of the seventeenth, Veblen wrote, the focus of development shifted to Britain, where the machine age commenced in the late eigh-

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teenth century and accelerated in the nineteenth: now rather than the worker using tools, “the machine process makes use of the workman.”82 At this point, Veblen moved almost imperceptibly to a discussion of the “latest phases” of development, when the “modern corporation” surpassed the “competitive system.” He focused on the role of technology, which allowed him to emphasize, like Marx or Hilferding, the “socializing” elements of the “new era” (Veblen’s phrase) for “perfection in the machine technology is attained in the degree in which the given process can dispense with manual [hand] labor” and “stress falls rather more decidedly on general intelligence and . . . familiarity with the commonplace technological knowledge of the time.” Schooling replaced apprenticeship, science replaced craft skill, the educated worker replaced the exploited child. Or at least this was the trend of things, though the system of “business” (based on private property in the “material means of industry”) resisted it, bending the new technology to fit an outmoded “metaphysics of natural liberty, self-help . . . individual initiative, and the like.” Nonetheless, in this “latest phase” of development, Veblen took note of the differentiation, not between ownership and workmanship (long accomplished), but now between ownership and management. Real power withdrew further from the scene of production into the sphere of “banking, underwriting, insurance, and the phenomena of the money market at large,” coming to rest in the hands of those “businessmen whose command of large means enables them to create and control those pecuniary conjunctures of industry that bring about changes in the market value and ownership of the equipment.” At this point, Veblen effectively ran out of steam, and a detailed study of how the corporate order worked as a whole would await Veblen’s last published work after the war, namely his Absentee Ownership of 1923. Yet in Instinct of Workmanship there was no question in Veblen’s mind that “machine industry” demanded genuine social ownership and control: the notion of individual rights in property in this stage of industrial development was nothing but a hopelessly outdated residue of the handicraft era. On the other hand, there was a note of pessimism in Veblen quite unlike Hilferding’s hopeful, though inconsistent, outlook. Veblen was convinced that the business system suppressed ongoing technological innovation as well as what it implied—the potential advent of a socialized economy. He had no confidence in class struggle as a means to free that outcome from the restraints of the established order, for the working class was, while ethically appealing in some ways, merely a partial interest within an order that, ultimately, could only be run effectively by the community at large.83 Despite Veblen’s pessimism, his work otherwise evoked a characteristic sentiment of the day. In Instinct’s early pages, he noted the “desperately precarious institutional situation, such as now (1913) faces the peoples of

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Christendom.” Just this sense of inhabiting unsettled conditions—a new order recently arisen, with yet uncertain outcomes to emerge from it in coming years—became widespread enough to color even the language of conventional Progressive reformers.84 Woodrow Wilson referred in 1913 to “nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human relationships” in which “relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other individual men.” With more radical intent, the socialist engineer Charles P. Steinmetz, star technician of the General Electric company in Schenectady where a Socialist Party mayor took office in 1912, published America and the New Epoch in 1916. It was a sensibility attuned precisely to that sort of theorizing that would judge the present to be transitional, shifting under people’s feet while making way for the new.85 Amid such sentiment, in 1914, Walter Lippmann emerged from Harvard’s Intercollegiate Socialist Society and a brief stint as assistant to Schenectady’s mayor to make his name as the wunderkind of the higher journalism. A favored student of the English Fabian Graham Wallas, a visiting lecturer at Harvard, Lippmann had already taken his distance from Socialist Party politics. In his debut book, Drift and Mastery, Lippmann saw little need to polemicize in favor of socialism. He merely aimed to combat traditional antisocialist arguments by demonstrating that “collectivism” was already a fact of modern social life and that the future lay with those willing to adopt consciously the tools of collectivism on behalf of promoting the public welfare. Then “a new morality” would emerge that was genuinely “social.” He had clearly read his share of Veblen, but Lippmann lacked the fatalism that gave Veblen’s critique a sharp, radical edge. Although Lippmann’s book made much of “the revolutionary movement” of his times and trumpeted his desire to “contribute to a conscious revolution,” he clearly thought that half the battle was already won. The opposition to change was already threadbare, he asserted, and the main task was to clarify aims, summon the requisite will, and realize the potential of the present. “If we flounder,” he declared, “it is not because the old order is strong, but because the new one is weak.”86 Although Lippmann considered a wide range of issues in Drift and Mastery, giving special attention to the women’s movement, he devoted virtually the whole first half of the book to economic issues. There, where Veblen might have seen the given regime of property as one of the most intractable problems of the day, Lippmann found the greatest evidence of pathbreaking change: “The leading thought of our world has ceased to regard commercialism either as permanent or desirable, and the only real question among intelligent people is how business methods are to be altered, not whether they are to be altered. For no one, unafflicted with invincible ig-

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norance, desires to preserve our economic system in its existing form.” Confidently, Lippmann asserted, “The cultural basis of property is radically altered, however much the law may lag behind in recognizing the change,” and “a silent revolution is in progress.” In modern enterprise, “the profitmotive is decadent and new incentives [are] ready” to guide our conduct in production and consumption. The conventions of industrial life, which defended the autonomy of great corporations from interference by government or labor, were, Lippmann suggested, little more than a brittle shell. Likewise, conventional economics, the discourse of university scholars, was obsolete, repeatedly justifying the existing distribution of income as the consequence of the rightful rewards of work or as a necessary incentive to productive effort. In fact, “there is no real relation today between moneymaking and useful work. Power, position, pull, custom, weakness, oversupply, the class monopoly of higher education, inheritance, accident, the strategy of industrial war—these are the things that determine income— not the incentive which is necessary.”87 Such occasional notes of rebuke competed with a calmer assurance. What was the source of Lippmann’s optimism about the decline of the old order and the immanence of the new? Essentially, the answer lay in the advent of the great corporation. It has “played havoc with the older political economy” and made fools of the economists precisely because it rendered “private property” ineffectual. Since the “corporation has separated ownership from management,” with many shareholders standing as “feeble representative[s] of the institution of private property” while “managers on salary” administer complex organizations, “most of the rights of property [have] already disappeared.” The trust movement is doing what no conspirator or revolutionist could ever do: it is sucking the life out of private property. For the purposes of modern industry the traditional notions have become meaningless: the name continues, but the fact is disappearing. You cannot conduct the great industries and preserve intact the principles of private property. And so the trusts are organizing private property out of existence, are altering its nature so radically that very little remains but the title and the ancient theory.

Much of this analysis was finely balanced between what could be regarded as a matter-of-fact translation of notions Marx and Hilferding shared (abolition of private property within the capitalist system, the need to convert what is already objectively socialized into a truly public function) and the remarkably sanguine view that revolutionary change was already accomplished, waiting only to be acknowledged by the astute and forward-looking members of the community. It did in any case lead Lippmann to predictions. The most organized trusts—the railroads—could be converted to public

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ownership with hardly any disturbance to shareholders, by exchanging their stock certificates for government bonds; thus, he wagered, the time “is sure to come when the government will be operating the basic industries.” He didn’t regard this as socialism per se, and it seemed to him that Marx, though the towering genius of the mid-nineteenth century, was outmoded as soon as competitive capitalism gave way to the corporate order. Rather, what was coming was a new order where the hard questions to face were those concerning how to balance “collectivism” with “democracy,” and how to allocate the roles workers, consumers, and government were to play in industrial governance. Besides nationalizations, his ambitions for reform were relatively high, suggesting a full range of social security measures: a “minimum standard of life” and guarantees of health and education, all of which would liberate “mankind . . . from a fear economy.”88 At the same time, Lippmann wanted the reformer to face up to reality without illusions—without convictions about providence or progress, without the crutch of utopia, and with the will to undertake the “hard” work of defining purposes and clear plans of action. Lippmann’s rhetoric, especially in the latter half of the book, was rife not only with a Nietzschean exaltation of will and fortitude but also with a vigorous pragmatic disposition. It was the “scientific attitude” that would answer the greatest needs of the moment, in both strategy and spirit—not a science of sure knowledge, but a science of experiment that recognized the “elusive and changing” elements, “the blendings and interweavings of reality.” Leaning on both his Harvard teacher William James and John Dewey, Lippmann insisted that this quality of experience rendered all doctrines suspect: “There is a weakness which clings to stiff and solid frames of thought because the subtlety of life is distressing.” Marx offered such “solid frames of thought” to his dependent followers, Lippmann thought. One such frame, one surmises, was the concept of “capitalism,” so recent yet to Lippmann already passing.89 Lippmann’s combination of vehement antiutopian realism with a strikingly confident optimism remained a mark of the postcapitalist vision. Lippmann became one of the leading editors of the new, influential journal, The New Republic, which issued its first number within six months of Drift and Mastery’s appearance. Its founder and editor in chief was Herbert Croly, regarded by Lippmann as “the first important political philosopher who [had] appeared in America in the twentieth century.”90 Croly, schooled by his father in Auguste Comte’s “positive philosophy” and a self-confessed “Hamiltonian nationalist,” had other grounds than Lippmann’s youthful socialism for greeting the “promise” of big business for a reconstruction of American life. At the furthest reach of his reformism, he followed Lippmann’s suggestion of freedom from a “fear economy.” As Croly’s biographer put it, he suggested in 1914 that “the day may come when citizens can for-

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get the economic aspect of life, when they can concentrate instead on ‘an ardent and intelligent cultivation of the essential art of living.’”91 These were the years when thoughts of reform, even among cautious liberals, ran far. John Dewey’s work, inspiring to Lippmann and Croly, reached the peak of his radically democratic imagination in his Democracy and Education of 1916, which called for the elimination of the strict divide between mental and manual labor, and hence in principle a profound attack on class barriers, to realize a democratic society.92 Indeed, the New Republic, in its insistence on drawing both from its socialist sympathies and the left wing of Progressivism, was a center for the new social liberalism. And part of the mood it shared with others at that “new age” conjuncture was hope for a society that might even be considered, as Croly suggested, beyond economy.93 By this point, the concept of capitalism was about to enter public discourse much more widely, particularly in the United States, where its use outside of radical circles had developed tardily. Weber used the word “capitalism,” as did Sombart, in their 1904 papers at the St. Louis World’s Fair, but their American counterparts there, such as Richard T. Ely, quite definitely did not.94 Resistance to the term still surfaced.95 Nonetheless, the rising tide of reform just before the war’s outbreak in Europe, which continued in the United States right up to U.S. intervention, lent a more bracing critical spirit to intellectual life and to the academic realm, including the growing social sciences. The late Progressive cohort achieved a degree of coherence and a place on the political spectrum rather more radical than electoral standard-bearers such as Roosevelt or Wilson. The new group included Arthur F. Bentley and Charles Beard—members of the generation that lay between Veblen and Dewey on the one hand and recent graduates like Lippmann on the other. They had come of age with populist or socialist sympathies, fit awkwardly into the conservative academic culture of their time, and helped further the quickening of reform sentiment in the years just before World War I. Even older, cautious middle-of-the-roaders in academic life such as Charles Horton Cooley and Albion Small denounced an exploitative ruling class and called for radical democratic change.96 The war would sharply interrupt this growing current of criticism and hopeful anticipation, but enough of it survived to color the intellectual and academic mood that opened the 1920s.97 Speculation regarding the nature of modern capitalism and its coming trends persisted, including even the emergence— right under the feet of those yet unaware of the new day—of new states of social, economic, and political order that were superseding capitalism.

chapter 2

The American Theory of Organized Capitalism *

World War I marked a rupture in the development of reformist social thought, and the optimistic expectations of the prewar years could not pass unscathed into the postwar period. Disenchantment and disillusion dogged the intellectuals who had embraced the promise of modern life and—like New Republic progressives—greeted the war as the means of realizing that promise, a “plastic juncture,” in Dewey’s phrase, when people could remold their affairs.1 The unfolding of Walter Lippmann’s career exemplified the turn away from such optimism. Having written in 1914 of the “old order” as a paper tiger, a flimsy set of habits and prejudices ready to give way if reformers were creative enough to recast an increasingly organized economy in a new, democratic mold, Lippmann found in the wake of the war that democracy inspired little confidence. Misleadership, propaganda, public apathy, ignorance, and mass hysteria all became painfully evident in the debacle of the war, its great-power settlement, and the postwar red scare.2 Dewey too was appalled, though he still found reason in the 1920s to challenge Lippmann’s deep distrust of the democratic public. In any case, although some observers then and since maintained that the war experience had led to an abrupt “end” to Progressivism, the break in reformist enthusiasm was hardly as sharp as all that. The anticipatory sense of a coming new era continued in the aftermath of war, albeit tempered by a rocky journey through several years marked by crosscurrents of hope, disappointment, militancy, and setback.

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Only by appreciating the experience of that tumultuous passage can we grasp the tenor of the social liberalism that emerged from the war. If some like Lippmann grew doubtful of prospects for rational progress, others had lost confidence in the authority of governing elites and radicalized for a time. A “degree of [European] working-class unrest . . . unparalleled in the twentieth century” made the years 1918 –1920 “the only period during which it was not unrealistic to assume that a ‘revolution in the West’ was on the agenda,” historian Donald Sassoon writes, and even in the United States growing workers’ power during the war fueled new initiatives in industrial unionism and labor solidarity, notably the 1919 steel strike and the Seattle general strike.3 The sharp, repressive response these struggles drew from panicked authorities in turn sparked accusations by some in the American intellectual and reform community that a business “dictatorship” had revealed itself. According to former Progressive Party activist Amos Pinchot, “The great issue is no longer that of preventing the abuse of power by the privileged class. . . . The great issue now is to take away the power itself.”4 Along with the surge of influence exercised by A. C. Townley’s radical NonPartisan League in the northern plains and other talk of new third-party efforts, progressive intellectuals decried the timidity of mainstream liberalism, and as Oswald Garrison Villard’s Nation magazine put it, called for a “new political alignment, based on fundamental economic issues” that put “the labouring class” in the forefront of change.5 The tide soon turned. The postwar upsurge ebbed, and avid talk of social “reconstruction,” made mandatory by a war that disgraced the old order, ceded pride of place to programs of restabilization, more or less achieved by bourgeois elites in Europe and the United States by 1924. The peculiarity of these years at the turn of the decade lay precisely in the confused mingling of notions concerned both with “reconstruction” and “restabilization.” Across a wide political spectrum, as the historian of interwar Europe Charles Maier has shown, it was conceded that order could not be restored without recasting modern society in some significant ways. And thus even as reactionary political currents in the backwash of war put their stamp on postwar life, social liberals persisted in their view that the postwar settlement did not quash but rather preserved their prospects. They still expected that a more socialized form of economy would yet emerge as a necessary feature of modernity. Mingling anxiety over defeat and continued confidence, the emerging social-liberal disposition of the 1920s leaned determinedly to moderation, and its advocates were willing to collaborate with a variety of figures and programs more conservative than themselves. Thus it has been easy, in retrospect, to mistake social liberalism as little more than a mask for, or version of, the astute plans by conservative corporate elites to

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reclaim and guard their power in a changing world. It is a mistake, however, to neglect the insistence of social liberals that a genuinely new order remained on the agenda. The years from 1914 to 1924 nurtured the first manifestations of the modern postcapitalist vision, from Lippmann’s expectation that the old order had all but vacated the scene to the formation of an interwar reformist intelligentsia convinced, even as “reconstruction” fervor declined, that the new order dwelled within society, to be realized in time. From an interwar milieu I call socioeconomics—a heterodox current often called institutionalist at the time and derived in some respects from the work of Veblen—we can see the survival of war-inspired aspirations to economic or industrial democracy. Such aspirations led by the early 1930s to a publication that set a keynote for the postcapitalist vision: Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Their focus on the corporation as a medium of change toward a social economy stemmed from social-liberal sources, not “corporate liberal” motives that historians, misled by the politically ambiguous milieu of postwar reconstruction and restabilization, have insistently identified. Berle and Means’s portrait did not vest confidence in corporate leadership to make reforms; rather, they unwittingly echoed what Rudolf Hilferding in the 1920s called an “organized capitalism,” a transitional phase opening the door to a postcapitalist order. Theirs was an American theory of organized capitalism, a conviction that capitalist development had rendered capitalism obsolete and would yield to a social economy in their own time.

Formation of the New Era in Postwar Progressive Thought The British radical J. A. Hobson, introducing a 1922 book in what his publisher called “The New Era Series,” declared that “a New Industrial Order is struggling into life, displacing piece by piece the old system of private capitalism.” Drawing on war-spawned demands for “radical reconstruction” and “industrial control,” Hobson noted that “the recent rapid growth of combinations on the part of Capital and Labour,” along with other forms of collective action by government or by voluntary associations (such as buyers’ or producers’ cooperatives), had made “organization” the key to the future. Modern society would be marked, henceforth, by mixed property forms (private, state-owned, regulated, and collective) as well as varied agencies of decision making that welcomed workers alongside managers, investors, and public officials.6 Yet the reformers’ epithet for a new age was later co-opted by the “New Era” capitalism of Herbert Hoover’s reign, the conservative il-

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lusion of a crisis-free capitalism based on widely diffused stock ownership and a fusion of hardy individualism with progressive business practices such as industrial trade associations.7 How do we understand the slippery character of this idea? Perhaps any formula of social and political recovery carried with it a sense that old ways had changed. As Charles Maier suggested for postwar Europe, restabilization meant not only overcoming the disruption of war and popular rebellion but also reformulating social, economic, and political means of order. Given the social upheaval of 1917–19, the bourgeois Europe of the Belle Epoque—where laissez-faire defense of property rights went untrammeled by any check on the power of wealth— had to be “recast.” The result, achieved only after a great deal of pulling and hauling, was a new “corporatist” form that included some measure of union recognition, state-economy integration, and quasi-public interestgroup bargaining. This three-part formula echoed the ambitions that had guided American, no less than European, wartime reformers.8 American left Progressives who sought a new social departure had pursued the goal of “industrial democracy,” associated with a militant wartime assertion of labor rights; hailed a “new economy,” in which state agencies would play a critical role in organizing production and exchange and hence bury laissez-faire dogmas; and promoted some concept of “pluralism” that would reshape sovereignty by inducting popular interests into the realm of government and—as suggested in Hobson’s rhetoric—by inventing new varied forms of property, productive enterprise, and distribution. Given the parallelism of aims and rough results, even the corporatist resolution of the crisis could lead reformers to believe that the coming years would yet reward their aspirations. The idea of reconstructing society along lines of “industrial democracy” entered American discourse during the 1890s but flourished later, among those reformers who helped forge an alliance between organized labor and Woodrow Wilson prior to his 1916 reelection.9 The 1915 report of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, led by Democratic Party activist Frank Walsh, set the keynote. In light of industrial battles such as the massacre of striking workers and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914, the commission claimed that solving the labor problem depended on “the rapid extension of the principles of democracy to industry.” More than bringing peace to industry was at stake, for “political freedom can exist only where there is industrial freedom; political democracy only where there is industrial democracy.” “Extending” democracy from politics to economic relations became a reformist refrain, but even the radicals of the Masses magazine greeted the 1915 commission report as “the beginning of an indigenous American revolutionary movement.” The commission’s rhetoric also appealed to the forward-looking businessmen who had been urged by Louis

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Brandeis to recognize workers’ right to some form of representation in the workplace.10 The reach of Walsh’s perspective, just touching the socialist Far Left on one side and bourgeois reformism on the other, set a long-standing pattern that illustrated the stretchable, Janus-faced character of emergent social liberalism. Walsh’s closest allies saw Wilson’s reelection as the springboard for a laborite movement that would convert the Democrats into a true party of reform.11 Undeterred after the United States entered the war in April 1917, Walsh and his colleagues believed the wartime expansion of government authority could usher in their goal of industrial democracy. Building on campaign connections, Walsh headed the National War Labor Board (NWLB) in 1918. Board decisions granting workers rights to elect their own representatives led to factory committees whose independence both from management and from old craft unions seemed to germinate a mass movement for industrial unionism, particularly among electrical and munitions workers of the Northeast and Midwest.12 Walsh considered the NWLB “the most left-leaning government agency” he had ever seen, the basis of “a new deal for American labor.” Industrial democracy in his view went beyond bargaining rights to imply that workers rightly claimed “a good share of profits” and even that “representative government in industry” demanded “government ownership” in the end.13 Besides prospects for labor rights, wartime hints of a controlled “new economy” also stirred the enthusiasm and ambitions of wartime reformers. The “more collectivist progressives,” as William Leuchtenberg called the New Republic writers and editors, insisted there was “revolutionary” significance in the array of public boards and corporations that gave the federal government powers to regulate prices and raw material allocations, set output priorities for industry, consolidate the railroads, provide workers’ housing, and seize plants where management resistance to unionism threatened production. Leuchtenberg’s claim that the war “raised the federal government to director, even dictator, of the economy” was quite an exaggeration, but left-liberal observers at the time believed a new economy under “the discipline of conscious government direction” had made its debut in 1917 and 1918.14 Most historians now see these ventures as evidence instead of collusion between private business and government, the former having the upper hand. Yet war participation by business progressives such as General Electric’s Gerard Swope gave the United States its share of bourgeois “new economy” advocates, analogous to Europe’s “planning” architects like Walther Rathenau of Germany’s General Electric and Etienne Clémentel in France, the commerce minister who urged consortiums of industrial business to embrace “the advantages of collective effort” over individual competition.15

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The third key to war-era reformist thought lay in a more radical, activist current—“pluralism”—developed independently by Arthur Bentley, an academic outsider who made his way from newspaper work to postwar organizing with the Non-Partisan League, and by Harold Laski, the British scholar and American sojourner who later became a spokesman of Labour Party socialism. Bentley’s most renowned work, The Process of Government (1908), seemed friendly to activism insofar as it claimed all governments “respond to the pressure of different social groups.”16 After his early training in German historical economics, Bentley had studied the roots of Populist grievances in Nebraska, which he identified as land monopoly and economic inequality. However “scientific” he believed his focus on the struggle of interest groups to be, Bentley was led by the conditions of the war to write a 1920 broadside (which remained unpublished), Makers, Users, and Masters, whose very title suggested a sympathy between producers and consumers, both suffering the domination of “profiteering” big business autocrats. In his updated populist vision of a cooperative commonwealth, Bentley advocated “middle-class” mobilization against the corporate class, which he believed had waxed fat on war, in hopes of averting both business dictatorship and a proletarian rebellion against it. He defended private property and profits, against big-business “profiteering,” but he also called for “radical reform” beyond the “palliative pottering for thirty years” that made up Progressive efforts at regulation. He called for a minimum income for all workers, nationalization of public utilities such as the railroads along with a burgeoning public sector of education and recreation, public credit for small companies, the breakup of trusts and “worker participation in the control and management of business enterprises,” producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives, and considerable redistribution through income and inheritance taxes.17 The mix of private property, workers’ participation, cooperatives, nationalized public utilities, and income redistribution showed “pluralism” not merely as “interest-group” analysis but as a vision of social organization whose diverse property forms and public services broke with the dogma of private-property individualism, competition, and laissez-faire as keys to freedom and efficiency.18 Laski’s pluralism, presented in his first book, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, was as “American” as it was British. After taking a university position in Montreal in 1914, Laski was drawn into Croly’s New Republic circle in New York as well as the milieu of a new “sociological jurisprudence” at Harvard.19 Laski was an activist in England whose early interests in eugenics, feminism, and sexual freedom (learned from his wife Frida) had been succeeded by radical suffragism, British syndicalism, and antagonism to the British war government. His allegiance to working-class activism (which hardly restrained his hunger for recognition by social as well as intellectual elites) dis-

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tinguished his politics from Bentley’s insistence on a self-consciously middle-class reform movement. Yet, as Laski worked his way into American intellectual circles, he melded his syndicalist (and self-proclaimed anarchist) antagonism to the state with an emphasis on the fluid, varied, and multifold character of social and political reality that John Dewey and William James affirmed. His intent to challenge the legitimacy of state coercion (and thus, in particular, to justify strike action during the war in the face of demands for loyalty) meshed, he thought, with the diverse, decentralized character of political units and voluntary associations that marked the pragmatists’ “plural” universe. Whatever “metaphysical” notions granted absolute sovereignty to the state, he argued that the state had no legitimate claim to workers’ obedience until its actions rewarded “their good, no less than its own.”20 And since any definition of “good” reflected the interests of particular, not universal, elements of the community, the state’s pretension to represent the “common good” only masked the interests of the dominant classes, that is, big capital.21 Amid war-fueled talk of industrial democracy, state intervention in an organized economy, and pluralism, the spirit of rebels and reformers seemed at a high pitch at war’s end. There were “twenty different kinds of heaven on offer,” recalled Lewis Mumford, then a young writer associated with the short-lived Seven Arts journal and the postwar iconoclasm of the Dial. Yet Mumford’s reformist milieu occupied a peculiar historical situation. The social forces that spawned it proved relatively weak, and before very long they were on the defensive. The limits of their achievement were becoming clear already by fall 1918. Despite liberal and radical expectations that shop committees formed by militant workers would lead the way as the United States “evolved into a pure industrial democracy” or turn into “the nucleus of a shop soviet,” the balance of forces was already leaning in the other direction. Unions that won gains from NWLB settlements suspended mass organizing efforts, while employers stepped up their resistance to labor’s advance as soon as the armistice was signed. Wilson dismantled the NWLB while also rejecting a proposal to establish an executive-branch “reconstruction bureau.” As historian Joseph McCartin explains, conservative “opponents of state regulation mobilized successfully in the electoral arena,” and Wilson had no compunction conceding to them.22 The issue was not settled, as the labor upsurge continued into 1919, but whatever enthusiasm the Left drew that year from the prevalence of strikes and interunion solidarity (as in Seattle), workers’ struggles met repeated defeats. The U.S. government also returned by 1920 to using court injunctions against striking railroad workers, something laborite reformers had believed the Clayton Act made a thing of the past. And bold talk at the end of the war—like Amos Pinchot’s talk of “taking away the power [of] the privileged

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class”—did not go very far. Pinchot had joined Frank Walsh’s campaign for industrial democracy before 1917, and his opposition to Wilson’s war appeared to put him thereafter on even a more radical path than Walsh.23 Pinchot helped organize the Committee of Forty Eight, proposing a new third party to bring reformers together with organized labor and moderate socialists around a platform including calls for government ownership of railroads and natural resources. But Pinchot was hardly a socialist, and the committee foundered in 1920 on differences between Pinchot’s “TR” Progressives and unionists and socialists who desired what the Progressives disdainfully called a “class” party.24 Reformist hopes suffered sudden reversals. As Maier noted, “Workingclass and social democratic aspirations would meet decisive setbacks” in Germany, Italy, and France in the year stretching from fall 1919 to fall 1920, and “by the end of 1920 and early 1921 the left was in retreat everywhere.” Except in Italy, where Mussolini’s fascists prevailed by 1922, the complex politics of adaptation to postwar economic conditions permitted left-wing forces an occasional opportunity to resurface, and in the United States radical activism lingered for a while as well. From 1919 to 1922, Farmer-Labor parties uniting agrarian radicals, militant unionists, and refugees from the war-battered Socialist Party formed in eight states, most strongly in Minnesota, and Chicago labor leaders attempted to build a national farmer-labor party. The momentum continued until 1924, when these activists stood to the left of the LaFollette campaign. There they hit a dead-end, given the reluctance of Robert LaFollette and AFL conservatives to launch an independent party. By this point, Samuel Gompers had reestablished his grip on the AFL, sent the “progressive bloc” of unionists packing, and set a narrowminded, craft-conscious, and defensive “voluntarist” mold on American labor. By the mid-1920s, U.S. politics settled into a conservative rut fixed by an orthodox Republican program of low taxes, minimal social regulation, and union-free industry.25 The intellectual Left nonetheless construed this conjuncture as a long period with transitional implications of a “new era” beyond the old capitalism. The various shoots of wartime enthusiasm, however short-lived their practical effect, “all had lasting consequences,” as Daniel Rodgers writes. Notwithstanding Amos Pinchot’s defection, the immediate postwar moment helped to blur “the boundaries between social-democratic and progressive politics” and hence foster a new variant of political ideology. The convergence of social democratic and liberal thought that historians have seen germinating in the few decades crossing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries emerged concretely in the form of a distinct social-liberal cohort of writers, scholars, and reformers. Wartime ideas of “social reconstruction” had turned a part of the American intelligentsia into a reformist Left, signaled by the move of

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war supporters John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen toward a critical stance. In 1918 and 1919, Dewey and Veblen joined editor Helen Marot in preparing a “Reconstruction Programme” for the Dial. Veblen named the journal’s editorial page “The Old Order and the New”; in it he denounced the postwar reaction along with the predatory Treaty of Versailles, assailed the backward force of business interests, and hailed the Bolshevik Revolution. Beyond Dewey and Veblen, the other social scientists Dorothy Ross has called the “left Progressives” opened the 1920s in a spirit of activism. Mary and Charles Beard wrote essays on union strategy, workers’ control, labor parties, and revolutionary movements abroad in one of the key publications of the labor movement’s “progressive bloc,” the Locomotive Engineers’ Journal. In that venue, the Beards were joined by a younger group of dissenting economists such as Paul Douglas and Carter Goodrich. The journalist George Soule likewise worked with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers as well as the League for Industrial Democracy (as the Intercollegiate Socialist League renamed itself in 1921).26 Left Progressives found footholds in unorthodox corners of academic life. Followers of Veblen flourished at Amherst College until 1923, when conservative faculty and trustees expelled reformer Alexander Meiklejohn from the presidency. Paul Douglas taught at the University of Chicago and published pioneering studies of working-class living standards. His wife, Dorothy Wolff Douglas, another laborite economist, started teaching in 1924 at Smith College, led by “the most liberal-minded college president today in the United States,” William Allan Neilson.27 Several reputable scholars listed themselves as members or associates of the League for Industrial Democracy, including historians Broadus Mitchell and Arthur M. Schlesinger, economists John R. Commons, Selig Perlman, and Wesley C. Mitchell, philosopher Horace Kallen, sociologist William F. Ogburn, and astronomer Harlow Shapley.28 Again, European analogues cast an illuminating light on the political character of American developments in reform and intellectual life. In the heartland of Maier’s corporatism, Weimar Germany, Rudolf Hilferding refined his idea that an “organized capitalism” had far greater progressive implications than he had believed before the war. Hilferding introduced his concept of “organized capitalism” in October 1915, as he criticized Social Democratic support of the German war effort. Starting with the uncertain notion in Finance Capital of a general cartel, he suggested that contemporary capitalism, under the combined control of monopoly and the state, could indeed contain the “anarchy of capitalist production,” smooth out the business cycle, cut unemployment, and thus ameliorate the living conditions of workers, but it remained an undemocratic economy, with socialism its antithesis. Amid the deprivations of war, socialists should encourage workers to recognize that their long-term interests could not be satisfied by the SPD’s

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“opportunism.” Later, with the end of the monarchy and establishment of a provisional, social-democratic government, Hilferding hoped the drive toward socialism could commence through the gradual socialization of major industry, but by 1921 he had concluded that defending the parliamentary republic against right-wing reaction took priority over socialization. The postwar reaction muted Hilferding’s aspirations and altered the terms of his social criticism. In the mid-1920s, after his circle of independent (antiwar) socialists rejoined the SPD, Hilferding insisted his commitment to Weimar was not incompatible with the long-range pursuit of socialism, since “organized capitalism” was no longer simply a false alternative. Writing in the inaugural 1924 issue of the new social-democratic theoretical journal Die Gesellschaft, Hilferding argued that the process of concentration, in cartels, trusts, and bank power, was “bringing the era of capitalist competition to a close” and ushering in a new system “characterized by economic regulation and planned production.”29 Although it was still a hierarchical social order, “just when [organized capitalism] has achieved its highest level of organization, it presents the problem of economic democracy.” Now socialism was no longer a utopia but the very concrete end of the proletarian “struggle for influence on the regulated and organized economy.”30 It was, Hilferding insisted, not “social democracy that has come nearer to reality [in growing more moderate], but reality that has come nearer to socialism.” Others agreed. Sombart likewise saw capitalist development toward organization, and economist Hans Ritschl remarked in 1928 that “the idea, that we are experiencing modern capitalism’s transformation into a late capitalist or early socialist economy, is generally accepted.”31 Such reformism, inclined to view the present moment as a transitional one fusing capitalist and socialist traits, contributed to the emergence of a postcapitalist vision. In the United States, Thorstein Veblen was less inclined to affirm the positive potential of the postwar settlement, though he offered a battery of concepts that would prove useful to postcapitalist speculation. Veblen opened his final book, Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise in Recent Times (1923), by acknowledging that his time represented a critical moment in capitalist evolution. The financial dominance of industry had “reached something like a culmination during these opening decades of the century,” bringing “the era of free competition” to a close, and with the postwar insurgency, “issues which arise out of the sovereign rights of absentee ownership are stirring the popular sentiment and engaging the attention of the officials with an ever increasing urgency.” At stake were “questions of its aims and uses, its necessary limitations, its continued security, its rightful claims, and its possible eventual abridgment or disallowance.”32 Yet contrary to Lippmann’s expectations of 1914, or Hilferding’s continued confidence in 1924, Veblen sketched a far darker picture. Corporate capitalism, inheriting American

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traditions of property and chicanery, was a concentrated system based on speculative finance and governed by irresponsible absentee owners indifferent to production except as a means of draining revenue streams from all of society’s work into their own coffers. And they showed no inclination to give way. Indeed, Veblen considered this system an anachronistic “misfit”: the “rights, powers, and immunities of ownership” in corporate property, which impose a levy on the collective output of all society, are “holdovers” from a bygone era, when individuals reaped the rewards of the enterprises they personally directed and the “principle of individual self-help [underlay] the system of Natural Rights” in private property. He called corporate property “make-believe,” resting on the speculative money value of titles to income, rather than on real assets or useful goods. Strictly speaking, the absentee owner was “dispensable” from the point of view of production per se. Yet there was nothing fictitious about the control exercised by the financial apparatus that governed industry. Continuing the analysis of business “sabotage” he had presented in Dial articles (and reissued in his 1921 book, The Engineers and the Price System), Veblen claimed that absentee ownership limited production to an output lower than possible, at prices higher than necessary.33 “Trade secrets” blocked the free movement of ideas and innovations crucial to technological and industrial progress. Veblen did not predict stagnation in production, laud technology as such, or assume (as his cagey Dial essays seemed to suggest) that engineers and technicians were necessarily a progressive bloc. Business still found productivity gains useful if only to lower costs and boost profits, but such gains were not geared to fashioning useful goods. Instead, business invested in a burgeoning apparatus of “salesmanship” to move high-priced products; with salesmanship built into the production system, engineers themselves were commercialized and technology twisted to promote artificial “necessities.”34 Given the profound anachronism entailed in wedding “make-believe” property rights to advanced technology and organized production, it might be expected that “some sizable element of the underlying population” would recognize that its own “claims and circumstances . . . do not fit into the legal framework of business-as-usual,” and that “some such shifting of the economic base [to accommodate those claims] should be due to follow, eventually.” But because “public opinion” rested on the views of “the substantial citizen,” combined with conservative war politics, “any proposal to disallow or abridge the sovereign rights of absentee ownership” was typically considered “sedition.” The war intensified the forces of imperialism, the reign of patriotic militarism, and the “substitution of coercion” in industrial affairs. “The net product” for the “underlying population,” he concluded, “is mutual and collective defeat and grief.”35

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Many of Veblen’s followers, who inhabited a social-liberal milieu eager to make the most of postwar possibilities, found Veblen’s alienated stance too much to bear. They wished to build a new economic “school” of their own and sought influence, not marginality. Veblen’s deep suspicion of military organization, nationalist traditions, and state power marked him as subversive, and his dark vision of reactionary powers in the saddle of the postwar world later won him admiration even from critics, like Theodor Adorno, who believed he had sensed something about the sources of modern totalitarianism.36 Yet former students believed Veblen’s postwar writings fostered “the misleading idea that he was radical.” Walton Hamilton, who dubbed the proposed new school “institutionalism” at the American Economic Association’s 1918 meeting, saw Veblen as “an acute critic of modern industrial society” rather than an “agitator,” and wished Veblen would return to his role as a “certified economist.”37 Yet by 1924, as economic growth returned, his theses about “business restrictionism” seemed outmoded.38 Veblen headed west for a lonely retirement near Stanford, dying there in 1929. In the meantime, his more moderate successors in professional economics upheld social-liberal aspirations and saw bright prospects ahead. Even though their conservative antagonists ultimately defeated their hopes of remaking the economics discipline, the reformers’ milieu yielded a distinctly Veblenite portrait of corporate property that in turn fostered the postcapitalist vision in the United States.

The Socioeconomic Spirit in the 1920s Although tempered by conservative reverses, the reformism aroused by wartime labor agitation, new-economy ideas, and pluralism emboldened academic dissenters to make a bid for disciplinary leadership of American economics. “Institutionalists” and others seeking a new style of economic thought—what I call socioeconomics—represented the future of the field, they thought, and sparked a revival of the “struggle over method,” like the Methodenstreit in German and Austrian social science during the 1870s and 1880s. The struggle pitted empirical (often critical) studies of economic development and business practices against abstract theories of market exchange and price equilibration.39 The new spirit found expression in a 1924 compendium entitled The Trend of Economics, edited by Columbia University economist Rexford Tugwell. At the AEA convention four years after Walton Hamilton’s programmatic paper on “the institutional approach,” Tugwell and a group of associates claiming to represent diverse perspectives proposed to fashion a volume assessing the current state and progress of American economics, “helping us to come to common ground and to understand

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each other.” Despite Tugwell’s claim of representing a full range of current opinion, only two of the thirteen contributors stood for “orthodox” or neoclassical economics, while the others voiced significant criticism of that tradition and support for what they regarded as a more realistic, reformminded economics. To be sure, reflecting a chastened postwar mood, Tugwell and his collaborators adopted a mild rhetoric: “No one of us believes that his own program is a panacea. Far from it, indeed. Every back seems turned, these days, upon Utopia; and ours, it seems, among the rest.” Still, repudiation of laissez-faire and an appeal for some kind of “social control of industry” on behalf of “social welfare” ran through almost all chapters in Trend. It was, Tugwell wrote, “a manifesto of the younger generation. . . . I do not think that most people realize the gathering force of the renaissance of economic thought we are having in this country.”40 Born in 1891 in upstate New York, Tugwell pulled up the rear of the “late Progressive cohort.” A favored student of Simon Patten and the socialist economist Scott Nearing at the University of Pennsylvania, Tugwell began his own career at Columbia University in 1920. There he was impressed by John Dewey’s instrumentalism as well as the inductive approach to economics promoted by Veblen’s student Wesley Clair Mitchell. Committed to a TR-style Progressivism, Tugwell supported Republicans until he switched to favoring Al Smith in 1928, all the while serving as a contributing editor to the New Republic and mingling with the socialists of the League for Industrial Democracy.41 Despite his early Republican loyalties and rather conservative temperament, Tugwell had an interest in Christian socialist traditions and English guild socialism. Writing on G. D. H. Cole’s definition of guild socialism in 1921, he worried that Cole was too wedded, in an “absolutist” fashion, to a particular institutional form of economy. Although Tugwell preferred a more patient, incremental reform of economic organization, he also thought that Cole was insufficiently imaginative in contemplating prospects for great changes to come, such as a radical decentralization of cities and industries.42 Like Charles Beard in his economic interpretation of the Constitution, Tugwell had a historicist sense of debunking formal doctrine.43 He regarded laissez-faire as a “myth” originally useful in the eighteenth-century revolt against mercantilism and monarchy and thereafter “clothed by its American devotees with a constitutional sanctity for which there was an explanation in terms of practicality, but no constitutional, theoretical or historical justification.” Reaching past Adam Smith to traditions of moral economy and just price embedded in common law, Tugwell’s 1922 dissertation argued that there existed a viable legal grounding for government regulation assuring that “services were . . . adequate to public needs and prices . . . reasonable.”44 He thought that expert intelligence—distributed

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unequally in human societies—had a paramount role to play in social reform; if this be elitism, it was accompanied by a marked disdain for businessmen and their academic apologists (though he regarded managers, in contrast, with some respect). He regarded labor union demands for higher wages socially and economically useful, and while he claimed no desire or intention to see private business nationalized, he looked on profit seeking as “a disruptive force, essentially anti-social, that leads to other goals than that of social welfare.”45 Tugwell’s radicalism was always quite measured. He quit his post as economics instructor at the University of Pennsylvania when trustees dismissed Nearing in 1915, but he never expressed deep sympathy for Nearing’s socialist views.46 He honored Veblen’s work but was much more devoted to his teacher Patten. Indeed, most of the 1920s socioeconomists distanced themselves from the socialist implications of Veblen’s critique, that is, from Veblen’s conviction that the modern system of capitalistic property and finance was corrupt to the core and might be replaced, root and branch, were it not for its lock on the culture and for the power of reactionary elites. Nonetheless, they upheld a version of Veblen’s critique of abstract, or formal, economic theory: that classical and neoclassical theories were based on abstract axioms and “normalistic” assumptions about market equilibrium that failed to grasp departures from norms such as disruptive business cycles or price fixing—the real subject of economics. They advocated a “descriptive” economics that addressed the structure and evolution of economic institutions such as the modern corporation. Generally, the institutionalists also called for some kind of economic planning—not very clearly defined—as a practical concomitant to the complex, concentrated form of production that had already evolved and stood at odds with the classical dream of unregulated competition among small producers. The essays in The Trend of Economics were activist and reformist but also self-consciously “scientific” rather than “propagandistic,” as Wesley Mitchell put it. Mitchell credited Marx with demonstrating that “the central problem of economics [is] the cumulative change of economic institutions,” but claimed “Marx’s alleged science was warped by his passionate desires.” For Mitchell, Sidney Webb, Veblen, and Sombart had commenced the “scientific” study of institutional evolution. To be scientific meant to be “realistic,” and a strong antiformalism ran throughout The Trend of Economics. According to George Soule, the only nonacademic writer featured, the old “bodies of economic doctrine . . . more resembled closed systems of metaphysics than an account of the real world.” William Earnest Weld was pleased that recent “economists have not grown frenzied over abstract economic theory,” engaging theoretical questions only when they were relevant to “some practical application.” Most contributors called for an “inductive” rather than

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“deductive” economics, putting priority on observation, the collection of data, forging means of measurement, and learning to use statistical techniques. They assumed that quantitative method was the route to an activist science. Mitchell thought the wartime demand to collect data and relate economics to practical policies would “give economics once again the vitality it had in Ricardo’s day.” Soule noted “the regenerative influence of quantitative analysis.”47 Far from value-free, this new empiricism had a driving purpose. Mitchell proudly recalled his faith in the progressive impact of the war and defined the current moment as “days of reaction,” insisting that “we cannot regain implicit faith in the stability of our prewar institutions.” Given the requisite data, economists would “attack the problem of controlling the business cycle.” Effective measurement of income would reveal the dimensions of inequality—a problem to be addressed by increasing “aggregate national income” through greater efficiency and growth. Measurement entailed reform. As one writer summed up the spirit of the time, “Public attention is already being called to the alleged possibility of increasing output of useful goods several fold by systematic planning of all production.”48 To be sure, the Trend writers failed to explain whether or why better scientific methods were necessarily linked to ameliorative purposes. They simply dwelled in, and responded to, the reformist mood of the time, particularly as that was shaped by Dewey’s arguments for the activist character of science (hence Tugwell’s advocacy of an “experimental economics”) and by Dewey’s insistence that solutions to problems would inevitably be partial in a plural universe. Indeed, Dewey’s example helped pull these writers away from Veblen’s radicalism. The new spirit, according to Albert B. Wolfe (who served on the wartime Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board), arose as “dissatisfaction alike with the apologetics of the classicists and marginalists and the doctrinaire militancy of the socialists has impelled many to seek for more objective theory.” A number of writers were at pains to show that they did not intend to wholly replace the going system. The institutionalist Morris Copeland sought a “synthesis” of the price system and its critics, arguing that the standard of “pecuniary value” (prices in money) “is worth preserving and improving upon as a standard of welfare and justice, in spite of its many shortcomings, and that, even if we cannot rely on it exclusively, its advantages are such that where it is applicable we cannot afford to do without it.”49 Nonetheless, they all called for some sort of new social economics. Copeland sought a “more accurate social cost accounting” that could set standards of well-being, to which “property rights, contract forms, social organization and so forth” should be adapted. The new economics should be more a science of welfare than of wealth. A distinct moral element, assumed by most of the writers though made explicit by only a few, accompanied their

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positivism and sustained their confidence in a reformist science that humanized the economy. One keynote of Veblen’s critique taken up by the young institutionalists was his attack on the validity of the “hedonistic psychology” presumed by the classical and neoclassical schools. Paul H. Douglas addressed the problem directly in his essay “The Reality of Non-Commercial Incentives in Economic Life.” He sought to demonstrate, in the cases of noted scientists, physicians, workers in cooperative enterprises, organizers of consumer cooperatives, and even some entrepreneurs, that various motives were effective in action, including “desire to do a workmanlike and efficient piece of work . . . ability to sacrifice for a principle, an institution, or a person . . . craving for recognition by others.” Douglas’s was perhaps the most radical of the essays, directly criticizing “capitalism” for allowing men no outlets for recognition or personal reward other than the pursuit of money. Wolfe, too, while rejecting the “doctrinaire socialists,” attacked “that abstraction, the economic man” and recognized ethical critiques by John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold as part of a heritage leading to Veblen.50 In fact, the arch-empiricist Mitchell insisted that the goals of welfare could not be limited to the production and distribution of goods. They must include such things as “a satisfactory working life filled with interesting activities,” a share in power, the “opportunity for every individual to live as full and free a life” as possible, and a reduction to the minimum of “waste from unproductive idleness and undeveloped talent, and from emulative consumption, conspicuous expenditure, [and] acquisitive predation.” These advocates of expertise were suggesting that reform involved not merely technical issues but was bound up with changing a whole way of life. A basic kind of culture consciousness appeared in remarks by George Soule, who made the strong claim that new strains of social thought liberated the imagination of social alternatives: The classical schools were without the benefit of modern anthropology, which has revealed so many varieties of communal life and economic mores. . . . At present the structure of systematic knowledge which in the end will enable us to order human relationships is hardly begun. Much of the material has not arrived. There is not even a good ground plan. By the same token, very little is yet surely known to be impossible.51

Thus socioeconomics welcomed the input of cultural criticism and a newfound awareness of variation in economic ethics. It saw that the economy both fit within a way of life and rightly submitted to moral control. Although Trend writers claimed that a spirit of moderation and synthesis would enable institutionalist and orthodox economists to overcome their differences, they also implied that the new “realistic” and reformist eco-

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nomics would triumph. Their hopes, however, were not rewarded in the little struggle over method between institutionalists and orthodox economics that simmered through the late 1920s. In the prominent 1927 essay “Recent Developments in Economics,” John Maurice Clark (son of American marginalist master J. B. Clark) stoutly upheld his own institutionalist faith, claiming that Veblen “altered the course of American economic thought until the orthodoxy of yesterday is today the thing everyone is trying to overthrow, replace, or modernise.”52 Nonetheless, a counterattack gained steam, notably when the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, having just begun teaching at Harvard University, issued a blast in the Quarterly Journal of Economics against Mitchell’s statistical work and flatly dismissed the value of Veblen’s corpus.53 Some writers, such as Cornell University economist Paul T. Homan, persisted in an accommodating mood. Trained as an orthodox Marshallian, Homan confessed to “dall[ying] a while in the camp of Veblen” and in his 1928 book, Contemporary Economic Thought, noted “the Present Impasse” in his discipline. He sought a third way through the debate but found much to recommend the institutionalists: “faith in the social efficacy of competition” had given way at least to the hope for “some desirable modicum of public control,” and the “evolutionary principle,” associated with the idea of human society as an “organic” whole, undermined the individualistic premises of the old economics.54 Recent historical accounts suggest that the 1920s debate was somewhat exaggerated, since the “orthodox” were averse neither to inductive historical studies of economic life nor to some measure of government intervention (though they approached such reform more cautiously than the institutionalists).55 And they saw no need to harp on the strict individualistic psychology that the neoclassicists of the 1870s put at the foundation of their theory. The key difference, however, was their defense of systematic theory in economics and their claim that the institutionalists had nothing comparable to offer.56 What is striking, in any case, is how quickly the apparent institutionalist ascendancy of the mid-1920s evaporated, especially in light of the capitalist crisis that brought the decade to a close. Even Clarence Ayres, a leading carrier of Veblen’s legacy between the wars and a mentor to later sociological luminaries Talcott Parsons and C. Wright Mills, remarked that institutionalism was essentially dead by the 1931 AEA meeting.57 The year before, the AEA had sponsored a roundtable discussion, chaired by Homan, called “Institutionalism: What It Is and What It Hopes to Become.” Morris Copeland and recent émigré Eveline M. Burns, a product of the London School of Economics, spoke on behalf of the new school. Burns voiced some sharp criticisms of orthodoxy but, in a defensive mood, remarked that institutionalism had been slow to realize its promise and lacked any clear definition of the logical relation between its emphases on

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statistics, social institutions, and welfare goals or a usable theory of which institutions were most important for understanding economic behavior. Three respondents, led by orthodox Harvard economist O. H. Taylor, stated in a rather lofty manner that institutionalism neither had coherence as a school nor seriously threatened the integrity or usefulness of systematic or deductive economic theory. A year later, in December 1931, Paul Homan wearily returned to the orthodox camp. Although “systematic theory”—particularly its conventional philosophical and policy generalizations (individualism and laissez-faire)—was in some disrepute, “its essential service of furnishing . . . tools of thought for the labors of analysis has been made sufficiently plain to all except the blind.”58 Nonetheless, the reformers left a substantial legacy. From Veblen’s old criticism that production was organized for the owners’ pecuniary benefit rather than to distribute “useful” goods to the “underlying population” came the “underconsumptionist” critique of the 1920s economy. Well before the 1929 stock market crash, Tugwell hammered away at the maldistribution of income and the weaknesses in the economy caused by workers’ insufficient purchasing power. Other institutionalists described how the interests of the producer (that is, the industrial owners) overshadowed or undermined those of the consuming public.59 As a result, a whole corps of institutional economists were ready by the early 1930s with an explanation of the Depression pinned on weak purchasing power and with a variety of reforms intended to remedy it. They found places in the New Deal administration and some influence by the time of the so-called second New Deal of 1935. A number of these, Tugwell in particular, remained on the left wing of the administration and were seen as somewhat disreputable: Tugwell was deemed a dangerous Red by Roosevelt’s right-wing opponents, and after his service in Roosevelt’s original Brain Trust in 1932, he was relegated to leadership of some of the New Deal’s smaller, underfunded social programs. Other underconsumptionists, notably Leon Keyserling, wielded influence through the Truman years.60 Tugwell’s reputation as a Red stemmed from his prominence as an advocate of “social planning,” though his views on the matter were far from distinctly socialist. Much like George Soule and Stuart Chase, New Republic collectivists of the 1920s, Tugwell offered an elitist view of social change promoted by “the enlightened few,” as historian Alan Lawson points out; they failed to anticipate anything like the revival of militant unionism in the 1930s.61 Moreover, Tugwell’s style of realism made him doubt that the concept of “capitalism” worked well to define contemporary economic affairs or the shape they were likely to take in the future. He had, he wrote, an “acquired taste for raw life in the making” and knew that “reality conforms pretty badly to theory.” No one could understand the U.S. economy, he in-

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sisted, by identifying it with “Alfred Marshall’s or J. B. Clark’s system” and even classifying the existing order as “capitalism” tempted one to mistake the real economy for the “finished and symmetrical” model the bookish economists offered. Analogously, he wrote, one could not understand Soviet Russia in the late 1920s by calling it “communist” and assuming it worked according to Marxist principles: “Perhaps communism is, in itself, something; perhaps capitalism, is also, in itself, something. I cannot somehow understand these systems in that way.” Reifying theory so as to identify and classify discrete, rigidly defined economic systems was, in Tugwell’s view, precisely the error committed by orthodox adherents of laissez-faire principles: this was the greatest roadblock to the radical reforms needed in modern industrial economies. Again, the situation in Soviet Russia provided a foil, since Tugwell interpreted the exile of Leon Trotsky as a mark that leftist ideology had been cast aside in favor of pragmatic policy: those “who were most doctrinaire made the poorest executives.” Tugwell continued, “We [in the United States] have no Siberia for ex-statesmen who remain orthodox in changing times. Our lack of ruthlessness may turn out to be a handicap.”62 Changing times in the modern United States required “economic planning,” which Tugwell saw primarily as a way of managing development to foster “social justice.” In particular, planning would help ensure that improvements such as labor-saving technology did not wreak havoc on “unprotected individuals as they do now.” New means of “social accounting,” he hoped, could measure the human costs of development and help “in segregating a part of the gains to meet the losses.” What is needed to bring some kind of reason and order into what is now a haphazard and unjust system is a national scheme of development. We need to visualize all our resources, of land, of machines, of processes, and of men and to devise a policy which shall be planned and controlled rather than uncertain and chaotic.”63

The principal obstacle to such a program, besides the prevalence of orthodox and antiquated “attitudes toward economic affairs,” was an administrative and moral one. Could executive ability be turned away from the typical goal of personal enrichment toward service for the common good? If such an orientation could not be cultivated, he suggested, the modern industrial order may not be humanly desirable. Speaking in 1932, Tugwell posed the issue sharply: It may be that we cannot command the communal loyalty of enough able men in competition with the private gains such men can always acquire at the expense of others. It may be that we actually lack the administrative ability to run such a machine as is required. If these doubts . . . are well-founded, the best

Theory of Organized Capitalism / 73 thing society could do would be to initiate a rational return to ruralism of the old sort [small-scale self-sufficiency].64

Rather than vesting full confidence in technocratic leadership, Tugwell saw both ethics and expertise as crucial to realizing the promise, or remedying the defaults, of progress. Tugwell did not call himself a socialist. He neither regarded the existing order as a fixed system (“capitalism”) that required revolutionary overturn nor did he define the coming order as one based entirely on state-owned or public property. Yet he foresaw epochal change: “The thing which interests all of us,” he wrote his colleague George Soule, “is whether we really are at the end of the regime of laissez faire and at the beginning of a new era of control.”65 Whatever his own hesitations, some of Tugwell’s colleagues, such as Harold Laski, were willing to regard him as a fellow socialist. In any case, Tugwell’s economics and politics stood within a specific mode of radical reform. Soule framed it well when he spelled out the differences that separated him and Tugwell from Marxian socialists. In early 1932, Soule urged Tugwell to write a reply to those on the Left who argue that there is no use talking about planning before we establish Socialist or Communist rule. You could argue that if we began to plan at all, as we must, we should have a bear by the tail and could not let go, until at some time in the future we should find that we had set up a Socialist economy. That would be the end of the process and not the beginning.66

Tugwell regarded economic planning as feasible under current conditions and likely, if implemented, to transform the going system into something unrecognizable from the standpoint of orthodox economic doctrine or current business practice. The transformation would be deeply rooted in ethics (service and altruism) as well as in economics. The solution to the current crisis, he wrote in 1941, “on the individual side . . . goes far back into Christian ethics; on the social side it broadens out in cooperation.”67 In his assumptions about the fluid character of economic affairs and his expectations of a systemic transformation that lay, very possibly, around the corner, Tugwell stood near the head of the American postcapitalist tradition.

The Modern Corporation and Visions of Social Reform The era of American socioeconomics was crowned by the 1932 publication of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, by liberal lawyer Adolf A. Berle and reform economist Gardiner C. Means. At first attacked by de-

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fenders of free enterprise who claimed it exaggerated how concentrated economic power had become in the corporate system, The Modern Corporation later (especially in the 1960s and 1970s) endured left-wing criticism for exaggerating the degree to which the management of large corporations had grown apart from the will of wealthy families or a capitalist class.68 In between, the Berle-Means argument was widely embraced by liberal American intellectuals, who judged it an accurate account of how U.S. capitalism had changed institutionally in the twentieth century. Indeed, the book offered far more than a rationale for modest securities reform in the early New Deal (for which Berle served, alongside Tugwell, as a brain truster). It cannot be understood adequately as a founding text of “corporate liberalism.” Rather, The Modern Corporation must be placed in its generative context, the postwar milieu of socioeconomics and left-liberal “new era” discourse. Berle and Means’s interpretation of the corporate form as an implicitly socialized organization of production was an analog to Rudolf Hilferding’s notion of “organized capitalism” and an echo of Veblen’s critique of anachronistic, “make-believe” property rights. Their book criticized private power exercised through corporate forms and argued that the rise of state-linked corporate business brought nigh the moment of transition to a social economy. Berle and Means built on criticism of corporate finance by Veblen, Brandeis, and figures such as William Z. Ripley, an economic historian at Harvard’s business school who had served as a pro-labor government mediator during the war.69 In 1925, Ripley denounced new stock-market issues of nonvoting shares as tantamount to a blank check for corporate officers. That and other fraudulent practices described in his subsequent book, Main Street and Wall Street, revealed the need for new means of assuring the public accountability of managers and directors—a claim that built his reputation as a gadfly. Within a few years, when utility promoter Samuel Insull became a Depression-era symbol of financial corruption, the censure of stock speculation and utility holding companies in that book made Ripley appear prescient indeed.70 Ripley opened his book confessing his mistrust of organized finance and recalling Veblen’s Absentee Ownership, though he considered that “too promiscuously accusative.”71 Indeed, his Progressivism, eager for agencies like the Federal Trade Commission to protect the public, was rather conservative. Like a growing train of observers, he noted that “ownership and control had parted company” in the modern corporation. More specifically, he cited “the progressive diffusion of ownership”— the wider share-holding world of “Main Street”—and “the ever-increasing concentration of managerial power on the other” as well as the “aggregation of financial and directorial power in our great capital centres,” that is, Wall Street. Considering the financial shenanigans of recent years, he saw danger in “conferring arbitrary and absolutely uncontrolled power upon an

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inside group.” Yet while young Walter Lippmann had declared that “no one proposes to put [corporate decision-making] back into the hands of the investor” (for “the notion that the 200,000 owners of the Steel Trust can ever be aroused to energetic, public-spirited control of ‘their’ property” was “fantastic”), Ripley wished to do just that.72 The new financial manipulations were “an egregious malversation of the rights of shareholders and of the public generally,” and he hoped that regulation of finance, with due concern for adequate annual reports and shareholder meetings, would turn corporate affairs to the public good while honoring shareholder democracy.73 Thus managing to criticize and foster the mythic “New Era” of Hooverian capitalism at the same time, Ripley also put in a good word for “a far-seeing younger member of the New York Bar, A. A. Berle, Jr.,” whose law journal articles on corporate finance during the 1920s marked him as an emerging expert.74 Berle, born in 1895, fit the profile of the “late Progressive cohort,” including a temperament strained between reformist vigor and conservative temperament. Berle’s maternal great-grandfather had moved from New England to Ohio, where he helped build the abolitionist college at Oberlin. His mother’s father, G. Frederick Wright, was a Congregationalist minister turned geology professor at Oberlin, and Berle’s granduncle helped administer Berea College in Kentucky, an institution that ran afoul of racial segregation laws in 1908. Berle’s father, Adolf A. Sr., son of an émigré German ’48er, married Mary Augusta Wright, and entered the ministry. As a social gospel minister, he maintained socially privileged connections in the worlds of reform and Republican politics. Having declared that “the spirit of the age is social and socialistic,” Adolf Sr. and Mary Augusta brought coffee to striking transit workers in the winter of 1903. They introduced their children to Jane Addams and Lillian Wald. According to his son, Adolf Sr. stood to the left of Theodore Roosevelt, in principle “probably much closer to the European classic Socialism than to any ideas of Adam Smith,” but he remained attached to the Taft Republicans, disinclined to follow Roosevelt into the Progressive Party.75 From the Brighton Congregationalist Church outside Boston, Adolf Sr. worked closely with Louis Brandeis to promote child-labor legislation in Massachusetts. He also joined the Anti-Imperialist League with Moorefield Storey, of the law firm of Storey, Thorndike, Palmer and Thayer, which vehemently opposed Brandeis’s appointment to the Supreme Court.76 Adolf Jr. similarly reached toward radical principles while nurturing links to established sources of power. His family encouraged concern for the downtrodden, genuine devotion to “service,” and self-conscious membership in an elite—a combination that fostered young Berle’s overweening confidence in his own brilliance and his urge to do great, daring things with

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new ideas (to be a “prophet” and, albeit without revolutionary proletarian commitments, “an American Karl Marx,” as Berle put it). Having attended Harvard, where he studied with the young Harold Laski among others, Berle considered the world war an interimperialist struggle the United States need not enter, but he enlisted in the army in 1917 out of a desire, encouraged by his father, to demonstrate the loyalty of German Americans. At an officer’s training camp for well-educated young men in Plattsburg, New York, Berle met Means, a year junior to him. Later, by means of wily selfassertion, connections, and luck, Berle found himself part of Woodrow Wilson’s peace delegation in Paris among a group of young men, including William Bullitt and Samuel Eliot Morison, that were devoted to framing policy toward Russia. They resigned in protest against anti-Soviet U.S. intervention in the Russian civil war, and Berle denounced the Versailles treaty in the Nation as an imperialistic peace.77 Berle returned to New York to begin a career as a corporation lawyer and a reformer, his political ambivalence evident at every turn.78 In December 1919, at an assembly of three thousand people at Carnegie Hall, he condemned plans by France, Britain, and Japan to carve up Russia, but protested the press coverage of the event by the New York Tribune, which dubbed Berle a “radical revolutionary propagandist.”79 A few months later, his father brought him together with Henry Cabot Lodge to discuss prospects for “international machinery which might be offered in place of the highly egoistic [i.e., nationalistic] product of Versailles.” Young Berle joined the National Republican Club in summer 1921, paying a Junior Member’s annual dues of $44. Yet at the same time that he objected to the Tribune’s characterization, he liked to think of his early writings on finance as “dangerous” to the corporate elite—and to place himself among what he called the jeunesse radicale.80 Starting out in New York in the early 1920s, he worked for the corporate law firm of Rounds, Hatch, Dillingham and Debevoise while living at Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement. He drafted a proposed constitutional amendment for the National Child Labor Committee and, in 1923 and 1924, his expertise in land law enabled him to play a key role in the campaign led by Mary Austin and John Collier to defend Navajo land claims in New Mexico. Defending “tribal ownership” against the “individualized program” of land allotments that had decimated Indian holdings ever since 1883, Berle developed a relativistic notion of property rights. As part of his work with the Foreign Policy Association, a group of internationalists including reformers like John Dewey and public-spirited businessmen like banker Thomas W. Lamont, Berle mocked the government’s insistence that recognition of the Soviet government depended on “return to a civilization based on private property in the American sense of the term”—“a strange proposition,” he wrote, “from a government which

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has confiscated property in slaves, in liquor, etc.” Recognizing that property rights rest in law and are open to a variety of restraints and revisions, he opposed the American “attempt to dictate on what basis the post-revolutionary government and economics of Russia shall stand.”81 Berle acknowledged “the driving force of the new social development,” that is, impulses toward collectivism, at the end of the war, and identified with the young, “liberal” current through the 1920s.82 He upheld the innocence of labor organizer Tom Mooney and admired the idealism of Sacco and Vanzetti.83 He stayed in touch both with the newly constituted American Civil Liberties Union, which protested American Legion vigilantism, as well as with a group of young New York City veterans who established a selfconsciously “liberal” American Legion post, the Willard Straight Post, named in memory of the New Republic’s benefactor.84 Identified as “a lawyer with a penchant for cases involving the underdog,” Berle was invited to participate in a symposium in the social-welfare magazine Survey on the spirit of protest among the younger generation of intellectuals, “men and women of Randolph Bourne’s generation” that ranged from the Dial veteran Lewis Mumford to the proletarian writer Mike Gold. In a contribution entitled “Skepticism,” novelist and poet Babette Deutsch represented something of the center in this milieu, when confessing that she had lost the “cocksureness” of her prewar revolutionary convictions but still shared an ecumenical left-liberal sympathy with “the Russian . . . attempt to build a society on the principles of justice and reason” as well as hopes for a gradual “socialization” of British industry and finance identified with “Mr. Keynes.”85 On the rightward edge of the group, Berle called himself “an innate conservative” who did not “doubt that the new day will be a fairer one.”86 Berle imagined that social-democratic reform would be achieved by cautious, legal means, entirely within the constituted order.87 Berle’s disposition was clear in a draft essay, “The Next American Revolution,” that led to his September 1921 New Republic article, “How Labor Could Control.” Recalling how “the Great Revolution . . . stalk[ed] straight across Europe” as he worked in the Versailles delegation, Berle suggested that “the next American revolution may come quite quietly and peaceably” if “a few men with courage and imagination” figured out how to use “the legal and financial machinery” of modern corporations to achieve stability, productivity, fairness, and the distribution of property. Writing amid the leftliberal enthusiasm for industrial democracy, Berle argued that ownership and control of corporations could be vested in “the men who work in it,” by distributing common stock to the whole staff, from “the manager [to] the mill-hand.” They would have “control of the plant” and determine managerial policy. Outside investors, whose contributions would be necessary to finance the work, would hold fixed-rate (usually nonvoting) preferred stock

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and, to ensure that their investment was safe, would have the power to step in “if there is any sign that the plant is being wrecked.” But the common stock would represent the “organization value,” that sum greater than the value of the parts that rested on the promise of future growth inhering in the collective effort of the whole staff. Holding shares paying dividends only so long as they worked at the plant, the local staff could provide better direction to the plants than the “manipulators or wreckers” who distributed highly “watered” common stock as a means of seizing control of management and bleeding companies dry.88 Such a scheme for labor control, Berle imagined, could meet the demands of “Mr. Taft or Mr. Townley or Mr. Trotzky with equal imperturbability.” Reformers applauded his New Republic article as “an apparently practical and workable basis for industrial democracy,” and Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard suggested, in a bit of exaggeration, that Berle had recapitulated the logic of Britain’s guild socialists.89 Meanwhile, Gardiner Means had traveled his own path toward a dissenting position in economics. It was not his first choice of fields. A chemistry major as a Harvard undergraduate, he took pilot training after bunking over Berle at Plattsburg but never saw combat. After the war, Means was sent to Turkey as part of Near East Relief, where he worked with thousands of Armenian orphans and administered a small complex of weaving, spinning, carpentry, and other handicraft shops that provided apprenticeships for the older orphans and a supply of basic goods for all the children. He had found a new direction and back in the United States started a company producing handwoven blankets. In the mid-twenties, he returned to Harvard for graduate study in economics, fascinated by the distinction between the economy he had found in Turkey, of small producers trading commodities—to which Adam Smith’s view of exchange relations might apply—and a large-scale corporate economy like that of the United States, where Smithian economics, he thought, did not. He was drawn to a dissenting, realist perspective on modern economics, later describing himself as “not a classicist and not a traditionalist and ready to look at things the way they were.”90 To do that, new perspectives had to break down the boundaries of narrow disciplines. Means recognized “that in factory and corporate enterprise, a great deal of economic coordination in the use of resources is brought about through administration and thus lies outside the respective disciplines of market economics and political government.” In the 1930s, he urged the creation of “a new and distinctly American political-economy” to cope with this emerging order. Although he showed no interest in socialism, he insisted throughout his life on making way for a substantial public administrative role in economic management that signaled a trend toward making the real American economy, as he put it, “less capitalistic.”91 Clearly, like Tugwell,

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Means assumed fluid movement in development across boundaries of abstract system definition. Means had not yet finished his doctorate when he began teaching quantitative economics at Columbia University. His wife, Caroline Ware, a pioneering social historian with pro-labor sympathies, had been a Vassar College classmate of Beatrice Bishop, who married Adolf Berle.92 After Berle began teaching law and corporate finance at Columbia in the fall of 1927, he told Columbia Law School dean Harlan Stone that corporate law was being taught in terms of “rules that applied to the little corporation of 20, 30, 40 years ago.” The field paid too little attention to “the realities and the law of corporation finance”—that is, “what goes on in the Stock Market, the bond market, the flotation of securities markets, and the whole financial processes” on which modern corporations depend.93 His sense of new “realities” corresponded to similar estimations by Means. Besides, with Ripley’s help, Berle had contacted the new Social Science Research Council, which wished to support research combining two or more disciplines; Berle would get $7,000 for a study of corporation practices as long as he had an academic affiliation and a collaborator. Means’s fortuitous presence at Columbia did the trick.94 Begun in the late 1920s, Berle and Means’s Modern Corporation heralded a “great change in the tide of social organization”: a “corporate revolution” that was succeeding the older “industrial revolution.” If the first revolution separated the worker from the means of production (as Marx described the creation of a propertyless wage-earning class), the second separated the owner from those means. Berle and Means did not intend merely to emphasize the “separation of ownership and management” (between holders of wealth invested in productive works and the overseers who superintended them, a theme decades old and well-known) but rather to highlight a further differentiation of ownership from control (or the actual power to decide business matters). This last step had a twofold effect. The corporate form established “a centripetal attraction which draws wealth together into aggregations of constantly increasing size.”95 Consequently, the number of corporations operating in the major branches of American industry continued to shrink while accumulating assets. According to the statistical survey undertaken by Means, the two hundred largest nonbanking corporations held half of all corporate wealth in the country. On the other hand, “the dispersion of stock ownership” moved centrifugally, as millions of people with modest financial resources bought shares and many large companies distributed stock widely. Berle and Means believed, thereby, that individuals or families had lost, by and large, their ability to control corporations through concentrated holdings, but they certainly did not intend this claim to justify

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the corporate regime as a shareholders’ democracy. To the contrary, it allowed them to challenge the very idea of private property in production. As Berle and Means put it, the “traditional logic of profits” had justified the appropriation of profits by a private owner on the grounds that the owner bore both the risk and responsibility of investing wealth in production. Having undertaken the risk and demonstrated skill in managing the enterprise, the owner deserved to be rewarded. Now, Berle and Means argued, property—or ownership of stock—was purely “passive,” divorced from “active” administration of the enterprise. As a consequence, what would ensure responsible behavior by the “active” element? When a division of owner and manager prevailed, the latter carried out the wishes of the former, who was hardly passive. Now, the functions of enterprise were divided threefold, between those who had an interest in it (share owners), those who “acted in respect to it” (managers), and those who “had power over it.” The last group—“the control”—was hard to pinpoint: it might be the executive management or those who had power to appoint executive management (the board of directors), or some cozy overlap between the two. Corporate law had already acknowledged that management did not owe utter allegiance to the “owners” (for returning all dividends to shareholders would disallow managerial decisions about reinvestment and potentially halt growth) but rather to “the corporation” itself. If severed, however, from the check of shareholders, what prevented top managers (the control) from using the corporation as a source of personal profit? Here was a legal—and social—no man’s land: “the control” acted in a way “analogous to a political ‘boss,’” that is, as a virtual extralegal authority.96 The “centripetal” trend of control, then, was evident not only in the concentration of corporate property but also in narrowing decision-making authority to a small body of persons (an interpenetrating group of directors and top managers) numbering fewer than two thousand in the top two hundred corporations. In Berle and Means’s unsparing words, “The concentration of economic power separate from ownership has, in fact, created economic empires, and has delivered these empires into the hands of a new form of absolutism.” Their language derived directly from the preoccupation during the World War I era with economic or industrial democracy. Modern society faced a new “economic autocracy,” a “corporate oligarchy,” unless some “demand for responsible power” became effective.97 And it was here, they insisted, that old notions of “private property” and “private enterprise” offered no defense. “When active and passive property relationships attach to the same individual or group,” Berle and Means wrote, “we have private property as conceived by the older economists. When they attach to different individuals, private property in the instruments of production disappears”:

Theory of Organized Capitalism / 81 The recognition that industry has come to be dominated by these economic autocrats must bring with it a realization of the hollowness of the familiar statement that economic enterprise is a matter of individual initiative. To the dozen or so men in control, there is room for such initiative. For the tens and even hundreds of thousands of workers and of owners in a single enterprise, individual initiative no longer exists. Their activity is group activity on a scale so large that the individual, except he be in a position of control, has dropped into relative insignificance.

Corporate enterprise is not private enterprise at all, they argued, but “the organized activity of vast bodies of individuals, workers, consumers, and suppliers of capital.” These organizations “have passed far beyond the realm of private enterprise—they have become more nearly social institutions.”98 Nor could the “control” cite in defense of its power the economizing virtues of market exchange, for “an increasing proportion of production is carried on for use and not for sale,” consumed within the bounds of integrated organizations.99 Thus, they concluded, when the “control” lacks a rationale for autonomy, and public concern confronts the uses of this power, then “the problems of control have become problems in economic government.” If analyzed “not in terms of business enterprise but in terms of social organization,” the evolving corporate separation of ownership and control has “cleared the way for the claims of a group far wider than either the owners or the control. They have placed the community in a position to demand that the modern corporation serve not alone the owners or the control but all society.” And “when a convincing system of community obligations is worked out and is generally accepted, in that moment the passive property right of today must yield before the larger interests of society.”100 Perhaps such rhetoric conveyed nothing more than Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum that property rights rested ultimately on public right.101 But Modern Corporation so undermined the old economic ideology of private property and competition, and made such a strong case for public responsibility versus economic autocracy, that it welcomed attempts to convert corporations to quasi-public entities. The notion that corporations could be compelled to bear “responsibility” to society at large did not equal the socialist or communist programs of state ownership, but Berle and Means thought “the difference in all of these lies only in degree.”102 They wrote in an epoch in which private property had lost its grounding and “collective” means of organizing economic life were ascendant. Echoing Lippmann, they meant to draw attention to one of those “revolutions of the more silent sort that . . . are unrecognized until they are far advanced.”103 Reviewers of the book generally recognized these implications. An extensive treatment in American Economic Review by Harvard professor W. L. Crum denounced the book’s “unsound” claims about extreme economic

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concentration, adding that because competition was still vibrant, government interference was unwarranted.104 Left liberals were likely to embrace the larger implications for change. Ernest Gruening of the Nation wrote that Berle and Means cogently portrayed the “capitalistic confiscation of property,” and while he sympathized with the expropriated small shareholder, his phrase might just as well have summed up what Marx and Hilferding meant by the corporate “socialization of savings and credit.” Gruening cried, “Sing us no song of property rights! . . . How inevitable . . . that in a self-governing democracy the people will proceed from control of the political state, and by means of it, to control also of the now uncontrollable economic super-power.” Harry Laidler of the League for Industrial Democracy thought the book confirmed his evolutionary socialist views, and Stuart Chase concluded, “These great properties are rotten ripe for collective ownership and management.” He continued, “The Fourteenth Amendment . . . still stands on the books, but if Messrs. Berle and Means are right, it is law [as a guarantee of noninterference with private-property rights of corporations] from which reality has fled, or is rapidly fleeing. . . . It is not too much to expect . . . that the Supreme Court may become aware of the fact in another decade or two.”105 At the far left, James Burnham, a New York University philosophy professor who was turning to Marxism, regarded the authors’ chapters on the nature of property “brilliant”: “They smash the ‘American myth’ beyond the restorative ability of even the most skillful bourgeois surgeon-economist.”106

The Ambiguity of Postwar Reform and Corporate Liberalism In the summer of 1928, an English visitor to the United States (and later Columbia University professor), liberal economist Arthur Robert Burns, remarked on the current “struggle over the place which private property is to take in the world of the future.”107 Burns believed that in the United States, as in England, “there is a very slow but recognizable drift toward public organization of some industries.”108 Thus the themes Berle and Means broached—the obsolescence of private property strictly speaking and the future of industry under some kind of public control—were bound to find resonance, even apart from the acute crisis of capitalism that ensued in late 1929. And though Berle and Means spoke less of “capitalism” than of “private enterprise,” their work was part of a milieu—hardly a revolutionary one—in which the nature and future of capitalism were real and open questions. This milieu did not necessarily assume an explicit “postcapitalist” guise. Tugwell, one of the most forthright and persistent liberal advocates

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of “planning” in the mid-twentieth century, refrained from anticapitalist rhetoric. True to Deweyan notions that reality was always in flux, likely to belie any reified definitions or categories, Tugwell thought that precise definitions of a postcapitalist future were unnecessary, or even faulty, because the very “capitalist” definition of the present was an artificial hindrance to furthering valued change. This caution placed him squarely in the tradition that questioned the reality of “capitalism” not in order to defend the status quo but rather to grease the wheels of change heading beyond what others meant by that term. The new social liberalism was a highly ambivalent milieu. Wesley Mitchell offered Harry Laidler advice on the best rhetorical strategies for socialist propaganda, while collaborating with wealthy corporate philanthropists and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to fashion microeconomic means by which decision makers in private firms could help tame the business cycle. One historian has argued that this Hooverian venture in economic stabilization amounted to a “techno-corporatist” effort that failed in the 1920s but set the stage for other, more successful ways (after the New Deal) of using social science to buttress corporate capitalism.109 And by implicating Mitchell in a program of strengthening, not surpassing, capitalism, this interpretation construes the left-liberal discussion of the transformative effects of the corporation as either a naive evasion of, or a mask for, conservative motives of sustaining elite power. Situated adequately in the complex, shifting milieu of wartime and postwar reform, however, the interwar American theory of organized capitalism offered something more and different than a “corporate-liberal” notion of reform, aiming at more ambitious goals than morally rehabilitated corporate capitalist management—even if its advocates rubbed shoulders with conservative procorporate reformers. The war gave a boost to planning theory of both bourgeois and socialdemocratic varieties. While the German social democrats established a “socialization commission” soon after coming to power in 1918 (albeit with no major accomplishments to claim by the time the revolutionary wave ebbed), “progressive” business leaders such as Walther Rathenau also advanced ideas about a planned economy. “A new commonwealth that dissolved the old distinction between state and economy seemed at hand,” Charles Maier wrote of Rathenau’s vision, calling it “a postcompetitive industrial order [that] drew on the promises of technology and organization,” not unlike Herbert Hoover’s view in the United States.110 Indeed, Maier’s portrait of reconstruction-cum-restabilization grasped the intricacy of the political and intellectual situation more subtly than most American historians of corporate liberalism. Early advocates of a new, coordinated system of production that relied on the use of public authority “spoke out from different points along the political spectrum,” Maier wrote. They included democratic lib-

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erals, syndicalists, guild socialists, Marxist revisionists, professional engineers, progressive businessmen, and aristocratic corporatists: all “rejected the Manchesterite, bourgeois state [while] their final visions remained different.” Maier concluded that “rescuing bourgeois Europe meant recasting bourgeois Europe,” or engineering a move “from bourgeois to corporatist Europe,” yet this conservatizing outcome of political battles fought both in the streets and within government ministries was hardly evident at the inception of the struggle, right after the armistice. As “men of left, right, and center” all “noted the new tendencies . . . the growing web of interest groups and cartels, the obsolescence of the market economy, the interpenetration of government and industry,” their visions ranged from the Left’s hopes for “a less coercive and more egalitarian economy” to authoritarian state corporations or Hoover’s technocratic “community of abundance.”111 “History was to play tricks on each group,” as the resulting “corporatist” system fit none of their models, and yet an adequate picture of the situation would keep us from assuming these peculiar bedfellows shared a single identity or purpose. Wesley Mitchell’s statistical studies of business cycles, and his hopes that such concrete knowledge might help businessmen act wisely to limit cyclical effects, led him into the camp of Hoover’s “techno-corporatist” planning committees, but he also remained close to his socialist friend Laidler, whom he invited to take an official position at the new (and more or less institutionalist) National Bureau of Economic Research. Throughout the 1920s, many of the academic dissenters in the socioeconomic milieu freely borrowed from socialist criticism, “showing that market values were not a good measure of the social values of goods and services” and decrying unemployment and the “power disparity” between owners and workers.112 In turn, all sorts of scholars and activists found their way onto the investigative panels Hoover promoted in the 1920s—such as Paul Brissenden, a labor economist who had defended the Industrial Workers of the World during World War I, and the social worker Mary Van Kleeck, who had served in the wartime Labor Department and later became a Popular Front advocate of state planning.113 Nor did temporary alliances of reformers and progressive businessmen silence debate. Mitchell, Van Kleeck, and others advocated public employment agencies and compulsory state insurance against unemployment ten years before the Social Security Act and found themselves in Hoover’s milieu fighting the stubborn resistance of the commerce secretary’s antistatist friends. Van Kleeck moved to the left by 1927, when she sounded an alarm about unemployment and stagnation, calling on unions to exert greater labor power in the economy.114 To be sure, history would, as Maier suggested, “play tricks” on American left liberals, but the “corporate liberal” thesis that reformism was simply dominated, or exhausted, by a unified ideology of private corporate control sustained by an expanding

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bourgeois government, is unwarranted. Rather than a “liberal” defense of elites governing a profit-making corporate economy, the American theory of organized capitalism, expressed in the institutionalist critique of private property traditions and a vaguely discerned future of public management, was an optimistic doctrine that foresaw a path through the medium of the corporation, falsely privatized but soon to be recognized as a collective organism, toward establishment of a social economy.

chapter 3

The Interwar Critique of Competitive Individualism *

When George Soule faulted orthodox economics for studying social relations “without the benefit of modern anthropology,” he suggested the close link between the new socioeconomics and theories of culture that flourished in social-liberal intellectual circles during the 1920s and 1930s. The proximity of the two fields bespoke the influence of Thorstein Veblen, whose insistence on combining economy and culture defined his iconoclastic view of his own discipline and shaped his critique of the American ways of wealth.1 In the interwar years, the thoughtways of social-liberal reform burgeoned on the convergence of socioeconomics and the new, modern (post-Victorian) anthropology of Franz Boas and his students as well as their critics among “functional” anthropologists. In this convergence, it was clear that the shift away from economics had not taken hold; it was yet to come in the flowering of the postcapitalist vision after World War II. Interwar cultural theory indeed attended to economic matters, particularly the newly understood variability of economic ethics or mores—the guiding motivations of economic activity—in different social settings. Cultural anthropology during the 1920s and 1930s provided one more building block in the formation of the social-liberal postcapitalist vision. By the time Soule called upon it, the pluralist trend identified with Boas had rejected the racialism of conservative nineteenth-century American ethnology. Students Boas trained in the first decade of the twentieth century had begun to find places in the academy, but they remained ill at ease. Not only was Boas attacked by his discipline’s old guard for his dissent from 86

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Wilson’s war but his students also represented an “outsider” group of immigrant offspring, some of whom identified with the bohemian, radical, and romantic currents of the 1910s.2 These dispositions did not prevent them from upholding, at the same time, the rigor and ethical independence of “science” as a benchmark of their professional identities, though during the interwar years the competing school of Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s anthropological “functionalism” made even more vigorous claims to scientific status and academic probity. Nonetheless, both Boasians and functionalists shared basic principles that helped make anthropology relevant to the left-liberal discourse on the nature and future of capitalism. Their understanding of the plurality of cultures fostered a degree of relativism that challenged the universalism of economic science—the concept of homo economicus, which presumed that human action was based purely on instrumental rationality, economic calculation, and self-interest, and hence the assumption that modern economic civilization was rooted in human nature. They insisted instead on examining culture as an integrated, complex whole. Though the Boasians upheld an expressive holism seeking ideal patterns of meaning that shape a culture, and the functionalists imagined a structural holism defined by the contributions varied institutions made to maintaining the integrity of a society, both had a muted romantic yearning for social and cultural harmony as they criticized contemporary society’s “maladjusted” condition.3 Critique of capitalism as a way of life was implied in a striking postwar essay by Edward Sapir, a German-Jewish immigrant raised largely in New York, educated by Boas, and serving as head anthropologist of the Canadian National Museum in Ottawa when the European war broke out. A pacifist and poet of romantic stripe, Sapir was alienated by the war, national chauvinism, and the regimentation of a mobilized society. In 1918, he drafted “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” and published part of it the next year in the Dial. Sapir maintained that the United States lacked a culture that knit together all aspects of life into a meaningful whole and gave the individual both a sense of sharing vital traditions and a platform for creativity. With a “unified and consistent attitude toward life,” a genuine culture would “not make a great show in its ethical ideals of an uncompromising opposition to slavery, only to introduce what amounts to a slave system into certain portions of its industrial mechanism.”4 The refinement of “technique” in science and industry—“civilization”—brought benefits, but if cut off “as a desert patch of merely economic effort” from a broader sense of values, its achievements paled: The great cultural fallacy of industrialism . . . is that in harnessing machines to our uses it has not known how to avoid the harnessing of the majority of

88 / Chapter 3 mankind to its machines. The telephone girl who lends her capacities, during the greater part of the living day, to the manipulation of a technical routine that has an eventually high efficiency value but that answers to no spiritual needs of her own is an appalling sacrifice to civilization. . . . How to reap the undeniable benefits of a great differentiation of functions, without at the same time losing sight of the individual as a nucleus of live cultural values, is the great and difficult problem of any rapidly complicating civilization.

Dial readers could not miss Sapir’s point: “The present world wide labor unrest has as one of its deepest roots some sort of perception of the cultural fallacy of the present form of industrialism.”5 The critique of mechanical order, permitting neither creativity nor solidarity, persisted into the 1920s. A voice of the “lost generation,” Harold Stearns, virtually echoed Sapir as he deemed “the whole industrial and economic situation . . . maladjusted to the primary and simple needs of men and women,” leaving society in a state of “emotional and aesthetic starvation . . . [with] no heritages or traditions to which to cling except those that have already withered in our hands and turned to dust.” The reactionary tenor of the 1920s, “the mania for petty regulation, the driving, regimenting, and drilling, the secret society and its grotesque regalia,” were merely “infantilisms of compensation” for this dearth.6 By deploying “culture” against capitalism, such critics implied no simple yearning for order.7 Indeed, the moral conservatism of the 1920s provoked the new culturalism to promote “modern” ideas of individual freedom. By the 1930s, the interwar style of culture critique was fleshed out with an admixture of émigré psychoanalysis, and it combined romantic and modernist dispositions in a deep suspicion of American “economic mores.” The brand of acquisitive individualism that stressed achievement, which was measured by “success” in the narrow range of private pecuniary accumulation, only stifled genuine individuality.8 For the critical anthropologists, moreover, the deepening political crisis of the 1930s revealed a profound disability in Western civilization, and they imagined that modern life, if it were to survive, would require a new form that likely lay beyond the confines of capitalist order.

From the Crucible of War to “Culture and Personality” In a 1930 survey titled “War and Reorientation,” the editors of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences—most likely influenced by Boas’s favored student, UC Berkeley professor Alfred Kroeber, who represented his field among the advisory editors—cited the “dislocatory effect” of anthropology, which led people to see their own culture “not as endowed with an un-

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yielding and inherent place in the scheme of things, but as mutable and merely a variant.” That sense of detachment, which Kroeber identified with the “anthropological attitude,” could be enhanced and broadcast among wider groups of people by seismic social disruptions like the war.9 Indeed, the war had a “dislocatory” effect on anthropology itself. Franz Boas, reacting against wartime demands for political conformity, shifted gears and defined a new agenda of study for his students, fostering the “culture and personality” school that became one of the most dynamic currents in interwar American anthropology. Broaching the general problem of how cultures shaped individuals and the scope of personal autonomy permitted under a culture’s conformist pressures, the leading popularizers of Boas’s project, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, explored the irony of an individualistic culture that narrowly constrained the course of individuality. In other words, they combined a liberal appreciation for individual autonomy with a social critique of economic individualism. Franz Boas abhorred the jingoistic sentiment and repressive apparatus of war. He backed the nascent American Civil Liberties Union in defending the Masses magazine against censorship but spent more time coping with the myriad ways government controls and abuses affected his work and that of others around him. He assisted German Americans who were fired from jobs, campaigning on behalf of a German-born naturalized anthropologist dismissed from the Bureau of Ethnology for allegedly making “remarks derogatory to the United States.” A German man interned in Canada was not permitted to send Boas translations of Indian texts, and Boas’s longtime assistant in British Columbia, George Hunt, was prevented from sending ethnographic maps on specious grounds of wartime security.10 At the same time, he suspected that staffing cutbacks called for by Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler and university trustees indicated their determination “to suppress anthropology if they possibly can.” All this was capped by the dismissal of Boas’s colleague, psychologist J. McKeen Cattell, a longtime critic of Butler’s autocratic governance, on the pretext that he had sent members of Congress an antiwar letter that the trustees deemed seditious.11 One of the most determinedly professional and self-consciously “scientific” of men, Boas confessed to his former student Robert Lowie, now at the University of California–Berkeley, that he could not “detach myself entirely from the events of the day.” Dropping his usual reserve and formality, he added, “I feel them keenly. The present prosecution craze has upset me completely.”12 Boas soon entered a political and professional quarrel that brought severe sanctions upon him. As early as December 1917, he had heard that a number of anthropologists were “engaged in interesting spy work” and declared, “It will be pretty hard for me to forgive any one for using the pretext

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of scientific work to do nasty political jobs.” Only after the war ended did he pen his blast, “Scientists as Spies,” in a short letter to the Nation. Mocking President Wilson’s claim that democracies employed no spies—a statement implying, Boas noted, that “we live under an autocracy”—he referred to “at least four men,” unnamed, who had traveled abroad, ostensibly on anthropological expeditions, while gathering wartime intelligence for the United States. By their deception, he wrote, they had “prostituted science,” and by having “shaken belief in [its] truthfulness . . . they have also done the greatest possible disturbance to scientific work.” For thus impugning the integrity of colleagues, Boas’s conservative opponents in the Anthropological Association, mostly physical anthropologists wedded to racialist and eugenic principles, censured him, dismissed him from his posts in the association, and expelled him from the government’s National Research Council. Historian George Stocking Jr. has called the anti-Boas crowd “the counter-revolutionaries,” though their attempt to purge the association was reversed by 1923, when Lowie became editor of the flagship journal and restored the Boas group’s predominance.13 The abortive anthropological reaction showed how the forces of conformity entered even nongovernmental social organizations pledged to higher principles, and it yielded the germ of Boas’s new program of study in “culture and personality.” In a 1917 Barnard College lecture, Boas had lamented that “in the University and outside of the University we are [today] called upon constantly to restrict the freedom of our thought in conformity with the current opinions of the day.” He proposed to combine the psychological understanding of individuals with an analysis of their society’s cultural framework with the hope of understanding how and why demands for conformity worked and what space existed for deviation from the norm. “The most essential requirement for obtaining clearness of thought and individual freedom must be the ability to understand the obscure emotional motives that determine our conduct and our way of thinking,” he told the Barnard students. Although those determinants made it difficult to attain “true freedom,” as scientists “we ourselves should be able to rise above the fetters that the past imposes upon us.” This aim established the essence of the “anthropological viewpoint”: the “willingness to take the position of the nonconformist, not to take anything in our social structure for granted, and to be particularly ready to examine critically all those attitudes that are accompanied by strong outbursts of emotion, the more so the stronger the accompanying emotion.” Boas knew this project called for an unusual degree of self-reflexivity. It asked practitioners to recognize that their own character was culturally determined while aspiring to a higher standard of “human ideals” freed from any “specific social setting.” As someone “exceedingly skeptical in regard to the absolute values of so-called national ideals,” he

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warned against the persistent temptation to confuse one’s own national tradition with such a universal standard. He noted too that “the intellectuals, who are steeped in historical tradition, are therefore, on the whole, little able to think clearly.” Like Veblen, he regarded them as part of the “segregated classes,” distant from the sway of experience and more enlightened ideals.14 Hopes for “scientific progress” were thus fragile. The new program marked a shift in Boas’s methods. His early work rested on a historical and “diffusionist” model of culture change. A people’s way of life comprised a number of diverse “culture elements” that came together in a particular constellation as a result of that people’s historical experiences of migration, conflict, or exchange with other groups. The aim of ethnographic method was to identify the distinct culture elements and then discern the paths of diffusion that had conjoined them. In the wake of the war, however, Boas sought to focus instead on the “inner development” of a culture that both created an order or “pattern” in a way of life and fashioned the “processes” that “acculturated” individuals to that pattern.15 Besides marking a new problem set for Boas and his followers, the study of culture and personality was bound up with the renewal of romantic cultural criticism in the 1920s, due at least in part to revulsion at the spectacle of Europe’s self-destruction. For over a century, the romantic sensibility had played a significant role in European and American thought as an intellectual force both generated by modernity and reacting against it. It yearned for both the fullness of personal experience and a reunion of self and community. In British letters, this disposition stemmed in part from a conservative tradition hailing the organic community life of “old England” in reaction against the advance of market relations and corrosive individualism. Similar sentiments of estrangement from liberal society, however, also emerged in league with the radicalism of the young Romantic poets and by the late nineteenth century had folded into the left-wing criticism associated with William Morris as well. As Raymond Williams wrote in his landmark portrait of this tradition, the critique of market society fit with the emerging anthropological notion of “culture” as “a whole way of life.”16 Wholeness connoted a degree of integral unity, both as a critical standard and as a methodological guide that encouraged the analyst to discover the connections knitting together in one fabric the varied aspects of human experience in society. As one American anthropologist put it, “culture” signaled “organization and consistency which gives a group moral solidarity,” in contrast with “the impaired moral organization of the [modern] urban society.”17 American culture wars in the 1920s compounded the ambiguity and ambivalence entailed by the balance of individuality and community in the romantic sensibility. The political reaction following U.S. intervention in Europe brought with it a set of social movements and legislative acts that

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seemed intent on restoring old, stringent forms of order. Though hardly all of a piece, the formation of the American Legion as a veterans’ organization to combat subversion, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the “fundamentalist” movement of religiously conservative Protestants, immigration restriction, and Prohibition overlapped with one another to suggest an inbred, backward-looking, and moralistic national mood. Meanwhile, the continued growth of cities, the flowering of mass entertainment, an increasing degree of young people’s social independence, and accompanying changes in middle-class styles of life boosted “new values” that emphasized personal autonomy, denied that morality consisted of fixed or absolute rules, and welcomed change for its own sake. By the mid and late 1920s, American culture seemed marked by a tension between traditionalism (or “fundamentalism,” as its critics came to identify it, generically) and the self-consciously “modern” values of the young urban middle class. And so the romantic sensibility was strained between its appreciation of cultural integrity, which might be mistaken for a confining sense of tradition, and its longing for enriched experience, which verged on the promotion of modern individualism. The tension lay at the very heart of Boasian culture and personality, since it combined a bias toward holistic interpretation and a desire to defend nonconformity. Interwar culture critics tended to applaud what Sapir called “genuine” cultures while admiring “modern” ideals of freedom and flexibility.18 Boas’s later students, particularly Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) and her protégé Margaret Mead (1901–1978), were charged with carrying out his new program. Only slightly younger than Sapir, Benedict first encountered anthropology in a course with Alexander Goldenweiser at one of the centers of postwar liberal intellectual life, the New School for Social Research. A childhood troubled by ill health and a family in financial straits had not prevented her from attending Vassar College, 1905 –09, or cultivating intellectual and literary ambitions. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s collectivist volume, Women and Economics, headed everyone’s reading list at Vassar, and in 1916 Benedict drafted a manuscript on the radical forerunner of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft. Mired in an unsatisfying marriage and apparently aware of her lesbian orientation, Benedict was inclined to embrace Boas’s approach to culture and individuality once she reached Columbia’s PhD program in 1921.19 She completed her degree quickly and soon began collaborating with Mead, who came from a Philadelphia family that was affluent and well educated. (Her mother Emily Fogg Mead once took a course with Veblen.) Mead transferred from DePauw College to Barnard in 1920 and then moved in the progressive circles of postwar social liberalism. A good friend invited her into a club “interested in the economic and social movements of the day,” which arranged lectures by George Soule, Scott

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Nearing, A. J. Muste of Brookwood Labor College, and an Indian advocate of producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives.20 Melville Herskovits, another Boas disciple, joked with Mead about her “reddish activities,” and it appears from the college newspaper Mead edited that her circle celebrated the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and welcomed prospects for drawing college students into contact with the labor movement.21 In 1925, after receiving a master’s degree in psychology, Mead embarked on an expedition to the South Seas under Boas’s direction. The result, Coming of Age in Samoa, appeared before Benedict’s programmatic statement of “culture and personality,” Patterns of Culture. Boas provided Mead with her general topic. Some years earlier, contrary to psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s judgment that adolescence was a period of Sturm und Drang, Boas had suggested that this experience was likely distinct to contemporary American culture and not necessarily universal. Mead was prepared to pursue the argument. In a finding that has since become notorious for its slim evidentiary basis, Mead concluded that the girls of Samoa experienced no visible storm and stress in their transition through adolescence.22 They generally remained bound to segregated groups of girls, drawing little distinction between the more and less mature, except that those in their late teens began amatory adventures with boys that gave them pleasure but little trouble. Sexual activity, including some between girls, was accepted as ordinary and of little emotional significance. When the time came, girls were prepared to make marriages of convenience, untroubled by acute infatuation, jealousy, or problems of sexual “adjustment.” In one of her well-known passages, Mead declared of the Samoans, Familiarity with sex, and the recognition of a need of a technique to deal with sex as an art, have produced a scheme of personal relations in which there are no neurotic pictures, no frigidity, no impotence, except as the temporary result of severe illness, and the capacity for intercourse only once in a night is counted as senility.

If marriages proved troublesome, they were more or less easily dissolved by relocating residence. Above all, “excessive emotion, violent preferences, strong allegiances are disallowed. The Samoan preference is for a middle course, a moderate amount of feeling, a discreet expression of a reasonable and balanced attitude.”23 In Mead’s elementary portrait of cultural relativity, individuals reliably followed the norms of their community, with a few exceptions that she explained away as the consequence of occasional disruptions to routine. Boas, however, had had something more in mind when the war experience encouraged him to reflect on the status of the individual. Writing to Mead as

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she was setting off to Samoa, he said, “The most important contribution that we hope you will make will be the psychological attitude of the individual under the pressure of the general pattern of culture.”24 In his preface to Coming of Age, Boas again mingled a concern with cultural variability and culture’s role in shaping personality with a focus on individuality. “A systematic description of human activities,” he wrote, “gives us very little insight into the mental attitudes of the individual.” Mead, he thought, had demonstrated that “much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilisation.”25 Just as individuals were shaped by their culture, he suggested, they also “reacted” against it, though Mead hardly addressed this problem. Her book was peopled by “well-integrated” and “adjusted” personalities. Mead, however, broached the problem of individuality in another way, by contrasting Samoan culture and modern American culture in her last two chapters, which revealed something about the view of economic ethics commonly held in her anthropological milieu. Mead’s admiration for the integration of Samoan culture stemmed from what appeared to her as the minimal intrusion of the U.S. administration in the territory.26 Besides the suppression of cannibalistic practices and blood feuds, she claimed, little had changed, and village organization, large households, “communal ownership of property,” sexual ethics, and the like were undisturbed. The mild anticapitalist sentiments of postwar liberal intellectuals appeared when she added: Economic instability, poverty, the wage system, the separation of the worker from his land and from his tools, modern warfare, industrial disease, the abolition of leisure, the irksomeness of a bureaucratic government—these have not yet invaded an island without resources worth exploiting.27

Mead’s admiration for Samoan culture stemmed largely from its lack of the competition, individualism, and privatism so characteristic of modern American culture. Echoing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s critique of the ingrown nuclear family of modern society, Mead condemned the “closed circle of affection [opposed] to a forbidding world” that trained children in “specialisation of affection” and a host of “crippling attitudes” (like Freud’s Oedipus complex) “fraught with emotion and pain.” Better the large household open to the community, the exposure of Samoan children to supervision by a wide range of relatives—and above all the security that came from avoidance of aggressive competition. “Samoa is a place where no one plays for very high stakes, no one pays very high prices, no one suffers for his convictions or fights to the death for special ends. . . . Neither poverty nor great disasters threaten the people to make them hold their lives dearly and tremble for continued existence.” Later, she added:

Interwar Critique / 95 Our whole [modern American] picture of saving, of investment, of deferred enjoyment, is completely absent. . . . Work is something which goes on all the time for every one; no one is exempt; few are overworked. There is social reward for the industrious, social toleration for the man who does barely enough. And there is always leisure . . . which is not the result of hard work or accumulated capital at all, but is merely the result of a kindly climate, a small population, a well-integrated social system, and no social demands for spectacular expenditure.

Yet, in the next and last chapter, “Education for Choice,” Mead switched from Samoa to contemporary America and, rather than upholding a critique of individualism, called for individual freedom from tradition and conformity: We present to our children the picture of a battle-field where each group is fully armored in a conviction of the righteousness of its cause. . . . [Instead] they must be taught tolerance. . . . They must be taught that many ways are open to them, no one sanctioned above its alternative, and that upon them and upon them alone lies the burden of choice.28

The book was welcomed as a brief for modernist flexibility, but her apparent shift in evaluation from an admiring view of Samoan culture based on a critique of American individualism to an endorsement of modern selfdetermination requires explanation.29 The crucial difference was America’s “heterogeneous culture,” while “Samoa knows but one way of life.” Modern society was characterized by change and “the absence of a common standard” such that children could hardly “accept unquestioningly their parents’ judgments.”30 Mead’s view of Samoa as a “well-integrated society,” where individuals were raised in sync with the way of life they would meet as adults, and her remarks on the “maladjustment which our civilisation has produced” as the individual faces inconsistent expectations of upbringing and getting along in the world, both made sense as manifestations of a rudimentary functionalism. Functional norms of systemic integrity broke down in the American case, ironically, as the very demands for doctrinal consistency (a spurious “integration”) conflicted with the personal self-shaping that better suited modern change and heterogeneity. Yet neither in Coming of Age nor in other writings of the time did Mead suggest that she identified the modern individualism of “choice” with the capitalist institutions she otherwise mentioned so caustically. The kind of “economic mores” Mead elsewhere summed up as “aggressiveness, initiative, competitiveness, and possessiveness—the familiar motivations upon which our culture depends”—might be the very source of an unduly narrow prescription of conduct in a new, modern age.31 The strain between values of harmony and personal independence

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marked Benedict’s work too. Her cultural pluralism recognized the distinctive holistic forms of varied societies and the virtues of a “tolerance” that rejected any orthodoxy. The same year Coming of Age appeared, Benedict elaborated Boas’s loose notion of cultural “pattern” in an article that defined “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” types, the terms that later guided her book Patterns of Culture (1934).32 There she argued in favor of “culture consciousness,” the recognition that distinctive forms of human behavior were not ingrained in nature but learned according to each community’s inherited and selective “choice” of norms. Through culture consciousness, “we may train ourselves to pass judgment upon the dominant traits of our own civilization” and thus recognize that concerted efforts at making social and cultural change, though not easily accomplished, were at least conceivable.33 In this spirit, Benedict joined those who regarded U.S. economic life as open to critique and reform: “Those explanations of custom which derive our economic scheme from human competitiveness, modern war from human combativeness, and all the rest of the ready explanations that we meet in every magazine and modern volume, have for the anthropologist a hollow ring.” Citing the extravagant, competitive festivals among the Kwakiutl along with modern American commercial life, she wrote: In both cases it is clear that wealth is not sought and valued for its direct satisfaction of human needs but as a series of counters in the game of rivalry. If the will to victory were eliminated from the economic life, as it is in the [orderly and ceremonial] Zuñi, distribution and consumption of wealth would follow quite different “laws.”34

Her skepticism toward economic universalism, and a sense that the feasibility of reform could be understood as a consequence of that critique, clearly echoed Soule’s views. Benedict advocated such reforms, with the vision of an egalitarian distribution of wealth combined with consensual, participatory forms of governance animating her social and political worldview in the 1930s. But where did that scale of values, that basis of criticism and vision, arise, if pluralism merely recognized a plausible variety of schemes and sought the acceptance of difference across societies?35 No answer was forthcoming, and the problem only deepened in her concluding chapter, “The Individual and the Pattern of Culture,” where she called for the toleration of “deviance.” Benedict hoped for “a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence.” Given her argument, however, that each culture “selects” from the “great arc” of possible human behaviors those deemed acceptable and admirable within its bounds, and only thereby achieves a “configuration” or “orienta-

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tion,” why should a norm of toleration arise instead of a plurality of systems each marked by conformity? If patterned culture determined the self, whence arose the voice calling for broad toleration of those “deviants” whose temperaments set them on some unselected point of the great arc? In Benedict’s view, American inclinations to join “orthodox dreams of permanence . . . with the individual’s illusions of autonomy” offered stiff resistance to the tolerant “culture consciousness” she promoted, and thus she vested her hopes in anthropological science itself and seemed to grant her own professional community the right to declare a new universal standard.36 The problem stemmed partly from Benedict’s particular approach to the problem of “culture and personality.” Her “configuration theory” of cultures, “oriented as wholes in different directions,” gave to each culture a distinct character. As many commentators noted, it treated culture as “personality writ large,” identified culture with a modal personality type, and assumed that most individuals within it assumed that mold—and thus made it harder to explain the source of independent judgment and the tolerant viewpoint. Sapir, on the other hand, insisted that more weight be given to the individual as an agent acting on culture as well as a creature acted on, thus hewing more closely to what Boas intended in first opening the question of culture and personality. Sapir wanted to recognize the “personality variations” among “definite individuals,” to see the way individuals interact in social life and thereby wield a measure of influence over the cultural ideals and values that in turn provide a model of desired behavior.37 Setting aside such critiques of Benedict’s excessive holism, however, we might recognize a distinct agenda in her work, one capable of resolving the paradox of cultural pattern and culture-free tolerance. Her final chapter in Patterns could be read not as saying we must now adopt an ethic of tolerance beyond that which any customary community would concede but as arguing instead that the empirical case of American culture in her time showed a peculiarly repressive degree of conformity, in excess of the normal procedures by which cultures select an acceptable range of behavior. Relying on the portrait of narrow-minded provincialism in Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown, Benedict claimed that the “fear of being different” in contemporary America brought with it a “staggering burden of psychopathic tragedies.”38 She suggested that American society exacted a special toll, not only because the extreme “fear of being different” made more “misfits” into “psychopaths” but also because American “success” ethics were so stringent: Another large group [who suffer “exclusion from social regard”] are those who are merely inadequate and who are strongly enough motivated so that their failure is more than they can bear. In a society in which the will-to-power is most highly rewarded, those who fail may not be those who are differently constituted [or “deviant”], but simply those who are insufficiently endowed. The

98 / Chapter 3 inferiority complex takes a great toll of suffering in our society. It is not necessary that sufferers of this type have a history of frustration in the sense that strong native bents have been inhibited; their frustration is often enough only the reflection of their inability to reach a certain goal. There is a cultural implication here, too, in that the traditional goal may be accessible to large numbers or to very few, and in proportion as success is obsessive and is limited to the few, a greater and greater number will be liable to the extreme penalties of maladjustment.39

In this denunciation of the uniquely conformist pressures of an America fixated on “success,” Benedict sketched an analysis of the competitive-individualist economic ethic that would grow through the 1930s. With further contributions from functionalist and psychoanalytic ideas, that analysis developed into an enduring midcentury American culture critique and a demand for social innovations moving beyond capitalist practices to make way for a socialized modern individual. Such a person would be capable of achieving autonomy while engaged in cooperative milieus of mutual aid, burdened by neither of the delusions Benedict said characterized American culture, the incompatible but conjoint desires for permanence and absolute individualism.

Pattern, Function, and Comparative Economic Ethics By the late 1920s and 1930s, as British ethnographers Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown promoted variants of “functionalist” anthropology in the United States, a young cohort of American anthropologists training at institutions other than Columbia had come to view the Boasian method as undisciplined or impressionistic. To a critic such as the young University of Chicago anthropologist Robert Redfield, Boas’s move away from “diffusionist,” historical approaches to notions of “pattern” meant only that one unsatisfactory empirical method, which strictly avoided significant scientific generalizations about cultural processes, had given way to another.40 The gap between Boasians and the British ethnographers was not as great as it seemed, however.41 Recognition of cultural pluralism, attention to the variable economic ethics of different cultures, and a holistic method that sought signs of cultural coherence or of disjunction in the lifeways of different peoples characterized both schools, and these common traits, taken up by someone as vigorous as Margaret Mead, would support efforts to synthesize the two currents.42 Malinowski was the first of the British visitors to gain an American audience. Years of fieldwork among the people of the Trobriand Islands, begun in 1914 and prolonged for the duration of the world war, helped Malinowski

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set a new standard in ethnographic depth. His Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) described in fine detail the Kula ring, a remarkable system of trading relations by seafaring canoes that knit together the Trobriands with other islands stretching hundreds of miles east of New Guinea. Magic spells or incantations accompanied virtually every act in the voyaging process, from felling trees and carving canoes to hoisting or furling sails and finally distributing the proceeds. The Kula was, Malinowski wrote, “exchange of an entirely novel type.”43 Thick arm bracelets carved out of shell were exchanged for necklaces strung of small shell disks: bracelets moved in one direction around the island ring, necklaces in the other. A voyage by one people to an island inhabited by ethnically distinct but longtime partners would bring either bracelets or necklaces, with the givers expecting to receive the other article when the partners made a corresponding voyage six months or a year hence. There was to be no hint of haggling exchange in these relations, although the pride of giving was mingled with a clear sense of what was due in return. Although he was not free of racialist assumptions, Malinowski mirrored the Boasians in his inclination toward cultural pluralism. Not only did he repeatedly challenge dismissive European views of “native” beliefs and habits by comparing them with analogous features of European culture, but he also defined the purpose of ethnographic study as understanding differences among cultures in “values,” the aims and impulses of action, definitions of happiness, and “codes of law and morality which reward [man’s] virtues or punish defections”—all without presupposing an evolutionary hierarchy among them.44 Exploring a people’s “institutions, customs, and codes” belied precisely the old “missionary” view of “natives” as “lawless [and thus] inhuman and savage.” The first and basic ideal of ethnographic field-work is to give a clear and firm outline of the social constitution, and disentangle the laws and regularities of all cultural phenomena from the irrelevances. . . . At the same time, the whole area of tribal culture in all its aspects has to be gone over in research. The consistency, the law and order which obtain within each aspect make also for joining them into one coherent whole. . . . The Ethnographer has . . . the duty before him of drawing up all the rules and regularities of tribal life; all that is permanent and fixed; of giving an anatomy of their culture, of depicting the constitution of their society.45

This most basic notion of “functionalism” was one Malinowski shared with Radcliffe-Brown, who furthermore called on ethnographers to surrender the speculative quest for “origins” of human customs and instead describe how a given society, examined at one time and as a whole, worked as an ensemble of parts.46 Malinowski too disclaimed any search for “origins” and

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instead wrote of “systems”—complex, organized sets of beliefs or activities that integrated individuals, groups, and communities. Thus the Kula “welds together a considerable number of tribes, and it embraces a vast complex of activities, interconnected, and playing into one another, so as to form one organic whole.”47 In his portrait of the Kula, moreover, Malinowski offered a potent study in the relation of economy and society and an argument regarding the relativity of modern economic norms. The Kula challenged Western misapprehensions of economic life among “primitive” peoples, namely the dual errors of supposing that savages lacked modern economic virtues and yet manifested just those virtues (as universal propensities) in germ. Malinowski dismissed the notion of the “happy-go-lucky, lazy” native, for the native “does work hard, and work systematically, with endurance and purpose.” Yet the Trobrianders carried out this work not strictly or even primarily under the goad of necessity or the principle of utility. Their agricultural, manufacturing, or trading endeavors, which were all guided by “magical” beliefs and imperatives, drove “their conscientiousness far beyond the limit of the purely necessary” and presupposed a “non-utilitarian element.” Indeed, the orthodox idea of “Economic Man” was, according to Malinowki, a “fanciful, dummy creature . . . blighting [anthropologists’] outlook with a preconceived idea . . . an imaginary, primitive man, or savage, prompted in all his actions by a rationalistic conception of self-interest.” Work among the Trobrianders followed “motives of a highly complex, social and traditional nature, and [pursued] aims which are certainly not directly towards the satisfaction of present wants, or carried out on the principle of the least effort. . . . Work and effort, instead of being merely a means to an end, are, in a way an end in themselves.”48 Seeing in Kula ritual no Smithian “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,” Malinowski challenged, in ways resembling the institutionalists’ critique, those assumptions about “primitive man” on which “many of the scholastic deductions of abstract economics are based.” He saw no evidence of “primitive communism” either, for besides examples in Trobriand life of collective property and communal labor, he also recognized an individual sense of property, motives of competition and rivalry, and the like.49 The Kula was in many ways a rivalrous exchange, an exercise in showing one’s greatness by giving more valuable gifts than one had received, suggesting both pride in the possession of these articles and a jealous concern for assessing their relative worth—even though the articles represented a most curious form of property. These cherished things were not to be owned permanently or willed to heirs but held temporarily before being passed on. They served not as tools, provisions, or even common ornaments of dress.

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Why devote such effort to articles denied even instrumental use in sacred rites? The significance of such questions stood out in discussion of the Kula a few years later by Marcel Mauss, the French collaborator and successor of Emile Durkheim. A correspondent of Boas, Mauss considered the Kula a kind of potlatch, a competitive display of giving that ran to the point of waste—thus suggesting the Kula was not “exchange of an entirely novel type” but rather something common across human cultures.50 Nor, in Mauss’s view, was the Kula entirely nonutilitarian, for as Malinowski acknowledged but understated, a great deal of bartering for useful goods occurred in markets set up on the occasion of Kula visits. As Mauss put it, the Kula was “the vehicle for busy intertribal trade,” since it “proscribes . . . all things relating to hatred and war that must be exorcised in order to be able to trade between friends.”51 Kula ritual showed, that is, how trade was woven into the structure of social relations: as gift giving sealed relations among groups and communities, exchange and solidarity reinforced each other. Moreover, the prevalence of such arrangements in the human past should make the current regime of market society look peculiar indeed, just as Sombart and others at the turn of the century had insisted when detailing the historical specificity of modern capitalism. Now in the 1920s, Mauss’s essay “was part of an organized onslaught . . . against utilitarianism,” according to anthropologist Mary Douglas, one intended “to underpin social democracy.”52 The Trobrianders conduct extensive trade, Mauss wrote, without “the cold reasoning of the merchant, the banker, and the capitalist.” Kula rivalry clearly did not demonstrate pure benevolence or altruism, yet along with similar systems of economic behavior, it proved that between the poles of individual self-reliance and “the solicitude arising from reciprocity and cooperation” there lay “an entire and immensely gradated series of institutions and economic events,” a range of phenomena “not governed by the economic rationalism . . . we [moderns] are so willing to propound.”53 In citing that “gradated series,” Mauss glimpsed an intermediary realm of service and cooperative institutions that social liberals expected to grow between, and in some fashion overshadow, the separate spheres of economy and government. Here was a third term, relevant to the measured aspirations of interwar reformers seeking a “middle way” between individualism and collectivism as well as to those emerging theorists who wished to locate civil society as a field that neither economists nor political scientists but only some new discipline could adequately grasp.54 Mauss pointed out that giving and obligatory reciprocity, which he had sighted in “primitive” societies, were in fact hardly absent from the modern world. They had recently returned in the form of “social insurance legislation, a piece of state social-

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ism that has already been realized.” In this way, social provision of goods and services reciprocated for the worker’s gift of labor: “A considerable part of our morality and our lives themselves are still permeated with this same atmosphere of the gift, where obligation and liberty intermingle. Fortunately, everything is still not wholly categorized in terms of buying and selling.” Indeed he hoped for further advances in such mixed forms of freedom and communal responsibility. A much greater role for “cooperation” would mark “the kind of economy that is at present laboriously in gestation . . . [especially] in the hearts of the masses, who possess, very often better than their leaders, a sense of their own interests, and of the common interest.”55 Mauss was surely more programmatic than Malinowski in sketching the connection between interwar economic anthropology and contemporary affairs, yet Malinowski’s spare conclusions pointed in the same theoretical direction. As he insisted that utilitarian views “ignore the deep tendency to create social ties through exchange of gifts,” Malinowski concluded he had found a “type of phenomenon, lying on the borderland between the commercial and the ceremonial.”56 Similar implications emerged in Radcliffe-Brown’s work. Though the two functionalists had distinct intellectual genealogies within traditions of English anthropology and their work tended to diverge over time, differences between their methods were not sharply etched before the mid-1930s.57 Both upheld a “scientific” view of anthropology, claiming their findings rested strictly on “objective” observation. Both said the purpose of ethnography was to disclose the structural “unity” of a primitive society.58 And as Malinowski challenged the “scholastic” dogmas of “economic man,” so Radcliffe-Brown counterposed his inductive approach to that of a political economist, who “starts from a priori theory, from which he tries to deduce all the economic institutions around him.”59 Before Radcliffe-Brown studied anthropology, dissenter and sexologist Havelock Ellis introduced him to Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902), which sought to rebut “social Darwinist” claims of inevitable competition in human interaction by citing the frequency of communal and mutualistic practices in many societies. Thus when Radcliffe-Brown began his first major fieldwork in the Andaman Islands before World War I, he was willing to recognize the “communism” of Andamanese production and consumption.60 He was also familiar with Marx’s work, and that, combined with the “sociological” milieu at the London School of Economics, where he taught in 1909 –10, led Radcliffe-Brown to define anthropology in more “social” than “cultural” terms. He emphasized “economic life in its relation to social structure and ‘social cohesion.’”61 The influence of Marx did not go far, however. More potent was Durkheim’s emphasis on “social cohesion,” which

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matched Radcliffe-Brown’s skeptical attitude toward economic theory and gave him the keynote for his “functionalist” or “structural-functionalist” method. His interest in the French school was reciprocated by favorable mention in Mauss’s work, which credited Radcliffe-Brown with providing further evidence that gift relations built social solidarity.62 In anthropology or “that branch of sociology that deals with primitive societies,” Radcliffe-Brown wrote, the “cause” of particular institutions lay not in their historical source, which was inaccessible to any method but speculation, but in their contribution to the general “social process” as it existed at a particular time.63 In the early and mid-1930s, Radcliffe-Brown developed these inclinations into programmatic statements on the meaning of “function” in anthropology. Functions “contributed” to the “total activity” of an organic system, Radcliffe-Brown wrote in 1935; “a social system . . . has a certain kind of unity, . . . a functional unity . . . [defined] as a condition in which all parts of the social system work together with a sufficient degree of harmony or internal consistency, i.e. without producing persistent conflicts which can neither be resolved nor regulated.”64 Because function could not be separated from “structure,” the settled relations among the parts of an organism that survived as individuals (cells or persons) came and went— any more than physiology made sense without anatomy—his approach became known as “structure-functionalism.”65 Radcliffe-Brown saw limits to the analytical power of social cohesion and functional unity. He did not take the organismic analogy too literally and doubted that the opposite of functionality—dysfunction or pathology in organic systems—made sense for society. Individual organisms got sick and died, though this was rare among societies, in which “functional disunity or inconsistency” might be remedied as the society “change[ed] its structural type.”66 Despite his hesitation to talk of a “sick” society, however, RadcliffeBrown contrasted “eunomia” (a condition of smooth functioning) with “dysnomia,” that is, “a greater or less degree of disorder or internal inconsistency in the social system which can only be remedied by a change of type in the social system or some part of it.” He made clear the relevance of these themes when he added that “some people think that the economic system of the U.S. at this period of history is dysnomic.”67 Despite the apparently loaded character of such judgments, Radcliffe-Brown insisted that “social cohesion” provided a standard for “objective judgment.” As evidence of his “objective” view, he noted, “A savage tribe practising polygamy, cannibalism, and sorcery can possibly show a higher degree of consistency than the United States of 1935”—an example implying that his notion of objectivity permitted him to take his distance from the moralizing rhetoric of Western “civilization.” It is hard to see how his functional standard could avoid value

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judgments altogether, since a diagnosis of “dysnomia” or inconsistency summoned up talk of “remedies,” and hence a therapeutic need for social change.68 Radcliffe-Brown had made a place for himself in American anthropology by the mid-1930s, and his students at the University of Chicago began to study North American Indian cultures in a synchronic vein, focusing on kinship and on “sanctions” as mechanisms of social control, particularly “shaming” sanctions, a theme destined to play a prominent role in cultural analysis through the 1950s.69 Tensions between functionalists and Boasians occasionally flared (Radcliffe-Brown archly questioned the value of Edward Sapir’s empirical methods in language study, and Sapir denounced his critic as an ill-informed interloper in Americanist ethnography), but grounds for collaboration were strong.70 The tacit functionalism that characterized the work of Boasians such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead provided an opening for attempting a synthesis of the two camps. Mead in particular tried to mediate between them and had a suitably wide range of training and affiliations to attempt it. Before graduate studies in anthropology, she had been a student of William Ogburn, a sociological phase in her development followed by a graduate apprenticeship in behaviorist psychology. For years afterward she maintained a close and affectionate relationship with Ogburn, who remarked in the early 1930s that “this functional approach is certainly waking anthropology up—and making it a most lively subject.”71 Mead was, moreover, deeply concerned “about the fate of the social sciences” (sharing the prevailing positivist view of anthropology as a science) and mingled in all circles of the American discipline.72 Malinowski began to make an impression on American anthropology on a 1926 lecture tour. A letter from Ruth Benedict describing that visit impelled Mead—soon to travel home on a long ship voyage in the company of New Zealander Reo Fortune—to read Malinowski. Following her divorce from her first husband, Luther Cressman, Mead set off on further fieldwork with Fortune. His connection to Radcliffe-Brown and the latter’s research center in Sydney (as well as rumors of Malinowski’s negative remarks on Mead’s work) brought Mead into the circle of “R-B,” as his friends and associates called him. Mead and Fortune spent a year in the Admiralty Islands, where Radcliffe-Brown had pointed them, and her stay there among the Manus people led to her 1930 book Growing Up in New Guinea.73 When Radcliffe-Brown lectured in New York City during the summer of 1931 before taking his position at Chicago, Mead took meticulous notes on all the lectures and hosted him regularly for dinner at her and Fortune’s apartment.74 Mead reported to Ruth Benedict that his emphasis on studying “social structure” and functional “mechanisms” with the hope of discovering, from a great deal of comparative work, some universal laws of society, “seems to me

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an excellent approach.”75 In turn, Radcliffe-Brown had a high opinion of Mead’s work, considering her kinship analysis in Growing Up in New Guinea “the most complete and thorough analysis of a system that is available in print.” Even though he believed Benedict granted far too much determining power to “patterns,” Mead became for him a significant interlocutor in attempts to define “culture” and its relation to social structure.76 As she bridged schools in anthropology, Mead also pursued affiliations with psychology. At the summer seminars in Hanover, New Hampshire, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council—richly funded events intended to spark interdisciplinary social research—Mead began collaborating with John Dollard, an Ogburn student at the University of Chicago who had been drawn into Sapir’s circle and the psychological side of culture studies.77 Also at Hanover, Mead was asked to represent anthropology in a study of “competitive and cooperative habits” commenced by psychologists Gardner Murphy and Gordon Allport. Soon tied up in the “horrible jealousies and factions” that troubled culture and personality studies (mainly between Sapir and Benedict), this project nonetheless provided Mead with an opportunity to comment on comparative economic ethics.78 Collecting essays on thirteen cultures (some covered by graduate students and others by herself), along with an introduction and a concluding “interpretative statement,” Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples appeared in 1937. The book displayed Mead’s penchant for synthesizing diverse strands in current thinking about self, culture, and society. She frequently cited Radcliffe-Brown’s schemata for analyzing “social systems” or distinguishing different “levels of integration” from simple stateless communities to elaborate political societies. She called on Benedict’s notions of a culture’s “ideal personality,” too, its mechanisms of “character formation,” and social responses to those individuals who do not conform. The book was also determinedly empiricist. In approaching the problem of comparative economic ethics, Mead built from the bottom up by simple observation. Refraining from strong conclusions about the relative salience of cooperation and competition in human behavior, she gingerly attempted to find patterns or correlations among the thirteen studies she assembled. At pains to emphasize complexity, she refrained from labeling a particular society either cooperative or competitive and recognized instead—much in the spirit of Mauss’s findings—a continuum of mixed practices from one pole to the other. She also enhanced the classification scheme with a third term, named somewhat confusingly “individualistic” since it did not carry Lockean or Smithian connotations. With these caveats, Mead was ready to distinguish the main emphases of different societies, illustrating the method in her own case study. The Arapesh in the mountains of New Guinea, she wrote, worked in family or other small, voluntary groups, largely for their own benefit but without

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intent to compete with or dominate others. They were motivated by the desire to “help” others and contribute jointly to the ideal of “growth,” understood both as the maturation of children and the increase in the community’s resources. It was in this sense an “individualistic” society (due to the relative independence of family groups) verging on the “cooperative.”79 Throughout, Mead challenged “utilitarian” economic notions regarding the necessary conjuncture of scarcity, competition, and acquisitive behavior, as well as what she regarded as the economic and technological determinism of vulgar Marxism.80 In their place, she adopted a very rough-hewn functionalist method. The factor that “determines whether individual members shall cooperate or shall compete with one another,” she wrote, was “the way the structure of the society is built up.” She defined “structure” in terms of the definition of kin groups, the construction of and relations among village settlements, the nature of political authority, the degree of fixity or mobility in individual status or rank, and so on.81 The Arapesh, for instance, lived in small villages of fluctuating population, worked scattered garden plots, and traveled trading routes that brought them into contact with different families among their own mountain people as well as with other peoples beyond their own territory. Clan membership had become largely a formality, as individuals chose whom they would work with, where, and when. They remained primarily devoted to a family ethic in which husband and wife reared their children jointly, with great affection, and they held cosmological beliefs of strict order and balance. Based on thick descriptions of this sort, Mead drew relatively simple conclusions. Cooperation seemed to hold where people belonged to “closed” groups marked either by “fixed” status hierarchies or the absence of definite status distinctions. In contrast, competitive societies were marked by loosely integrated (and sometimes violently divided) communities that permitted individual initiative, staggered statuses, and the possibility of individual mobility along the scale of prestige.82 Mead also introduced a psychological dimension to the distinctions between competitive, individualistic, or cooperative types of society. In many cases, “competitive” (as opposed to merely “individualistic”) societies manifested an insistence on “ego maximization,” coupled with the “will to power over persons,” resulting in sharp distinctions of wealth, relations of dependence, and exploitative practices. “Among the Ifugao [of the Philippines],” she noted, “the stratification between rich and poor approaches that with which we are familiar in our own society,” and generally such settings provided meager provision for “security.” Competitive societies generally offered individuals a single standard of “success” against which all measured themselves, and when their efforts enabled them to move “up or down on some one common scale,” anxiety was rife.83 Among the Arapesh, in con-

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trast, she found “a low valuation of the self in relation to the ends of others, and above all . . . the devotion of the entire people to a common non-material ideal.” They manifested an attitude of “mutual helpfulness and care” and pursued “mild and kindly ends,” while “the violent man, the man who is possessive, high-tempered, jealous, distrustful” was the deviant. Mead’s evaluation was not unmodulated: her earlier account of the Arapesh in her 1935 book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies made it clear that their cultural suppression of the “high-tempered” not only caused personal suffering for such individuals but also denied the society the contributions of more self-assertive and innovative sorts. Yet in this account, she focused especially on standards of achievement among the Arapesh: “Conspicuous also is the diffuseness of the goal set up by the society, the number of ways in which a satisfactory functioning may be attained, the freedom left to the individual to choose or reject a skill, the lack of any single scale by which success can be measured.”84 Mead’s evaluation of economic ethics gave high marks to a pluralist recognition of diverse modes of action, combined with the value of individuality versus conformity. The aim of modern anthropology, Mead told participants in the Hanover seminar, was not to uncover the origins or the long-distant past of contemporary societies, but rather to “understand other possible ways of life, other solutions which are open to human beings.” It illuminated “the different conditions of personal and social life under which human beings can survive and flourish, and also what prices must be paid by some members of society that other members—either of different sex, age, status, temperament, or intellectual endowment, may have a full development.”85 Though she understood culture as something that grew and changed “slowly and painfully,” few statements more clearly expressed the rationale for anthropology as one of disclosing the variability, and hence changeability, of human institutions. Critics of contemporary economic institutions welcomed the point. Reviewing Mead’s Sex and Temperament in 1935, the New Republic’s Malcolm Cowley linked the thesis of cultural variability in gender norms to the nature of class hierarchies, the possibility of challenging them, and hence the feasibility of remaking society. Echoing George Soule, he wrote: Miss Mead is essentially right in her principal conclusions about sex and temperament and the lack of a real connection between them. She is right [too] that most . . . of the traits connected with social classes are also non-hereditary, are roles invented as if by a dramatist. . . . There is no more biological basis for class distinctions than there is for the belief of the Mundugumor that only a child born with the umbilical cord wrapped round its neck can become an artist. And Miss Mead is justified in her emphasis on the infinite adaptability of human nature. This, indeed, is the lesson pointed by the studies of almost all the modern anthropologists. After scattering over the world for 30 years,

108 / Chapter 3 they are now carrying home the results of their studies. They have to report that nothing is humanly impossible, that there is certainly no inferno in which man has not managed somehow to live and probably no Utopia toward which he might not rise.86

Mead thought cultural relativity undermined the economic dogma that human nature, competitive markets, and admirable social traits such as industry, innovation, and individuation were necessarily tied together. Writing from Bali, Mead challenged “the idea that such completely cooperative societies make people less industrious,” for the cooperative and egalitarian Balinese, she wrote, “are the most tirelessly industrious people I have ever seen.”87 And despite her claim that cooperative norms most often appeared in societies where status hierarchies were closed, fixed, or flat, she denied that cooperation rendered everyone alike.88 Quite the contrary. In a 1961 reissue of Cooperation and Competition, she wrote, “I would, today, lay more stress upon the exceedingly standardizing effect of competition in the reduction of range in behavior and the production of uniformity and conformity.”89 Her interwar work had helped nurture an analysis of capitalist ways of life, founded on a Benedict-like challenge to the “single standard” of “success” that, far from disappearing after the end of the Depression, remained on the scene as a long-term midcentury cultural critique.

The Cultural and Functional Critique of Competitive Society By the mid-1930s Mead had joined an interdisciplinary circle devoted to culture criticism that included Benedict, sociologist John Dollard, and analyst Erich Fromm in a close group galvanized by Freudian émigré Karen Horney. Born in 1885 to an affluent German family, Horney broke barriers by earning a medical degree, entering an all-male profession, and embracing Freud’s new science. She sought a training analysis in 1912 and soon joined the teaching staff of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, which by the 1920s overshadowed the original movement center in Vienna as the liveliest milieu for the development of Freudian ideas. She worked with Hanns Sachs, one of Freud’s early circle, and had a high standing as clinician and lecturer, even though her gender kept her at some distance from the institute’s elite. In 1932, a former Berlin student, Franz Alexander, the director of Chicago’s Psychoanalytic Institute, invited her to become the institute’s deputy director. Alexander cultivated ties to the University of Chicago, and while the medical faculty would not accept him as one of its own, the university’s social scientists began to congregate around him. Already in 1930,

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political scientist Harold Lasswell and John Dollard, still a graduate student, were meeting with Alexander. The three got to know Horney once she arrived, and while Dollard left Chicago in 1932, he renewed his ties with Horney once she moved to New York in 1934.90 The other émigré in the group, Erich Fromm, was trained both in sociology (under Alfred Weber at Heidelberg) and in psychoanalysis (under Sachs and Horney at Berlin). At the Berlin Institute, he had joined the Kinderseminar led by Otto Fenichel for young trainees interested in a leftleaning, Marxist-inflected psychoanalysis. Led by his Heidelberg classmate Leo Löwenthal, in 1929 Fromm joined the Marxist Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt led by Max Horkheimer. He fled Germany in 1933, visited Chicago to lecture, and there met his old teacher Horney, with whom he began a long love affair. With her, he made his way to New York in 1934 and there resumed his role as head of psychological research at the nowtransplanted Frankfurt Institute, sheltered at Columbia University. Fromm’s tie to Marxism led him to examine the social-historical context of psychological phenomena. His influence on Horney was compounded by her association with Lasswell and with Harry Stack Sullivan, whose emphasis on “interpersonal” dynamics suggested a distinct brand of neo-Freudianism. All these reinforced Horney’s own inclinations to insist on a broader context for neurosis than the inbred drives of the individual. Her experience of women’s subordination in professional and social life, as well as her transatlantic struggle to make a new home, made her sensitive to the claims of culture over biology.91 By this time, Dollard regularly visited New York City to conduct the “control analysis” that completed his psychoanalytic training, meanwhile cultivating a close working relationship with Mead.92 They steadily widened their circle of collaborators. Dollard arranged for Mead to meet Fromm in early 1934, and she reported having a “grand time,” impressed by Fromm’s combination of Freudian training and familiarity with the matriarchal theories of iconoclastic anthropologist Robert Briffault.93 Following the summer 1934 Hanover conference, Dollard and Mead talked of convening a special group of likeminded scholars to take culture and personality studies to the next level. At Dollard’s instigation, Mead enjoyed her first sustained intellectual encounter with Horney in early 1935. Soon Dollard dreamed of setting up a “training unit for social scientists who want to add personality research techniques to their other equipment . . . the idea being Freud multiplied by Boas, [Radcliffe-]Brown, Malinowski, Mead and Dollard.”94 At a June 1935 party given by Fromm, Mead completed the circle by introducing Benedict to Horney. That evening Mead brought up the “shame sanction” prevalent among North American Indians—the enforcement of social norms by the sensitivity of the individual not to an inner sense of “con-

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science” but to the community’s approval or disapproval—and Fromm speculated about the psychic mechanisms underlying it.95 Such discussions enhanced Horney’s and Fromm’s sense of their debt to the social scientists. Fromm told Mead her Sex and Temperament and Benedict’s Patterns of Culture had influenced him deeply, and Horney noted that her growing emphasis on the role of culture in forming personality derived from Dollard, Mead, and Benedict.96 The expanded New York–New Haven group met regularly through the following fall, as Horney presented a New School lecture series, “Culture and Neurosis,” that served as the basis of her revisionist book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time.97 Horney remained active in the New York Psychoanalytic Institute until 1941, though Neurotic Personality clearly challenged the Institute’s orthodoxy. She softened the blow by stressing those elements of Freud’s work she affirmed and “built upon,” and by displaying the ways her dissent rested on her mastery of the tradition. As a clinician Horney emphasized intense concentration and sensitivity in hearing her patients and trainees talk; on that basis she distrusted the tendency of young analysts to leap from an analysand’s descriptions of current difficulties to their presumed infantile origins. She would not cast aside “the genetic approach,” but neither would she ignore “the actually existing unconscious tendencies and . . . other tendencies that are present, such as impulses, fears and protective measures.” Horney offered a more phenomenological description of patients’ feelings and the dilemmas they faced in everyday life as adults.98 She rejected a one-sided biological focus on instinctual drives and called instead on the explanatory role of “culture” understood in a pluralist vein. In the 1920s she had criticized Freud for rooting female psychology in female anatomy. Now, in opposing the “instinctual” bias, she decisively broke with Freud’s universalism. She recognized that neurotic symptoms only exaggerated traits common among “normal persons,” but she attributed those similarities to the common culture neurotics and others shared: “That they do not represent problems common to ‘human nature’ seems to be warranted by the fact that the motivated forces and conflicts in other cultures are different from ours.” Because culture also varied across time, Horney doubted that neurosis arose only from the repression of sexual urges, insofar as common attitudes toward sexuality had relaxed since Freud’s early work. Such relaxation occurred in 1920s and 1930s Germany and the United States, especially among the professional middle classes, and contemporary neuroses likely stemmed from repression of some other sentiment: not erotic desire as such but rather the impulse of aggression, or as she usually put it, hostility. She recognized as well as Freud did that analytic interpretation needed to unravel the mediating factors that linked latent impulses like hostility to manifest neurotic symptoms. Rather than overt ag-

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gression, she typically saw in her patients “a certain rigidity . . . a discrepancy between potentialities and accomplishments . . . [and] the impression that he [the neurotic] stands in his own way”—all marks of fear, inhibition, and withdrawal from the world, or, in sum, signs of anxiety.99 “Anxiety is the dynamic center of neuroses,” Horney declared, and she followed Freud in judging anxiety to be rooted in fear of one’s own impulses—in these cases, the fear of venting hostility and reaping the consequences that followed. Furthermore, she sought an etiology for this disorder in childhood experience, though her genetic analysis owed more to culture than biology. Lack of parental warmth or sibling rivalry spawned hostility and the fear of expressing it, all of which owed something to the modern culture of the family, which, as Mead had pointed out in Coming of Age, enforced an undue degree of personal isolation, conflict, and jealousy. The mechanism of repression was crucial, leading individuals to project their hostile sentiments on to the world at large, consequently perceiving their own aggression as an external force confronting them. This Horney called the “basic anxiety”: “a feeling of defenselessness toward what is felt an overpowering danger menacing from outside,” or “an insidiously increasing, allpervading feeling of being lonely and helpless in a hostile world.” Seeking relief from this anxiety, individuals might search incessantly for love and approval, or for power and control shown by domination, prestige, or possessions. They might seek both to gain approval from people and to dominate them, to render themselves inoffensive while craving attention, to atone for imagined sins while nursing a self-righteous sense of self. Trapped in such “unsoluble” compromises or vicious circles of hostility, inhibition, and anger, people suffered paralysis.100 Horney promised to demonstrate why and how “our culture generates a great deal of anxiety” and why “practically everyone has built up one or another of the defenses I have mentioned.” Such neurotic traits appeared to be lodged in contemporary “character structure,” a notion she borrowed from colleagues in Berlin, particularly Wilhelm Reich. His “characterology” meshed well with notions of American “culture and personality,” at least those marking Benedict’s, not Sapir’s, approach. Moreover, Horney paid special attention to contemporary economic norms and their cultural as well as psychological consequences, building an argument using roughly equal portions of Fromm’s Marxism and the mild anticapitalist critique of the Americans. Her language virtually followed Mead’s work in Cooperation and Competition, though it was franker in its critical edge. She did not offer a critique of capitalism per se (the word did not appear in her text) but of competitive individualistic culture. It was not that anxiety, or the desire to relieve it by pursuing power or other compensations, was uniquely American or modern. More germane was the American ethic of success, following

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hints by Mead and Benedict before her. Like them, she linked cultural and psychological problems not to the dirty underside of bourgeois society, to its exploitative relations of inequality, but rather to the ideology that justified the society, the norms of mobility due to effort that the society deemed just: “If . . . power, prestige and possession have to be acquired by the individual’s own efforts he is compelled to enter into competitive struggle with others. From its economic center competition radiates into all other activities and permeates love, social relations and play. . . . it is not at all surprising to find it an unfailing center of neurotic conflicts.”101 Horney’s rhetoric made her affiliation with Mead and Benedict crystal clear: “There is, in fact, so much destructive competition in an individualistic culture that as an isolated feature one hesitates to call it a neurotic characteristic. It is almost a cultural pattern.” The “emotional isolation” that marked American life (stemming from a family constructed, in Mead’s words, as a “closed circle of affection [opposed] to a forbidding world”) helped make neurosis “a stepchild of our culture.” As Horney saw it, The isolated individual has to fight with other individuals of the same group, has to surpass them and, frequently, thrust them aside. The advantage of the one is frequently the disadvantage of the other. The psychic result of this situation is a diffuse hostile tension between individuals. . . . The potential hostile tension between individuals results in a constant generation of fear . . . [and] the prospect of failure. The fear of failure is a realistic one because, in general, the chances of failing are much greater than those of succeeding, and because failures in a competitive society entail a realistic frustration of needs. They mean not only economic insecurity of needs, but also loss of prestige and all kinds of emotional frustrations.

Horney built on Benedict’s hints about the peculiarly repressive character of American society rooted in the straitjacket of success norms. She fashioned a forceful, coherent version of the cultural critique then emerging from interwar anthropology and psychology. Recognizing the role of economic ethics in the formation of modern culture and personality, this critique combined romantic anticapitalism with a defense of modernity against traditionalism. It upheld individual nonconformity, and it assailed economic individualism for introducing dysfunctional motives and behaviors that denied the individual a satisfying place in a community.102 This critique of competitive culture had broad application in social analysis then and in years afterward. The same year Horney’s book was published, John Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town deployed similar themes to grasp the tortured American dynamics of race. Dollard had spent the summer of 1935 in Indianola, Mississippi, collecting autobiographical “life histories” from a number of African Americans as a means of marking “the

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growth of a person in a cultural milieu.”103 In his book, Dollard went beyond his own mild racial liberalism to provide a searing portrait of Jim Crow as a system resting on brutal domination of black folk. He recognized the social construction of race categories—he alluded to “solidarity based on whiteness”—as well as the aggression that accompanied the “caste system” of the color line. He noted the “economic gain” that the dominant caste (all whites) drew from the system, but he also recognized how cultural and social-psychological dynamics rooted in social class served to reinforce racial power. On the authority of his black informants, Dollard disputed the notion that the most virulent Negrophobia lodged itself among “lower class” whites. Rather, the white middle class, called “strainers” by the blacks, was far more viscerally disturbed by black folk, especially so because U.S. norms of classlessness demanded that the strainers repress their equal contempt for the poor whites beneath them. The strainers had to endure “exceptional impulse renunciation” due to “the pressure toward individual achievement and advancement,” and they sought compensation in secret vices that they identified with racial subordinates. Thus the success motive in American life again took center stage. Dollard noted, like Horney, that “power, prestige and mastery are the prime values of our society” whose achievement was signaled by “control of money” as the goal of those seeking status. Moreover, echoing Horney’s note on the conjoined impulses to mastery and subjection in an individualistic milieu, Dollard noted that some competitors felt a need to “prop self-esteem through the pain and humiliation of others.” In an individualistic culture that pinned everything on personal effort, status was felt to be acutely insecure, especially among “strainers,” who most urgently wished to assert and defend their racial prerogative. Their “renunciation of impulse freedom” and the consequent sense of “frustration” unleashed aggression. And although aggression was usually illegitimate, the system gave the white caste a socially accepted object for it—black folk.104 The social-psychological link Dollard made between racism and economic norms had a broad appeal among liberals and leftists, and it began a cultural analysis that endured into the second half of the twentieth century. Writing for a journal run by the racial liberal Lillian Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois hailed Dollard’s “brilliant psycho-analytical interpretation,” saying it provided the “most frank and penetrating analysis of southern mentality that I have ever read.” Dollard’s means of relating class, desire, and resentment figured in critiques of whiteness over succeeding decades by scholars running from Kenneth Stampp to Nathan Huggins, Joel Kovel, David Roediger, and Eric Lott.105 Dollard’s viewpoint also implied a reformist politics. In a passage resting on symbolic interpretation, he suggested ways to rebut the caste system’s patriarchal positioning of African Americans in “child-like” roles:

114 / Chapter 3 The parent-child symbol between the castes is one of the strongest barriers which a real economic democracy in the South would have to face. Very probably the caste institution could only be broken up when “brother” identifications with other Negroes, and perhaps whites, were substituted for the passive idealization of the “father”-planter and boss.106

If Dollard’s prejudices allowed him to imagine that Southern blacks, for now, accepted their dependency, he nonetheless also obliquely endorsed horizontal solidarities—implicitly working-class or union identities—as a route to economic democracy. The emergence of a social-psychological critique of success ethics, wedded to a rather widely shared social-liberal disposition among young reformist intellectuals of the interwar years, showed their skepticism toward capitalism as a way of life and their openness to alternative economic norms in the future of modern Western civilization.

Ralph Linton’s Synthesis and “The Next Civilization” Meanwhile, in a striking rebuff to Boas on his retirement in 1936, Columbia’s administration named a successor from outside his circle, Wisconsin anthropologist Ralph Linton. Linton had studied briefly at Columbia in 1916 –17 and was a mediocre scholar in Boas’s view. When he enlisted in the American Expeditionary Force in summer 1917, he pleased Boas no more than his Quaker parents, and when he returned to register for fall 1919 classes—in uniform—he alienated Boas further. Lacking prospects there, Linton soon left for Harvard, though he spent less than a full year in residence there before submitting his dissertation in 1925. Never the disciple of an established scholar, Linton managed to secure museum posts and grants that took him to the Marquesas Islands, Madagascar, and various North American sites, where he had a talent for drawing close to his informants. In The Study of Man (1936), Linton’s summa of interwar American anthropology, he thanked by name more “native friends” than professional colleagues. “I consider as my greatest accomplishments,” he wrote shortly before he died in 1953, “that I am an adopted member of the Comanche tribe, was accepted as a master carver by the Marquesan natives . . . , am a member of the Native Church of North America (Peyote) according to the Quapaw rite, became a properly accredited ombissy nkazo (medicine man) in Madagascar, and was even invited to join the Rotary Club of a middle western city.”107 Bouts of malaria kept Linton home in the mid-1920s, first at the Field Museum and then at the University of Wisconsin, where he created a program in anthropology. He regarded himself “an interpreter or a synthesist of anthropology for a large audience.”108

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The Study of Man featured a curious dedication, “To the Next Civilization,” and Linton opened and closed with a degree of pessimism that was nearly Spenglerian: This book has been written in a time of confusion and uncertainty. It is still too soon to tell whether the Western World will recover from the self-inflicted wounds of the World War or whether, as seems more probable, partial recovery will only be a signal for a second and presumably successful attempt at suicide. There have been dark ages before, and there is no reason to suppose that they cannot recur.

He returned to the theme at the book’s conclusion. He feared the coming regressive forces of the “totalitarian state” would suppress “the study of culture and society,” since “for men to take an interest in such matters is in itself a criticism of the existing order, an indication that they doubt its perfection.” Should “centuries of darkness and stagnation” ensue, Linton still hoped that modern social science would be remembered in the way “we look back to the Greeks”—as “a heritage of technique for investigation and of discerned but unsolved problems; a new frontier from which free minds will sometime press forward again into the unknown”—once the “next civilization” emerged.109 Between these brackets of cultural despair, Linton addressed more proximate needs for reform. He disclaimed any attempt to “evaluate the plans now current” but wrote that “no one can doubt that there is urgent need for action looking to the reorganization of our society and culture on a sounder basis.” He followed most of his peers in recognizing the reformist implications of his field’s most recent conclusions. He denied that universal norms given by “human nature” or biological propensities set social standards, stressing instead the “extreme mutability both of men and their social institutions.” He noted the place of “cultural growth and change” in any anthropological theory of society, appealed to the recurrence of “invention” in material culture and social forms, and intended to explore the possibilities of “social engineering.” Thus he seconded Mead’s view that anthropology revealed the alternative solutions humans brought to their problems; he implied no yearning for a “technocratic” mode of social change. Linton recognized the pressure that individuals endured in “fitting in” to society and affirmed the value of human freedom. “Comparative studies provide some measure of the degree to which individuals can be shaped by their social environment,” he wrote. Anthropology aimed “to discover the limits within which men can be conditioned, and what patterns of social life seem to impose fewest strains upon the individual.”110 Linton recapitulated his field’s recent denunciation of racialism, and while “race” categories and ethnic prejudices occasionally appeared in his

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text, his cosmopolitanism was reasonably strong. Noting that race boundaries had been defined in various, highly subjective ways, Linton remarked that “all investigators who have a first-hand knowledge of non-European groups will agree that the total range of psychological types [among them] is very much the same as among ourselves.” He claimed to be agnostic about whether it was possible to demonstrate that one group was more intelligent than another but argued that existing intelligence tests measured cultural differences more than “innate ability.” If there were mental differences, he would view them not as “differences in absolute intelligence” but as diverse talents or inclinations, imagining a group that “might produce an over-sufficiency of artists and inventors but lack individuals who could work happily and effectively under the [mechanical] regime of the time-clock.” In Linton’s time, such distinctions might very well imply an invidious racialism, judging people of color as being unsuited to modern industrialism, yet Linton pointedly welcomed the prospect of a socially and economically egalitarian modernization: If all races have very much the same innate abilities, it is safe to assume that modern civilization will spread to all parts of the world. It is improbable that this would ever result in a dead uniformity of culture. For example, the housing, clothing, and food which were suited to tropical life would not be suited to life in northern Europe. However, it would mean a universal familiarity with modern techniques of production and a leveling of most of the present economic differences. This, in turn, would remove the main incentives for conquest and political domination. If colonies did not provide markets for the surplus manufactures of their owners, they would not repay the cost of administration. The various races of mankind would thus be put in a position of practical equality out of which social equality could easily develop.

He could not confidently predict this, but “the only real solution of what we call racial problems lies in a change in the white man’s attitude toward members of other groups,” and if that change were not forthcoming, the white man was in for a “rude awakening.”111 Linton regarded anthropology as a “young science,” typically marked by a number of “competing schools” that “tend to fuse and disappear” as a science “matures.” He expressed his willingness “to go part way with any one of these competing schools but not all the way with any one.” Although his book avoided the highly technical specialties (linguistics and kinship systems) that were hallmarks of the Boasian and functionalist schools, Linton carefully assessed the most important claims of each. His simple definition of social structure as a combination of “statuses” and “roles” fashioned an idiom that soon became widespread in American social science. By status he meant not a hierarchical mark of prestige but a position occupied in rela-

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tion to others, say, “father,” “mother,” or “sibling”; “doctor,” “healer,” “carrier,” and so forth. “Role” defined the activities expected of a person in such a position, and role behavior was governed by “ideal patterns.” The “sum total of the ideal patterns” guiding behavior constituted a “social system” that “organizes the attitudes and activities of such aggregates into functional wholes.” The idea of “functional wholes” implied that a considerable degree of “integration” (or fit and consistency among the “ideal patterns” in a social system) was necessary for cultural survival, though Linton noted that “pattern conflicts” or inconsistencies among varied roles and norms in a system were common. Indeed, too great a degree of integration would render a society rigid and unable to adapt to change. Thus Linton seconded many of Radcliffe-Brown’s propositions, but he also claimed—anticipating common criticisms in decades to come—that “structure-functionalism” paid inadequate attention to “the field of time” and imposed too heavy a sense of “functional determinism,” explaining any element of culture simply by its fit in the social whole. Linton insisted that people in different societies made real choices about what innovations they would admit to their lives; although such changes had to meet functional needs, the conditions of such a “fit” were not so narrowly defined that only one cultural element could do the job. Given the range of possibilities in the particulars, the explanation of any given cultural ensemble would depend not on functional order alone but also on historical views of human agency.112 Linton challenged Benedict’s method for implying the “complete submergence of the individual in society.” He agreed that one could find a systematic “directionality of ‘interests’” in a culture: one people tended to be individualistic, competitive, and violent and another familistic, harmonistic, and placid. But Benedict’s notion of “pattern” too closely identified culture and personality. The better individuals were “adjusted” to their statuses and roles the more “smoothly” society operated, but strains were inevitable and provided an impetus to social change. “All life in society is a compromise between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group,” he wrote, “and it has the indefiniteness and instability of all compromise situations.” A prevailing social order may “attempt to fix and perpetuate those compromises,” but such attempts were “doomed to ultimate failure,” as “everchanging external conditions . . . throw their weight now on the side of the individual, now on that of the group.”113 Linton’s views of the current scene peeked through his careful assessments. In another idiom-shaping initiative, Linton distinguished those statuses that are “ascribed,” or allocated according to some given feature of an individual due to birth, and those that are “achieved,” or occupied by individuals as a consequence of their efforts and merits. Noting that “Americans have been trained to attach such high values to individual initiative and

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achievement,” Linton questioned this confidence, pointing out how much ascription (in prohibitions against Negroes and women) limited competition for achievement, and questioning the absolute value of achievement ethics as such. The person living in a society governed by ascribed statuses is much less likely to be disappointed than a man living under our own system, where every other man may be a rival and where the limits for ambition are not socially defined. . . . Membership in a rigidly organized society may deprive the individual of opportunities to exercise his particular gifts, but it gives him an emotional security which is almost unknown among ourselves. Which of these . . . makes for the greatest happiness to the greatest number the reader must decide for himself.114

Thus he alluded to the Benedict-Horney critique of achievement ethics. Linton questioned Americans’ economic faith. Acquisitive tendencies may be “almost universal,” but that did not make modern capitalist norms natural, for “although all societies recognize the existence of individual property, all of them also place certain limits on its acquisition” and otherwise regulate economic activity in culturally diverse ways. “Small-scale manufacture and trade can be carried on quite successfully in the absence of the profit motive, as we commonly use that term,” he noted, with reference to the prevalence of gift exchange among the Marquesans he studied in the early 1920s. Moreover, private property in most human societies consisted of personal property, “things which have been made or gathered, not of the sources of supply.” In premodern societies, he continued, “the ownership of these sources is normally vested in some social unit, such as the clan or entire tribe,” and open access to common resources assured a measure of social equity, whatever variations prevailed in individual skills or accumulation. Like an old follower of Henry George, Linton supposed that similar conditions prevailed on the “open frontier” during Euro-American settlement of the American West. And like many Depression-era liberal planners who argued that the “closing of the frontier” and industrialization had profoundly changed the value of laissez-faire, Linton suggested that restricted access to common sources of wealth rendered private property and initiative less virtuous than they might otherwise be.115 “As long as access to the sources of wealth is guaranteed to all,” he wrote, “the acquisitive tendencies of individuals are a real asset to the group,” by stimulating effort and encouraging “the building-up of a surplus against the time of need.” But “when such access is cut off,” acquisitive drives “must be rigorously controlled and techniques developed for ensuring a share of the society’s wealth to each of its members.”116 Denying an anthropological imprimatur to prevailing economic norms, Linton seemed to favor thoroughgoing reforms, but like many social liber-

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als with conservative temperaments he also dismissed “agitators” who insisted on a sharp division of society into antagonistic classes. His holistic suspicion of atomistic individualism as well as class conflict led him to decry a modern lack of common beliefs and commitments, which he believed necessary to bind individuals and groups together. In Linton’s view, this loss of solidarity only made the current “derangement of the economic system” and the inequality of modern society that much worse. He compared the cultural straits of modern society with decadent periods of Rome: Exploiters and exploited have existed since the dawn of written history, but the only parallel to the modern situation is that of Rome in the days of the late Republic. Here also power came to be vested in the hands of a group of selfmade men who had no common standards and no feeling of responsibility to each other or to the state.

Having thus skewered the irresponsible rich, he also noted (referring now to the late Empire) that the suffering poor similarly lacked “enough cultural unity to do anything” about worsening conditions. In the spirit of Sapir’s critique of “spurious culture,” he remarked, “The sudden rise of the machine and of applied science has shattered Western civilization and reduced Western society to something approaching chaos.”117 Yet despair was not all. Linton appealed to small-scale community, the potency of “closely integrated, self-conscious social units” to help reconstitute a “new order” in the future. He suggested that “the breakdown of our present economic system” might encourage radical decentralization, whereby “those who survived would be forced to return, for the most part, to life as peasants in small communities,” and the disturbing impulses of technical innovation would abate. Yet, if Linton thus seemed to echo regressive proposals of such conservative groups as the Southern Agrarians, he also emphasized racial equality and the need to enhance the “degree of cultural participation” for all as a means “to the effective operation of democratic institutions.”118 Like Sapir Linton argued that what the modern world needed, “more than improved production methods or even a more equitable distribution of their results,” was “a series of mutually consistent ideas and values in which all its members can participate.” And like the Boasians, his point was not an antimodern one. He condemned the rigidity of society, which welcomed “mechanical invention” but scorned “social invention.” Though he admired the “common interests and a common culture” among tribal peoples he knew, Linton sought an equivalent for a mobile society: If the members [of a society] lack this feeling of unity, no elaboration of formal governmental patterns or multiplication of laws will produce an efficient state or contented citizens. How such unity may be created and maintained in

120 / Chapter 3 great populations and especially in fluid ones where the individual’s close, personal contacts are reduced to a minimum is probably the most important problem which confronts us today.

His point was a familiar one in the social-liberal milieus of the interwar period. However ill-defined he left the outlines of “the next civilization,” he believed modernity had finished with unregulated private economic initiative and awaited a new impulse of collective control to revive itself. The resources of solidarity could not exist solely in political unity but depended on some intermediary realm of social relations, like Mauss’s “gradated series” of institutions between state and economy. Linton shared some of the characteristic romantic dispositions of interwar anthropology, the subdued legacy of an old tradition reworked in modern terms to sustain a critique of the culturally straitened order of competitive individualism. He also pointed to further developments, whereby the expectation of a postcapitalist order moving beyond economic individualism was conjoined with a drive to further define an intermediary realm of civil society that could sustain both solidarity and individuality. In that venture, drawing together the threads of interwar social thought while moving into the new world beyond another great war, the postcapitalist vision would come to fruition.119

chapter 4

Talcott Parsons and the Evanescence of Capitalism *

Two currents of interwar thought sought to promote the development of social science and to engage in social criticism: socioeconomics and cultural anthropology. Somewhat tenuously rooted in the academy, these intertwined currents galvanized intellectual creativity. The most influential interwar work of empirical sociology, Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd’s Middletown (1929), combined a Veblenian critique of business and pecuniary motives with a culture concept, partly Boasian and partly functionalist, in an exposé of the conformism governing American life. Middletown was a landmark of American social liberalism, and Robert Lynd’s career in the second quarter of the century showed how social liberals could enter alliances with wealth and power while persisting in their own reformist aims. Lynd had moved from the social gospel into the foundation world of social research tied to Rockefeller interests, where he remained a major figure until World War II. His left-leaning impulses grew more rather than less pronounced. His widely read broadside of 1941, Knowledge for What?, called for a committed scholarship and assailed positivist modes of social science that recorded facts without meaningful purpose or criticism; later, in the brief flush of reconstruction sentiment after World War II, he remained a vigorous proponent of “economic democracy” in sympathy with the social unionism of the United Auto Workers. Helen Merrell Lynd continued beyond the war to study “shame” and “guilt” cultures as explored earlier by Mead and Benedict. Yet by the 1950s, the Lynds seemed passé.1 The mantle of sociology passed to the archtheorist Talcott Parsons. 121

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Parsons’s distinction rested on a number of achievements beginning in the 1920s. Following a brief stint of graduate study in Germany, he returned to the United States dedicated to bringing the work of Max Weber to an American audience. Weber already had some ties to American life. He made that most “American” figure, Benjamin Franklin, his exemplar of “the spirit of capitalism,” and he lectured at the Congress of Arts and Sciences convened at the St. Louis World’s Fair in September 1904, during a hiatus between writing the first and second installments of his famous essay on the Protestant ethic. Yet, when Weber died in 1920, his writings were largely unknown to Americans and to American social scientists. It was the young Parsons who published the first—and for seventy years thereafter, the preeminent—English translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which was welcomed on its appearance in 1930 by an audience steeped in cultural criticism of the Puritan origins of American culture and the “iron cage” of bourgeois convention.2 Parsons went on, in his monumental study of 1937, The Structure of Social Action, to become the writer most responsible for importing the work of European social theorists, notably Emile Durkheim as well as Weber, into the milieu of American sociology. And after World War II, Parsons helped relocate the academic center of American sociology from the University of Chicago, home to the field’s most powerful department for the first four decades of the century, to Harvard University (accompanied by Columbia University, where the most prominent of Parsons’s many students, Robert K. Merton, held sway). By the 1950s, Parsons had developed what he called a “structural-functional” theory of society, widely considered to be the dominant paradigm of the postwar discipline. Parsons seemed to represent a war-borne sea change rendering American social thought more conservative.3 He was far more devoted to an ostensibly value-neutral academic science than Lynd, and postwar critics routinely charged that “structural-functional” theory was devoted to understanding the nature of social order rather than the dynamics of social change. In fact, however, Parsons remained optimistic about continued reform in the modern world, and that optimism, far from being “conservative,” was rooted in social-liberal convictions nurtured in an interwar milieu not far removed from that of the Lynds. Parsons was a child of the Progressive Era and a young man of the 1920s liberal Left. Having studied initially with dissenting institutional economists who had a good deal of sympathy for cultural anthropology, Parsons only became interested in sociology per se during his academic tour of Britain and Germany in the mid-1920s, bypassing entirely the early academic centers of American sociology, Chicago’s ethnographic urban ecology and the beginnings of positivistic survey research sparked by Columbia’s first sociologist, Franklin Giddings.4 When he returned from his studies abroad, it seemed to Parsons his academic future was uncertain in-

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deed. Even as he found his place at Harvard as an instructor of economics and sociology, his early work on the relations of economy and society sought to relativize market relations and adumbrate the potential for a “new order” beyond capitalism. Anticipation of a “new order” took on special urgency for left liberals who hoped to avert the threat of fascism. In his own desire to foster reform and social solidarity, Parsons, like other social liberals, adopted the new culture critique of the 1930s. The interwar milieus of institutional economics and cultural anthropology sustained a mild critique of capitalism and aspirations for the construction of a social economy beyond its boundaries. They commenced the construction of a postcapitalist vision, providing some of its prototypical elements: (1) convictions about the variability of economic norms across time and the approaching obsolescence of private property; (2) the suspicion that real economic practices violated the strictly defined boundaries of economic systems and rendered the very meaning of “capitalism”—even as it occupied everyone’s attention—uncertain; (3) the interdependence of morality and expertise in fashioning the means of guiding a social economy to come; (4) the mortifying and socially dysfunctional standards of economic individualism and the need, if reconstruction were to succeed crisis, of making way for a new kind of socialized individuality; (5) the desire to locate a pluralist range of institutions across an intermediary realm of civil society. As Parsons’s interwar work helped build a new discipline, we see these elements come together in a richly articulated whole, recast as a mature postcapitalist vision that carried into another postwar world. By the late 1940s, Parsons came to believe that American social science as a whole was undergoing a significant reformation, a “shift of emphasis away from economics” as the “new social sciences” of sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology sketched out a distinct realm of experience apart from politics and economics that he understood as “social relations.”5 At the same time, Parsons concluded that the very notion of “capitalism,” too wedded to economic reductionism, had lost salience in the analysis of modern society. For Parsons and others, the coming of war had at first aroused acute anxiety about the dysfunctional aspects of individualistic American society, but its successful prosecution put those fears to rest and awakened confidence in the prospects of a democratic solidarity capable of sustaining a dawning social economy.

The Reformist Dimension of Parsons’s Early Social Theory Talcott Parsons was born December 13, 1902, in Colorado Springs, to a middle-class professional family. The last of six children, he was given the

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maiden name of his maternal grandmother. His parents had solid bourgeois credentials and liberal inclinations. Edward S. Parsons, son of a modestly successful Brooklyn box manufacturer, turned away from a business career to join the Congregational clergy and espouse the social gospel. Talcott’s mother, Mary Augusta (Ingersoll) Parsons, daughter of a prominent Cleveland business family, supported woman’s suffrage and other reform causes. Edward Parsons had attended Amherst College, as most Parsons men did. Founded in 1821 as a center of opposition to Harvard’s Unitarianism, Amherst combined Congregational orthodoxy, evangelical spirit, and devoted scholarship. Student revivals swept across campus periodically, the last one touching Edward. He went on to Yale Divinity School and worked for a time as assistant to Lyman Abbott, an early leader of social Christianity and a Progressive Era reformer. Contributing to the movement redefining Christianity in more moral than doctrinal terms, Edward published a short book, The Social Message of Jesus.6 In 1888, he took a pulpit in Greeley but held it for only four years, before becoming a professor of English (and Milton scholar) at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. After serving as college vice president from 1898 to 1916, and working briefly in New York City to coordinate the YMCA’s war-related services, he assumed the presidency of Marietta College, Ohio, in June 1919.7 By the time Talcott reached Amherst College in 1920, the era of student revivals had passed, but a strong ethic of “service” combined with sophisticated study in the natural sciences remained.8 Talcott planned to become a physician, following his older brother Charles, who worked in the medical missions founded by philanthropist Wilfred Grenfell in the poor fishing villages of Labrador and Newfoundland. Under the leadership of President Alexander Meiklejohn, Amherst in the late 1910s and early 1920s was vibrant with intellectual and political activity; it was cited by Upton Sinclair in his scathing account of higher education, The Goose Step, as an exception to the upper-class conservative bias of American colleges.9 Meiklejohn hired young faculty with settlement house experience, brought the British socialist R. H. Tawney to campus, and fostered the local growth of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and its successor (after 1921), the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID).10 Young laborite intellectuals such as Carter Goodrich were welcomed on the faculty. In the early twenties, Meiklejohn backed a labor college cosponsored by Amherst and the trade unions of nearby Holyoke and Springfield. Talcott’s favorite teachers, biologists Otto Glaser and Henry Plough, joined the effort, as did the institutional economists Walton Hamilton and Clarence Ayres, who drew Parsons away from premedical training to social science. The introduction they provided included Veblen and a sample of Boasian anthropology in Robert Lowie’s critique of Victorian evolutionism, Primitive Society.11

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Meiklejohn antagonized several constituencies in the college community by leading a campaign against intercollegiate sports, struggling with the older, established faculty over administrative prerogatives and curricular reforms, and showing a marked distaste for vigorous fund-raising. He was forced to resign by college trustees in June 1923, and though confidential documents emerged decades later to suggest that Meiklejohn was dismissed for mishandling college funds, the episode seemed at the time a clear case of a radical innovator confronting a college old guard.12 The young Parsons belonged “to the group who were most agitated by the events and who were among [Meiklejohn’s] strongest partisans.”13 Along with Addison Cutler, Parsons wrote a report on the affair for the New Student, the publication of the National Student Forum, a left-liberal network with which Margaret Mead’s Barnard College social science club was also affiliated.14 After threatening to leave the college in protest (but then deciding to stay on after all), Parsons’s group vowed to carry on the spirit of Meiklejohn’s program in progressive education. As Hamilton, Ayres, and others left Amherst in the wake of the controversy, Meiklejohn’s student supporters took their place at the helm of the labor college classes and organized for themselves an independent “group major,” an interdisciplinary set of courses in economics, political science, history, and philosophy devoted to current social problems, under the rubric, “Control in the Economic Order.” Reminiscing in the mid-1970s, Parsons described himself as an engaged student, one of the “enthusiasts for the Russian Revolution and for the rise of the British Labor Party . . . firmly in the opposition to the current United States regime during the presidencies of Harding and Coolidge.” Parsons chaired his college chapter of the Student League for Industrial Democracy.15 As he and Cutler declared in the New Student, they learned at Amherst “that the economic and social order was a matter of human arrangements, not one of inevitable natural law, and hence that it was subject to human control.”16 When Parsons set off in 1924 for a year at the London School of Economics, his Amherst teachers provided him with introductions to the preeminent social-democratic intellectuals there, Harold Laski and R. H. Tawney.17 He also attended lectures by Bronislaw Malinowski, whose Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) had just launched his international renown. According to a friend he met in Vienna during the summer of 1925, Parsons considered himself a socialist.18 The next year (1925–26), he attended the most liberal of German universities, Heidelberg, where he knew Karl Mannheim and studied Marxism with Emil Lederer, one of the few Social Democratic Party intellectuals in the German academy. Under the direction of Edgar Salin, a popular lecturer who edited the papers of Friedrich List, founder of German historical economics, Parsons wrote a doctoral dissertation on Sombart’s and Weber’s theories of capitalism.19

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Under Weber’s influence, Parsons began to turn away from the institutional economics he learned at Amherst. Shortly after returning to the United States to become an instructor of economics and sociology at Harvard in 1927, he accepted—under certain limiting conditions—what the institutionalists denied, namely, the scientific validity of formal, or neoclassical, economic theory. The institutionalist spirit lingered, however, in articles drawn from his Heidelberg dissertation, where Parsons criticized the universalism and rationalism of “Anglo-American economic thought.” Economics, he wrote, failed to recognize the historical specificity of capitalism and the social structure that made it an integral whole exceeding the sum of individuals within it. Sombart and Weber concurred with Marx in seeing capitalism as a compulsive system that exerted force over individuals regardless of their personal intentions and wishes. Capitalism’s systemic character demanded that any reform of it be radical—or as he put it, not mere “tinkering with some parts independently of others.”20 Yet Parsons worried that such organic principles of analysis also ascribed to society a rigidity that denied the possibility of significant change—the root, he thought, of Sombart’s and Weber’s conservative pessimism, particularly Weber’s ideas of the “iron cage” and the ossification of bureaucratic routine. Parsons preferred to uphold the possibility of reform by emphasizing lines of continuous development from one social order to another: There seems to be little reason to believe that it is not possible on the basis which we now have to build by a continuous process something more nearly approaching an ideal society. . . . In the transition from capitalism to a different social system surely many elements of the present would be built into the new order.21

Ten years after the war, the transitional aspirations of the liberal Left had survived. Notions of social reform governed Parsons’s thought during the following ten years as he wrote the series of studies in abstract theory that led to publication of his first major treatise, The Structure of Social Action, in 1937. That ponderous, 775-page book examined the work of Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber in order to set modern sociological theory on a new footing, summed up by Parsons as the “voluntaristic theory of action.” Parsons intended “voluntarism” to challenge the vogue of behaviorism, begun in the 1920s, and other positivistic persuasions, which reduced social action and social order to given facts outside of consciousness, such as heredity, environment, or conditioning. Humans had agency, as we would say today—yet this agency could not be reduced to the terms offered by an old, outmoded “utilitarian theory of action,” that is, the rational pursuit of individual self-interest.

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The Structure of Social Action described the scientific development of sociology in terms quite like those Thomas Kuhn used years later to mark a scientific revolution: Parsons focused on the emergence of a new paradigm (or “frame of reference,” as Parsons called it), a single framework of basic questions or concepts, whose adoption among a community of practitioners serves to “found” a science.22 For Parsons, the obsolete paradigm of prior social thought, the “utilitarian theory of action” that gave primacy to the rational pursuit of individual self-interest, foundered on a particular empirical problem—the explanation of social order—that the emergent theory of voluntarism promised to overcome. From Hobbes through Locke, the tradition that Parsons named utilitarian explained the order, stability, and continuity of society by reference to either a superior sovereign authority (the Hobbesian state) or a natural reason that led Lockean individuals to reach accommodation among themselves. Both factors, Parsons claimed, lay outside society as such (in the state or in nature) and both contradicted other important presuppositions of utilitarian theory, namely that individuals are motivated to pursue ends that are in principle independent of the ends of others. Pushed further to account for social action in its entirety— including the question of how actors’ goals are determined—utilitarian thought proved its “positivist” bent, Parsons explained: it assumed that humans acted either “rationally,” in adapting to their environment, or lawfully, according to instinctual patterns of behavior. In either case—rational adaptation or instinctual drives—the ends that humans pursued were identified with or collapsed into the conditions of action, that is, considered to be something given to rather than chosen by an actor. When Parsons thought of “action,” he had in mind a schema constructed of four key elements: the given conditions of action, the ends actors pursued, the means they used, and the norms determining how they chose those means. By collapsing “ends” into “conditions,” positivist theories violated the integrity of this schema and treated social activity in naturalistic terms.23 Positivistic theories, in Parsons’s view, focused one-sidedly on conditions and means (nature), idealistic theories, on ends and norms (culture). Mediating between the two, Parsons’s voluntaristic sociology was to provide an immanent explanation of social order, relying on no extrasocial source of integration. He insisted that something other than rational self-interest rendered society possible: an element of solidarity rooted in the subjective orientation of its participants. Society existed as such insofar as the varied and distinct sets of motives and purposes guiding individuals were all “integrated” with a wider “common system of value attitudes.” This truly social element did not lie outside the individual as an impersonal entity called “society” but rather inhered as a “constitutive element” of personality itself. The individual “participates in a common social life,” Parsons wrote. Indi-

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viduals shared “a well-integrated system” of values or ethical principles that, however vaguely defined, offered potent ideals (such as “freedom” and “justice”) as a basis for orienting action. Here lay “a self-consistent ideal of conduct, not merely random ethical values but the expression of a single ethic.”24 Parsons’s voluntaristic theory rang with political overtones. The “utilitarian theory of action” stood for the liberal market theory of economic orthodoxy and the model of homo economicus criticized by institutionalists and anthropologists: it treated actors as atomistic individuals, took their ends as exogenous factors (varying “randomly”), and assumed that their only norm for selecting means of action was that of rational efficiency. Such a theory could not adequately explain social affairs; moreover, the theory tended to decay into debased forms (various kinds of “radical positivism” explaining action in terms of instinctual drives or rational adaptation to given conditions) that violated its founding principles of human freedom. However veiled his rhetoric was, Parsons’s claim that an ideology devoted to justifying capitalism was so faulty, even in its ability to sustain essential liberal values, suggested a sharp critique of bourgeois society. Facing the collapse of capitalism and the looming threat of fascist regimentation based on reactionary appeals to “blood and soil,” left-wing critics in the 1930s typically offered socialist reforms as the best means to sustain principles of reason, freedom, and democracy. Parsons’s depiction of theoretical crisis in a time of paradigmatic revolution virtually echoed those very terms: he described “the inherent instability of the utilitarian system” and showed how it “breaks down,” becoming a “mechanistic determinism” that explained human action solely in terms of “heredity and environment.” To avoid that theoretical fate, Parsons urged a move in the “opposite direction”—away from biological reductionism to reaffirm the role of reason and the possibility of freedom—by “radically revising” the utilitarian system’s “whole framework.”25 Exchange “capitalism” for “utilitarianism,” and Parsons’s formulation evokes a familiar left-wing trope. Parsons believed he was living in transformative times. An unpublished paper of 1932 asked impatiently, “Is the stability and permanence of the present politico-economic regime to go entirely unquestioned?” Similar sentiments marked the opening pages of The Structure of Social Action, where he wrote, “Is it not possible that the future holds in store something other than ‘bigger and better’ industrialism . . . that instead of this, contemporary society is at or near a turning point . . . [?]”26 What connection might be drawn, then, between the abstract theoretical exposition occupying most of Parsons’s book and these concrete, practical questions that sparked his reflections? Parsons took for granted a basic trend of modern social evolution— that capitalist society was yielding to something much more collectivist in form—and he assumed, on that basis, that the most significant remaining

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social problem was a moral one. The Structure of Social Action posed this question: In a society ideologically so dependent on the nineteenth-century liberal (utilitarian) tradition, what resources were available to morally justify individuals’ acceptance of and commitment to new collective forms of political economy? This formulation of the problem recalled Rexford Tugwell’s musing on whether a modern planning regime could “command the communal loyalty of enough able men in competition with the private gains such men can always acquire at the expense of others.”27 In effect, both writers signaled the concern that the interwar reformist milieu had with the relation between morality and economics. It was the issue that Weber and the interwar anthropologists addressed: the comparative study of distinct “economic ethics,” the variable motivations governing how people acted economically. Parsons’s treatment of the relation between morality and economics appeared in two significant, and contrasting, articles he published in the early and mid 1930s. His 1933 essay, “Service,” in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, joined the notion of secularization with a kind of social-Christian critique of capitalism, much as R. H. Tawney did, arguing that “the individualistic economic developments of early modern times” had eroded “ethical sanctions of service” and left no doctrines extant with “the power of justifying to the individual a real submergence of his self-interest.”28 Two years later, however, Parsons offered an entirely different view. Reviewing the work of British economic historian H. M. Robertson, he claimed that Weber had shown that capitalism could not be understood as “economic individualism” at all, or as the “pursuit of self-interest” unfettered by moral restraint. Rather, capitalism had arisen because “stringent ethical control” was applied in new ways to economic behavior. “The element of positive ethical value” that Weber discovered at the origin of capitalism “remained and still remains as a basic element in the modern economic order.”29 His point was not to vindicate contemporary capitalism. Nor did he think that accepting the scientific status of orthodox economics—if the nature of science was understood rightly—committed him to justifying capitalist social relations, which he still regarded as historically relative. In a 1930 draft essay on Alfred Marshall, Parsons set out to prove that Marshall’s advocacy of “laissez-faire” was not logically entailed in Marshall’s economic theory. Parsons repeated the point in a 1936 essay that attacked certain unnamed “dogmatists” for wedding economic theory to “defense of a particular empirical social order.” (Almost certainly Parsons had in mind the antisocialist arguments of Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, whose critical account, Collectivist Economic Planning, had appeared the year before.)30 Parsons considered most economists to be as naively empiricist as the institutionalists, who imagined they could adequately capture “the whole

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economic life-process” in a realistic portrait based solely on inductive methods. Institutionalists, in the critique Parsons borrowed from Weber, failed to recognize the always-limited and selective nature of observation, and hence its inevitable reliance on theory; on the other hand, orthodox economists were guilty of reifying abstractions of economic man, rational motivation, and optimal efficiency as if they were real descriptions of actual social life.31 As description, the institutionalists’ (and Berle and Means’s) view of the U.S. economy—the steady growth of business concentration, making the old image of thrifty, competitive individualists hopelessly obsolete—struck Parsons as basically correct.32 Thus, in his essay on the economic dogmatists, Parsons rejected the view that monetary incentive to individuals was the sole motive of social action or even the prime mover of economic growth. Returning to the interpretation of Weber that he had deployed against Robertson, Parsons claimed the early bourgeois were driven not by egoism but by “disinterested” ethical concerns (Puritan concerns over election and proof)—a fact suggesting that new moral motivations might yet emerge in lieu of pure monetary incentive to drive economic activity effectively. And he found no reason to conclude that equalizing income would necessarily degrade work motivations or innovation: In so far as money income has become, as is largely the fact in our society, the dominant symbol of achievement and social status, the explanation is not to be looked for in any intrinsic nature of economic motivation, which if interfered with will bring disaster, but in what may roughly be called “institutional” causes which are historically variable.33

Thus he upheld the interest in alternative economic ethics that ran from the socioeconomists through the work of interwar anthropologists. Parsons’s views on the status of economic theory, combined with his sense of “institutional” variability in economic motivations, sustained a reformist viewpoint. First, he argued in a 1934 article that economic laws were to be understood not as faithful descriptions of given social reality but rather as propositions bearing a conditional character: if one strove toward economic efficiency, the laws formulated the means toward it. Economics rested on a purposive standpoint.34 Formally, Parsons’s argument resembled that of market socialists, professional economists such as Oskar Lange, Abba Lerner, and H. D. Dickinson, who sought to drive a wedge between what they considered the scientific price theory of neoclassical economics—which could be a tool of planning in a collectivist regime—and capitalist society, which, because of its monopolistic and wasteful character, did not operate in an “economic” fashion at all.35 Whether or not Parsons fully embraced

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their arguments, he knew their work and had argued similarly to distinguish Marshall’s theory from the economist’s laissez-faire advocacy.36 Parsons thus had some sense that neoclassical economics could be applied to macroeconomic management. Second, the perspective Parsons adopted on the malleability of economic motivation rested on an intriguing combination of Weber’s notion of the “calling” and Durkheim’s reflections on “institutional” regulation and the revitalizing role of “occupational groups” (like professional societies) in sustaining ethical standards of common practice.37 For Parsons, Durkheim had illustrated the “non-contractual bases of contract” (the shared norms necessary for people to enter into contract to begin with), thus refuting the utilitarian individualism of classic liberal theory by demonstrating the existence of a common ethical element in social interaction. Furthermore, Durkheim suggested that even individualism was a moral postulate held collectively, to be distinguished from anomie or loss of moral regulation per se. From these premises, Parsons concluded that the social-Christian or ethical-socialist view of contemporary market society he had evoked in his article on “Service”—that is, as an amoral cutthroat world corrosive of social bonds— accepted as fact (while condemning in principle) the mistaken liberal assumption that modern societies consisted of atomized individuals. On the contrary, Parsons insisted, contemporary society had a moral element, a communal dimension, and that element was none other than Weber’s notion of the “calling” (Beruf )—or perhaps, depending on one’s translation, one’s profession. Indeed, just as Parsons was nearing completion of The Structure of Social Action, he embarked on a study of modern professions—particularly medical practice—as a paradigmatic case of “institutional” regulation and a potential source of solidarity. Parsons adopted Durkheim’s sharp dichotomy between collective moral factors and individual instrumental factors, and he defined institutions as those social arrangements regulating human action primarily by force of moral commitment rather than by positive or negative sanctions that appealed to self-interest. He did not doubt that utilitarian considerations naturally arose as “secondary” supports for institutionalized behavior, among which he counted “political” measures defined as such by their reliance on coercive power. But all these secondary supports would prove bankrupt, he wrote, should “moral attachment . . . dissolve away.”38 Thus, at a time like Parsons’s, when dramatic social reform was usually identified with expanding the capacity of the state to intervene in and manage economic affairs, he cast some doubt on the efficacy of purely “political” measures of control. Since “political” measures depended for their efficacy on a preexisting moral bond secured in social institutions, the real locus of reform lay not in the state but in civil society. Only in civil society, that is, could new institu-

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tions—a source of moral renovation—provide the necessary foundation for mounting tendencies toward establishment of some kind of planning regime. Like Tugwell, Parsons rested the prospects for social reform in many respects on the possibility of reforming the moral orientation of leadership. Like Veblen, Parsons contemplated the capacity of professionals to turn away from “pecuniary motives.” And like Durkheim, who imagined “occupational groups,” in their guildlike standards of practice and public service, as a source of renewed solidarity in the modern world, Parsons took up the “professions” as one of the central “institutional” forms of social solidarity in modern life and thus the fulcrum of a social reform strategy.39 In a 1934 prospectus for his research study of the medical profession, Parsons proposed to study the relation between the American medical profession’s “formal structure” of “competitive individualism”—the fee-for-service system of private practice—and its governing professional ethics, based on traditional nonmarket commitments to provide care.40 Parsons claimed that the medical profession provided “a peculiarly favorable test case” for the Durkheimian thesis that institutional norms underlay individualistic behavior, and thus Parsons suggested that the nonmarket motivations were at least as deeply rooted as market individualism. Parsons never completed the program of fieldwork he outlined for his study of medical practice, but his reflections on medicine informed several of his articles in the late 1930s, particularly “The Professions and Social Structure.” In it, Parsons claimed it was mistaken to distinguish business occupations sharply from the professions on an axis of “egoism and altruism,” again seeming to rebut the ethical critique offered by such writers as Tawney, who saw economic individualism eroding “service” motivations. But Parsons’s insistence here that “the problem of self-interest itself has been exaggerated” also challenged capitalist ideologues who identified egoism and efficiency. Professional and business occupations, he wrote, shared functionally similar commitments to rationality, specialization, and so forth, and, as individuals, professionals and businessmen were probably equally motivated by a mix of self- and other-regarding concerns. Implied was the judgment that professional ethics of service could sustain efficiency and that businessmen were not wholly immune to professional motivations. Parsons did not deny that between the two spheres lay “a clear-cut and definite difference on the institutional level”—that is, the primacy of monetary incentive in business—but it was precisely the domain of institutions that was historically relative and changeable. Thus “Professions and Social Structure” ended with the suggestion that a sociology of professions could “throw much light . . . on certain . . . possibilities of dynamic change.” He noted that professional organization already was highly valued in modern society, particularly in the pursuit of knowledge and the provision of medical care.41

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What kinds of “dynamic change” did Parsons have in mind? Could the functional similarities between modern business and the professions be considered a smooth path conducive to a program of reshaping the first to resemble the second, reconstructing business enterprise in professional organizational forms? In 1928, Parsons had raised the hope, contra Sombart, of discovering some line of continuity between existing social structure and a proposed future state. Was he now implying that the professions—representing (as forms of consensual, collegial self-regulation) the survival of community within modern society—provided a model for achieving control of economic life, establishing a kind of collectivism based on norms already present in the existing social order? In view of Parsons’s early motives, we can interpret his basic theoretical assertions of the 1930s—on the nature of price theory, the historical mutability of institutions, the significance of common moral motivations, and the effectiveness of sanctions—as part of a coherent, though not entirely explicit, political argument: that a future economic order based more on planning than market incentives was possible if state control were undergirded by generalized professional values gearing personal behavior in the economic sphere to commonly accepted definitions of the public good and the public trust. At this time, professionalism had not lost the reformist overtones it had for some Progressives.42 Left-wing writers in the Depression decade continued to see middle-class professionals as a swing group that might be recruited to the Left or lost to the Right.43 In some scenarios of social change drawn in those years, moreover, managers were expected to play a professional role in a coming social-democratic order. In a 1942 book, The Unfinished Task, the prominent left-wing writer Lewis Corey argued in Veblenian fashion that the local management of business, if disengaged from absentee ownership and unalloyed profit maximization, could serve as a skilled, professional staff in public enterprises.44 The market socialists’ view of the role of managers, as acting independently under the price-setting authority of a central planning board, was not much different. Left liberals in the cooperative movement and the trade union leadership foresaw an expanded role for public enterprise—as “yardstick industries” established to set standards for private corporations—which required managers to perform a “disinterested” public function.45 The hardiness of this discursive community suggests the mild left-wing tinge of Parsons’s reflections on the professions.46 His letters of the time made it clear that he viewed the professional model as something that could be extended to new spheres of social life, effectively removing them from the sway of market forces. To a student, he wrote that the newspaper, for instance, might “evolve in a direction that brings it closer to the fiduciary professional organizations like universities, hospitals, and so on,” resting on

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endowments rather than profit seeking and thus freeing the journalist to act as a true professional, rather than as an employee subject to commercial pressures and restraints.47 Even in his favored case of medicine, Parsons clearly did not consider the established mix of market and nonmarket motivations unchangeable. In an unpublished 1939 book review, he mocked the “romantic” individualist propaganda of the American Medical Association while showing some sympathy for “the most important experiments in organization which have departed from the ‘orthodox’ private practice,” such as cooperative delivery of care in group medical practices.48 Parsons regarded the primary and crucial question of social reform as a moral one: that of disseminating, as he put it in a short essay on “Education and the Professions,” “disinterested” motives in place of the rampant “love of money.”49 By mounting a moral project of extending existing norms of professional practice, Parsons believed that contemporary society held the seeds of its own salvation. The problem was merely that existing values and moral orientations of a more collectivist sort were insufficiently concretized in institutions. In a telling passage of Structure criticizing Durkheim, Parsons revealed his commitment to social reform. Durkheim, he wrote, showed an excessive preoccupation with order and stability, and so firmly identified moral norms with social cohesion as to endorse mere conformism and “eliminate the creative element of action altogether.” By contrast, Parsons brought attention to the gap between ideal norms and the social conditions that block their realization. At precisely this point there arose, he wrote, the specifically voluntaristic category of “will and effort,” and in this striving to effect ethical ends—to realize a society’s own ethical affirmations—were to be found “the dynamic processes of social change.”50 This passage helps to tie The Structure of Social Action to the reform-minded ideas evident in his more topical articles. It also helps to determine the meanings implied in the name Parsons gave to his social theory—“voluntaristic.” One of its meanings carried a reformist imperative: the will to make social change by compelling a society to live up to its professed ideals. Another meaning Parsons gave to “voluntaristic” referred to the peculiar kind of social action shaped by institutional regulation according to ethical standards. This was a conception of action that was neither instrumentally rational in the economic or technical sense nor purely symbolic (or “ceremonial”) in its reference to otherworldly ideals. As a mediating concept, “voluntaristic” action was practical action guided by moral standards encoded in institutions, which constrained individual self-interest by the force of internalized rules, rules chosen as part of one’s orientation to action. Institutional action was a matter of free, or volitional, consent to social regulation. Preoccupied with the question of whether “contemporary

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society is at or near a turning point,” Parsons shared the view that modern society created increasingly complex forms of large-scale social organization that effectively limited the sway of individualistic action as understood in classical liberal theory. That tradition, Parsons stressed repeatedly in his writings of the 1930s, was deeply marred by outmoded assumptions. In particular, he attacked its dogged insistence on a metaphysical individualism, its belief in linear progress based on continuous economic growth, its facile assumption that a “natural identity of interests” held all members of a market society together, and its neglect of the element of coercion in economic affairs (which Marx, he recognized, had analyzed so acutely).51 Its resources for conceiving social order, especially at a time of sharp conflicts, were profoundly weak. In this context, Parsons’s book set off in search of a postliberal theory that could explicate the kinds of motivations required to effectively sustain the moral legitimacy of a collectivized order that was already emerging. Such a volitional moral bond as was promised in “institutions” (epitomized by the professions) was necessary if coercive forms of collectivization, all too evident in the guise of totalitarianism, were to be avoided. Forms of solidarity had to be cultivated, to counter or constrain atomistic “interests,” and they should be consistent with freedom and rationality. They were to be means of surpassing liberal market precepts in order to sustain liberal values of individuality, reason, freedom, and change. In these terms, Parsons’s work remained devoted to interwar schemes of reform that saw modern society moving beyond capitalism. It expressed his social-democratic wish to discover routes of reform that could surpass capitalist social relations on the basis of communal resources still potent in modern society.

The “Shift Away from Economics” The years following publication of The Structure of Social Action saw Parsons move from concerns most closely associated with the interwar milieu of socioeconomics toward the other most dynamic social science field of that time, cultural anthropology and its growing association with psychoanalysis. This intellectual reorientation coincided, for Parsons, with troubles of a personal, professional, and political nature. His great theoretical treatise, which carried with it practical arguments for the feasibility of a more collectivist political economy, appeared just as the legislative program of the New Deal crested and confronted stiff political resistance in the wake of the 1937 recession. With Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic program in disarray, foreign policy concerns increasingly took priority in public discourse, sparked by rumblings of war abroad. By 1940, Parsons took an active part in disputes

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over U.S. intervention or neutrality in World War II. At the same time, his admired older brother Charles died prematurely, due to alcoholism. Parsons’s attempt to account for his brother’s self-destruction gave him grounds to reflect, professionally, on phenomena of “deviance” and the social control of it, just as he attempted to understand American society’s capacity to mount war and the war’s likely effects on American social structure. All this occurred while Parsons sought a way to push his sociological enterprise forward, both to complete his empirical study of the medical profession and to flesh out the theoretical program whose outlines he had only sketched through interpretations of Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber. The transition from learned commentator to independent theorist was bound to pose its own difficulties aside from the highly strained context of political and personal events. Those events gave him, nonetheless, the opportunity, interests, and language to bring forth a new statement of “voluntaristic” theory in terms subtly but fundamentally recast. Parsons had always been inclined toward a holistic view of social science, and his entire career can be viewed as a succession of attempts to build a general social theory abstract enough to provide a systematic, all-sided view of social phenomena (the relations among economics, politics, culture, and community) and to stipulate the relations between different disciplines in probing aspects of this totality. In Structure, he stressed sociology’s relation primarily to economics and secondly to politics, while in 1940, he helped develop a shortlived undergraduate concentration in Social Science at Harvard based on a “common language” that bridged economics, government, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. By the early and mid-1940s, however, his relation to anthropology and psychology came to the fore. In other words, Parsons gradually turned his sights from the region where politics and economy met sociology to that marked by the “boundary” sociology shared with culture and personality.52 Thus he began his “shift away from economics.” Conjoined with that shift was a refocused version of the postcapitalist vision, one less concerned with forecasts of a coming collectivist era and more dedicated to the proposition that an ongoing transition in social affairs rendered the problem of capitalism all but obsolete. Despite Parsons’s early exposure to cultural anthropology with Clarence Ayres at Amherst and Malinowski at the London School of Economics, the field did not impinge on Parsons’s central concerns until the late 1930s. At that point, besides dwelling on “values,” he began to speak more explicitly in terms of “culture.” He carefully watched the rising status of functionalism in anthropology, encouraged by Malinowski’s and Radcliffe-Brown’s sojourns in the United States. At the same time, psychoanalysis, which was steadily gaining influence as émigré analysts fled Europe, gave Parsons the means of understanding how socially sanctioned values and motives became

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embedded in individual personality, via mechanisms of introjection and internalization forming the ego ideal and the superego. Parsons was ready to adopt the study of culture and personality, at least if psychoanalysis could be drawn away from its notion of “instinctual” drives to recognize the role of social-cultural context in personality formation.53 Parsons’s published and unpublished writings of 1939 –1940 show how he moved to incorporate the newer social science fields. His concern with explaining the phenomenon of social order and his adoption of the idea of “system” in The Structure of Social Action made functional anthropology appealing, with its emphasis on how the elementary parts of a society and culture could be understood by the contribution they make to the maintenance of the whole. That approach did not mean—and especially in the tumultuous times of the late 1930s could hardly maintain—that society was a faultless organism. Nor was psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on intrinsic psychic conflict, inclined to view personality as coherent or stable. Hence, in an unpublished theoretical manuscript of 1939, “Actor, Situation and Normative Pattern,” Parsons insisted that the “integration” of social systems and the “integration” of personalities were at best relative accomplishments. In fact, “strain and conflict” were quite real and active.54 He applied these terms of analysis in “The Motivation of Economic Activities,” a 1940 article that showed how his old language of reform melded with his new perspective on culture and personality, and how the psychocultural critique of the depths of anxiety and aggression in American life joined with his residual Veblenian view of pecuniary and professional motives and his fascination with the social-structural transition initiated by the advent of corporate organization. Parsons wrote that the development of large corporate organizations brought motivation in business occupations closer into line with the motivations guiding the professions: what mattered in appointed corporate positions was not status based on accumulated wealth or investments but the expert fulfillment of one’s given task. He pointed out, however, that such a scenario of generalized professional norms would prevail only in “an institutionally integrated social system,” when in fact “ours is a society which in a number of respects is far from being perfectly integrated.” To illustrate the point, Parsons cited the tension in male occupations between monetary ambitions and professional performance that made corruption and official malfeasance all too common. Moreover, he suggested, conflicting pecuniary and professional values spawned widespread personal confusion and emotional insecurity among American men. The result was a kind of neurotic tension that vented itself in aggressive impulses that, if anything, reinforced egoistic drives, fostering the “acquisitiveness of a sick society.”55 Parsons’s remarks on the “sick society” indicated his incorporation of the

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late-1930s culture critique and even suggested a more pessimistic view of American life than he had offered in the mid-1930s, when he insisted that modern society held the seeds of its own salvation. Moreover, this new rhetoric signaled a telling innovation, or turn, in his work. As he recalled years later, his work on the medical profession and professional ethics—begun as a study related to the problem of economic motivation in a capitalist society—led him “on the whole unexpectedly . . . to another cognitive problem: namely, the relation of illness and its treatment to the motivational structure of personality.”56 Originally devoted to social control of economic behavior, that is, Parsons’s study took up the prism of sickness and treatment as the means of understanding how systems of values drew individual and community together—or failed to do so. The problem of “illness and its treatment” had a very concrete manifestation in the troubled life of his brother Charles. Charles’s vocation had encouraged Talcott to consider the medical profession first as a possible career and then as an object of study, for Charles’s involvement in the Grenfell medical missions suggested the kind of “service” Talcott recognized as a significant element of professional motivations. By the late 1930s, however, Charles’s career was tarnished by a pronounced drinking problem. Following his sojourn in Newfoundland, where he married another medical missionary, Charles established a practice in Kingston, New York, in 1933, but left in January 1938 to spend five months in China providing medical care under the auspices of a Popular Front organization, the American League for Peace and Democracy. For months after his return to the United States, Charles was, as Talcott put it in a letter, “without occupation,” while he was institutionalized for alcoholism. Afterward, he directed a small Boston alcohol treatment center, the Washingtonian Hospital.57 Charles’s marriage ended in divorce in August 1940, and on New Year’s Eve of that year, at age forty-seven, he died of a heart attack in a Philadelphia hotel room after a drinking binge.58 Even before that denouement, Talcott had considered alcoholism as the focus of a study that would examine psychic and social forces in interaction and hence illuminate the “boundary” relation between psychological and sociological theory.59 Studying “illness and its treatment” would illuminate the social shaping of action, the “motivational structure of personality.” He thought the Washingtonian Hospital could serve as the site of the study, and even after Charles’s death Parsons continued to discuss the project with the new administrator of the hospital, poet and psychiatrist Merrill Moore. As late as July 1941, he described his projected study of alcoholism as one concerning the “efficient functioning of social organizations, with special reference to the question of the mechanism by which tendencies of deviant behavior are controlled.” Although he turned over the study of alcoholism to a favored student, Robert F. Bales, Parsons’s new interdisciplinary coor-

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dinates of culture and personality stemmed in part from Charles’s decline and death, a tragic failure in the control of deviance.60 The war debate became the other proving ground for Parsons’s new interests. Like many mid-1930s left liberals, Parsons wished to avoid U.S. involvement in another foreign war even while he kept antifascist commitments to collective security. He contributed to a Popular Front organization that supported the Spanish Loyalists, hoping defeat of the fascists there would obviate U.S. military intervention in Europe. In the wake of the StalinHitler pact and the outbreak of war, however, Parsons became an advocate of aid to the Allies and later of U.S. intervention.61 In 1940, he joined the Council for Democracy, a New York-based organization that urged support for the Allies and protection of American society from fascist threats at home or abroad. He corresponded with the Committee for National Morale, a Council affiliate headed by a corps of liberal and social-democratic reformers that included Frank Kingdon, Gifford Pinchot, Louis Adamic, A. Philip Randolph, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson.62 In fact, promotion of “national morale,” defined as a sense of collective solidarity and responsibility in facing the demands of war, was a liberal campaign of 1940 and 1941, associated with strong support of New Deal reform and an ideological definition of the war as a “democratic” crusade.63 The idea had special currency at Harvard University, where political scientist Carl Friedrich, defining “morale” in participatory terms, tried to organize “committees of correspondence” around the country to “strengthen citizen participation in policy determination” through local discussion of “American Defense needs.” His greatest success was at home, where interventionist senior faculty combated the antiwar spirit of radical students and instructors organized in a left-wing teachers union.64 Prowar faculty formed an organization called, in Friedrich’s parlance, American Defense—Harvard Group in early 1941. Parsons chaired its local Committee on National Morale.65 Parsons’s reflections on war deepened his focus on “illness and its treatment,” for he considered isolationism a sign of social pathology, a kind of magnified anomie—Durkheim’s name for the loss of normative regulation that broke down social structure and disoriented isolated individuals. In terms such as these, liberals invested the struggle for national morale with political passion, for if they had long decried American individualism as antisocial—the main roadblock to social reform—they now identified isolationism as a comparable instance of privatism on the world plane.66 Individualism, Parsons wrote, has been defined to highlight not positive aims but purely “negative” liberties, “which in international affairs tends to take the form either of only wanting to be let alone and repudiating all international responsibility, or of using our governmental power simply to promote the ‘interests’ of individuals and groups [i.e., dollar diplomacy].”67 So he wrote in a Council for Democracy essay exploring the dimensions

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of social pathology in American life and the danger posed by far-right groups like Father Coughlin’s Christian Front. “All the major culture elements and antagonisms in Germany in the twenties and early thirties are, though in different combinations and proportions, present in our own society now,” he wrote, noting anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, a nationalist tradition linked to racial definitions of belonging, and diffuse “lower middle class” hostility to big business. Whether a cultlike mass movement would arise depended on the degree of disorder in social life and the aggressive sentiment it unleashed. “Social disorganization and the attendant personal disorientation and conflict,” he added, “are particularly widespread in this country at the present time.”68 The remainder of Parsons’s memo explored the sources of social strain and possible remedies for it. He noted a conflict between U.S. commitment to “equality of opportunity” and a “class” system derived from advantages and disadvantages bestowed on individuals by their family origins. “Equality of opportunity” itself, however, produced potentially explosive problems. Echoing arguments made elsewhere by Ruth Benedict, Karen Horney, John Dollard, and Ralph Linton, Parsons noted that any society that pegged individual worth solely to personal achievement gave rise to acute disappointment, anxiety, and recriminations over one’s status. “Frustrations of legitimate expectations” could lead to “a great mass of ‘aggression’ and hostile sentiment” aimed at scapegoats.69 This was a danger in the United States, where differences in social status coincided in part with differences in ethnic identity; hence ethnic prejudice, both in a “frustrated” lowermiddle class and an “indignant” upper class, might combine to fuel the mélange of hierarchical power and lower-middle-class resentment that infused fascism. Thus Parsons recognized that the American social system was riven by contradictions, not all of them easily remediable. Yet certain tensions might be resolved by social reform. Strain, conflict, even “deviance,” Parsons wrote in terms that challenge a purely “conformist” reading of his functionalism, “form[s] the basis of all ‘progress’ as well as of social disorganization.”70 Echoing Radcliffe-Brown, he noted that a “functional need for ‘reintegration’” among the conflicting structural elements occasioned social change; indeed, change often occurred by means of “a slightly, or sometimes radically, altered tradition” of values and symbols.71 Parsons admired elements of the American “social tradition,” notably the freedom permitted by its emphasis on achievement and equal opportunity and the openness to change allowed by “the rational-critical spirit” and “instrumental activism” (the conviction that problems discovered in nature or society could be solved through reason and effort). He demurred at the extreme individualism of the American tradition, however: “Society should not be a mere collection

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of individuals each pursuing an independent self-interest seeking only to minimize restrictions, but a company engaged in the pursuit of common goals.” He also welcomed a new element in American values, the 1930s ideal of “promot[ing] the social welfare of the masses,” even though some believed this commitment to equality in the provision of social welfare conflicted with “productive efficiency.” In contrast to that kind of alarm, Parsons urged more, not less, reform. Rather than insisting on a contradiction between ideals of welfare and achievement, he sought “reconciliation” of the two, in part by “removing the principal components of the basic standard of living from their present status as symbols of differential achievement.” He continued, “It seems probable that a sense of responsibility can best be symbolized otherwise than by treating loss of economic support as the primary penalty of failing to do one’s part.”72 In typically condensed and elusive terms, he was suggesting that problems bound up with achievement ethics— differential outcomes, frustration, resentment, and strife—were exacerbated by widespread insecurity (feared “loss of economic support”). Since social solidarity was Parsons’s aim, he proposed to neutralize that fear by assuring “the principal components of the basic standard of living” to all. In effect, Parsons called for a guaranteed annual income, which he thought offered little threat, and very likely a boon, to the sense of “responsibility,” or belonging and effort, called for in the present crisis. These were reformist conclusions drawn from functional analysis. No doubt Parsons’s tendency to view society as a communal body, and reform as the pursuit of harmony, suggested a kind of conservative organicism that rendered him at least ambivalent on issues of social change and social order. While his 1940 memorandum advocated the goal of mass welfare, it also urged respect for established social elites, in order to minimize popular upheaval and thus keep revanchist sentiments from gripping the upper ranks. However open Parsons was to social-democratic change in capitalist society, he shared a common trait with many exponents of the postcapitalist vision, however varied their perspectives and methods otherwise were: a commitment to gradualist and slowly evolving change in which sharp breaks with the past were distrusted and avoided. The implications of Parsons’s concern for social stability became somewhat clearer in his first major article exploring Freudian theory, “Propaganda and Social Control.” Parsons’s essay responded to the Roosevelt administration’s wish not to repeat the wartime information and agitational practices of the Wilson administration, which were widely considered responsible for abetting reactionary outbursts of chauvinism and xenophobia. How, indeed, should the U.S. government, formally dedicated to democracy, conduct war propaganda?73 The aim of government, Parsons suggested, should not be to stir up enthusiasm, or use force to suppress dissent,

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but to concentrate simply on “reinforcing” values already held in common by most members of the society and restraining “distortions” in public perceptions of the war effort by offering “disinterested” information in a “professional” manner. Parsons’s model for this latent “propaganda” was psychoanalytic therapy, particularly the kind of “social control” exercised by the analyst in relation to the analysand. The element he drew from Freud was “transference.” In the psychoanalytic encounter, according to Freud, analysands replicate their most troubling relations with authority figures (e.g., parents) in their attitudes toward the analyst; the analyst, however, refused to respond in kind, to act out the parents’ role in conflict. Rather, the analyst used the transference to objectify within the analytic session the troubling relations the patient needed to recognize, while refusing to confirm the patient’s neurotic perceptions of the world. The emotional weight granted to the analyst as an authority, then, could be used to uphold the “reality principle” (acknowledgment of the world outside the self and beyond the bias of one’s desires and perceptions)—thus helping patients work their way back to effective interaction with the demands of social life. In this process, psychoanalytic theory discloses the “latent, unconscious control function apart from deliberate control policies” at work in all medical encounters and perhaps in professional authority generally.74 The government’s role in providing information about the war effort and limiting disaffection from it might be understood similarly, as an analog of therapy as tacit “control.” Parsons’s point in citing this model of latent control was not, as some critics have suggested, to promote the claims of a professional elite seeking to take the helm of a state manipulating its citizens.75 Parsons wished to describe a kind of social control distinct from exploitative domination or illegitimate power, a form of order geared to common purposes and free of either self-interested assertion or tyrannical practices. He noted that the physician, while enjoying an elevated social status, “specifically does not turn [this status] into a certain kind of authoritarian role.” The habit of “following doctor’s orders” was an “acceptance of authority [that works] without coercive sanctions,” since trust in medical authority is institutionalized as the “confidence” patients show in their physicians. Patterns of voluntary compliance figured in other professions too (notably, scholarship), and might be promoted by a propaganda agency that simply aimed to “reinforce” common values and maintain a disinterested, reportorial honesty, declining (like an analyst) to respond to instances of public distrust and rumor mongering.76 Rather than a crude strategy of enhancing social scientists’ prestige as state-sponsored therapists, Parsons’s argument can be better understood in light of Michel Foucault’s work on modern forms of power. For Foucault, stringent forms of constraint infiltrate those institutions that claim the man-

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tle of service (asylums, hospitals, penitentiaries), and assertions of power accompany every claim to knowledge. By comparison, Parsons’s confidence in benign government at first seems naive, but in other ways his theoretical conceptions were prescient. His distinction between “coercion” and “latent, unconscious control” anticipated Foucault’s view of how modern life replaced public uses of overt violence with humanitarian “discipline,” converting (in Foucault’s terms) “a visible fortress of order” into “the castle of our conscience.”77 Parsons’s analysis of the therapeutic relationship as a structure of authority fits well with Foucault’s critique.78 Yet Parsons and Foucault evaluated these distinct modes of control differently. For Parsons, the passage from one to the other was indeed progressive. He was hardly eager, as Foucault was in his early and mid career, to applaud deviance as transgressive. Perhaps with Charles in mind, he thought it often destructive and saw the role of equilibrium in self and society as something to be welcomed. Parsons’s model of propaganda was surely a “disciplinary” agency, but he proposed it frankly, and rather than distrusting such authority, regarded “regulation”—when accepted or “internalized” by social actors, as in his voluntaristic notion of institutions—a crucial element of any morality and social order. Most important, Parsons’s article on propaganda signaled a key turning point in his construction of the postcapitalist vision. The article recast his vision of the professions, disengaging it from the question of capitalism and the social reform of economic behavior.79 When Parsons considered the issue of “capitalism” at this point, he approached it in the way an analyst approaches an analysand’s delusions, to provide a “reality check.” “Capitalism,” he concluded, weighed too heavily in public perceptions of contemporary society, stirring unneeded turmoil, and his organicist vision of reform called for lessening its salience in popular discourse. Thus, in lecture notes of 1943, Parsons pointed out how frequently the evils of capitalism appeared in the rhetoric of both the Far Left and the fascist Right, and he urged a greater measure of “realism” that would counter this “ideological distortion” of public discourse. One way to reduce social stress, besides the reform in social welfare he advocated, was to drain away the significance attributed to “capitalism.” In these notes, he urged: a) Understanding that “capitalism” is only one aspect of basic modern Western structure b) Better understanding the motivation problem c) Appreciation of Gemeinschaft elements Tendency of structural change to lessen importance of capitalism issue.80

This outline tells a story of intellectual transformation. The empirical note on “structural change” is clear enough. Parsons appended the phrases “bu-

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reaucratization” and “the fading symbolic significance of money,” to cite the same factors he noted in “The Motivation of Economic Activities”: the prevalence of large organizations, which raised principles of meritocratic appointment and expert performance above those of wealth and marketbased competition. Items (a) through (c) in his outline had figured prominently in his attempts of the 1930s to relativize the market system: point (a) recalled Parsons’s refusal in the 1930s to identify the social process as a whole with the economic calculus of utilitarianism; (b) repeated his emphasis on the “value” element of motivation that both complemented and countered the prevalence of economic self-interest; and (c) reasserted his argument that nonmarket communal orientations (“Gemeinschaft elements”) remained vital in modern society. These arguments had been part of a polemic against economic ideology, illuminating the possibility of moving beyond purely capitalist norms of economic organization. Now, in 1943, the same arguments appeared not to pave the way for conceivable change but to deny significance to the “capitalism” issue. Where once Parsons called for critical analysis of the economic order, he now declared the virtual supersession of capitalism as a social system. Parsons’s “shift away from economics” was almost complete, and the next task was to create an institutional apparatus for studying society conceived in noneconomic terms. In 1942, Parsons turned Harvard’s Committee on National Morale into a working group concerned with comparative studies in the “social structure and ideology” of the principal belligerent countries. From it came a proposal, cosigned in May 1943 by anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn and psychologists Henry Murray, Gordon Allport, and O. H. Mowrer, for the merger of sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology that would appear in 1946 as Parsons’s new Department of Social Relations, dedicated to building “an integrated research, teaching, and graduate training program in the social sciences.” The sociology department dissolved and its members mingled with social psychologists and cultural anthropologists. Students received an education in theory and field methods drawn from all the constituent fields and were encouraged to pursue research topics that took advantage of the “complex interrelations” among them. Parsons regarded it as a “radical innovation” that signaled a new tolerance and experimental flexibility in higher education, and students recognized the élan animating it, especially the idea that the social sciences would now help build “a better world.”81 Parsons and his colleagues were not alone in pursuing such ventures. The vision of an integrated social science had motivated interwar philanthropic foundations (particularly the Rockefeller Foundation and its organ, the Social Science Research Council) and later flourished during World War II in the Research and Analysis branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),

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an outfit devoted to studying social conditions in enemy countries by means that broke down “the walls separating the social sciences.”82 Integrated social research in this vein usually focused on the unity of national societies and cultures, and the integral notion of a national society and culture had special resonance for Parsons.83 Merely positing such an object and presuming that an order prevailed within it helped salve the anxieties liberals brought to the problem of war preparation. For besides the conventional meaning of “fighting spirit,” “national morale” evoked the elementary phenomenon of social solidarity and moral order implied in the French morale and Durkheim’s concept of conscience collective, the polar opposite of anomie.84 If isolationism appeared to interventionists of 1940 and 1941 as magnified egoism, the ability of government to marshal sentiment for the war effort served as a test and confirmation of solidarity in American culture. Consequently, by spring 1941, seeing popular support for Roosevelt’s plan to make the United States the “arsenal of democracy,” Parsons took “a rather more optimistic view” of American society: it was “full of tensions with widespread disorganization in certain areas, but also with important elements of stability and powers of resistance.” Parsons was reassured that the kind of public spirit he desired as a hedge on egoistic individualism had proven resilient.85

Parsons’s Postwar Views of Economy and the Social System The “shift away from economics” by Parsons was never absolute. In fall 1940, he introduced a course called “Economics and the Social Structure,” and in 1945 he argued that economic development was crucial to the social reconstruction and democratization of Germany. Still, the war had incubated a new conception of social study, signaled by the difference between the abortive concentration in Social Science in 1940, which strove for an allembracing unity of the social sciences, and the Department of Social Relations. The latter dispensed with the “old social sciences” of economics and politics to focus on the new: sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology. Having once believed that an integrated social science was necessary to grasp the totality of social life, Parsons settled for the truncated totality of “social relations” based on a noneconomic concept of civil society. This was an intellectual transition, in the early war years, summed up ten years later in his big book, The Social System (1951), which persisted in studying the noneconomic dimension of social life and, in some respects, arguing for the noncapitalist nature of American society. Following the terms of his wartime shift toward studies in personality and culture, Parsons by this

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time added Freud to Durkheim and Weber as his touchstones and borrowed a “structural-functional” definition of analysis from anthropology. He also acknowledged a distinctly “American” element of his social theory, a debt to the Chicago school of W. I. Thomas and George Herbert Mead. In their terms, an actor (either an individual or a group) had to assume a meaningful orientation toward a particular situation, which—by definition in a social system—always involved other actors.86 Thus social action was always interaction, and the interaction between self and other (ego and alter) became a focus of Parsons’s analysis. Yet the real “units” of social systems were not individuals as such but rather the normatively structured models of behavior that drew actors together—that is, in Ralph Linton’s terms, the “roles” that accompanied the varied “statuses,” or positions, in a system or constellation of statuses. An individual occupied not one status but many—as parent, worker, friend, religious devotee, and so forth—whose roles fostered multiple interactions. Parsons’s analysis worked on several levels. “Structure” concerned the formation of statuses and roles according to certain standards of value Parsons called “pattern-variables.” Thereby, he sought to systematize the notion of culture patterns of Boas and Benedict by specifying the range of relevant variables that worked, in an algebraic sense, to define the formulas of culture. In particular, he emphasized those “variables” that determined whether statuses were occupied according to “ascribed” traits (like “race”) or individual achievements, whether role-appropriate judgments or actions were supposed to apply universally or only to particular situations or classes of persons an actor encountered, and so forth. Structural analysis also asked how statuses and roles were “differentiated” and then “integrated,” parsed out and then recombined in the whole of personal and social life. “Function” on the other hand concerned how actors assumed roles, upheld role standards or “deviated” from them, and perhaps restored or recalibrated role conformity under conditions of social strain. None of these processes were simple. Early socialization gave ego “internalized” motives for adhering to “role-expectations,” but beyond that, ego’s interaction with alter—particularly the rewards or sanctions with which alter responded to ego—continued to affect the course of social practice. The interaction helped either to encourage adherence to expected performance or to frustrate it, and thus either to bring “deviant” behavior back into line or to foster further alienation.87 This concentration on processes of “conformity” and alienation helped give Parsons his growing reputation after World War II as a “conservative,” rather than as a proponent of American social liberalism and its postcapitalist vision. He was a victim of poor timing, since publication of The Social System and its analysis of “social control” processes appeared just as a new wave of popular cultural criticism—a popularization of interwar cultural

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modernism—made “conformism” appear to be the besetting sin of herdlike Americans. Parsons attended so closely to matters of “conformity” because he was broaching the elementary question of how social processes of interaction perpetuate themselves at all; like Radcliffe-Brown, he thought structural integration and functional equilibrium were the norms for societies, since utter breakdown into chaos is rare. On the other hand, Parsons aimed to recognize the “strains” and “incompatibilities” that arose in the process of combining personalities and collectivities, roles and responses, deviance and its “control.” Nor was he unaware of variation in modern life. “Such a [complex] society [as the contemporary United States] offers a rich fund of alternative value-patterns,” Parsons wrote, “often without being defined as radically deviant.”88 It would be unfair to conclude that Parsons’s analysis of functional processes of social control simply showed a preference for homogeneity characteristic of cold war regimentation. Yet The Social System seemed to lack the social and cultural critique of American life that Parsons shared with other liberal social scientists during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1942, Parsons analyzed sex distinctions, arguing that the segregation of men’s and women’s roles in adulthood caused acute dissatisfaction, shown by a nostalgic tendency to romanticize “youth,” when the constraints facing emotionless men and homebound women had not yet set in. Now, in 1951, he voiced little dissent from the “modern” pattern of male breadwinner and female mother/housekeeper.89 Likewise, his Depression-era and wartime critique of corrosive individualism and forces of aggression in American life lapsed, as he seemed to applaud the “modern liberal-individualistic type” of society. Only remnants of the psychocultural critique glimmered as Parsons noted the “exceptionally high levels of discipline” required in American society, the compensation for passionless work offered by mass entertainment, and the extreme “segregation and isolation of the conjugal family” that imposed stress on both women and men.90 Most of all, the book gained its “conservative” reputation from Parsons’s emphasis on limits to change. The institution of the family, some kind of coercive government, differential rewards and hence stratification of some sort were inevitable, he wrote. “Utopian” attempts to eliminate them only gave way to their restoration, with a vengeance, as in the Soviet Union. His accepting attitude toward American society and the critical tone he adopted toward “radical” movements, Communism, and the Soviet Union suggested that the book’s relative conservatism stemmed from cold war reflexes. Yet the story is considerably more complicated than that. Parsons’s posture was not unlike that of many left liberals at the dawn of the cold war. As late as 1948, he published a Horney-like essay on “the sources of aggression” in Western societies that still registered a left-liberal discomfort with the revival of militarism so soon after World War II—a view critical of U.S. policy, at

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least up until the Czech coup and the Marshall Plan for Western Europe’s reconstruction drove many old Rooseveltian liberals into the arms of the Truman administration.91 Moreover, although it is conceivable that the conservative tone of The Social System reflected a retreat from social criticism under the siege of McCarthyism, Parsons did not easily concede to the mood of the time. He had to answer a loyalty investigation when applying for a visa in 1953, because he had supported the Spanish Loyalists in the late 1930s and had given his name as a faculty sponsor for Harvard’s reorganized Young Communists in 1946. In The Social System, he repeatedly referred to the McCarthy style of anti-Communism as a “witch-hunt,” and he took some steps to resist it. He welcomed to Harvard the psychologist Edward C. Tolman after Tolman refused to sign California’s loyalty oath, defended some of his students against retribution for their past Communist affiliations, and drafted a statement for the American Association of University Professors against political dismissals of faculty members.92 He never assumed a staunch, right-wing anti-Soviet stance and by the 1960s joined the international Pugwash group of scholars promoting nuclear disarmament, traveling to one of their meetings in the Soviet Union.93 Above all, rather than read The Social System simply as a cold war text, we must recognize that the book’s theoretical basis, Parsons’s “shift away from economics,” preceded the high pitch of the cold war’s onset by up to ten years.94 Setting aside tendentious readings of the text, we might better catch the full flavor of The Social System by carefully examining the status of the economic sphere in Parsons’s theory. Strictly speaking, his definition of the “social system” included economic and political behavior within its boundaries, yet he still faced the problem of defining the scope of his own discipline. “Sociological theory,” he wrote, “must be either the theory of the social system as a whole, or some special aspect of the theory of the social system rather than the whole of it.”95 Parsons settled on the latter course, emphasizing that his book’s emphasis on socialization into roles, deviance, and social control (accounting for three-fifths or more of its bulk) made it essentially a contribution to sociological theory, which dealt specifically with issues of “institutionalization of patterns of value-orientation in roles”— rather than social-system theory in general.96 Naturally, a discussion of modern American society could hardly avoid touching on “economic” affairs, particularly the way an “industrial economy” shaped principal features of social life, and how American society, compared to others that possessed more robust statist traditions, had a pronounced “economic accent.” Still, Parsons preferred not to speak of an “industrial economy,” and even less of “capitalism” (which always appeared in skeptical quotation marks). Rather, he spoke of the “modern liberal-individualistic type of society” and its characteristic “occupational structure,” which was a matter of roles. That struc-

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ture included roles like the physician and the artist, which he regarded as “noneconomic,” and what united all modern roles, economic or noneconomic, was a common pattern-variable set: one was supposed to uphold standards that were universalistic, achievement-based, professionally expert, and dispassionate.97 Parsons’s discussions of socialization, role strain, and conformative and alienative tendencies touched on a wide array of issues, all arguably part of a noneconomic sphere of civil society. These included the phenomena of “hoboism,” bohemianism, juvenile delinquency, political alienation, psychotherapy and its social role, “time off” for holidays and vacations, youth culture, gambling, education, science, ideology, religion as belief and ritual, expressive symbolism including dress and other aspects of lifestyle, eroticism, expressions of group solidarity (and its inverse, “scapegoating”), spectator entertainment, and his famous “sick role”—his claim that being sick was not merely a biological fact but a social relation, an accepted way of opting out of social roles for a time and later gradually reassuming them. It was not only, however, a focus on the noneconomic sphere that distinguished the approach of The Social System but also Parsons’s persistent intent to subordinate the significance of capitalist economics to other dimensions of modern social life as a whole. When Parsons discussed the social universals that utopian visions could not alter, he pointedly did not include “private enterprise” among them, for it was “not a fundamental institution in the same sense” as family, government, and social stratification. In modern societies, he noted, the “economic process may be the resultant of large numbers of discrete decisions by participants in the market . . . but it may also be a centralized decision process carried out by a government planning body.”98 Thus he still denied primacy to the economic sphere and indeed, whatever other “conservative” inclinations it betrayed, The Social System refrained from defending American capitalism as such. Building on work by the interwar institutionalists and the anthropologists who combined culture-and-personality studies with functionalism and psychoanalysis, Talcott Parsons reconceived the study of society in the 1940s as part of a “shift away from economics” while his social analysis posited the evanescence of capitalism. Amid debate over U.S. intervention in World War II and the imperative of “national morale,” Parsons de-emphasized the salience of capitalism in modern society as a way, he hoped, of rebutting both the Far Left and the Far Right. This early version of an end to ideology, however, did not entail a suspension of social reform. His perspective remained part of the social-liberal current that forecast ongoing social change beyond the limits of laissez-faire economics and competitive-individualist culture. Parsons’s wish to reinforce common values, he wrote, “does

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not commit one to freezing the status quo . . . [for] all the main potentialities of reform in society, of a more ‘democratic’ way of life, are bound up with the maintenance of a basic continuity with the fundamentals of Western institutional and cultural tradition.”99 And even if Parsons cherished social order as the prerequisite for ongoing change, the war reinvigorated more buoyant expectations of a grand social transformation that, reformers believed, was bound to come in its wake. Parsons’s inclination to defend the structure of American life while withholding explicit apology for American capitalism was consistent with his view that “capitalism” was losing salience in the development of social life. The conviction that capitalism per se was an evanescent phenomenon in modern society, as progressive tendencies drove beyond the power of concentrated wealth and the primacy of market forces, persisted in American social liberalism during the 1950s and 1960s. What did the “shift away from economics” and the rise of the “new social sciences” mean in a practical, political sense? During the 1940s and 1950s, liberals surrendered plans for challenging the power of big business for a variety of reasons: their confidence in modest Keynesian measures, wariness of “statism,” retreat before postwar conservatism, their embrace of cold war anticommunism, or fear of red-baiting.100 At the same time, however, they also indulged in a kind of wishful thinking. Crediting the World War II government with having established the legitimacy of a higher level of state action, liberals occasionally claimed an unheralded victory—a kind of “silent revolution,” like that predicted by reformers from Lippmann to Berle and Means, which promised the effective suppression of market automatism or the subordination of economic affairs to social regulation.101 Through this prism, the neglect of economic institutions in the new liberal agenda represented an imaginative leap beyond the present toward a kind of postcapitalist order where social needs might be addressed independently of pure economic forces. Thus the “shift away from economics” in social theory manifested, besides evasion, an element of reformist hope, claiming that the present social order opened broad vistas of change, even the gradual evanescence of capitalism itself. The discursive “shift away from economics” and the new construction of civil society virtually inscribed the postcapitalist vision in the basic form of postwar social theory. The “new social sciences” toward which Parsons gravitated had all grown up with a theoretical critique of economics, that is, a critique of individualism, the primacy of rational efficiency as either motive or organizing principle of society, and the presumed universality of market relations. Now, however, beyond taking exception to the specific biases of orthodox market economics, the new social theory questioned whether the economists’ objects—property, labor, exchange, and wealth accumulation—

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need be decisive to social analysis broadly speaking. This proposition deserves careful scrutiny. One definition of capitalism is that form of society that makes the creation of wealth autonomous of other social, cultural, and political relations and hence mobilizes social action in historically unprecedented ways to serve the overarching goal of private accumulation. In this sense, the hypostatization of economic relations as the sum total of social relations reflects the very nature and organizing principle of capitalism. That is why Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism (the reification of market relations in the worldview of conventional economics) did not lead Marx to deny the historically unusual centrality of economics to modern life. In the mid-twentieth century, however, social theory’s critique of economics leapt over that caveat: to criticize orthodox economics was also to question the economic model of society that capitalism in practice fostered, and thus to question whether capitalism itself still reigned. It was, to say the least, a wishful theory, and in Marxist terms a determinedly idealist theory that invested a change in thoughtways with the power to change social reality. It was, moreover, an “ideological” proposition implicitly defending the status quo by embracing the premature assumption that the elements of postcapitalist conditions, however desirable and anticipated, were already present. But it was far from simply a conservative or cold war–inspired theory, for it had not surrendered the lively interwar aspirations for reform. The portrait of society built in the wake of world war and cold war rested on precisely those aspirations. The greatest problem facing the social-liberal postcapitalist vision in the second half of the twentieth century was how to contend with the prominent place in American life of a reinvigorated ideology of “private enterprise,” and how to maintain the reformist propositions about the coming supersession of the economic sphere amid a powerful economic boom that later observers came to call “capitalism’s golden age.”

chapter 5

The Displacement of Economy in an Age of Plenty 

Great wars have been forcing houses of social change in the modern world even as the political demands of military mobilization served to suppress dissent, and the strain between these contrary trends typically lasted beyond war’s end to mark the experience of recovery. As in the years 1918 – 24, the social, political, and intellectual scene after World War II was muddied by such crosscurrents, making historical interpretation of the era difficult and contentious. For all those historians of the United States who define the aftermath of World War II as buoyant “proud decades” resting on world power, economic growth, and national unity, many others imagine it as a period of reaction in which remobilization for the cold war, McCarthyism, and boom times clapped a conformist mold on American life.1 In either case, the outcome of World War II and the quick onset of the cold war are understood to represent a decisive rupture in U.S. history, revitalizing capitalism and suppressing old dissenting movements of a labor, socialist, or populist sort. Although there are grounds for understanding the 1940s as a moment signaling the transmutation of U.S. politics, society, and culture, the survival of key interwar trends makes rupture far too crude a means of understanding the rise of the postwar world. The persistence of a social-liberal bloc, however riven and subdued by postwar anticommunist passions, and the ongoing influence of the postcapitalist vision sprung from that milieu, indicated a measure of continuity across the midcentury divide.2 Political vicissitudes over a distended period from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s whipsawed observers of social and political development, shap152

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ing the tenor of social-liberal thought and the character of the evolving postcapitalist vision. At an early point in this passage, around the time of the war, pessimistic writers of both the Left and Right anticipated the worldwide onset of a new coercive order, as statism and managerial authority supplanted market regimes in Russia, Germany, and the United States. Before long, a more optimistic, social-democratic view came to exert greater sway among intellectuals, reform activists, and organizers, and some policymakers as the war effort’s democratic, egalitarian, and progressive ideology gave the Left a new quantum of morale. In Europe, the victorious antifascist struggle seemed to wipe the slate clean of authoritarian social relations, and in the view of several leading writers in Britain, as well as Central European exiles living there or in the United States, capitalism was nearing its end and reconstruction initiatives were moving along the left fork of the road toward socialism. In the United States, where conservative forces were stronger, liberals and leftists hailed programs ranging from Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights” and Henry Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man” to the CIO’s social unionism and left-wing calls for a third party of progressive reform. To be sure, the onset of the cold war brought these trends up short, and by the early 1950s many liberals and leftists sought more to differentiate their ideas from Communism than to make bold bids for social reconstruction. Just then, however, writers Anthony Crosland and Ralf Dahrendorf chose to name the new order of their time “postcapitalist society.” If left-leaning intellectuals by the early 1950s no longer had the confidence they possessed in the mid-1940s that something called socialism could issue from the war, they still believed their society was moving onto new terrain. They argued against Marxist views of postwar society as decidedly capitalist and still subject to revolutionary challenge, but they also assailed the Right and any doctrinaire defense of capitalism itself. They embraced “anticapitalism” as an “article of faith,” Raymond Aron said, and simply did not believe that markets, private property, profit, and entrepreneurship could by themselves assure abundance and democratic equality, which had emerged from the Depression and World War II as watchwords of modern liberal politics.3 Those four capitalist principles could very well play some role in the further development of modern society, but these writers generally expected that role to be steadily diminished as other means of organizing economy and society came to the fore, including social provision and decommodification of basic services, strategic or “indicative” planning of economic growth, and public means of corporate administration.4 The postcapitalist vision that germinated during the interwar years, always largely non-Marxist, provided a set of dispositions on which young Depression-era American socialists, exiting the Far Left under the force of world war and cold war anticommunism, could fall back. Others such as David Riesman,

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who were never Marxist but were shaped by interwar reformism, also helped devise a style of analysis that brought social liberalism into the new era in terms having a surprisingly broad appeal. The rhetorical posture such writers assumed against the Far Left and the capitalist Right—a disposition characterized as an “end of ideology”—did not place them in the middle of the political spectrum. Their residual anticapitalism and tacit vision of postcapitalist society meant that they stood to the left of the political mainstream’s center—while the center, given widely held regulatory and social-welfare principles, had itself shifted to the left of where it lay at the outset of the twentieth century. Still, this intellectual current found itself in an uncomfortable position, for amid cold war stresses they tried to reach an accommodation with their own society and vest their hopes for its future on the basis of an analysis that remained at odds with the society’s self-image. They foresaw a postcapitalist future while revived big business “sold free enterprise” and mainstream liberal politicians trimmed their sails to conform with corporate prerogatives. Postcapitalist inclinations in a probusiness era posed a contradiction these near-left intellectuals could not entirely evade, even if they usually addressed it only obliquely. The same contradiction marked the conceptual revolution that was in progress. The shift away from economics toward exploration of a purely “social” realm gained ground in postwar academic life even as economic growth continued to hold the spotlight in public affairs, and the discipline of economics continued to be the most powerful, well-funded, and theoretically and technically refined social science.5 Although even the “old social sciences” of economics and politics featured currents that followed the reformist drift of intellectual life, the paradox of postcapitalist visions amid probusiness culture figured most in the “new social sciences.” They strove to displace economy from the center of analysis due to confidence in the promises of plenty—promises that, rather than leading to complacency, were believed to provide the condition for social transformation.

Naming the Postcapitalist Society “Nobody in Europe believes in the American way of life, that is, in private enterprise,” British historian A. J. P. Taylor declared on the BBC in 1945, “or rather, those who believe in it are a defeated party, which seems to have no more future than the Jacobites of England after 1688.” A young Communist in the 1920s, Taylor by the late 1930s scorned the Soviet Union and spoke before the anti-Communist Democratic Socialist Society at Oxford, whose undergraduate members included Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland, later to be leaders of the Labour Party’s “new right.” Upholding an an-

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tifascist nationalism, Taylor joined left-leaning “morale” efforts and came to the attention of the BBC as an experienced commentator on war events. After the war, he resisted the drift toward cold war and pushed for a BritishSoviet alliance stretching across the continent to ensure the security of Europe, keep Germany down, and welcome the “Socialist reconstruction of Europe.” In New York, the ardently anti-Soviet Russian émigré Raphael Abramovitch also judged that the trend was toward socialism, despite what he called the U.S. determination to uphold “capitalism in one country.”6 So widespread was the consensus that the war years marked a watershed in modern history that several leading conservative intellectuals, albeit in a disconsolate mood, reached similar conclusions and would not even exempt the United States from the diagnosis. The movement of individuals across the Atlantic, and the exchange of ideas among Europeans and Americans about the new drift of modern society, was not unimpeded, but it remained vibrant enough to influence any new initiative in social thought after World War II. It was under these conditions that efforts to name the system came up explicitly with “postcapitalist society” for the first time, even though the terms of the analysis had been germinating for over a generation. The mood of the time was captured in uniquely compelling terms by a handful of diverse Central European writers in exile who were taking up residence—or hoping to—in the United States. All told, they spoke—with hope, despair, or warning—of capitalism’s exhaustion or demise. Hungarians Karl Mannheim and Karl Polanyi, both waylaid in Britain for some time, represented a new installment of war-induced reconstruction rhetoric. Convinced they stood at the end of a classically liberal epoch of laissez-faire, each fashioned an idiosyncratic, arms-length association with conventional socialism and argued that postwar reconstruction must restore communal ties and subject economic affairs to social control. Mannheim had fled Budapest following the suppression of the brief-lived Hungarian soviet republic in 1919, settling in the home of modern German sociology, Heidelberg, to fashion a new science of society and politics capable of answering the disruptive tenor of his times. His “sociology of knowledge” implored intellectuals to counter modern fragmentation by fashioning a new civic discourse that might synthesize many partial but complementary perspectives on common problems and their solutions.7 After his second emigration, from Germany to England, Mannheim published Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, arguing that Smithian individualism could make no sense of the great cartels, trade unions, and mass culture that robbed the age of social equilibrium and of responsible politics. “Negative democratization” had leveled all distinctions, wrecked culture, eroded the “publics” that once provided an audience for reasoned political discourse, and made way for demagogues. If totalitarian solutions to the decay of liberal society were to

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be avoided, responsible leaders (assisted by an intelligentsia striving toward social synthesis) would have to learn the means of binding the masses together in civic, democratic ways and of rescuing liberal virtues of reason and freedom in a postliberal order of “planning.”8 Failing to win the American academic post he desired, Mannheim wielded some influence via his student Hans Gerth, who escaped Germany for the University of Wisconsin and there tutored the young C. Wright Mills.9 A greater measure of success greeted Polanyi, who made his way via England to the United States. In his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Polanyi brought together themes from Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Malinowski to analyze the social and economic fallacies of a decrepit capitalism.10 Like Mannheim, he was convinced that “automatic” mechanisms of control (like Smith’s “invisible hand”) no longer worked in modern society, since powerful social groups had already insulated themselves from market impacts. In doing so, they perceived accurately that uncontrolled market exchange was a destructive force that threatened any vested economic position and undermined social and communal resources generally. In particular, the establishment of a free market in labor (signaled by England’s poor-law reform of 1834) had ripped communities apart, deprived the propertyless of any social sustenance, and made fear (of hunger) the prevalent motive to work. Although advocates of market reforms thought they had reinstituted “natural” conditions of work and property, Polanyi insisted that the industrial-capitalist world of market exchange was highly unusual in the history of human society. Uses of natural resources, property, and labor were typically “embedded” in social and political relations of obligation and members of any community, however poor, enjoyed traditional guarantees of subsistence—a point already highlighted by Marcel Mauss and Ralph Linton. In response to the unnatural, amoral conditions of industrial capitalism, Polanyi wrote, there arose a “countermovement” for the restoration of social bonds and the imposition of moral control on economic life. Given the growing disorientation of market systems in his own time, the countermovement would triumph in a new society promising “higher income and material security widely diffused,” the subordination of technology and economic organization to “the needs of human community,” and an ethical order in which “social communion and social responsibility [were] expressed in everyday economic activities.”11 The moment was propitious for Polanyi’s arguments, for “if the war had shattered anything,” a historian of the European Left has written, “it was the already damaged belief that capitalism, if left to its own devices, would be able to generate the ‘good society.’” All left-wing parties concurred that “the new postwar order . . . would have to be radically different from the prewar era,” that “the future was bound up with socialism.” The Right conceded the

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point. In 1947 the German Christian Democrats declared that “the new structure of the German economy must start from the realisation that the period of uncurtailed rule by private capitalism is over.”12 The conservative counterparts of Mannheim and Polanyi—the procapitalist Austrian émigrés to the United States Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek—were either resigned to the decline of capitalism or determined to raise an alarm against the world’s steady drift away from market liberalism. Schumpeter confessed to “hate socialism or at least look upon it with cool criticism, and yet foresee its advent”—in Europe and especially under U.S. social and political circumstances. Having come to the United States in 1927, he was surprised that the 1930s revival of Marxism had influenced “so many Americans,” where “no Marxian strain of importance” had earlier figured in the labor movement or intellectual life. Explaining this trend was his aim in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), and he concluded that capitalism tended to “break down” not from the economic disabilities that radicals typically assailed but from social and cultural developments fostered by capitalism’s economic success.13 His focus on the corrosive impact of capitalist development on social relations oddly echoed Polanyi’s concerns in a distinct political idiom. Schumpeter endowed the capitalist entrepreneur with a capacity for innovation, daring, and fortitude even as he castigated the bourgeoisie for lacking “the lordly attitude—that ability and habit to command.” His view of the United States was likewise stretched between two poles: the country displayed that long-run economic dynamism, indicated by a growing output of consumer goods, that he considered the best argument for capitalism, at the same time that it manifested the democratic clamor he considered the nemesis of wise leadership, economic or political. He scorned the view that classic capitalism had reached the end of its tether due to the decline of “perfect competition” or, as the American Keynesian Alvin Hansen and his New Deal followers put it, to “vanishing investment opportunity.” Competition continued effectively—in the long run—even among oligopolistic or monopolistic firms, which were never immune to market forces as long as entrepreneurs might create wholly new techniques, products, or services. As for Hansen’s “stagnationists,” Schumpeter found no reason to think that either geographical limits of national expansion or the surfeited condition of existing industries should be identified with absolute economic limits to change and growth. What counted, however, against capitalism’s long-term viability was the tendency of its social institutions to crumble. Capitalism, to begin with, nurtured a mentality of rational calculation, leading to a pervasive critical bent of mind that “rubs off all the glamour of super-empirical sanction from every species of classwise rights.” Schumpeter had no doubt capitalism was a system of classes, and it was a sense of “classwise rights” that

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sustained “the substance of property,” that is, “the sense of the legal right and actual ability to do as one pleases with one’s own . . . the will to fight, economically, physically, politically, for ‘his’ factory and his control over it, to die if necessary on its steps.”14 This notion of private right was crucial to the function of the entrepreneur, but in an unintended echo of Berle and Means, Schumpeter wrote with self-conscious irony that “the capitalist process . . . takes the life out of the idea of property.” Capitalist development uprooted peasants, artisans, and small manufacturers, whose commitment to private property might have provided the bourgeoisie some of the social “buttresses” it needed. While only aristocratic elements managed to provide leadership to state and society in most of Europe (since the bourgeoisie proved unfit or unwilling to “rule”), capitalist principles jettisoned their aid too. Even the remnants of aristocratic demeanor in bourgeois practice—large families and grand homes, a sense of tradition and posterity associated with family, and confidence in one’s authority—ebbed away. The bourgeoisie lost faith in their private domain, the family estate, and relied on “a maximum of outside service and outside life.” Thus “things and souls are transformed . . . to become increasingly amenable to the socialist form of life.”15 The odd echoes across the political spectrum and the complex interleaving of ideas regarding capitalism’s decline in the work of diverse writers yielded some highly ambiguous and ambivalent trends. Schumpeter had adopted a “tragic” tone of concession, while the more resistant Viennese economist Friedrich Hayek trumpeted an alarm that only strict adherence to market economics would uphold freedom in the face of onrushing totalitarianism.16 Hayek looked to be one of Taylor’s Jacobites, and yet his fear of the market system’s wane surfaced also in a dyspeptic version of the postcapitalist vision drawn from the political Left. James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) best represented the type. Having greeted Berle and Means’s Modern Corporation and Private Property in 1933 as a demonstration that capitalist property norms were in decline, Burnham by the late 1930s and early 1940s concluded (in a distinct but parallel register to Talcott Parsons’s) that capitalism was already evanescent. His diminishing confidence in the prospects for socialist revolution, combined with a radical critique of Soviet tyranny that he had nurtured earlier as a key exponent of American Trotskyism, led him to conclude that the successor of capitalism would not be socialism but a newfangled order headed by managerial elites (like the economic autocracy that Berle and Means had hoped to jettison or outmaneuver). These elites functioned within corporations as well as in the analog of modern corporations, the collectivized enterprises of the Soviet Union.17 Such a pessimistic view found voice in Dwight Macdonald’s politics magazine, though Macdonald and his colleagues distanced themselves from

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the conservative implications of Burnham’s prognoses. It also occurred among writers of the Frankfurt School in American exile, who extended their analysis of fascist dictatorship to a general diagnosis of “administered society” (an analog to the “administered prices” of monopoly corporations) throughout the West, in which order rested on the rule of bureaucracy and popular faith in science, technology, and progress.18 With its critique of militarism and propagandistic mass communications, its preference for decentralization and small-group interaction as a haven of threatened hopes for human emancipation, this current made up a prototype “new left” in the 1940s, but the dyspeptic postcapitalist Left was not influential enough to seriously challenge the hopeful social-democratic view after World War II. By then, in a reverse flow, interwar American social thought had started to infiltrate the European scene. In his 1947 book Jenseits des Kapitalismus (Beyond Capitalism), Richard Löwenthal, soon to be an intellectual mainstay of the German SPD, cited Berle and Means but, contrary to Burnham, insisted on treating the separation of ownership and control as a sign of capitalism’s erosion and the transition to socialism. So did Austro-Marxist Karl Renner in his collected essays published in 1953, The Transformation of Modern Society. Meanwhile, publications with titles such as The New Society and The Silent Revolution flourished in Britain.19 The tangled course of the postwar sensibility had not yet reached its conclusion, however. Enthusiasm dimmed after tripartite Liberation unity governments of Communists, Socialists, and Christian Democrats broke apart, and social-democratic hopes of nationalizing big industry in occupied West Germany were stopped. West European social democrats found themselves by the early 1950s working under an umbrella of military protection provided—Schumpeter notwithstanding—by the determinedly “free-enterprise” United States. Moreover, the loss of the British Labour Party’s parliamentary majority in 1951 signaled a common problem for social-democratic parties: their voting turnout remained strong, but their ability to build coalitions and rally support for dramatic change weakened as economic growth stilled discontent and helped revive promarket views. Given the belief, just yesterday, in the watershed occasioned by the war’s end, contrasted with today’s turning political tides and limits to social change, the moderate Left concluded that the current order was no longer capitalist but unlikely to turn socialist soon.20 A chastened mood settled over European socialists facing the tension between hope and stalemate. Here the postcapitalist idiom emerged in its clearest guise. Starting in 1951, Anthony Crosland deployed the concept of “postcapitalist society” as a transitional notion.21 While questioning the “inevitability” of socialism and stressing, like Eduard Bernstein, the role of ethics and will in building the future society, he had little doubt about the trend of things.22

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“Capitalism is undergoing a metamorphosis into a quite different system,” he declared. “With no hope of abortion, [it] is forced to give birth to a new society.” The new order inhered in the separation of ownership and control in industry, suggesting that individual property was no longer the key to social power; growth in the power of the state; the high level of social services and employment along with the political consensus on avoiding mass joblessness; the increasingly “variegated” class structure that muddied the categories of capital and labor; and crucial ideological changes. “The dominant emphasis,” Crosland wrote, “ceases to be on the rights of property, private initiative, competition, and the profit motive; and is transferred to the duties of the state, social and economic security, and the virtues of cooperative action.” Like Polanyi, he claimed “another essential feature of capitalism has . . . disappeared—the absolute autonomy of economic life,” marking a “reversion, after a brief abnormal spell of laisser-faire, to the normal historical pattern (both in the ancient and the modern world) of conscious control over social and economic life.”23 The rise of socialism, however, was not a given, for the immediate “successor” to capitalism was “statism”—a worthy achievement in itself, he insisted. Burnham’s model of “totalitarian bureau-technocracy” was unlikely to prevail, and Crosland doubted that external affairs such as colonial developments or the cold war would derail democratic statism at home. With Taylor’s confidence, he saw Tory attempts to restore capitalist property rights as signs of a “cultural time-lag,” leading only to “half-hearted” policies, for “the pressures making for statism are far too strong to be held back.” Even the United States “may gradually” undergo the same change, “though at an infinitely slower pace.”24 Socialism was yet a further goal beyond statism, but now the very definition of socialism was up for grabs. Complete nationalization of property was no longer deemed necessary to assure a good degree of security and income redistribution to the working and middle classes. Nor was “planning” the essence of socialism, since even Conservatives accepted the legitimacy of state intervention to avoid a repeat of a 1930s-style depression. “No one of any standing now believes the once-popular Hayek thesis that any interference with the market mechanism must start us down the slippery slope that leads to totalitarianism,” he wrote in 1956, and socialists had concluded that detailed, centralized control of business decisions was impracticable. Market prices worked effectively to distribute goods, leaving two tasks for limited planning: setting aggregate levels of savings, investment, and demand to assure full-employment and noninflationary economic growth, and intervening to control profit-driven practices that imposed unacceptable “social costs,” such as plant relocations or pollution.25 Consequently, Crosland defined socialism as the far-reaching goal of “the

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classless society,” to be achieved in part by redressing imbalances in wealth, overturning invidious traditions such as the educational hierarchy of Britain, and establishing a new “legal structure of company ownership” that would make workers “members” in the enterprises that employed them, with a stake, a voice, and hence participation in decisions that affect everyday life.26 In any case, “in Britain, as we approach the socialist goals of the long revolution, the reformer will bend his energies more and more to issues which cannot be classified as specifically socialist or nonsocialist, but which lie in other fields altogether.” He sought more “liberty and gaiety in private life” by challenging a range of restrictions: There come to mind at once the divorce laws, licensing laws, prehistoric (and flagrantly unfair) abortion laws, obsolete penalties for sexual abnormality, the illiterate censorship of books and plays, and remaining restrictions on the equal rights of women. Most of these are intolerable, and should be highly offensive to socialists, in whose blood there should always run a trace of the anarchist and the libertarian.27

Crosland’s diagnosis seems complacent in retrospect, confident that continuing economic growth was unproblematic, that a consumer society based on high working-class wages in effect made “production for use and production for profit” identical, and that the separation of ownership and control meant “owners” as a group no longer wielded decisive economic or political power.28 But in his most utopian moments, he vaulted ahead to suggest that the emerging era drove social experience and social reform beyond the realm of political economy per se. Although he said the reforms he had in mind—including town planning to avoid urban sprawl and to preserve the countryside and architectural treasures—were not specifically socialist, they had some link to the cultural concerns of the William Morris tradition and relevance to “the original cooperative ideal” of the movement. “With the aid of rising material standards, we might find that another aspect of this ideal, the weakening of the motive of personal gain, was also being insensibly and imperceptibly realized,” he wrote. The shift in social theory away from economics thus figured in Crosland’s final speculations: prosperity itself rendered economics less and less salient.29 The other principal analyst of “postcapitalist society” in the 1950s, sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, did not portray that order as transitional to socialism, but he more emphatically stated that “the supersedence of capitalism,” based on the “decomposition of capital” into separated ownership and control, applied no less to the United States than to Britain or Germany.30 The son of a German Social Democratic Party leader, he knew the central European political tradition that had fostered postcapitalist expectations, citing Löwenthal and Renner alongside Berle and Means. Yet Dahrendorf saw

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himself mainly as a defender of liberal democracy, based on the newfound pluralism of modern society, once capital had “dissolved and given way, in the economic sphere, to a plurality of partly agreed, partly competing, and partly simply different groups.” Now, he wrote, “the justice and creativity of diversity, difference, and conflict” was easier to recognize and accommodate, as the historically peculiar “superimposition of authority, property, and general social status” in one group, the old nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, had ended. Given the dissolution of that overarching monopoly of power, “industrial conflict and political conflict are no longer identical,” while class struggle had become less intense and processes of change in social structure were less sudden, radical, or violent.31 Yet he knew that relations of authority and subjection persisted under postcapitalist democracy and that the proliferation of bureaucratic administration both in business and government gave society a conservative cast. Contrary to Burnham, Dahrendorf thought bureaucracy too variegated—between public and private organizations and on internal scales of rank—to compose a “ruling class,” but the functionaries who staffed the bureaucracy were a “reserve army of authority,” inclined to perpetuate the status quo, especially if political parties failed to give state policy meaningful direction. The proliferation of bureaucracy also obscured the sources of concentrated power while it stirred diffuse resentment. “Many people find it hard to name and, perhaps, identify those ‘above’” in the order of power, though administration became by default the focus of people’s sense of subjection. As David Lockwood, sociologist of the white-collar (in British parlance, “blackcoated”) worker, put it, “The clerk is the man on the other side of the desk who is somehow associated with authority.” In these ways, Dahrendorf qualified his comfort with pluralist democracy and approached the views of the dyspeptics who saw postwar society as a static and depoliticized bureaucratic order.32 The explicit naming of “postcapitalist society” in England and Germany did not carry over directly to the United States, but its spirit breathed through the better-known “end of ideology” current of American social thought. This social-scientific circle, which included Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Edward Shils, and others, was shaped not only by their cold war embrace of U.S. foreign policy but also by their social-democratic disposition. The international body these writers joined, the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF), waged its intellectual cold war on a theoretical and political basis marked by Crosland’s influence.33 In many cases, they had entered the postwar academy after spending early years in socialist and communist movements and undergoing a prolonged deradicalization that drew them away from their Marxist roots, though they usually refrained from defending capitalism as such. In effect, they fell back on a ready-made intellectual and political heritage, of social liberalism and the

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interwar postcapitalist vision, which provided means for them to “choose the West” in the cold war while also vesting their confidence in the socialdemocratic potential of an evolving status quo.34 Their studied reconsideration of Marxist premises followed the three dimensions that first nourished reformist aspirations after World War I: industrial democracy, new-economy ideas of state intervention, and pluralism. In this regard, they cited the status of organized labor after the wartime confirmation of CIO legitimacy and collective bargaining, the apparent efficacy of countercyclical government action, and the multifold character of class and power. Like Dahrendorf, they doubted that the bourgeoisie retained the Belle Epoque’s sealed combination of wealth, power, and status, and they grew fascinated with the proliferation of “new middle class” groups.35 The idea of an “end of ideology” germinated in the years after World War II, and its history from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s comprised many of the diverse elements that figured in the tortuous political developments of those years. Most clearly stated at an early point by Albert Camus in 1946, a wished-for “end of ideology” connoted a dismissal of totalitarian doctrines and enthusiasms, besmirched by the blood of millions, in hopes of reinvigorating in their place a genuine radical humanism. Later, at the founding meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950, the anti-Communist Arthur Koestler evoked an end-of-ideology notion when he declared that the need for political unity against the Soviet totalitarian enemy meant “the words ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism,’ ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have today become virtually empty of meaning.” Such talk turned Camus’ postwar radicalism into a cold war consensus. Some writers—notably H. Stuart Hughes—subsequently concluded (like the postcapitalist dyspeptics of the Frankfurt School) that such forced political unity signaled the “end of ideology” in a different sense: an order in which all significant social conflict was suppressed in favor of a bureaucratically controlled or administered society. To conclude, moreover, that the alleged obsolescence of “socialism” and “capitalism” was little more than a propagandistic maneuver in the anti-Soviet cause seemed justified by the disclosure in the late 1960s that the CCF had received covert CIA funding. Yet at the 1955 CCF conference in Milan where the theme of an “end of ideology” first became a catchphrase of social-democratic and liberal European and American intellectuals, it seemed to convey an ardent conviction that modern society moved in ways that transcended the poles of “socialist” and “capitalist” order. If its proponents hailed those socialists who had surrendered doctrinaire commitments to complete nationalization of productive property under a comprehensive plan, they likewise dismissed out of hand Hayek’s alarmist identification of planning and totalitarianism. As Raymond Aron vigorously argued, “market” and “plan” were nothing but “ideal types” whose terms almost seamlessly intertwined in actual practice.

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To say this did not indicate support merely for minimal regulatory intrusion on free enterprise; on the contrary, the preference for “mixed systems” among CCF end-of-ideologists conveyed the assumption that the marketconstraining measures of social control, not the market itself, provided the center of gravity. As Seymour Martin Lipset put it, “The ideological issues dividing left and right had been reduced to a little more or a little less government ownership and economic planning.”36 Given its circuitous development through the late 1940s and early 1950s, the “end of ideology” mood was neither unambiguous nor wholly geared by cold war purposes to uncritical celebration of “the West.” It was not selfevidently procapitalist. The writer who came to be most identified with the phrase, Daniel Bell, still showed signs of a residual anticapitalist animus through the 1950s. He also built his intellectual program on coming to terms with what seemed to him a new “stage” of social development, whether that constituted a new arrangement of the capitalist economy or some alternative system. In the early 1950s, he invoked the sense, echoing that of 1915 –20, of a “new order” as yet dimly understood, and the urge to “name the system” when old names no longer quite sufficed.37 The “end of ideology” mood, rightly understood, gave voice to a social-liberal disposition that hinted at postcapitalist expectations, and in that guise it echoed across the landscape of the social sciences.

Planning and Pluralism: Reform in the Old Social Sciences In one reading, economic thought after World War II heightened the reification of economy, that is, its treatment as a self-contained and autonomous sphere. A growing commitment to refine economic analysis via sophisticated mathematics, and Paul Samuelson’s 1955 declaration of a “grand neoclassical synthesis” that joined Keynesian demand management with orthodox price theory, set the insular and monolithic cast of the discipline. Recent historians, moreover, find the roots of late twentieth-century laissez-faire economism in the cold war–inspired development of abstract modeling, rational-choice individualism, and game theory.38 Yet there was greater diversity in postwar economics than these readings admit. In political science, too, where “pluralism,” the upstart method of the interwar years, achieved some predominance, the conservatism and rigidity of the postwar intellectual mainstream have been exaggerated.39 Rather than resting on a reified notion of the economy, postwar economic thought recognized a substantial role for government and for social values to guide economic affairs. Political science pluralism, beyond applauding the decentralization of power

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in a democratic United States, accommodated a fairly wide range of reformist intentions. Indeed, planning and pluralism were complementary aims for those postwar scholars who upheld social-liberal principles. We are accustomed to regarding Keynesianism as a settled doctrine of the postwar period, the linchpin of a “liberal consensus” that judged all was well with modern capitalism if only a modest program of countercyclical measures smoothed the path of economic growth. The neoclassical synthesis of the mid-1950s certainly had this flavor, but it offered only one possible interpretation of Keynes’s work. For others, Keynes had posed a much more dramatic challenge to deep assumptions of orthodox marginalist theory, and the neoclassical synthesis was only a “bastard Keynesianism.” If one extrapolated from the logic of Keynes’s work to conclusions even he was reluctant to draw, one would see how far policy might go in socializing economic decision making.40 Then economic affairs would be treated not as a world unto itself but rather as an instrument for satisfying socially and politically defined needs. The basics of Keynes’s 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money are well-known. Conventional economics, he argued, falsely equated saving and investment and upheld outmoded ideas on the virtues of thrift. In fact, the savings of the rich did not necessarily move from what was essentially a money hoard into capital investment, and high interest rates encouraging the rich to save proved counterproductive in a mature economy that was operating short of full employment. Likewise, the macroeconomic benefit of low wages (that is, enforced thrift), aimed at driving workers to labor hard and loyally, thus making way for high profits, was overrated. By discrediting the social efficiency of low wages and high savings rates, Keynes wrote, “one of the chief social justifications of great inequality of wealth is, therefore, removed.”41 Thus he proposed low interest rates and government deficits as well as public works and a more equalitarian distribution of incomes accomplished by progressive tax policies—the latter boosting consumer demand since workers had a higher “propensity” to spend (instead of save) than the rich. Keynes saw these as very modest measures, but the conclusion to the General Theory offered something more open ended. There, Keynes proposed lowering interest rates so far that “the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.” Moreover, he argued that “banking policy on the rate of interest” was a crude, inefficient means of shaping economic behavior and “a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment.” He did not specify the meaning or the means of investment “socialization,” besides defining it as the state’s ability “to determine the aggregate

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amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments [of production] and the basic rate of reward to those who own them.”42 Whether one views these proposals as limited or ambitious is almost a matter of taste. No overall “planning” was imagined: “Apart from the necessity of central controls to bring about an adjustment between the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest, there is no more reason to socialise economic life than there was before.” Yet Keynes admitted his proposals involved “a large extension of the traditional functions of government,” and he could imagine no alternative, since high rates of unemployment were “inevitably associated . . . with present-day capitalistic individualism.” The ambiguity here was thick: Did challenging “present-day capitalistic individualism” mean moving beyond capitalism, or simply—somehow—overcoming the culture of greed while leaving the system of privately owned, marketdependent enterprises intact? Keynes answered evasively, “It may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease whilst preserving efficiency and freedom.” It was up to his interpreters to judge how much or little change, within or beyond capitalism, his insights demanded.43 Balanced between vague invocations of “socialisation” and fealty to property, Keynes came to mean different things to different people. English Labourite John Strachey claimed business was right to fear Keynes, for “if once they were to admit that it was necessary to control the system, even in order the better to preserve it, true virtue would have departed from it.”44 Having “rashly shown that those levers [of social control, such as the interest rate, deficits, and public works] had only to be pulled and pushed this way and that, in order to manipulate the [economic] system at will,” Keynes made “the greatest single contribution to the technique of democratic transition” to socialism.45 Reformist versions of Keynes appeared in the United States too, particularly in the 1938 Economic Program for American Democracy developed by a group of young Harvard and Tufts economists that included radicals Alan and Paul Sweezy. They proposed wide-ranging government intervention and economic reform, including deficit spending on social-welfare purposes, tax-spurred income redistribution, regulation of oligopolies and public ownership of them as a last resort.46 To be sure, they did not present their reform package as a route to socialism. Nor did Alvin Hansen, who had a more conventional economics pedigree. Nonetheless, following the 1937 “Roosevelt recession,” Hansen used his 1938 presidential address to the American Economics Association to unveil his most dramatic diagnosis of long-term stagnation, which he believed could be escaped only through government investment in place of faltering private investment.47 He advanced the policy before the Temporary National Economic Committee in May 1939 and later as an advisor to the National Resources Planning Board before its demise in 1943.48 Besides compensatory spending to boost de-

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mand in times of slump, he urged a program of “public investment” that he equated with “community consumption.” Public investment “in human and material resources—education, health, low-cost housing, river valley development, and transportation modernization” would meet social needs and assure “an expanding and dynamic economy.”49 Most American businesses, represented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, opposed even deficit spending as unsound policy. A smaller group of business leaders, including department store executives Beardsley Ruml and Edward Filene along with paper-company magnate Henry Dennison (part of Hoover’s “private planning” schemes of the 1920s), believed such a “negativistic” approach left business with no leverage on public policy. Accepting government intervention as inevitable, this group aimed to define the elements of the Keynesian model that business could live with. In Robert Collins’s elegant reconstruction, this “positive business response to Keynes” involved a political effort to prevent the “left-wing Keynesianism” of Hansen and his followers from gaining ground, by promoting a program using the least-interventionist elements of Keynes’s model—passive acceptance of deficits during slumps and the use of simple monetary and tax measures to liberate private investment capital as needed.50 The main thread of American economic theory was woven together with this “commercial Keynesianism.”51 According to Samuelson’s “grand neoclassical synthesis,” basic assumptions of “the older economics” regarding methodological individualism, the basis of value in measures of marginal utility, and the optimizing rationality of individuals and firms remained the core of a valid microeconomics, to be wedded with Keynes’s “modern theories of income determination” and accompanying notions of how to use monetary and fiscal policy.52 Within boundaries established by those countercyclical tools, self-correcting market mechanisms worked.53 Such conclusions marked a steady deradicalization of Keynes-inspired economic thought. The course of postwar “growth economics” aptly illustrates the same story. This was a new transatlantic field that emerged in the Depression’s wake and drew on the Keynesian revolution in Britain and an American institutionalist legacy. Work by the young Keynesian, Roy Harrod, and Evsey Domar, a Russian émigré and Hansen student in the United States, proposed a bracing model for public policy in the 1940s: relations between macroeconomic variables such as savings, investment, productivity growth, and workforce expansion were so delicate that steady full-employment growth could hardly be assured without a very substantial role for government intervention (and public investment) that went beyond “a mere anti-cycle policy.”54 Another contribution stemmed not from theory but statistical work. Hoping to discover means of assuring growth, the English sta-

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tistician Colin Clark wished to “regularise its flow through time” and “equalise its distribution between persons.” Compounding Keynes’s challenge to economic orthodoxy, he found that current trends in increased productivity depended less on the rate of capital accumulation than on the advent of new technical knowledge and a more skilled workforce. This quasiVeblenian view joined Clark’s influential typology of primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors of the economy (based in extractive, manufacturing, and service activities, respectively), which he argued dominated successive stages of economic evolution. Clark’s U.S. counterpart was a master of national income statistics, Simon Kuznets, a student of Wesley Mitchell and hence an intellectual grandson of Veblen, whose feasibility studies of programs to accelerate war production in the early 1940s also suggested means of “planned” growth.55 Such aggressive notions of intervention, however, were steadily scaled back by the mid-1950s. In a 1956 article, Robert Solow termed the Harrod-Domar model “the knife-edge notion of unstable balance” and proposed that postwar growth showed there was more latitude in adjusting all the variables necessary for full-employment growth. Thus a “mere” countercyclical program indeed sufficed to maintain continuing growth with only mild variations in cycle swings around an upwardtending curve. On the basis of such “self-correcting, dynamically fairly stable models” of growth, Samuelson’s camp of liberal triumphalism gained force.56 Despite the moderating trend, however, some postwar economists still bore significant ties to legacies of interwar radicalism. Kenneth Arrow, renowned for devising a mathematical model of general equilibrium considered central to the postwar neoclassical canon, was hardly an uncritical observer of the U.S. economy or economic theory. While attending the City College of New York in the 1930s, Arrow thought “that the system of production according to profit established vested interests in destructive activity, most especially war and imperialism, but also oppression of workers and destruction of freedom.” Disabused of hope in the Soviet Union after the Moscow purge trials, he maintained his commitment to socialism, concluding in 1940, when he began graduate study in economics at Columbia, that it was possible “to interpret neoclassical economic theory and particularly the then new and rapidly developing discipline of welfare economics as pointing to an ideal efficient economy rather than the actual one, marked both by massive unemployment and by monopolistic distortion.” Agreeing with Oskar Lange, he considered “socialism . . . the way in which the ideal market was to be achieved.”57 As he wrote retrospectively, “My ideal in those days was the development of economic planning, a task which I saw as synthesizing economic equilibrium theory, statistical methods, and criteria for social decision making.” Although Arrow’s radicalism attenuated in time

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with his “provisional acceptance” of the “widespread consensus in the euphoria of postwar economic growth,” he “still felt it important to explore more deeply the possibility that socialism was [an option] superior” to capitalism.58 From such origins, Arrow went on to make a profound intervention in welfare economics with what he called a “general possibility theorem,” better known as the Arrow Impossibility Theorem. Welfare economics sought ways of deriving a definition of collective well-being—satisfying the interests of the greatest number of people—from orthodox standards of individual economic rationality, thus squaring the formal theory of economics with the new democratic sense that popular welfare was a public obligation. Interventionist government seemed here to stay, and public policies on everything from tariffs to taxes had some consequences for income distribution and the widest access to utilities (desired economic goods and services). The challenge lay in devising tools of economic logic capable of determining the best means to such desired outcomes. To be sure, Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” did not seem to bode well for these welfare-economic aspirations, but his point was more a critique of orthodox economic assumptions than an attempt to deflate hopes of social reform.59 Arrow presented his views first in an essay modestly titled “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare” and refined them in his 1951 book, Social Choice and Individual Values.60 The “difficulty” lay in how to move from the variety of choices individuals make in determining utility (their judgment of what they want or consider “good” for themselves) to an aggregate “social choice” of one economic policy over another, considering its impact on all individuals. Was it possible to somehow alter the balance of satisfactions among different individuals in a way that would make society as a whole “better off,” in the sense that the sum of satisfactions enjoyed by all individuals grew? That goal implied a need for quantitative measures comparing one person’s utility (understood in terms of the intensity of wants) with that of another—and thereby determining who needed what most. By Arrow’s time, most welfare economists had concluded that such quantified interpersonal comparisons were beyond reach, and rather than measuring each one’s intensity of wants, it was only necessary to devise an ordinal ranking of utility preferences to start developing formulas that incorporated individuals’ interests in a general definition of well-being. But this too was problematic, Arrow pointed out, for simple models of preferential voting by unrelated individuals showed that private choices did not tote up to make a clear, common judgment: given, for instance, three voters and three options for them to rank, no clear majority emerged in favor of just one option above all others. Arrow concluded there was no universally applicable method for aggre-

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gating individual preferences into a social choice if those preferences were assumed to vary widely among individuals—that is, randomly, in the sense that consumers presumably have unique “tastes” that are “given” and not determined by the market itself—and no preferences are either favored or excluded by custom or dictatorship. Arrow’s point was not that social choices were literally impossible but only that such choices could not be based purely on aggregating the widely varying preferences of the rational individuals typically depicted by economic theory.61 The failure of purely individualistic assumptions to lead to a well-defined social welfare function means, in effect, that there must be a divergence between social and private benefits if we are to be able to discuss a social optimum. Part of each individual’s value system must be a scheme of socioethical norms, the realization of which cannot, by their nature, be achieved through atomistic market behavior. These norms, further, must be sufficiently similar among the members of the society to avoid the difficulties outlined above.62

In effect, Arrow echoed Parsons’s challenge to the economic worldview— his radical doubt that social relations can persist on the basis of individualistic rational choice alone. Likewise, Arrow suggested that individual choices were in fact likely to be limited or shaped by “cultural values”—which in turn implied a supraindividual standard that evaded the impossibility of social choice defined wholly in economistic terms. A bold reading of Arrow’s argument would suggest, then, that the satisfaction of social needs required a kind of decision making that went beyond economics, requiring choices that rested on social values of what is good and just for a community. The normal procapitalist view that the public interest was satisfied merely by maximizing the conditions for free choice among economic individuals would be shattered and economics as the keystone to social policy dethroned. This remained a distinctly social-liberal disposition. In itself, Arrow’s affirmation of it did not entail a postcapitalist vision, but it did reveal a clear critique of economism by a leading economist. Yet if theorists could recognize an urgent role for the visible hand of public authority in meeting social needs, what were to be the purposes of public authority, and how would they be determined? Which scale of social values would come to bear on economic decision making? Political thought might have something to say about such matters, but the newly influential school of pluralism in political science ostensibly viewed public decision making as the outcome of free competition among interest groups—hardly a promising means of avoiding atomistic methods or of theorizing effective social values. Nonetheless, postwar pluralism held to reformist commitments more ardently than it appeared to do, and in the hands of some advocates even sustained the postcapitalist vision. Having arisen in the 1910s and 1920s as a challenge to

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concentrated economic power, a call for insurgent political action, and a rationale for new, diversified forms of property ownership, pluralism carried implications of a new order through the 1930s and into the 1950s. Indeed, one of the leading pluralist political theorists of the mid-twentieth century, Robert Dahl, had finished his Yale PhD in 1940 with a dissertation intended to prove the viability of economic democracy, in a scheme melding Deweyan pragmatism with the market socialism of Oskar Lange.63 In the mid-1940s he joined with a young Yale economist, Charles Lindblom, to explore the meaning of planning, and their 1953 book, Politics, Economics, and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes, revealed a vision of social reconstruction that predicted the displacement of capitalist property from unchallenged preeminence in economic organization. Dahl and Lindblom adopted a postcapitalist perspective in an “end of ideology” guise. They doubted the postwar viability of anything clearly recognizable as capitalism and insisted also that their flexible, pragmatic style of “economic planning” implied no “command economy.” The promise of planning depended on escaping the now vanishing tradition of the great “isms.” . . . Capitalism is now hardly more than a name stretched to cover a large family of economies in which distant cousins, it is true, resemble one another, but no more than do “capitalist” United States and “socialist” Britain. Socialism once stood for equality; but income and inheritance taxation, social security and other techniques of “capitalist” reform have destroyed its distinction. And in the eyes of socialists themselves, public ownership of industry is now simply an implement in everyone’s tool kit for economic reform. . . . Both socialism and capitalism are dead.64

Surpassing that dichotomy depended on new techniques of “rational calculation and control” for social benefit. In light of Arrow’s theorem, they knew that any program of rational social control had to venture a set of “postulated” ethical ends. Theirs fitted a mild social-democratic agenda: (1) maximum possible individual freedom; (2) rationality and efficiency defined in more than purely market terms (quality of work life, if valued, might be maximized and still judged “efficient” despite a measure of output reduction); (3) democracy understood as political equality and majority rule; (4) a “subjective equality” assuring wide access to common need-satisfactions including education, housing, and medical care as well as such social values as “control, respect, status, and dignity”; (5) security, or the assurance of freedom over the long run; (6) progress as the pursuit of growing freedom; (7) and “appropriate inclusion” in a community of citizens.65 Dahl and Lindblom argued that the means to achieve such goals were

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highly varied and far from reducible to a simple choice between “private” (economic) or “public” (political) action. The institutions of contemporary society varied along a continuum between private and public, economic and political, “autonomous” and “prescribed” (terms they preferred to what dogmatic anti-planners called free and coerced) activities. Modern economic organizations varied so widely as to include the small, family-owned enterprise, the managerial corporation, government service agencies like the post office, regulated utilities, public authorities (in some countries under the control of tripartite boards of business, labor, and public representatives), government operations carried out by private companies under lease and strict contractual expectations, as well as public purchases of private goods and services for popular distribution (such as public housing or, in Britain, public health). Above all, they wrote, this variety “attest[s] [to] the inventiveness of our times.” Dahl and Lindblom buoyantly regarded the decline of “isms” and the new “invention and innovation . . . in social structure” as a liberation. Perhaps their confidence in the wide variation in available social techniques under given conditions, and their neglect of the possibility that vested interests posed definite limits to social, political, and economic experimentation, mark their vision as a complacent one. But rather than expressing simple satisfaction with the status quo—an “end of ideology” as a slack surrender of ambitious aims—they believed there lay ahead so much yet to do in social action with the new, and proliferating, means at hand. Just as for Tugwell, Gardiner Means, and others before them, the decline of “isms” signaled the pliability of contemporary affairs and the promise of postcapitalist forms even in conservative times.

The Displacement of Economy in the New Social Sciences While a number of economists who studied growth and welfare, as well as political pluralists, came to think of economy as a malleable feature of social life, the newer social sciences after World War II commenced to define social life almost without reference to an economic dimension at all. There were exceptions to this mode of analysis in social science currents that strove to maintain links between society, culture, and economy, such as the economic anthropology of Karl Polanyi and his students at Columbia University during the 1950s as well as the University of Chicago circle of modernization theorists concerned with “economic development and cultural change.”66 Yet the “shift away from economics” made its mark. A work such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd examined society without economy, even though growth and prosperity underpinned his view of social

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trends. His work illustrates how an age of plenty facilitated the displacement of economy from the center of attention. Riesman’s early career showed how Parsons’s “shift away from economics” worked its way through other venues of the American academy. Aside from Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, the college core program at the University of Chicago also witnessed a move, over the 1930s and 1940s, from an economy-based formulation of social-scientific concerns to a noneconomic concept of society. In 1931, as Robert Hutchins was leading the creation of Chicago’s core curriculum, a team of three instructors devised a yearlong Introductory General Course in the Social Sciences, which moved through fall, winter, and spring quarters featuring Harry D. Gideonse on economics, Jerome Kerwin on political science, and Louis Wirth on sociology. Uniting the three terms was a concern with “the parallel evolution of economic, social, and political institutions, from the folk society of the medieval manor, through the vicissitudes of the Industrial Revolution, to the urban industrial societies of the twentieth century.”67 In 1947, however, the course underwent reconstruction and was renamed “Personality and Culture” by David Riesman, who had been recruited from the University of Buffalo Law School and was making himself over as a sociologist. Riesman’s self-reinvention came under the aegis of psychocultural theory and rested on a political background squarely set in interwar social liberalism. He had been analyzed by Erich Fromm (to whom he was referred by Karen Horney, a friend of Riesman’s mother), and he had struck up a friendship with Margaret Mead, whose work he put on Chicago’s common reading list. The course was only one of three yearlong sequences that introduced students to the social sciences, the first dealing with the development of U.S. government and the third approaching issues of freedom and order in economic and political action. Hence, “Personality and Culture,” also known as Social Science 2—or “Soc 2,” for short—concerned itself with the “new” fields outside politics and economics. Just as Parsons had found the new discourse of national culture and society the key to finding solidarity in American life, so Riesman began his course with a reading of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, a classic contribution to that literature in its description of an “American creed.” The course went on to examine personality and culture in urban industrial society based on readings in classic texts by Adam Smith, Marx, Weber, Freud, and Durkheim. Rather than as theorists of capitalism, though, Smith was more likely to be taught for his model of rational egoism, Marx for his notions of social groups in conflict, and Weber for his insistence on the role of subjectivity and culture in social change. As psychologist David Orlinsky described it later, the course aimed at the “development of a unified, multidimensional theory of human behavior and its sociocultural context.”68 Riesman cited an exception that

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proved the rule: as part of the teaching staff, he noted, “Sylvia Thrupp was already on the scene as an economic historian—the closest to economics Soc 2 ever came.”69 The general formulation of the noneconomic fields lasted for decades, and in 1968 the course was renamed “Self, Culture, and Society.” This model of tripartite organization was widely imitated throughout American social thought in the postwar years. Howard P. Becker, standardbearer of Wisconsin’s Sociology and Anthropology Department (which also taught social psychology), published his own version of the formula in a 1956 textbook, Man in Reciprocity: Introductory Lectures on Culture, Society, and Personality.70 But Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd best illustrated the model. Riesman’s renowned examination of the shift in American character type from “inner-directed” to “other-directed” clearly stemmed from a “culture and personality” approach to social analysis. His intellectual lineage enabled him to combine anthropology’s interwar cultural critique with the analysis of new social trends that had gained steam since 1940. Property, power, production, and class had all, Riesman thought, changed their stripes, and “capitalism” could be cited only in quotation marks—a misapprehension by stubborn, old-fashioned businessmen or dwindling numbers of dogmatic leftists. Riesman brought to this analysis his own unusual political slant, which was temperamentally conservative in its Tocquevillean distaste for pulling things up at their roots, liberal in its openness to the present and future, and radically utopian in its insistence on a new frontier of social change that demanded new values of work, leisure, and community. Yet the combination of social reform, often imagined daringly, and a disinclination to pursue disruptive change was not untypical of social liberalism since the 1910s, and the key to understanding The Lonely Crowd lay in the postcapitalist context of postwar liberal social thought. Riesman was born in Philadelphia in 1909 to a secularized elite Jewish family. His father was a distinguished professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and his accomplished mother, Riesman recalled, imagined the world divided between exceptional talents, or “first-raters,” and everyone else. Young Riesman worried that he fell short of the elect and thus nurtured a lifelong suspicion of the individualistic achievement ethics that Karen Horney and others criticized. After attending a Friends school, he entered Harvard in 1927, where he was speakers’ chairman of the Liberal Club (inviting Alexander Meiklejohn to campus), protested ROTC on campus out of pacifist convictions, spent summers at the Grenfell missions of Labrador, and visited the Soviet Union in the spring of his senior year. He considered a medical career and became close friends with Carl Friedrich, who introduced him to the tradition of Heidelberg sociology. Yet after graduation, he opted for Harvard Law School, where he was “astonished,” he

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later wrote, to find himself at the top of the class. He clerked for Justice Louis Brandeis, and his hostility to nationalism led him to unabashedly challenge Brandeis’s Zionism.71 As he took a post at the University of Buffalo Law School, Riesman still regarded himself as a pacifist and remained ambivalent about U.S. involvement in World War II. During the war he worked at a medium-sized defense contractor, Sperry Gyroscope, where he concluded that ordinary business executives were hardly the exploitative ogres pictured by the traditional Left.72 He opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and began reading Dwight Macdonald’s politics magazine, which he regarded as “magnificent.” The horrifying escalation of U.S. tactics from saturation bombing to firebombing to nuclear warfare, he said, “drastically altered the political landscape for me.” Although he was always suspicious of Communist dogmatism and shared Macdonald’s fierce disdain for the Wallace campaign of 1948, even his participation in the liberal anticommunist organization, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, did not keep Riesman from criticizing the cold war.73 He hoped the Soviet Union would crumble but always wanted to avoid war. He collaborated with the antinuclear “scientists’ movement” in the late 1940s, defended J. Robert Oppenheimer from disloyalty charges in 1953 (and resigned from the ACCF when it failed to do likewise), opposed Edward Teller’s advocacy of thermonuclear weapons, and joined the renewed antibomb activism of the late 1950s.74 The Lonely Crowd appeared in 1950 as the third volume in the series Studies in National Policy, which was sponsored by faculty members in economics, political science, and law at Yale University, though its link to the “old” social sciences was tenuous. Writing to Margaret Mead in July 1948, Riesman described it as “a study of the relation between political apathy and character structure.”75 He and his assistants conducted in-depth interviews of college students, seeking to understand what they perceived as the disengagement of the young generation from political concern. Skimmed over in The Lonely Crowd, this motivating concern figured prominently in the companion volume of 1952, Faces in the Crowd, which was based on the interview records. Although memories of economic depression and fears of relapse were still alive when Riesman started the book, he thought more about the rise of mass production and consumption in the 1920s and the signs that it would resume with postwar union-bargained pay increases. Moreover, he relied on the late-1940s population model devised by demographer Frank Notestein, an S-curve that began with low population growth, headed steeply upward, and then leveled off, predicting “incipient population decline” in the coming years.76 To this model Riesman tied Colin Clark’s model of economic growth: traditional societies, where the “primary” extractive sector of the

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economic prevailed, had stagnant population; rapid increase accompanied the growing dominance of the “secondary” manufacturing sector; and the coming steady state followed the emergent “tertiary” service sector. When the baby boom made his demographic schema one of the great gaffes of social-scientific literature, Riesman removed it from later editions. But in 1950, he cited it continuously: the rapid rise of population coincident with nineteenth-century industrialization gave a “scarcity psychology” to the “inner-directed types” who had to muster their personal resources for arduous effort. Borrowing a metaphor from his wartime business experience, he said the inner-directed type was one who operated on the basis of an internal “gyroscope.” Inculcated at an early age with the need to assume a posture of self-reliance, such types kept their own balance wherever they were and, in line with the society’s ideal of independence, were driven to act according to their own lights, undeterred by the views of their fellows. Now, when “the problems not only of mere subsistence but also of large-scale industrial organization and production have been for the most part surmounted,” the other-directed type was “befitting a society of abundance” and proceeded by “radar” (another World War II metaphor) that constantly checked others’ responses to one’s actions in order to fit in with the group.77 Riesman combined a host of recent developments in social thought and analysis. Friedrich had introduced him to studies of mass communication, and the new critique of mass culture in Macdonald’s politics helped sustain his interest in the topic. Riesman knew the research on the “new middle class,” begun in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and continued after World War II in the United States by (among others) C. Wright Mills, whose interview data for White Collar (1951) Riesman had already seen.78 He followed Max Weber on the rise of bureaucracy and cited James Burnham, among others, on the rise of managerial authority in place of property ownership (though he rejected Burnham’s idea of an omnipotent managerial elite). He had some familiarity with the work of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, particularly Leo Löwenthal’s argument that mass culture now lionized “heroes of consumption” rather than “heroes of production,” as well as Max Horkheimer’s Studies on Authority and the Family, which depicted the decline of patriarchal authority before that of “peer groups,” as Riesman rephrased it.79 The culture critique of the Fromm-Horney-Mead-Benedict milieu was paramount. “Inner-direction” was another name for Weber’s Protestant ethic and the competitive-achievement model Horney, Dollard, and others had questioned. “Other-direction” was very much modeled on the more group-oriented cultures the anthropologists examined. The Lonely Crowd cited the Hopi as a model of that kind of sensitivity to others geared to maintaining one’s place in the group. Another case could have been Ruth Bene-

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dict’s examination of Japanese culture in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. The shift from inner- to other-direction fit well with the anthropologist’s distinction between “guilt” cultures and “shame” cultures, and Benedict’s sympathy for the latter over the former was echoed in Riesman’s ambivalence about the new form of character in the advanced industrial West.80 In a society based on bureaucratic organization, communications, and services, “the product now in demand is neither a staple nor a machine [Clark’s primary and secondary sectors]; it is a personality.” When people’s activities were concerned less with dealing with things than dealing with other people (a mark of the tertiary sector), society perforce stressed sensitivity to others rather than doggedly making one’s own way despite them. Though Riesman did not use the term, he described the new order as virtually a “postindustrial” one, “almost as destructive of the craft-oriented [i.e., innerdirected] professional and businessman as a society in the earlier stages of industrialization is destructive of the handicraft-oriented peasant and artisan.”81 For all his references to the role of work in setting the conditions for changes in character, Riesman clearly let economics drop out from his analysis. His conviction that it no longer made much sense to describe U.S. society as capitalist was clear when he stated that “assumptions of a ‘ruling class’ based on pelf or power may be quite as mythical as the belief of residual capitalists in the ‘invisible hand.’”82 He devoted a great deal of space to discussing class and power, insisting—in an extreme kind of political pluralism—that power was exercised less by purposive, controlling groups than by defensive “veto groups” representing an enormous variety of interests including “small business and professional men who control Congress . . . military men . . . big business managers and their lawyers . . . labor leaders . . . black belt whites . . . Poles, Italians, Jews, and Irishmen . . . editorializers . . . [and] farmers—themselves a warring congeries” of ranchers and planters in different crops. The image of the staunch businessman defending property—like Montgomery Ward’s Sewell Avery, a throwback to Schumpeter’s old-time bourgeois, when he resisted a government takeover in 1944—was an illusion, because most businessmen feel “weak and dependent.”83 Pushing the point, he wrote, “While it may take leadership to start things running, or to stop them, very little leadership is needed once things are under way . . . the fact [that things] get done is no proof that there is someone in charge. Power in America seems to me situational and mercurial.”84 It was not only that the social structure and distribution of power in contemporary America was “amorphous”—repeated use of the term indicated Riesman’s dependence on mass society theory—but also that economic motivations per se had lost purchase on social action. In effect, Riesman converted the old critique of economism (and homo economicus) into an empir-

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ical generalization about recent social change: “The older motivations of self-interest and duty [definitive of inner direction] fade.” Deeper than all this lies the gnawing doubt whether self-interest is actually a potent spur to action under the conditions of contemporary America. Management has learned to its bewilderment that “incentives” do not always stimulate production—even among executives. The other-directed man, like his tradition-directed forebears, tends to respond to a group definition of the situation and not to individualistic appeals. A lush commission is not enough to induce salesmen to sell: they must be cajoled, shamed, inspired, and organized into groups . . . in order to induce strenuous efforts to sell. One could argue that altruism is a much more important spur to social behavior than selfinterest.

He added: “Vanity, conformity, the need for projecting guilt, masochism, and sadism—these and others tend to replace the more traditional forms of ‘rational’ self-interest.”85 The “economic man” was finished. Certainly Riesman knew that the United States remained a market society—consumption and consumerism were at the heart of his analysis—but that alone was not sufficient to define American society as distinctly capitalist. He deliberately chose the term “other-directed” over Fromm’s substantively similar notion of a “marketing personality,” to better distinguish the new from the old bourgeois order. Something more socialized had emerged. Remarking on “Five Little Piggies,” Riesman wrote, “The rhyme may be taken as a paradigm of individuation and unsocialized behavior among children of an earlier era. Today, however, all little pigs go to market; none stay home; all have roast beef, if any do; and all say ‘we-we.’”86 To be sure, the recast rhyme sounds like mockery. Moreover, Riesman recognized that the “amorphous distribution of power in America” had detrimental effects. Anticipating a bit of Dahrendorf’s analysis, he remarked, “The political framework of society has become opaque, bewildering, or uncertain,” and “while politics increasingly influences people’s lives, their feeling of control and competence seems to diminish; people no longer feel confident that they can affect their destiny, in anything that matters, by political action, individual or collective.” Thus Riesman returned to his initial concern with the problem of political apathy. Yet, like everything else in the book, Riesman’s attitude toward apathy was ambivalent. Soon, he would publish an essay defending apathy because it set a limit on totalitarian attempts to mobilize whole populations.87 The book’s ambiguities bedeviled Riesman as he tried resisting “a tendency to overidealize inner-direction and to be overcritical of other-direction.” While he continued to criticize the “conformist” ethos of “we-we,” he

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welcomed the fact that people were no longer “unsocialized” but out in the world (including women, whose rights and sensitivities he took seriously), just as he welcomed the arrival of abundance: The messiness and amorphousness I recognize in many contemporary otherdirected lives do not lead me to forget the brutality and rigidity of many deceased inner-directed lives. Indeed, even the American upper-middle classes are by no means free as yet of the domestic and business and professional tyrannies and quiet violences that inner-directeds of both high and low principle can produce around them.

He told Mead he was reluctant to “see these social changes only negatively, as seems to be the fashion.”88 Toward the end of the book, he highlighted his continued “Enlightenment optimism,” “hopeful, utopian and trusting.”89 To be sure, Riesman seemed naively content with the new society around him—abundant, increasingly classless, lacking in overbearing power. “The chiefs have lost the power, but the followers have not gained it,” he wrote.90 The problem now was to rejuvenate politics not in an old inner-directed model but to maximize the opportunities of other-direction, to create social conditions under which sensitivities to others and to the inward life gave persons “autonomy” rather than leaving them merely “adjusted,” or worse, unattached and “anomic.”91 Riesman’s vision mingled the false confidence and the ambition of the postcapitalist vision. Like Dahl and Lindblom, he saw few obstacles to remaking economic and social order. Rather than recognizing obdurate private interests or impersonal markets at the helm of social policy, he called for planning in some guise (though he did not, needless to say, endorse nationalization of property): “We need rapidly to expand the tertiary trades that cater to leisure” and to address (as Tugwell suggested in the 1930s) “the problem of where to automatize.” Advocating a revival of “utopian political thinking,” he wished to depose the tyranny of full employment models of social policy while “shifting our American ‘selves’ away from jobs and job situations.” Guilt over not working a paying job should be surrendered: “If the other-directed people should discover how much needless work they do . . . then we might expect them to become more attentive to their own feelings and aspirations.” His call for relinquishing “models developed in the era of the invisible hand” and building a “new view of society, a view of the potentialities of leisure” resembled Crosland’s notions of the future of socialist politics in promoting development of the noneconomic realm of experience. The old society’s productivist biases, he noted, fostered an unfair derogation of women’s work in the home as opposed to men’s work in the factory, for though the former might be just as exhausting it was not paid or “productive.” With abundance, and growing leisure, he thought people

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should nurture “newly critical and creative standards.” “If these people are not strait-jacketed before they get started—by the elaboration and forced feeding of a set of official [production-oriented] doctrines—people may some day learn to buy not only packages of groceries or books but the ‘larger package’ of a neighborhood, a society, and a way of life.” The allusion to “buying” was unfortunate, for Riesman believed the real choices were ultimately political and cooperative, not economic. In that spirit, he hailed Paul and Percival Goodman’s Communitas (1947), and its anarcho-communitarian visions of reconstructed cities, as “one of the most imaginative discussions of work and play in any contemporary writing,” a “welcome exception” to the contemporary dearth of utopian thinking.92 Back in the 1930s, Parsons had worried that contemporary social theory would fail to broach the prospects for something other than “bigger and better industrialism.” Now Riesman wrote that he looked forward not to “more production of production.” He called for “an increased ‘capital budget’ of the enormous variety of recreational resources our leisure, our training in consumption, and our educational plant allow us to develop.” Such a view, he knew, might seem indifferent to the bottom third who as yet did not enjoy prosperity. Yet, by his insistence on cultivating a tertiary sector beyond the scope of private consumption, Riesman had in mind a crucial political and macroeconomic concern: By thinking of expansion of consumption in terms of the market for durable and semidurable consumer goods—with the skies eagerly scanned for . . . new gadgets . . . to hurl into the Keynesian multiplier formula—we are left open to an antiquated set of economic habits and assumptions. By clinging to them one heavy-draft, politically feasible outlet remains for the overexpanded primary and secondary spheres: a war economy.93

His notion of a national “capital budget” resembled Hansen’s old notion of “community consumption.” In economics, he remained a left Keynesian of late-1930s stamp. Adding to that a postwar sensibility shared with Macdonald’s politics, Riesman built his own postcapitalist vision, in which the alternative to successfully overcoming the primacy of the reified economic realm was social regression to permanent war. In that, even an echo of Veblen’s Absentee Ownership sounded.

The Revival of Social Keynesianism in the Late 1950s The curious relation, in The Lonely Crowd, between the assumption of economic growth and the analytical displacement of economy showed how so-

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cial liberals adopting a postcapitalist vision could square their conviction in the new primacy of “the social” with an age of economic boom. By the late 1950s, Parsons himself addressed this paradox as he returned to the study of economic phenomena. By its very title, Parsons’s 1956 book Economy and Society, written with a young colleague, sociologist Neil Smelser, seems to depart from the trend Parsons earlier identified as the “shift away from economics.” But the book still revealed a strong impulse to check the sway of economics in social theory. Based on Parsons’s 1953 Marshall Lectures at Cambridge University, “The Integration of Economic and Sociological Theory,” the book gave Parsons an opportunity to appraise the impact of Keynes, and it shows how Keynes’s work might be interpreted, even in the 1950s, as a more challenging doctrine than a minimalist program of fiscal management for the sake of pump priming.94 The formulations Parsons offered in Economy and Society depended on a new scheme of analysis that he fashioned with the help of a former student, Robert F. Bales, and Chicago sociologist Edward Shils. Looking at small groups as sociological microcosms, Bales discerned that group members given a common task typically divided themselves into different roles serving specific functions for the group as a whole. Accomplishing a task involved some purely instrumental functions such as gathering needed materials and planning the actions required to complete it, but it also involved “expressive” functions needed to hold the group together for the duration of the job, such as keeping the participants focused on the task and facilitating interaction between those undertaking different parts of it. The observations were simple—some individuals became “executives” while others excelled in keeping up morale—but they offered an elegant formulation that promised to simplify Parsons’s picture of a social system’s functional dimensions. In a 1953 volume generalizing these findings, Parsons, Bales, and Shils defined functions applicable to any social system as follows: “adaptive” for mobilizing resources; “goal-attainment” for the executive role; “integrative” for facilitating interaction and assuring cohesion; and “pattern-maintenance” for upholding common values and norms.95 (Later, they would be coded A-G-I-L, marking “pattern-maintenance” by “L” for the “latency” of cultural values in socialized actors.) Parsons intended to show that “no society can live by economic values alone, and hence there must be subsystems and roles which are governed primarily by non-economic values.” Moreover, he argued that Keynes’s greatest achievement was to demonstrate that economic systems were not self-sufficient (and self-correcting) but “open” to, indeed dependent on, interaction with other aspects of social life.96 To demonstrate these points, he called on the “four-function model” he devised with Bales and Shils. Empirically, different segments of a highly differentiated society could be iden-

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tified with distinct functional “subsystems,” so the economy figured as the “adaptive” (“A”) quadrant, government fell under “G,” and “L” was most clearly associated with institutions like the family, as agencies of socialization.97 The theory also served to analyze each subsystem in finer detail, along the same four-part scheme. Thus the economy, for example, had its own “adaptive” segment, that part devoted to securing its fundamental resources, defined as access to credit. Because Parsons and Smelser saw the provision of credit ultimately as the responsibility of government (through its central bank), they posited a “boundary interchange” between government and economy of one output for another: “credit” for “productivity.” This formulation gave just one hint that Parsons and Smelser regarded the economy as something more than a sphere of “economic man,” market relations, and private accumulation. Rather, the economy in their view provided a general social resource, productive power, which was ultimately subject to public purposes stipulated by government. In the same spirit, they wrote there are no “‘propensities’ of the individual which determine social processes,” and “utility . . . should not be defined in relation to ‘the individual’ but in relation to the society.”98 For Parsons and Smelser, basic definitions changed as the economy submitted to social control. “The earlier emphasis was on physical consumers’ goods and their ‘hedonistic’ consumption values,” they wrote. “The later emerging emphasis has been on the generalizing of wealth as purchasing power,” to be understood not merely as consumers’ cash but as a capacity distributed across a society’s several “subsystems.” Consequently, a new notion of economizing emerged, based not merely on decisions by individuals, each with freely varying preferences, but on social judgments of need: “Cost must be measured in relation to the social (not merely economic) value of the product, i.e., it must be assessed in terms of its alternative noneconomic uses. . . . [For instance], the use of a body of scientifically trained personnel for economic production entails the loss of their services for ‘pure’ scientific research, which is a non-economic function.” What else could determine these alternative uses but political judgment and social values? How else to choose, for instance, between “commit[ting] purchasing power on the most generalized level to economic use to increase the productivity of the economy” or to “the financing of primarily pattern-maintenance ‘capital’ such as schools, churches, recreational facilities, etc.”? Thus Parsons and Smelser challenged “the classical formulation [that] reduced as much of the non-economic as possible to economic conditions.” For while Keynes’s analysis of unemployment showed there were some things “classical theory could not account for without theoretical embarrassment,” they wanted to widen the wedge Keynes put there. In contemporary life, both labor and capital became more socialized as they depended on the generalized

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knowledge of science and technology; the social dimensions of economic affairs grew; economics had to move closer to sociology if it were to understand the modern world.99 Yet as Parsons and Smelser emphasized the social embeddedness of economic affairs, they could not fail to recognize the primacy of “economic values” in “highly differentiated” societies, especially in American life where demands for efficiency, productivity, and growth loomed exceptionally large. Parsons and Smelser remained undaunted. Distinctly economic values assumed priority in social evolution as production and distribution were differentiated from religious, communal, or household practices; taken further, differentiation cut off the economic subsystem from the family subsystem. Parsons and Smelser here cited Berle and Means’s claim that the rise of managerial corporations with dispersed shareholdings marked the end of “family control” and Schumpeter’s view that capitalism could not survive without the maintenance of a quasi-aristocratic pride by the bourgeois family in its accumulation of property. Thus, given the “separation of ownership and control” and the severed connection between corporations and elite families, Parsons repeated his claims of the early 1940s that American society lay beyond “capitalism.” Since processes of integration always followed differentiation, “economic” affairs of growth and productivity, when freed from the lock of private family control, became more, not less, susceptible to overarching mechanisms of “social control,” that is, subject to socially informed, politically guided allocations of resources to varied economic and noneconomic purposes. Alas, “the opinion of most economists remains within the framework of the capitalism-socialism alternative,” unable to recognize the “mixed system” Parsons and Smelser applauded.100 As he hailed the integration of economic functions with large-scale social demands and control capacities, Parsons depicted the economy as purely instrumental, a tool to be used for ends framed by the value consensus of society or the “goal-attainment” functions of a legitimate state. Thus he denied the independence of the economy as a determinant force in its own right, shaping social relations through the accumulation of wealth, the political influence of property, the unequal power it grants different players, and its yet uncontrolled disruptive effects. Even if he neglected these factors, though, Parsons must have recognized the hegemony of economics as a mode of thought, and his argument for the priority of the social was an uphill battle, waged by will. He searched for a convenient name, comparable to “economy” and “polity,” for the distinct sphere sociology studied (the “I” or integrative field) and which Parsons believed had become a dynamic force in its own right. By the early 1960s, he coined the name “the societal community.” Still driven to subordinate the economy, he announced that this sphere was “the core” of modern society and its developmental trajec-

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tory, the vanguard of progress in promoting new forms of equality and solidarity.101 By that time too he had embraced a “cybernetic” notion of functional hierarchy, whereby forces high in energy submit to “control” by agencies high in information, or “values.” Economy sat at the bottom of the hierarchy, a furnace in the basement, its operations led by a society and state setting the “temperature” of growth and welfare by subtle steering.102 Thus the drift of postwar liberal social analysis was either to displace economics from centrality or to assume that growth itself rendered the economic order malleable. Despite the long-touted complacency of the 1950s, several dissenting economists contributed to a revival of interest in models of social economy that challenged the neoclassical synthesis. In the mid1950s, the main Depression-era advocate of left-liberal Keynesianism, Alvin Hansen, was back on the scene, arguing that “quality [as opposed to sheer quantitative measures of output] and social priorities at long last must concern us or we perish in the midst of plenty.”103 It was a theme John Kenneth Galbraith took further a few years later in his book The Affluent Society, giving him pride of place as the contemporary exponent, in effect, of a social Keynesianism.104 Some left-wing Keynesians had argued that the U.S. economy continued to show signs of stagnation—signaled by three recessions in the Eisenhower years and a particularly sticky one late in the decade—but Galbraith seized on problems of “affluence” or “plenty” itself.105 His conclusions resembled Hansen’s 1955 view that conditions of economic growth in the contemporary world belied the convictions of orthodox economics and demanded a dramatic turn toward public investment and public involvement in economic affairs. Galbraith’s concern with “quality and social priorities”—framed by his famous contrast between “private opulence and public squalor”—assailed the “urgency of production” that demanded a maximum of capital accumulation in private hands and a minimum of wages and security to drive labor to produce.106 According to historian Bernard Sternsher, who was writing his biography of Tugwell in the early 1960s, a “Great Debate” over the virtues of public versus private spending resumed at that time. “The question of growth,” he wrote, “tied in . . . with the issue of collectivism—collective public, or governmental, action,” and yielded enough new publications to “fill a long library shelf.” Sternsher’s subject, Tugwell, saw the recurrence of recession in the late 1950s as proof that “monetary and fiscal policies [are] crude devices for maintaining economic stability” and “stated his collectivistic position, his belief in the need for planning and coordination, without socialism, if the economy were to achieve growth with balance and continuity.” A number of Keynesians, radical and liberal, recommenced calls for a “sweeping program of public works” and increased purchasing power, while they became fascinated with the “guided capitalism,” “indicative planning,” or “over-

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all coordination” practiced in France and other European countries. Gunnar Myrdal called on the United States “to do what we do in every European country—make an analytical forecast of what a greater growth rate for five or ten years implies,” while British writer C. P. Snow, warned about falling behind other, “future-directed societies.” Robert Heilbroner added, “The mechanism of the competitive market, the ‘traditional means of control over business as well as labor,’ was being eroded by the waning of economic necessity. . . . The ‘road to abundance leads subtly but surely into the society of control’ and into the ‘socialization of life.’”107 The idea of inhabiting an ongoing transition beyond the limits of capitalism to a new society, collectivist in some regards though not socialist, had staying power even in the postwar period, despite war-stirred doubts about the virtues of technical progress or the resistance to social change posed by cold war conservatism. If Keynes demonstrated that the economy, rather than being an impermeable self-correcting system, lay deeply embedded in society, then Parsons and Smelser as well as others judged that social values—or their expression through political channels—took the driver’s seat in directing the economy. As the economy was subordinated, society was liberated. Despite Snow’s worries, this was a society, many American analysts thought, peculiarly able to adapt to change as it faced the future. By the 1960s, social thought came to focus on the ideal of a dynamic society, perpetually changing its form as it met new circumstances, perceived new needs, and addressed new demands for growth, equality, welfare, and freedom.

chapter 6

The Heyday of Dynamic Sociology

*

The revival of social Keynesianism in the late 1950s came amid a tentative but broad-based resurgence of liberalism and the Left in American politics, spurred in large part by the communal mobilization of Southern blacks against Jim Crow and echoed in diverse ways, from small-group protests against the arms race to Democratic victories in the 1958 midterm elections as well as hopes on the far left for a phoenixlike “realignment” of radical forces after the virtual collapse of the Communist movement in 1956.1 Much of the resurgent spirit drew on elements of interwar reform. Gardiner Means’s critique of corporate power resurfaced in congressional hearings led by Estes Kefauver and Wright Patman on the price structure of monopolistic industries.2 The Student League for Industrial Democracy, descendant of Harry Laidler’s organization of the 1920s and 1930s, reorganized in 1960 as Students for a Democratic Society. The interwar sense of dwelling in a new age also revived, ironically in the form of a conviction that dissent in the 1960s departed from all antecedents. Youth protest bore this sensibility in the form of a “New Left” consciousness that grew increasingly explicit by the middle of the decade. Meanwhile, social theory contemplated the onset of a new society that seemed radically different from the past even as it remained inchoate and hard to name. The dawning discourse of “postindustrial society” was the most evident form of this speculation, marking the high point of the twentieth-century postcapitalist vision. Writing in 1961, three Boston-area sociologists—Warren Bennis, Kenneth Benne, and Robert Chin—declared that they lived “in an age whose 186

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single constant is radical change.”3 Their book, The Planning of Change, cited Dewey’s notion that change occurs “not only in details but also in the method of directing social change,” and it adopted postcapitalist terms in arguing that current “methods of change” pushed beyond both Marx and the market, beyond the obsolescent “law of nonintervention and law of radical intervention,” by which they meant laissez-faire and state planning. Bennis and his colleagues stepped beyond economics into the “social” realm, enacting “planned change” based on the uses of “social and psychological knowledge” in “various institutional settings . . . industry, government, welfare, health, and education.” Relying on studies of small-group interaction that lauded “democratic” styles of leadership, the Bennis team imagined “change-agents” fanning out across a wide range of social institutions to initiate “a deliberate collaborative process” addressing the problem of controlling “the impact of technological change.” Since technological advance spurred both growing social interdependence and corrosion of traditional communities, the “planning of social change must extend beyond the effective and humane management of accelerating technological change to the building and rebuilding of valid bases for ‘community’ life. This means, of necessity, helping people to build and rebuild their value orientations as well.”4 However vague, such a prospect signaled their faith in the malleability of social structure and the onset of what earlier reformers claimed the market economy prevented: the planned, value-determined use of technology to enhance rather than undermine community life. The attention the Bennis team focused on “the impact of technological change” was hardly a new theme, having figured prominently in the discussion of “cultural lag” during the 1920s and the debate over “technological unemployment” beginning in the 1930s.5 Yet when they wrote, some fifteen years after the end of World War II, few readers would have missed their allusion to nuclear anxieties or the wave of new technologies of which the new weapons were a part. A “third industrial revolution” based on electronics, advanced aeronautics, and nuclear energy began during World War II, and according to some theorists of “long waves” in economic development, sparked the new phase of postwar growth.6 Growth theory since 1940 (starting with Colin Clark’s The Conditions of Economic Progress) had begun to emphasize technological change, rather than the accumulation of capital, as the spur to economic expansion.7 Taking off from such arguments, social theorists could begin to view technological dynamism as an autonomous factor, stealing primacy from the economic sphere. Writers variously argued that sweeping technological change promised to conquer scarcity, that it depended on and cultivated collective resources, or that it required advance planning. In any case, it seemed to supersede the economic principle of market exchange that determined optimal allocations of resources only af-

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ter the fact, as price signals and cyclical shifts rendered their verdict, instead of by benefit of forethought.8 Moreover, this third technological revolution possessed traits distinguishing it from the first one of power-driven machinery and the second in the late nineteenth century based on electricity, automobiles, and chemicals—most notably in its reliance on the organized development of and application of science. Ever since the call for public funding of research in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 book, Science: The Endless Frontier, science advocates claimed that new applications of technique depended on prior research in “basic” or abstract scientific knowledge.9 And science seemed not to fit the familiar category of the “factors” contributing to economic growth, namely, land, labor, and capital. Growing in importance as war melded into cold war, science became a new growth factor, one closely bound up with the state. Thus a former Defense Department science adviser, Don K. Price, identified the personnel and institutions engaged in science as “the scientific estate,” an institutional sphere or “establishment” sustained by public subsidies that injected a dynamic element into contemporary affairs. Price noted “the breakdown of boundaries,” particularly the way “the scientific revolution is moving the public and private sectors closer together.” In a postcapitalist vein, he believed that science foreshadowed the obsolescence of traditional notions of private property. Mobilized as a public resource, science was something not easily bounded, quantified, or possessed. It was something that you cannot build a fence around, or organize on a production line. It is traditionally a proper function for support by the government, as well as by industry and education. Its new costs are so massive that only the government can pay them, and its benefits so unpredictable that no one can say in advance how they should be allocated.

With public funding, Price noted, “we have socialized our science,” and he cited a 1948 report calling the federally funded field of atomic energy “an island of socialism in the midst of a free enterprise economy.”10 Price refrained from taking this analogy too far: he was acutely interested in fighting an ideological cold war against Communism and in reassuring conservative members of Congress that modern science did not mean a socialist future for the United States. Still, the social role of science implied new forms of property, production, ownership, and decision making that escaped the category of capitalism. Complex relations between universities, government, and business spawned an array of institutional forms that included private enterprises wholly sustained by government contracts, publicly funded research in nonprofit universities, private companies spun off by government agencies (such as the RAND Corporation), and government

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agencies devoted to planning technical development. There were, as Price put it in pluralist terms that echoed Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, “an infinite range of possibilities” in new institutions neither wholly public nor private, neither wholly political nor economic, which “makes the old arguments about socialism versus private enterprise a series of obsolete abstractions.” He criticized not only traditionally defined state socialism but also its opposite, insisting that “sentimental” attachment to “particular kinds of property,” such as Barry Goldwater’s conviction that “the sanctity of private property [is] the only durable foundation for constitutional government in a free society,” would not do.11 The new society founded on the advance of science and technology demanded flexibility and foresight, a view toward the future. Its shape was as yet uncertain, though writers throughout the 1960s persisted in efforts to define it, yielding a profusion of new names for American social structure—postindustrial society, the active society, the selfconscious society, the technetronic age, and more.12 The labels highlighted the dynamism or the perpetual reinvention of social relations. Thus the 1960s marked the heyday of dynamic sociology.

The Field and Genealogy of Postindustrial Ideas During the 1960s the view ascribing socially transformative effects to organized science and high technology took many forms, from adulatory to caustic, with many variations in between. It flourished in the United States and in Europe (on both sides of that divided continent), and in milieus identified conventionally as both capitalist and socialist. In some respects, this discourse of technology and social transformation capped a decades-long reflection on the watershed in social development—the onset of a new era—that reformers had seen in World War I and its aftermath. Now, for postwar liberal American social theory, attention to the scientific and technological revolution marked the starting point for the most potent and enduring diagnosis of total social structure to emerge in the 1960s, the idea of postindustrial society. This was an idea pushed by particular authors and at the same time a perspective shared broadly by a range of writers. The idea’s wide penumbra of connotations and implications makes any attempt to define it challenging but by no means hopeless. A good sense of its meanings can be grasped by placing it both within a more or less contemporary field of point and counterpoint and as the outcome of a genealogy stretching back four or five decades. To show just how widely talk of “the scientific-technological revolution” spread, Don Price noted the currency of the phrase in Communist literature—at least since the onset of de-Stalinization—that sought to depict how

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West and East vied with each other in the pursuit of progress. Indeed, Eastern European dissenters seeking to reform Communist regimes from within called on the notion that science and technology gave a peculiar cast to, and placed unique demands on, contemporary economic development. In an aptly titled work of 1968, Civilization at the Crossroads, Czech philosopher Radovan Richta gave a socialist-humanist slant to the transatlantic discourse of technology, economics, and social change. Richta recognized Western industrial societies as capitalist still, but he credited the scientific-technological revolution with pushing against the boundaries of that system in a collectivist, egalitarian direction; at the same time, he insisted, it demanded profound reforms in Eastern Europe’s statist order.13 As “an independent parameter” in growth “above a certain level of civilization,” the ensemble of science, technology, organization, and skill required that “the economic structure . . . be made dynamic” in order to meet “the new mobile conditions of . . . the coming epoch.”14 Such appeals to the progressive import of science and technology hardly satisfied all social critics, however. In France, Jacques Ellul published an eloquent polemic, The Technological Society, which not only inverted the priorities implicit in the formulation of “the scientifictechnological revolution” but also painted the future it forecast in dark tones. For Ellul, technique (his preferred term despite the English translation of his title) had taken over the world since the nineteenth century, demanding the reduction of all qualities to quantity, a “quest of the one best means in every field” and the “efficient ordering” of things, which fixed all attention on means to the neglect of value-laden goals. Technique was impersonal, artificial, self-perpetuating (or automatic), and collectivistic or totalitarian. Thus rather than achieving for itself a new power and authority, modern science—impossible without the most complex laboratory instruments, and as in the case of nuclear physics, governed by an agenda set in the government’s weapons laboratories—“has become an instrument of technique,” so much so that “a disinterested piece of research is no longer possible.”15 Yet despite his dissent from progressive optimism, Ellul’s view also found a salient place in the field of postindustrial discussion. In genealogical terms, postindustrialism dated back to World War I. As early as 1917, the phrase “postindustrial society” appeared in the subtitle of a book by Arthur J. Penty, an English writer whose medievalist disposition led him to expect a restored guild system of handicraft work after the social crisis marked by World War I brought industrialism to an end. As an architect convinced that his profession had been corrupted by commercial principles, Penty embraced a romantic critique of capitalism drawn from John Ruskin and William Morris. During the 1910s, he moved in circles of social and cultural critics where notions of guild socialism also germinated. The milieu was clearly antimodernist in temperament, and a few of its leading

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figures, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, while friendly for a time to left-wing critiques of capitalism, shifted toward a Catholic traditionalism that led them in ever more conservative directions. By the 1920s and 1930s, Penty and some others verged on fascist sympathies, but earlier his views— while hostile to statist models of socialism—seemingly belonged to the romantic Left.16 Although Penty’s antimodernism set him apart, no less than Ellul, from most of the American theorists considered in this book, he pursued a critique of economics that established some proximity between him and the effort throughout the mid-twentieth century to chart a noneconomic social world. Of all the faults he saw in the modern industrial system, he emphasized the role of technology in rendering skills obsolete and throwing large numbers of workers out of their jobs. Above all, Penty’s grievance was that economics separated commercial exchange from morality and allowed trade to undermine the human bonds essential to communal and social order. The virtue of medieval guilds lay in their close integration of craft-based production and exchange with moral regulations and notions of justice. He called his perspective “Christian sociology” and sought a new society, as he put it, “beyond economics”—a watchword of postcapitalist speculation throughout the twentieth century.17 The course of postindustrial ideas, from Penty to the 1960s, was a discontinuous one, but in some respects Lewis Mumford’s work in the 1930s stands as an intermediary. He listed Penty’s Post-Industrialism in the annotated bibliography of his major work, Technics and Civilization (1934), describing Penty’s book as “criticism of modern finance and the machine and prediction of the downfall of the system at a time when this position was far less popular than at present [in the midst of the Depression].”18 Mumford’s mentor, the Scottish theorist of planned towns Patrick Geddes, belonged to the Ruskinian tradition, another link to Penty’s milieu. Mumford shared Veblen’s contempt for the “price system” as an obstacle to realizing the material surplus made feasible by new technology, but he also speculated on lifeways belonging to a new technological revolution Veblen had not foreseen, a “neotechnic” order beyond mechanization.19 “Whereas the growth and multiplication of machines was a definite characteristic of the paleotechnic period [the first Industrial Revolution], one may already say pretty confidently that the refinement, the diminution, and the partial elimination of the machine is a characteristic of the emerging neotechnic economy.” Crucial to the new technics, according to Mumford, was the advent of cheap electricity. If he was overoptimistic in imagining hydroelectric dams to be environmentally friendly and the large-scale exploitation of solar collectors an imminent development, he nonetheless daringly forecast on this basis the decentralization and deconcentration of industrial plants as well as the

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possibility of “complete automatism.” This trend recast the very nature of work and led, he wrote, to “the displacement of the proletariat.” Not only would concentrations of proletarians be broken down, but as Marx had already noted, “the worker, instead of being a source of work, becomes an observer and regulator of the performance of the machines—a supervisor of production rather than an active agent. . . . he must be an all-round mechanic rather than a specialized hand.”20 Mumford recognized the negative impact of innovation: industrial productivity threatened to create mass unemployment, nearly “instantaneous communications” might lead to mass regimentation, and canning and refrigeration might replace fresh foods, where readily available, with processed goods. But he was hopeful that neotechnics opened the way to a new society. He denied that his view rested on technological determinism. Rather, he upheld a “social ecology” that foresaw the interaction of technique, ways of thought, and social institutions. Neotechnics, he noted, revealed the primacy of science in innovation. While paleotechnic development depended on the trial and error work of “practical men,” the scientific method, whose chief advances had been in mathematics and the physical sciences, took possession of other domains of experience . . . initiative comes, not from the ingenious inventor, but from the scientist who establishes the general law: the invention is a derivative product. . . . In a whole series of characteristic neotechnic inventions the thought was father to the wish. And typically, this thought is a collective product.21

His association of science as a motive force resting on collective endeavor stemmed from Veblen and prefigured the postcapitalist connotations of postindustrial speculation. The provision of life’s necessities would also be collectivized. Since “the process of displacing workers from industry under [the old] system is the equivalent of disfranchising them as consumers,” the only solution lay in supplying a basic income to all. Such a “universal system of distributing the essential means of life”—food, housing, medical care, schooling, recreation—took priority, before society offered “special incentives” for achievement or addressed individuals’ “special wants”: here was a program of “basic communism.” Due to the dependence of neotechnics on “collective” effort, its incompatibility with the “price system,” and the need for “basic communism,” one need not wonder that those who affect to control the destinies of industrial society, the bankers, the business men, and the politicians, have steadily put the brakes upon the transition and have sought to limit the neotechnic developments and avoid the drastic changes that must be effected throughout the entire social milieu. . . . At present, instead of finding these [new institu-

Dynamic Sociology / 193 tional] forms [for neotechnics], we have applied our skill and invention in such a manner as to give a fresh lease of life to many of the obsolete capitalist and militarist institutions of the older period. Paleotechnic purposes with neotechnic means: that is the most obvious characteristic of the present order.22

Thus, in one of the more bracing versions of postcapitalist speculation, Mumford saw his moment on the cusp of great change, as “obsolete capitalist” practices blocked the way. Whatever hindrances lay in the way, Mumford’s 1934 vision was in principle a forward-looking embrace of the potential for positive social change offered by technological development, a posture making him one of the prime targets of Ellul’s postwar critique. Yet Ellul still had his place in a broad scheme tracing the emergence of postindustrial thought, at least in his unconscious echoes of Penty’s original concerns. Like Penty, Ellul was a self-consciously Christian sociologist, seeking to recall meanings of “society” and “man” he associated with Christian ideals of community and individuality (or “personhood”). Like Penty, he looked back to the order of guilds and perceived in it the workings of “natural social groups” and “a balanced social environment” that kept technique under wraps. In craft work, Ellul argued, the tool was subordinate to the man: “This was a kind of technique, but it had none of the characteristics of instrumental technique. Everything varied from man to man according to his gifts, whereas technique in the modern sense seeks to eliminate such variability. . . . Traditionally the accent was on the human being who used the tool and not on the tool he used.” And, Ellul commented, when work was organized collectively, as in old New England “bees” (he could as easily have cited Malinowski’s or Mauss’s grasp of the gift relation), “the work was scarcely more than a pretext for coming together.” Ellul most objected to the process of development that disengaged technological, economic, or political matters from any ethical considerations whatsoever. Technique, he wrote, “dissociates the sociological forms, destroys the moral framework, desacralizes men and things, explodes social and religious taboos, and reduces the body social to a collection of individuals. . . . Communities break up into their component parts. But no new communities form.”23 Ellul judged that “technique has become autonomous; it has fashioned an omnivorous world which obeys its own laws” in the pursuit of absolute efficiency. Ellul objected that this infernal process was not reducible to economic functions, since technique operated in everything from organizational behavior to standards of hygiene. Paradoxically, though, in contrast to many other observers of the scientific-technological revolution, he found that the expansion of technique, rather than diminishing the economic

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sphere, actually enlarged it. The model of homo economicus, Ellul insisted, had become more, not less, paramount in modern times. Like many others, Ellul foresaw a “directed and planned economy” coming and noted that the rise of the working class might be expected, by some, to question the “primacy of the economy over man.” But instead, the prime agency of the working class, the labor union, “subordinates its members even more closely to the economic function.” Hence, even with the rise of planning on behalf of popular interests, one could only conclude that “the further economic technique develops, the more it makes real the abstract conception of the economic man.” Thus, Ellul wrote, in a complex counterpoint to the postcapitalist vision of the postwar era, “the bourgeois himself is losing ground, but his system and his conception of the human being is gaining.” Not only did Ellul echo Penty’s premodern world where ethics and economics, work and personality, community and God were intertwined, but he also injected a crucial challenge to the postcapitalist discussion of technology and society: Did the trends of the time forecast the eclipse of the economic realm, or indeed its hypertrophy?24 By the time an explicit theory of postindustrialism emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it tended to be aligned with the more optimistic disposition of the social-liberal postcapitalist vision, while retaining the keynote of Penty’s thought, the desire to collectivize and moralize the economic realm. Different analysts of “postindustrial society” might define the term differently, and at times even antagonistically, highlighting the waning of productive effort and the rise of leisure, the potential for a postscarcity way of life, the new prominence of social services, or the new dynamic force of science and public-private institutions of learning. However these theories varied in the 1960s, they generally accepted the prevailing image of the affluent society that Galbraith had outlined on the eve of the new decade, particularly his proposition that recent development rendered acute the problem of social goods and the ineffectuality of the marketplace. Very much like Galbraith, David Riesman built his early essay “Work and Leisure in Post-Industrial Society” (1958) on his claim that prospects of material abundance made cooperative or collective management of social and economic affairs more imperative. “Relatively well-off and well-educated Americans,” who had lost, he thought, not only the old productivist work ethic but even the “zest” for commercial consumption, were leading the way to a new ethos: The amenities which [they] desire, once their own families are well provided for, are not those which can be bought by individuals acting in isolation from each other. They are rather such social goods as pleasant cities and sprawl-free countrysides. . . . Some of our desires have been made highly visible by adver-

Dynamic Sociology / 195 tising and market research. . . . But other desires, which require cooperation to be effective, are often lamely organized and all but invisible. . . . It is extraordinary how little we have anticipated the problems of the bountiful future.25

Likewise in a 1962 discussion of Daniel Bell’s early work on postindustrial society, it was argued that demands not easily satisfied through market mechanisms emerged once production came to rely on intellectual capacities and social services: “The American public today, a metropolitan public by and large, requires a series of services [in recreation, education, and health] which American private enterprise cannot produce because of barriers to investment and to sale for profit. Therefore, the public cannot secure what it most wants and needs and could afford to pay for.”26 In an enduring echo of Veblen, Penty, Mumford, and others, postindustrial society appeared as one in which social development pressed beyond the logic of markets. The postcapitalist implications of postindustrial thought become clearer if we return to Richta’s Civilization at the Crossroads as a mirror or foil. The distinctive cast of U.S. discourse, particularly the pressure of cold war anticommunism, may have made it more difficult for postindustrial theorists in the United States to express fully the implicit postcapitalist drift of their work, which Richta, because of his own ideological setting, was in some sense freer to voice. In Richta’s rendition, although the “scientific-technological revolution” appeared to be a transformative force in society, it tended not to make technique dominant but rather to unleash the development of human subjectivity. The new age relied on the uses of knowledge, the flexibility of experimental learning, and the acknowledgment of our social, cultural, and psychological needs. It heightened the role of human self-consciousness in determining the ends or purposes of action; it enhanced the dependence of individuals and their productive aims on the cultivation of community. Richta denied that the scientific and technological revolution marked merely another stage of the Industrial Revolution, for it surpassed and “turns the tables” on the Industrial Revolution itself. Rather than breaking up jobs into simple parts, chaining workers to repetitive tasks, the new revolution transformed work by knitting production processes together, utilizing cybernetics to withdraw workers from the interstices of the labor process and put them in a position of designing and overseeing it as a whole.27 In this move toward synthesis, and the use of knowledge and information to guide the process, Richta wrote, the revolution turned “one branch of production after the other towards being ‘an experimental science.’” The scientific and technological revolution ultimately “transcends labor” by reversing the subordination of people to production and calling on each in-

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dividual to participate as “an active subject.” Not only could work time be reduced radically but the uses of knowledge in production, the reliance on ongoing scientific development, and the need for flexibility, participation, and forethought also summoned up the all-round “development of man.” Richta claimed the scientific and technological revolution ushered in “the greatest cultural revolution known to history, because it transposes culture, which has hitherto tended to lie on the fringe, right into the centre of life.” Richta’s science was not a positivistic one that objectified the world. Rather, he foresaw “a multidimensional method in science that would take account of motion on the part of both object and subject,” one that could comprehend the natural, social, cultural, and personal conditions for generating knowledge. Creativity would henceforth be a key concern of scientific inquiry. Richta considered industrialism—with its systems of hierarchical command, its objectifying disposition toward machines and the “hands” that tended them, and its alienating approach to work—wedded to capitalism. New demands for public investment in education and planning were best addressed by socialism, and the scientific-technological revolution’s prospects for transforming work, liberating individuality, and fostering human culture cohered with the ultimate aims of communism.28 Since Richta knew economic development lagged in the state socialist regimes, his postindustrialism represented a call for reform there; in doing so, his forecasts converged with notions of “mixed systems” that Western reformers imagined. Civilization at the Crossroads was a plea, in the mode of socialist humanism, to “catch up” with the West, to carry out the collectivizing demands of postindustrial development that Western countries found hard to meet, and to liberalize the state-dominated regimes that gave little room for free scientific development and individual freedom. The command economy, he insisted, was an industrial model of power, treating the whole economy like a capitalist enterprise. Appealing to the peculiar dynamism of social relations in his time, Richta called for adopting “systems of self-operating processes” that would make social coordination much more flexible and leave room for individual discretion. New uses of computer programming and modeling, which made it possible to render relatively open market processes subject to “control” (or to a “steering mechanism”) in the cybernetic sense, pointed the way toward economic reform in the “socialist countries.” According to Richta, “The instruments of civilization used hitherto (such as market-based money relations or democratic forms) cannot be superseded unless we use them, master them and thereby deprive them of their power as elemental forces.”29 The economy, even if granted a degree of market autonomy, was to be rendered an instrument of collective will, while the noneconomic social realm—“social, psychological and anthropological factors”—took the lead. Richta’s idiom was that of socialist humanism, yet the

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terms with which he grasped the relation of society and economy were utterly consistent with those of Talcott Parsons. Postindustrial theory concurred that change was the only constant in contemporary society. Bell defined an “orientation to the future” as a key principle of the emerging postindustrial society, and Richta saw society as a collective of individuals engaged in making and remaking themselves. “There has never yet on the face of the earth been so much tireless effort to map the future,” Richta wrote. “This turn to the future is deeply rooted in the nature of contemporary civilization processes.” As for Bell, future-orientation did not mean rigid planning that tried to fix the course of things to come. Rather than facing a foreordained future, Richta wrote, there is “a multiplicity of variants for the future.” As Bell too argued, Richta noted that “forecasting scientific and technological advance” became necessary, and what followed was “the need to record expectations and make plans or programmes to steer the totality of society’s growth” in ways that match “the new, emergent subjectivity of man and the community.”30 Daniel Bell’s approach to postindustrialism was reaching fruition by the late 1960s, notably in a two-part article published in the journal Public Interest in 1967, the most finished presentation of his ideas before a major draft in 1969 –70 that led to The Coming of Post-Industrial Society in 1973. Bell’s approach to understanding the emerging social order was distinct from that of other early adopters. While Riesman recognized the expansion of leisure and the problem of allocating social resources when “productivist” values had lost precedence, Bell defined postindustrial society as “one in which the intellectual is predominant.”31 By that he meant not that intellectuals became a new ruling class but that the expanding social functions of science, the development of computer-based techniques of modeling and simulation, and growth in both public and private funding of research and development all contributed to make intellectual institutions (most notably the university) as socially “central” in contemporary society as the business corporation had been in recent times. Bell always balanced skepticism about utopian claims of postindustrial abundance with an emphasis on new, emergent social principles that could transform human relations. The preeminence of “theoretical knowledge” (basic, rather than applied, science) demanded an “orientation toward the future” that was the watchword of postindustrialism. Only such forethought could provide long-term guidance to the generation of knowledge as a social and economic resource. A society organized to anticipate long-range needs was perforce focused on central, national institutions; at the moment he wrote, recent civil rights laws lent some plausibility to his claim that American life had entered a new period in which “the conscious direction of social change [is undertaken] by the federal government.”32

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Behind this formula of postindustrial society lay an idealized image of the welfare state, fully developed and bringing to fruition the evolutionary trend that enabled a democratic polity to shoulder tasks of social planning. In a sense, his skeptical and progressive inclinations worked together, for only the assumption of persistent scarcity made public planning an imperative, resting on the need to choose between alternative allocations of essentially social resources. Yet despite his emphasis on inescapable scarcity, Bell’s argument shared the keynote of affluence: the alleged tendency of contemporary social development to press beyond the logic of markets. If, in Bell’s mind, postindustrial society could not be considered “posteconomic” in the sense of having escaped scarcity, it nonetheless was governed by a new “sociologizing” mode of decision making that superseded an “economizing” mode. The first comprehended integral social processes involving nonprivate resources and goods such as education and environmental quality, while the second demanded the efficient allocation of discrete inputs to given production processes.33 Bell consistently resisted the inference some readers drew that his postindustrial society could no longer be understood as “capitalist.” Still, the essential links tying his forecast to the postcapitalist vision should be clear in his claims that the university had supplanted the business corporation as a center of social dynamism, that the United States was “moving away from a society based on a private-enterprise market system toward one in which the most important economic decisions will be made at the political level,” and that “production and business decisions will be subordinated to, or will derive from, other forces in society.”34 Indeed, Bell’s notion of “future orientation” fit neatly with the most potent general notion in U.S. discourse on society during the 1960s: an emphasis on the dynamism of contemporary society, a vision of perpetual change, and of society prepared, with the participation of all its members, to remake itself. In his 1960 book, The Self-Conscious Society, Harper’s magazine editor Eric Larrabee observed: Henry Miller, in The Wisdom of the Heart, says that real progress always has elements in it of the blind and instinctive, like a leap in the dark. What is asked of us is yet more difficult—like a leap in the light. . . . Abundance, to say it once again, is not a social soporific but a call on society and its members to transcend themselves. It leaves us no alternative but to think.35

Similar themes appeared in the work of observers who offered other diagnoses or names. Amitai Etzioni described the emerging order as “the Active Society.” It was, he wrote, “a society that knows itself, is committed toward a fuller realization of its values, that commands the levers such transformation requires.” It was “able to anticipate, recast, survive, and grow,” and as American and other “advanced” societies moved toward the condition—not

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yet achieved but in the offing—of the “active” society “our central interest is the malleability of the world of action.”36 Though ways of identifying a society on the move were highly varied, they routinely emphasized how the present stood across a breach with the past. Terms employing the prefix “post-” proliferated. C. Wright Mills had designated a “post-modern period” or “Fourth Epoch” in his 1959 book, The Sociological Imagination.37 Contrary to most progressive postindustrialists, Mills did not affirm hope for the future. He identified modernity with the promise of ascending reason and freedom associated with the Enlightenment. Now, the emergence of highly bureaucratized, centralized society—which maximized “rationality” but minimized freedom—broke that equation and thus initiated a new age. The term appeared too in the work of Etzioni, who saw himself mediating between the liberal currents of sociology and the more critical Millsian currents. Hence, for Etzioni, “postmodern society” fit in the same time frame as Mills’s new age—beginning promptly at 1945, with the “radical transformation of the technologies of communications, knowledge and energy that followed World War Two.”38 Like Mills, Etzioni assumed the postmodern order featured highly centralized structures of decision making, particularly in the state, though he did not regard this necessarily as oppressive. Though growing powers to manipulate people (and perhaps provide them with illusory contentment in a time of affluence) rendered postmodern society more “inauthentic” than modern society, the new society also had a greater degree of “malleability and guidance capacity” (via decision centers) than the old one. It was because “post-modern societies have a considerably higher level of self-consciousness and a much greater societal decision-making capacity as well as some tools for societal transformation” that they can give birth to what Etzioni regarded as active societies proper.39 George Lichtheim, writing from London, chose another term for the current order: “postbourgeois society.” While U.S. public policy and academic economics lagged behind, West European industrial society in the form of the mixed-economy welfare state was, he wrote, neither capitalist nor socialist: In reality, social-welfare legislation and income redistribution are aspects of a socialization process that circumscribes the operation of the market economy. The other half of this process is constituted by the expansion of public ownership, and by the deliberate establishment of a balance between the public and private sectors. What underlies the whole movement is the persistent tension between social and market values, with the former gradually getting the upper hand.

Lichtheim did not question the direction or permanence of change: “the ‘socialization’ of economic life . . . was publicly recognized as an irreversible

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trend to which doctrine had to accommodate itself,” and “the nineteenthcentury class structure tend[ed] to dissolve along with the institution of private entrepreneurship on which it pivoted.”40 Wealthy owners of capital could no longer impose their will through the market system; the “idle rich” were irrelevant; the working class under welfare-state democracy underwent social leveling upward, minimizing social distinctions between skilled and unskilled labor. “Bourgeois” society as a whole was governed by a business class and devoted to principles of hardy economic individualism, family piety, stringent moral restraint, and respect for superiors in private and public life. Social equality, personal freedom, secularity, and nonmaterial values might all be part of a “postbourgeois” order. In this sense, postcapitalist visions beckoned to a new way of life.

The New Left in the Context of American Social Thought Visions of a dynamic society provided a culturally conducive context for a revival of radical protest and the intellectual movement associated with it, generally known as the New Left. If “advanced” societies were supposed to have reached a condition of perpetual, self-conscious change making, who else should assume pride of place in the new era but radicals ready to push the pace of social transformation? Yet the relation of the new movements and their intellectual manifestations to the postcapitalist vision is by no means simple. Young radicals seemed to be outside the reform consensus thus far described. If social-liberal theory saw advanced societies as dynamic, young activists often saw their society as stifling; their radicalism bespoke their frustration in facing resistance to long-overdue reforms such as racial equality. Furthermore, the liberals who devised much of the postwar theory proved to be some of the radicals’ most strident critics, convinced that the young leftists’ visions of change were atavistic and counterproductive rather than attuned to the rhythms of the day. Other observers deemed the New Left to be a creature of the new society emerging since World War II, but did the New Left issue from the new society as the carrier and proponent of its prospects for dramatic reform or as the critic and opponent of its illusory, smug self-confidence? Tracing its emergence during the early 1960s can help clarify the uncertain cast of New Left consciousness, revealing both the ambivalent stance it bore toward, and the natal links binding it to, the social-liberal postcapitalist vision. To be sure, “the New Left” was a spongy label never easily identified with a particular organization, campaign, movement, program, or ideology. At first the name generally appeared as “a new left,” referring to the renewal

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of protest without necessarily distinguishing this Left from older ones. Attempts to delineate its traits as a fundamentally new type of Left soon followed, stemming as much from journalistic trend spotting as from the activists’ generational sense of self-fashioning.41 At a greater historical remove, it remains uncertain who or what to count in or out of the New Left. Should the Maoist activists who came to play a prominent role in youth radicalism by the late 1960s be considered New Leftists, given their allegiance to a decades-old Communist heritage? Should the “old” leftist Hal Draper of Berkeley’s Independent Socialist Club be excluded, despite the influence he and his critique of bureaucratic power had on “new” Free Speech Movement activists Mario Savio and Jack Goldberg? Should the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as a focused, action-oriented group, be sharply distinguished from the more programmatic Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which pinned its leftism on its general social diagnosis and systemic vision of change?42 Too stringent a definition would impose narrow doctrinal or existential categories on a messy historical reality of protest and criticism; too much latitude would miss the ways many young activists and thinkers saw themselves departing from earlier forms of radicalism. The issues of racial equality, decolonization, and national liberation, and the practice of democracy—though far from new to the Left—bulked especially large in the left-wing consciousness of the 1960s. Moreover, the rupture in left-wing activity in the 1950s contributed to the young radicals’ sense of distinction. The movement arising after the hiatus occasioned by both McCarthyism and the beginnings of de-Stalinization not only seemed new, its advocates wanted it to be new. The term itself had a curious transatlantic origin. In the late 1950s, radical intellectuals in England were seeking a new formulation of radical politics. Some of them were Communists or former Communists distressed over Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt, while others were a brand of socialist disenchanted by the Labour Party’s electoral defeats and distrustful of its bureaucratic, state-centered model of reform. They looked across the channel to find a name for their aspirations. The nouvelle gauche was the term given by Resistance veteran Claude Bourdet, in his weekly France Observateur, to a “third camp” position of independent socialists standing between the unacceptable poles of Stalinism and Soviet power, on the one hand, and social democracy with its NATO allies, on the other.43 The name proved appealing as a growing circle of British left-wing intellectuals searched for new definitions of radical democracy, discussed the “socialist humanism” drawn from the recently available “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” of the young Marx, engaged in struggles for better housing and town planning that made “quality of life” an issue for the Left, and found inspiration in the giant marches against the arms race organized by the Campaign for Nuclear

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Disarmament (CND) in 1959. By 1960, these groups identified with a kind of house organ, the New Left Review, and the term came over to the United States when C. Wright Mills’s brief New Left Review article on resuscitated dissent, “Letter to the New Left,” was republished in the American Studies on the Left, begun by graduate students (several of whom had Communist Party backgrounds) at the University of Wisconsin in 1959. SDS’s Port Huron Statement of 1962 still called for “a new left”—a resumption of left-wing criticism, protest, and movement—rather than identifying itself with “the New Left,” but the drift was clear toward making that phrase a self-conscious name for an upstart movement.44 Still, no solid core of coherent ideology identified a definite, bounded New Left, and many of the most self-conscious New Leftists would have rejected any such limits. Skeptical of “theory” and “ideology,” they upheld a “pragmatic emphasis” that insisted that their political ideas win “proof through action.”45 An early historian of the New Left wrote, “It is important to recognize its relative incoherence and amorphous quality from the outset. Its ephemeral organizational expressions, its evanescent issues, eclectic theory and transient movement formations were hardly calculated to stabilize a recognizable core-identity.”46 The young activists proposed to surpass the conventions and watchwords of interwar radical and liberal protest, such as strict notions of class, class struggle, revolution, reform, democracy and social democracy, party organization, economic regulation, and even socialdemocratic traditions of anti-Communism. Yet even their attempts to make a new departure paradoxically tied them to patterns of the past. The early New Left was marked more by its proximity to radical reform efforts than by any decided, revolutionary consciousness (though in the spirit of escaping old categories, activists sought to blur the poles of reform and revolution), and it typically spoke of welcoming both liberals and socialists in its ranks. In this, it resembled the fusionist sensibility of social liberalism; its sense of inhabiting a peculiarly innovative moment evoked the idea of a “new order” that dominated the late 1910s and early 1920s. Its motivating impulses came from varied sources, some radical, some reformist. From the left, the 1956 manifesto of the journal Liberation, founded that year by the Rev. A. J. Muste and other veterans of 1940s-era socialist and anarchist pacifism such as David Dellinger and Bayard Rustin, set the tone for much of the “new” radical sensibility: the conviction that nuclear weaponry put war, and its threat to contemporary society, on a whole new footing; the need to rebuild a left opposition that would escape both the factionalism and the undemocratic practices of the Old Left; a commitment to ideals of radical democracy and a dedication to realize the goals of the movement in its actions, mainly by the practice of nonviolence; and the intent to resist social evil by moral witness and even “personal disaffiliation” from a society

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bent on destruction.47 This radical pacifism surfaced in 1956 and 1957, just when Nikita Khrushchev’s Twentieth Party Congress speech on Stalin’s crimes shook the remnants of the Communist Party, and other traditional left-wing organizations were likewise at a low ebb. Even hopeful veterans of the Left, looking forward to “a new burst of political creativity in the coming decade,” concluded that “the Left is by now too shrunken to permit any continuity between the movements of the thirties and any manifestation in the sixties.”48 New activism also sprung from liberal quarters. As Doug Rossinow has shown, a student movement arose in Austin, Texas, associated with Christian student groups, where existentialist ideas thrived and the principle of “authenticity” echoed the kind of “witness” radical pacifists promoted. Besides religious motives, the most important force generating dissent was the Texas liberal tradition that harked back to New Dealer Maury Maverick and survived in the writing of Jim Hightower and Ronnie Dugger at the iconoclastic Texas Observer.49 Activism there and elsewhere mobilized slowly in the early 1960s around a number of specific issues, showing a “lack of real political synthesis” among the various causes that agitated it from time to time.50 Southern lunch-counter sit-ins and the Northern sympathy pickets riveted attention in 1960. Campaigns against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and limits on students’ rights to hear controversial speakers marked the next academic year (1960 –61), and demonstrations of solidarity with Cuba introduced some students to an anti-imperialist perspective. The next year, agitation for a nuclear test ban, led by the largest student dissident group, the Student Peace Union (SPU), took center stage.51 When three single-issue groups came together at Cornell University, they became the Cornell Liberal Union, in a spirit not unlike the student groups Talcott Parsons and Margaret Mead joined in the early 1920s. One of the first, and still best, historians of the New Left, James O’Brien, estimated that a quarter to a third of the “core political activists” in these milieus were “red diaper babies,” but he also noted that most of them did not have well-formulated Marxist views—indeed, that Communists of the late1950s cohort vacillated between a deep feeling of political marginality and a willingness to support any liberal promising to resurrect New Deal reform. Likewise, many members of the Young People’s Socialist League, which spearheaded organization of the SPU, promoted a “realignment” strategy calling on Democrats to exclude the Dixiecrats and thus create a real reform party.52 If anything, social-liberal mediation provided the watchword of these currents. Radicalizing pressures picked up in 1962 and 1963. SDS called a convention for summer 1962 devoted to issuing a manifesto that would provide a “comprehensive critique of American society” knitting together the par-

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ticular issues taken up by dissenters in recent years. The resulting Port Huron Statement continued to call, in an ecumenical fashion, on “liberals and socialists,” or “liberals and radicals,” to join the movement, advocating the expansion of government responsibility for economic development and social welfare while allying itself (with some reservations) to the labor movement and repeating a “realignment” program for rejuvenating the Democratic Party. More daringly, it ventured a critique of cold war foreign policy and pointedly denounced anti-Communism as a blight on free political discussion and dissent within American political life. Most of all, The Port Huron Statement rested its critique of American society on the centralization of power in bureaucratic organizations—the corporations, the military, and high reaches of government—that rendered most Americans helpless and fostered apathy; countering such concentration of power depended on spurring a new “democracy of individual participation.” By most accounts, this analysis remained the greatest intellectual influence on the movement’s young radicals for much of the 1960s.53 Events lent the movement more passion in the next two years. President Kennedy’s brinkmanship during the Cuban missile crisis further alienated peace activists and led sociologist Barrington Moore Jr. at a Cambridge rally to call for more “destructive criticism of a destructive system.”54 Within two more years, in the wake of segregationist terror in Mississippi, the rebuff to Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party activists at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, and the experience white student protesters had confronting the arbitrary rule of university administrators, a growing number of activists identified themselves with a “radical-democratic” opposition to the going “system” of American life.55 When military escalation in Vietnam in 1965 gave protesters another focus for activism, the student movement was still somewhat unsteady: SDS led the first major demonstration against U.S. policy in Vietnam but dropped the issue for a time, unsure whether antiwar activism would adequately motivate a broad, radical critique of American society.56 Nonetheless, as O’Brien puts it, the New Left had “crystallized,” and what marked it as “new” were its insistence on moral witness against social evil; a weak continuity with radical traditions and groups of the past; “a kind of populistic concern with the processes of decision-making in society”; lack of an overall program for what society ought to be like; and a view of the campus as a legitimate arena of struggle.57 The new student movement saw itself in opposition to “society as it is, a going concern,” in C. Wright Mills’s phrase; this alone suggests that it stood apart from postcapitalist confidence in the emergent trends of the present order.58 And the New Left’s antagonism to the liberal, social-democratic circles invested in the “postcapitalist” analysis grew increasingly clear—though that antagonism was rooted in their political propinquity. When SDS’s Tom

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Hayden prepared to draft The Port Huron Statement, he dutifully paid a visit to Daniel Bell, the moderate social-democrat, and while Bell later professed a dislike for Hayden, he also expressed an initial admiration for the way the New Left broached the problem of bureaucracy and sought to challenge it on behalf of freedom and democracy.59 The young American radicals, however, quickly grew estranged from their social-democratic elders: the youths’ opposition to McCarthyism came to be called “anti-anticommunism” and represented, to many of them, the sine qua non of their radicalism—and, to their elders, the mark of their irresponsibility. After years of tension, SDS broke with the League for Industrial Democracy in 1965. Dissent magazine editor Irving Howe judged the young radicals part of the “authoritarian left,” and New Left writers by then also made clear their contempt for liberals and social democrats who defended the cold war West.60 Anti-bureaucratic critique provided a key part of the New Left’s identity. Bureaucracy, in the popularized version of Weber’s work disseminated by C. Wright Mills and others, was a kind of “iron cage,” a rigid order based on sucking all resources of decision making to the top of a strictly stratified pyramid. Below the bureaucracy itself lay a populace converted, as one observer put it, into mere objects of administration—administrés—than citizens.61 The concentration of bureaucratic power had become an issue among some radicals in the 1940s, particularly among the writers and readers of Dwight Macdonald’s politics magazine. Indeed, Macdonald had written at that time “the social order is an impersonal mechanism.” The dissenting Trotskyists with whom Macdonald had once associated, led by Max Shachtman, described the tyrannical Soviet Union as “bureaucratic collectivism,” and before long some critics, like those at Liberation in 1956, applied the same term to the West, which they thought had likewise assumed the form of an overorganized “bureaucratic collectivist economy.”62 The identification of bureaucracy with an oppressive mechanism echoed through the New Left. In 1962, an Antioch student at a peace vigil remarked, “I don’t know what force in the world maintains and supports the military machine, but I do know that the multitude must overwhelm this machine.” In 1964, Mario Savio at Berkeley made his more famous call to resist “the machinery” of social order, imploring protesters to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels . . . and . . . make it stop.”63 New Left suspicion of bureaucracy implied a similar attitude toward the state as such, though this disposition had to contend with the activists’ residual confidence in liberal government as a friend of change. Such confidence was clearly on the wane by 1963. In a few years, SDS leader Carl Oglesby would look back on the Kennedy administration as the epitome of “corporate liberalism,” a system in which the liberal guise covered a stand-pat commitment to elite power.64 For the moment, however, SDS remained am-

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bivalent: it issued a 1964 electoral slogan, “Part of the Way with LBJ,” while putting more emphasis on community organizing. A direct-action bias against NAACP-style legal action soon widened to a broader distrust of political parties and electoral campaigns, leading one observer to call the New Left a form of “latter-day anarcho-syndicalism.”65 Thus the radicalizing movement rebuffed the social-liberal faith that the growth of the state and its ability to guide the economy toward social ends showed the way forward to a more democratic society. By the time young New Left intellectuals seriously read the work of Herbert Marcuse, the language of the Frankfurt School neo-Marxists gave young radicals new ammunition to fire against the “administered society.” Running rife through a volume of self-identified “New Left” essays dedicated to Marcuse were the terms “total administration” (for a rigidly controlled, centralized society) and its counterpart, the “political void” or “depoliticization,” the utter loss by citizens of vital participation in self-government.66 The doctrine of “corporate liberalism” marked the New Left off from the postcapitalist trend. The designers of this term and diagnosis—the editors of Studies on the Left, James Weinstein and Martin J. Sklar—had been involved in the Old Left as young Communists. They argued that greater involvement of government in guiding the economy—including such innovations as granting legal protection to labor union rights—had little to do with limiting, constraining, modifying, or surpassing capitalism. Quite the contrary, state intervention in this view had everything to do with the leadership of large corporations using government for their own ends, stabilizing market competition and labor relations for the sake of perpetuating profits and business control.67 Oglesby was responsible for bringing the Studies analysis into the New Left (that is, to SDS), where it cohered reasonably well with views of the “mechanical” or strictly “coordinated” character of the social order. In this context, moreover, the arguments that found in the corporate form transitional signs of postcapitalist development came under attack. Sophisticated New Leftists assailed the Berle and Means thesis, arguing that the ostensible “separation of ownership and control” proved nothing about the waning power of a capitalist class.68 At least part of the New Left, especially after the middle of the decade, became engaged in a polemic to prove that contemporary America was indeed capitalist America, characterized by undemocratic elite control working through the economy to dominate, exploit, and suppress the lives of many. Still, the New Left might reasonably be construed as a phenomenon belonging to the postcapitalist current broadly speaking—perhaps as its radical branch or successor—rather than standing wholly outside and against it. The American New Left’s natal links to the social-democratic circles that promoted postcapitalist theory, and the young radicals’ conviction that they

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faced a new world, one that demanded a “new” radicalism, was clearly anticipated by the view of the social-liberal theorists that advanced societies of the postwar era could no longer be analyzed in traditional terms of “capitalist” and “socialist.” Although the elder theorists have gained a reputation among historians as tired, resigned, accommodated to the status quo, and given to positivist methods that excluded social criticism from social science, they often evinced a buoyant view of Western society as having broken out, just recently, of obsolete constraints and facing an open door to wide-ranging reform. If they were more inclined than the new young radicals to speak of reform rather than resistance, it was due to some combination of wariness about revolutionary disruption with a degree of wishful thinking about the flexibility of the current state of things—though this did not necessarily conflict with the reformist disposition of the early New Left.69 Moreover, many dispositions of the new radicals had been anticipated by the postwar social theorists. Even as Crosland vested a great deal of confidence in the progressive promise of the present order, he urged socialists to turn in a new direction, toward enhancing “liberty and gaiety in private life,” promoting sexual freedom and women’s rights, and retaining “a trace of the anarchist and the libertarian.” When the British New Left roused itself, it ended up following Crosland’s advice (despite its distaste for the Labour Party right wing he represented) by insisting that “quality of life” issues, the nurturing of “social goods,” and renewed “community” were crucial to rejuvenating the Left.70 Much of the American New Left shared C. Wright Mills’s dismissal of “the labor metaphysic” (or the socialist premium on proletarian struggle) and adopted its own sense of an “end of ideology.”71 The Port Huron Statement offered “no sure formulae, no closed theories,” and young radicals shared the mood of casting off “old” ideological alternatives, even if they carried this impulse in directions their elders did not relish. Their “anti-anticommunism” stemmed not only from the conviction that McCarthyism was a blight on American political life but also from their sense that debates between Communists and social democrats, and between Stalinists and Trotskyists, were outmoded hang-ups. Carl Oglesby even suggested that left-wing and right-wing (libertarian) youth unite to mount a common opposition to the way things were. Rejecting another outmoded polarity, he wrote, “Capitalism and Socialism are [but] different means for pursuing the common and general aim of industrialization.”72 Apparently, “the capitalism/socialism dichotomy” had become as irrelevant to him as it had to Talcott Parsons in the 1940s. Paul Potter too had reached such conclusions when he called on demonstrators, at the 1965 antiwar rally in Washington, D.C., to “name the system” of racism, war, bureaucracy, and materialism—and concluded that “capitalism was for me and my generation an inadequate description of the

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evils of America . . . a hollow, dead word tied to the thirties.”73 Although his view, which deemed the current order radically wrong, set him apart from the hopeful view of “postcapitalist” society propounded by the new postwar social theorists, his empirical judgment of what was salient, or not, in current social structure cohered with theirs.74 In many respects, too, New Leftists shared the idea of postindustrial society. In one of the earliest uses of the term, David Riesman teamed up with young radical Staughton Lynd as they recalled the legacy of Thorstein Veblen and looked forward to a “post-industrial world . . . both abundant and fraternal.”75 The Port Huron Statement assumed a postindustrial posture as it pinned a strategy of student organizing on the premise that the university was a new strategic locus of contemporary society, tied to centers of political power and social action far more intimately than earlier academic institutions had been.76 In a 1964 document known as the “Triple Revolution” manifesto, several young intellectuals around SDS joined social liberals Robert Heilbroner and Gunnar Myrdal and social democrats Irving Howe and Bayard Rustin in calling, like Mumford had in his prospectus of the “neotechnic” order, for responding to automation by providing a basic income to all, apart from employment.77 Others who sought to define what made the New Left distinctive often argued that the opening of a new stage of society rendered the Old Left of Socialist and Communist parties obsolete; thus Massimo Teodori, one of the New Left’s first anthologists, remarked that “the American New Left is perhaps the first, embryonic expression of a new force which confronts the problems of postindustrial society.”78 In an interesting New Left book, A Disrupted History, SDS leaders Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman embraced postindustrial language, describing a body of “scientific, technical, and professional workers” needed to “design and run . . . automated and cybernated machinery,” who had displaced the “old working class” and Marx’s proletarian strategy. In training for those roles, students could lead a revolution, promoting personal liberation and communal solidarity while making universities “a living model of the struggle for a new society” beyond work and scarcity.79 Also characteristic of its postcapitalist stance was the New Left’s concentration, for much of its early development, on the noneconomic realm of civil society. In its manifesto, The Port Huron Statement, SDS began not—as would have been customary in an Old Left group—with an analysis of economic and political conditions facing the movement for change, but with a long introduction intended to clarify the question of “values.” Just as the new theory of “social relations,” in the hands of Parsons, regarded “values” as the key to social order, so for SDS values had to underpin political action. For its values determined not only its image of humankind and the good society—generally a hopeful view of human capacities for reason and fellow-

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ship, and the vision of participatory democracy—but also its understanding of the problems it had to combat. First among them was apathy, or the withdrawal from civic engagement. Struggling against apathy and a dull acquiescence in the way things were, the New Left—as it matured into a view of itself and its project—typically stressed the realm of consciousness, of ideas, attitudes, and commitments. In line with the new social theory, its perspective was to a large extent psychological. The New Left pursuit of “authenticity,” the achievement of felt truth, reality, and meaningful interaction with others, always counted as more than a private matter. This ideal stemmed from and reinforced the repudiation of numbing social convention, public hypocrisy, and materialistic drives. It served not only to sustain the purpose and morale of individuals but also to keep the movement true to its aims, to prevent it from folding into yet another compromise with the status quo—the fate, it seemed to these nervy young activists, of all prior radical generations.80 Yet the experiential emphasis helped make the realm of culture, personality, and social relationships the necessary milieu of action, and in this respect too the young activists fit squarely in the new stream of social theory. When the work of Frantz Fanon began to appeal to U.S. activists—due to the growing influence of anticolonial movements abroad and despite its reversal of the activists’ initial insistence on nonviolence—it held sway largely because it spoke to the New Leftists’ social-psychological bent and related the realm of individual experience to questions of the organization, conduct, and democratic quality of the movement. “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force,” Fanon wrote. “It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”81 Self, culture, and society—watchwords of midcentury social thought—provided the basis of action. The emphasis on community organizing likewise rested, for the most part, outside the economic realm in the sphere of civil society. SDS’s community projects initially had an “economic” program, based on an analysis, soon to be falsified, that predicted an economic slowdown, worsening unemployment of a cyclical and “technological” character, and the possibility of building a mass movement for “Jobs or Income Now” as part of an expanded public commitment to social welfare. They soon shifted away, however, from the issue of unemployment and national economic trends to highly localized problems and solutions, ranging from garbage collection to welfare rights.82 This localization of politics, along with the New Left’s ideal of keeping means consistent with ends, fostered a program of building the movement’s own “institutions” or “counter-institutions” right now, without waiting for some future transformation of society. This “prefigurative” impulse could be interpreted in different ways.83 Some viewed it as a daring,

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“guerrilla” struggle to “build the new society within the old”; others considered it of a piece with the liberal pluralism of the day, the resurrection of Tocqueville’s celebration of “voluntary associations,” concentrating the real work of democracy in civil society to balance the state.84 Or as Stanley Aronowitz—a veteran of the Old Left who tried to “theorize” the cause of the New Left at the end of the 1960s—put it, the New Left was dedicated to working on “the microsocial level, that is, in the course of everyday life.” Here the New Left drew close to the “social relations” model of self, culture, and society, the interactions and institutions defined by the new, noneconomic notion of civil society.85 To say that problems and solutions fell outside the “old” economic and political definitions is not to say that activists avoided issues of power. The uses of power to subjugate African Americans in the South (and in the North) were obvious, in the everyday routines of white authority, police coercion, and the role of segregationist mayors, governors, and senators, as well as in the curious, two-faced posture of the federal government. But the movement tended to have a broad, even amorphous notion of power— something that was all-embracing, present at the centralized points of public decision making but also, and perhaps more important, at the intimate level of social interaction where authority and subjection were exercised. Here was the flashpoint of tension between whites and blacks, men and women, during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, over who assumed leadership and asserted strategic authority, and who carried out the plan of action; who dictated and who typed reports; who led marches to the courthouse and who cleaned house. Insofar as the movement devoted itself to radical, egalitarian democracy and insisted on the consistency of means and ends, on building counterinstitutions for a new society now, these were in fact urgent issues. The issue had been raised in The Port Huron Statement’s suggestion that the movement should make “private troubles into public issues.”86 In fact, by broaching these problems the New Left stepped out of the traditional definition of the “political” into an arena that might properly be called the “micropolitics” of human relations.87 Though this move stemmed from the experience of activists in a social struggle, the activists nonetheless swam in the sea of their times, and their ideas about micropolitics paralleled developments since the late 1940s, as part of the “new” social sciences, in the study of “small group” dynamics. In Ann Arbor’s Research Center for Group Dynamics and the National Training Laboratories in Bethel, Maine—the source, in 1947, of the innovation called “T-groups” or “sensitivity training”—social scientists explored personal interaction, group process, leadership styles, and the differentiation of roles.88 Building on the work of antifascist émigrés Kurt Lewin and Jacob Moreno, much of this work explored the distinction between “authoritar-

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ian” and “democratic” leadership, which attracted a good deal of attention from the left-wing and social-democratic intellectuals who entered the social sciences in the late 1940s.89 Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, students of small group behavior insisted that they had discovered a crucial locus of social change and focused on the ways small groups could cultivate “change agents,” as the Bennis team put it, who had the potential to affect larger, “overlapping” social circles.90 By 1959, one of Lewin’s collaborators, Dorwin Cartwright, published Studies in Social Power, which helped nurture a notion of micropolitics.91 By the 1960s, ideas about small-group process, social change, and authority had fanned out into the broader culture. Dwelling in the realm of micropolitics helped to make the New Left distinctive and brought the movement into proximity with current social thought. The young political theorist Marshall Berman found that the discovery of power in everyday social relations was one of the traits that made sociologist Erving Goffman peculiarly appealing to young radicals in the 1960s. Goffman’s painstaking examination of social “form,” the rituals of etiquette that wove the fabric of social relations, appealed to the spirit of anti-institutional revolt guiding New Leftists: “They understood how a culture’s system of manners, of decorum, its rules of civility, propriety, order, could crush human life as effectively as any column of tanks.”92 It is hardly surprising then that the rejuvenation of feminism, by young women experienced in a number of New Left organizations, took as its slogan the micropolitical judgment, “the personal is political.” Their concern with the subordination of women to men, painfully evident in the activist organizations they had joined as well as in the broader culture and society, compelled them to move beyond traditionally defined economic and political realms into the sphere of family, household, and sex. By examining the power exercised along lines of gender in the bedroom, kitchen, and nursery, as well as such public arenas as the workplace and mass culture, the new feminists delved deeply, whether consciously or not, into the fields of the new social sciences—examining roles, socialization, interaction, deviance, and sanctions.93 Their own adoption of “consciousness-raising” molded T-group forms into agitational techniques. Radical feminists, like the advocates of “applied behavioral science” ten years before, regarded group process as one of the best milieus to generate “change agents.” To be sure, consciousness-raising techniques were championed more by some feminists than by others. Given a good deal of ideological variation and factionalism within this new branch of the New Left, it was the self-described “radical feminists” who looked more intently at the “politics of the personal,” while “socialist feminists”—already committed to the turn that some New Leftists made toward the critique of capitalism in the late 1960s—focused more on the roots of women’s oppression in political economy. In any case, the factions over-

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lapped a good deal, and with all its ambivalence, the feminist grasp of gender relations owed something, at least, to the new definitions of social relations that marked the postwar era.94

American Social Liberalism at the End of the 1960s The rise of a radical opposition to the “going system” led some social theorists to use the standard resources of 1960s dynamic sociology to account for the New Left. Amitai Etzioni’s The Active Society (1968) was one of the most ambitious attempts. Etzioni dedicated the book to “the Active Ones, In particular my students at Columbia and at Berkeley,” two centers of radical protest. Etzioni did not share the contemporary emphasis on micropolitics and criticized trends toward “psychologism” and “micro-analysis” for diverting attention from the “macro-analysis” of “total societies.” To grasp their dynamics, he wrote, was to be concerned not with social interaction (in Goffman’s sense) but with “societal” change. This methodological emphasis was wedded to Etzioni’s criticism of the “neo-anarchist” streak in the New Left; he defended the centralized state, at least as potentially a positive agent of change.95 Yet otherwise he imagined himself sympathetic to the new styles of 1960s protest and social mobilization. While dismissing micropolitics, Etzioni defined society largely in noneconomic terms. In the fundamental shift from “modern” to “post-modern” society, the state rose to have a considerable power over economic affairs, granting postmodern society a greater degree of “societal control” than modern society had had. As other social-democratic and liberal analysts had claimed, “the importance . . . of economic factors” and “business influence” tended to decline, while governmental control of economic affairs grew “widely legitimated.” Regarding the trend as irreversible, he cited the freeenterprise ideology of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign as “pathological” and “deficient in reality-testing.” Everything indicated further decline in the weight of economic or, in Etzioni’s terms, “utilitarian” factors in determining social affairs. Human capital mattered more than old standards of capital accumulation; education had replaced wealth as a basis of stratification; knowledge and its application at the top level of a “cybernetic hierarchy” mattered most in decision making: “There has been a secular trend in which symbols have become increasingly significant, while the relative importance of objects has declined.”96 If Etzioni saw greater promise in “post-modern society” than C. Wright Mills had, a few other social scientists responded to the flowering of protest by using the term in even more benign ways. Kenneth Keniston’s 1968 so-

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cial-psychological study Young Radicals identified a “postmodern style” of consciousness, ideals, motives, and action that characterized the new stage of “youth” in an age of affluence. It emphasized constant flux, movement, fluidity, and a “search for new forms”; generational identities that transcended race and nation; a “personalistic” and participatory preference for small-group interaction, intimacy, nonviolence, and authenticity, in contrast to fixed roles, power relations, and manipulation; and an ambivalence toward technology, at least insofar as technology imposed efficiency and standardization on life. It was, in other words, the mold of youth and activism appropriate to the dynamic, posteconomic society. In quite similar terms a few years later, social psychologist Philip Slater found the beginnings of a “new culture” battling an old one: The core of the old culture is scarcity. . . . The new culture is based on the assumption that important human needs are easily satisfied and that the resources for doing so are plentiful. Competition is unnecessary. . . . The new-culture adherents are thus not merely affluent—they are trying to substitute an adequate emotional diet for a crippling addiction [to material goods].97

These were only two instances of the perpetuation of postcapitalist ideals in these years. Ideas first bruited in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s regarding the growing significance of social solidarity and consequently the reshaping of modal personality away from bourgeois norms of self-reliance and the autonomous individual returned and flourished in the 1960s, cropping up in all sorts of literature by 1970. The British scholar Richard Lannoy, for instance, turned a discussion of economic development in postcolonial India into a comment on culture and personality in the West. He hoped India would bypass the socially destructive effects of early industrialization and predicted a kind of convergence between Eastern communal traditions and advanced industrial (or postindustrial) societies: “The irony is that in the West electronic technology and complexity of organization no longer permit the survival of individualism, but encourage unified-field awareness and interdependence.”98 Such McLuhanesque views of electronic media here fused with ideas about the consequences of modern organization that date back at least to Berle and Means and Lippmann, as well as the belief in the obsolescence of competitive individualism and the isolated self that followed the interwar psychocultural critique. Like Keniston and Slater, Etzioni expected society to move beyond market standards of scarcity and efficiency, and thus “values have an independent role in the transformation of societies.” He noted the coming primacy of a new “normative criterion” of “societal usefulness” beyond the economic

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standards of competitive efficiency: that is, that “a member [of society], in making his decision, ought to take into account the extent of the usefulness of the projected activity for the society at large (or, for ‘others’) . . . that the pursuit of self (or unit) goals is not automatically societally useful.” Even more significant than this shift away from economics in defining “usefulness” was the “higher level of self-consciousness” about their central “values,” which gave postmodern societies a unique capacity for “transcendence.” Such societies had a unique ability to assume a critical standpoint toward their own practices, enabling them to approach “value realization,” or “societal transformation” in the direction of meeting the society’s highest ideals.99 The “value-realizing” capacities of “the Active Society,” he acknowledged, did not inevitably emerge from or succeed “post-modern” society. Etzioni thought the postmodern order might foster “societal policing [to] replace welfare and education,” thus deepening “subjugation and alienation.”100 These potential negative consequences of postmodern statism stemmed from old styles of planning that “overmanaged” affairs from a distant, central point, thereby crushing the bright prospects that heightened “self-consciousness” offered for value realization, egalitarianism, ongoing change, and engagement of citizens in “societal guidance” of the future. In contrast, the genuinely Active Society, capable of looking ahead and marshaling its material and symbolic resources for valued ends, would use (as Richta also had suggested) cybernetic techniques of “guidance” that maximized flexibility and responsiveness. Thus, according to the cybernetic notion of homeostatic control exercised by the information-rich symbolic realm rather than the energy-rich production realm, Etzioni suggested that the moral sphere rose to centrality in social life, overriding the economy.101 Most important in bridging the gap between postmodern society and the Active Society was the intervention of what Etzioni called “social mobilization” and “consensus formation”—that is, social movements “from below” that transformed consciousness and provided the public will that could give direction to central agencies of governance. He evoked the civil rights movement, whose doctrine of nonviolent civil disobedience sought to tap “common values” that would shame the oppressor and transform antagonism into a “beloved community.” As Etzioni put it: Marx argued that history is propelled by inter-class struggle; we hold that the acting units are often collectivities whose primary base is not shared economic interests but shared values and statuses, especially ethnic ones, and that the relationships among collectivities are various mixes of conflict and cooperation and not only “struggles.” . . . The struggle that is most significant for the explanation of societal change, of history, is one which is internal to each collectivity (and society). This is the struggle to mobilize under the given conditions and for the purpose of changing them; it occurs between the mobilizers and the unmobilized.102

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The “activation” of society, in Etzioni’s view, thus lay in movements that brought the highest societal values to consciousness and demanded that they be put into practice. His future society was a social movement writ large, wedded to the flexible cybernetic machinery of a state-led order. A new standard emerged of gradual but ongoing “transformation,” even “permanent revolution.” The urgency of utilitarian standards and “production goals” would continue to subside as the Active Society moved further away from the “drift” of “capitalist democracies” such as the United States, which remained woefully “underplanned and undercontrolled.” Tending toward egalitarianism (and economic redistribution), of “societal usefulness” rather than “self-interest,” the Active Society would deploy power in new ways: Where [the old norm of] exchange is the prevailing mode of gaining one’s way, where each person is a means to the other and the accounting and calculative orientations dominate, market relations prevail. . . . Where appeals to values, consensus, education and debate are prevalent, members are more committed to each other and to the shared societal goals.103

A postcapitalist vision infused this scenario. Etzioni mediated between the liberal postcapitalist current of postwar social theory and the young protesters he admired for “activating” the postmodern society. Clearly, he shared the liberals’ hopeful diagnosis of the centralized, social-welfare state, and he paid virtually no attention to economic concerns. In his notion of a flexible, cybernetic planning regime, he followed very closely the “mixed” model of institutions laid out by Dahl and Lindblom in 1953, speaking of “an important state-owned and state-managed economic sector, public authorities, producer and consumer cooperatives, private enterprises, regulatory agencies, and varying combinations of these elements.” On the other hand, Etzioni attacked Dahl and Lindblom’s political pluralism. The fixation on a localized study of jostling “veto groups,” he wrote, ignored the role of national institutions and “ruling classes.”104 The policies that emerge from the interest-group bargaining the pluralists applaud tend to “overrepresent the strong and underrepresent the weak,” to overlook the “values and interests of the poor, ethnic minorities, untouchables, and so forth,” and hence “ignore . . . overdue societal innovations.” Thus the rising protest movements of the 1960s had injected at least this critical dissent into the general mood of approbation that liberal social theorists gave to the present order. Although Etzioni continued the postwar theoretical tendency to subordinate the economic sphere, he returned attention to the political dimension of change. At least at one point in his argument, he even acknowledged that corporate concentration gave power to property and that the inequitable distribution of “utilitarian assets” per-

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sisted, posing a problem that would have to be redressed in the Active Society.105 These hints of “old” concerns with power, property, and inequality may have foretold the beginning of the breakup of the liberal postcapitalist current. By the late 1960s, cracks appeared in the confidence of the postcapitalist vision, deepening in the coming decade as issues of political economy, raised on all sides of the political spectrum, returned to the scene and began to overshadow the realm of “social relations.” For the time being, however, postcapitalist dreams seemed robust enough. Adolf Berle, in his preface for the 1968 edition of The Modern Corporation, foresaw the emergence of the American state partly as an administrator of wealth distribution, partly as a direct distributor of certain products. In notable areas production for use rather than production for profit is emerging as a norm. Education, scientific research and development, the arts, and a variety of services ranging from roads and low-income housing to nonprofit recreation and television constitute a few illustrative fields. Health will probably be—in part now is—such a field. Increasingly, it is clear that these non-commercial functions are, among other things, essential to the continued life, stability and growth of the non-statist corporate enterprise.106

Other signs of striving toward a social economy appeared at the end of the decade. Great Society government administrators and academic social scientists worked together to devise “social indicators,” means of measuring the overall welfare of the population in health, housing, education, and other standards—benchmarks of progress as government moved ahead in a program of promoting social equality. To social liberals, vital steps had been made toward fulfilling the aspirations of the interwar socioeconomists for a science of welfare rather than wealth, to fashion what Morris Copeland called “more accurate social cost accounting” that could provide standards of well-being, to which “property rights, contract forms, social organization and so forth” should be adapted. Second, the idea of a guaranteed annual income—occasionally raised by reformers in the 1930s and 1940s, and recalled in the early 1960s by radical reformers of the “Triple Revolution” manifesto—became more of a mainstay among liberals by the late 1960s. The National Association of Social Workers endorsed it, and then hundreds of liberal economists signed on. By 1969, the President’s Commission on Income Maintenance Programs, appointed by Lyndon Johnson though it delivered its report to Richard Nixon, opposed Nixon’s insistence on “workfare” and asserted that since “our economic and social structure virtually guarantees poverty for millions of Americans,” including low-income full-time workers, the best solution was “a universal income supplement . . . making payments based on

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income needs to all members of the population” and thus assuring “a base income for any needy family or individual.”107 Third, the trend some observers have dubbed the “new social regulation” continued even under the Nixon administration, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and federal affirmative action guidelines.108 Yet despite the role of the central state in overseeing markets, challenges to de jure racial (and later, gender) segregation, and the addition of health insurance and further income subsidies to the aged, no major expansion of social control over economic life, beyond the New Deal model, occurred in the 1960s. The proposal for a guaranteed income, the most significant expansion of “social citizenship” proposed at the time, went nowhere, as Richard Nixon—cajoled into hopping on board—proposed a “family assistance plan” with a work requirement and an income grant only two-thirds of what the president’s commission had proposed as a modest first step. His bill predictably fell to defeat. The new social regulation by the EPA and OSHA enjoyed wide public support but soon encountered stiff resistance from American business and later became targets of the Reagan counterrevolution against the Great Society legacy. In the wake of the economic crisis beginning in the 1970s, “social indicators” of well-being stagnated, while Berle’s forecast that health care would enter the sphere of “production for use rather than production for profit” has not come to pass.109 Naturally, social-liberal visions of the 1960s were not all of one piece. Galbraith moved on from his trend-setting book of the late 1950s, The Affluent Society, to diagnose “the larger matrix of change,” which he called, in his 1967 book of the same name, “the new industrial state.” Quite to the contrary of Daniel Bell’s postindustrialism, which posited the university supplanting the business corporation, Galbraith stuck with the “industrial” model and made the “great corporation” and its ability to determine the path of production (effectively overriding the ideal of “consumer sovereignty”) the keystone of the current system. And of course, as an economist writing about economic affairs, Galbraith can hardly be charged with abetting the “shift away from economics” in social science. Yet like a genuine follower of Veblen and Berle and Means, and a social Keynesian, Galbraith came to conclusions that were roughly within the postcapitalist schema. In his “new industrial state,” he wrote, “the forces inducing human effort have changed. This assaults the most majestic of all economic assumptions, namely that man, in his economic activities, is subject to the authority of the market. Instead we have an economic system which, whatever its formal ideological billing, is, in substantial part, a planned economy.” Despite all the supposed distinctions between capitalism and communism, the world was seeing “a broad convergence between industrial systems.”110 Like other writ-

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ers of the 1960s, he believed that advanced technology, applied in largescale productive organizations, was the motor force of growth; long-range planning in public and private bureaucracies, as well as government assistance in stabilizing demand and subsidizing massive investment, were necessarily entailed in that mode of production; and that those who “carry the banner of free markets and free enterprise” were bound to be sidelined by history. What distinguished Galbraith from the other, optimistic social liberals of his time was this: the lapse in market determination, the growing role of the state, and the imperative of planning did not inevitably mean that noneconomic values would trump the productivist mentality. Like Ellul, he suggested that the convergence of economy and society meant not the submission of the first to the second but the infusion of economic standards of output through all of social relations. Galbraith warned that “we will allow economic goals to have an undue monopoly of our lives and at the expense of other and more valuable interests,” and desired some means of “emancipation” from such imperatives. He was, in his own way, one of the few liberals to sense the profound ambivalence that led the New Left both to embrace and recoil from the new stage.111 In its main currents, though, 1960s social theory emphasized future-orientation and the dynamism of American society, meanwhile offering very little by way of understanding the forces of social inertia. If analysis could discover not only the possibilities of ongoing change but also the rooted sources of resistance to change, one would hardly know it from reading much of liberal social theory in the 1960s. New Leftists differed from their liberal, social-democratic elders in being suspicious of the status quo and regarding the going order not as a flexible arrangement that facilitated change but as a rigid system that stifled it. But such a model of monolithism, precisely because it offered only a blanket judgment of affairs, made the New Left no better prepared than social liberals to understand the forces of social inertia, to locate specific enemies or allies, to cope with the vicissitudes of politics, or to devise long-range strategies of struggle. The Achilles heel of the postcapitalist vision was its reluctance or inability to grasp the limits of change under given conditions while it exposed the potential for change in contemporary social structures. As the 1970s unfolded, American social liberalism painfully confronted roadblocks that obstructed the postcapitalist evolution it envisioned. Given the bounding optimism of dynamic sociology in the 1960s, the postcapitalist vision had few resources with which to approach such problems in the years to come. By the end of another decade, the postcapitalist vision—as a viable tradition of social thought within the liberal mainstream—had virtually broken up and evacuated the scene.

chapter 7

The Great Reversal



There may be “sharp turns” in modern history, as Lenin once said, but there are few clean breaks, and in the moment of reorientation that opened in the late 1960s, confusing crosscurrents flourished in social vision and social theory. Strains emerged on several axes, first between a social-liberal perspective and a revived right wing. Some reformers circa 1970 argued that further, bolder policies in social provision and social planning were necessary to address the mounting “urban crisis” in the United States, while conservatives—most notably, and ironically, Rexford Tugwell’s student Edward Banfield—claimed social problems were so resistant to remedy that cities were best left to the sway of unregulated economic forces.1 On another axis, the left-leaning sociologist Alvin Gouldner saw a “coming crisis” in the field. A generation of young scholars reared amid protest movements assailed the postwar social relations model for failing to acknowledge how interest and power—elements of the economic and political spheres—govern social affairs; for downplaying the concentration of wealth and use of force in American life; and for painting far too benign a portrait of contemporary life. These dissenters still held high hopes for dramatic social change, but they had little confidence that the going order led in that direction; instead of fulfilling the potential of things as they were, social change demanded a break from given social forms. No one position dominated. Some observers strove to update social-liberal premises to portray the “counterculture” and feminist consciousness as signs of a drift toward social relations based more in solidarity and community than modern economic civilization had al219

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lowed, but by the mid-1970s even postindustrial theorists sensed the transition to a social economy was likely to be far more rocky than they had hoped five or ten years before. From this generalized sense of crisis, first stirred by the social, political, and cultural strains of protest and reaction, the postcapitalist vision began to lose potency. The stiffest challenge came from the return of intractable economic woes. Early indications of trouble appeared in 1968, with a balance-of-payments crisis that put sharp pressure on the value of the U.S. dollar, linchpin of the postwar world monetary system.2 A recession hit the United States in 1970, while inflation begun in the late 1960s persisted, leading Richard Nixon to embark on a “new economic policy” that included an interventionist program of wage and price controls. More important, the administration decided to break the Bretton Woods formula of fixed monetary exchange rates and start probing new strategies to assure the dominance of the dollar and U.S. economic power.3 The recession of 1973 –75, the deepest the United States had suffered since the 1930s, was also the first since that time to mesh with a general economic downturn around the world.4 Within a few more years, postwar assumptions about the unproblematic nature of the “modern” economy as an engine of growth appeared, in retrospect, to be among the most dubious propositions of a bygone era. The postwar wave of buoyant prosperity had ended, and the combination of sluggish growth and inflation befuddled the economists of the Keynesian synthesis. In response, radical “post-Keynesians” called for a critical theory of capitalist economy in place of a generalized science of economics. Freemarket anti-Keynesians campaigned for a return to the perspective of homo economicus. Neither doubted the capitalist character of the order. As free-market forces gained momentum, there came a corresponding decline in the assumed preeminence of “the social,” the sphere that postcapitalist theorists had tried to mark off from both economy and polity. The “crisis” Alvin Gouldner predicted came in the shape of sinking fortunes for the discipline of sociology and the alliances it had built on behalf of a noneconomic definition of civil society. Talcott Parsons’s ambitious interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations broke apart in the early 1970s into its component fields, because of new trends in the disciplines and rivalries peculiar to Harvard University. Parsons’s disappointment was keen, and while he spent the 1970s trying to consummate his life’s work in a study that would show American lifeways to have a peculiar dynamic toward progressive change in social relations, he also felt he had to fight a late battle against resurgent trends to reduce social development to terms of economic interest and political force. Through the middle of the twentieth century, liberal social thought—as it put the analysis of “capitalism” aside—had pursued a critique of economism, the view that market relations had autonomy,

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systematic order, and unchallenged social predominance. The decline of the postcapitalist vision by the late 1970s went so deep that a renewed and virulent economism questioned not the reality of capitalism but the reality of “society” as such. Thus the long, mid-twentieth-century reign of a social-liberal view that current society dwelled in a transitional phase of change pushing beyond the boundaries of capitalism came to an end. Newer views came partly in the form of radical social criticism, that is, as a turn away from the reformist optimism of the 1960s and an acknowledgment that capitalist social structure posed limits to the malleability of social relations and the achievement of a more egalitarian, collectivist order—even if some of these critics were convinced that capitalism was decrepit or in its “twilight” years.5 Their radical diagnosis of capitalism as a dying social order was quite distinct from the confident assumption of earlier years that the transition to a new postcapitalist order had already commenced. Yet this was not to be the dominant element in the ideological trends of the time, for while the postcapitalist vision was subject to the critique offered by a more radical anticapitalism, to a much greater extent it yielded prominence to an emerging mood of capitalist triumphalism. Crisis, recalibration of postindustrial hopes, and finally the receding notion of society before economism resurgent: these reveal the great reversal of postcapitalist expectations.

Two Roads from Crisis Awareness of a manifold “crisis” in American life emerged rather suddenly in the years from 1965 to 1969. The rise of antiwar protest as well as a string of urban uprisings, accompanied by a new intellectual radicalism and styles of cultural disaffection (from the counterculture to Black Power), all combined to cast a critical eye on the social order that reformers had thought was moving in a postcapitalist direction. Social liberals came to fear the ruin of progressive hopes, as the “shared values” they had expected to guide social development frayed, while radical disenchantment with the promise of the going system called for its transformation rather than its fulfillment.6 Meanwhile, a conservative backlash against disruption probed the prospects for restoring old bourgeois values of self-reliance and social order.7 One early focus of debate was the “welfare crisis” in public policy, which brought a two-sided critique of New Deal/Great Society trends. Conservative suspicions of growing relief rolls provided grounds for the Right to question government’s role in remedial social provision. Radical “crisis theorists,” on the other hand, argued that postwar welfare-state regimes (in the United States and Europe) had already lost their ability to “steer” econo-

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mies, guide “consensus,” remedy injustice, and promote social change. At this watershed, it was unclear whether the vaunted “crisis” provided an opportunity for radical social transformation or for social reaction and restoration. By the mid-1970s, these two divergent paths seemed to stretch out ahead, even before the full weight of economic recession became evident. In either case, political economy came to bulk much larger in the social imagination than it had under midcentury liberal theory. Edward C. Banfield’s intellectual career reveals the reversal of fortune suffered by the social vision of reformist social sciences even by the outset of the 1970s. Banfield (1916 –99) began as Rexford Tugwell’s most distinguished student in the Program of Education and Research in Planning that Tugwell established at the University of Chicago. With Tugwell often away from campus in the late 1940s, Banfield kept things running. He taught Social Science 260, “Introduction to Planning,” treating everything from basic theories of collective behavior, rational decision making, and definitions of capitalism and socialism to special discussions of “planning for underdeveloped areas,” city and regional planning, and public housing programs (featuring the work of housing reformer Catherine Bauer and urban critic Lewis Mumford).8 Banfield’s syllabus included conservative documents such as writings by Friedrich Hayek and Chicago’s own laissez-faire advocate Henry C. Simons, but the liberal canon was much more fully represented, including Karl Mannheim, Paul and Percival Goodman, and Chicago standards such as Robert Redfield, Herbert Blumer, and Charles Merriam on the example set by the New Deal’s National Resources Planning Board. Banfield identified himself as “a planner,” and while his first major publication showed a measure of skepticism regarding grand designs of social reform, he did not question the planner’s conviction that government bore responsibility for the “public good” and could not simply delegate that responsibility to the unguided marketplace.9 Over Banfield’s career from 1950 to 1970, that planner’s conviction would be upended. Banfield’s first book, Government Project (1951), described the fate of a five thousand–acre cooperative farm that housed and employed sixty poor farm families. It had been started by the Resettlement Administration (RA) at Casa Grande, Arizona, under Tugwell’s direction. Observers called it “a modern Brook Farm” or “a little Soviet,” but the project was conceived with no ideological or utopian aims, Banfield insisted; the RA’s decision to promote a cooperative rather than parceling out small family farms was based wholly on the careful calculation of which mode of operation, under local and market conditions, was likely to generate the most revenue. It was based on just the kind of flexible, nondoctrinal, and socially informed guidance of economic affairs that Tugwell called “planning.” In one respect it worked: the farm was a financial success over the years it operated, from 1938 to

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1943. A few years after the cooperative was dissolved in favor of private farming, by common consent of the Farm Security Administration (successor to the RA) and the settlers’ association, veteran settlers told Banfield the cooperative “was far, far better than it is now, and they are so sorry it is destroyed.” So how did this “failure” of planning follow from success? Banfield underplayed the role of a conservative Congress, in demanding that the FSA liquidate its investment in cooperative and resettlement projects, but he effectively demonstrated the range of discontents that led settlers to endorse the dissolution, despite their growing prosperity. Banfield’s findings had to chasten a planner’s optimism. Rational decision making notwithstanding, the settlers’ community was riven by “irrational” power struggles, invidious status distinctions, strains between ideals of “democratic self-management” and efficiency, as well as a general lack of morale because they accepted the general social view that cooperative forms of property and work were disreputable or demeaning (likened to a “poor farm”).10 As Tugwell summed it up in his foreword: It is not a nice story. Our simple impulse to better the economic situation of a few almost hopelessly poverty-stricken folk in the Southwest came to grief not because the conception was bad or because the technique was mistaken but because the people there could not rise to the challenge. It was character which failed. And that was not because the human stock was feeble; it was because the environment was hostile to the development of character. Mr. Banfield would have had a different end for his story if Americans had approved what was being tried at Casa Grande; since they did not approve, how could a few families—who were American too—wrestle successfully with that [implacable] hostility?11

Like other interwar social liberals, Tugwell implied that the problem lay in the antipathetic environment of American individualistic values. Banfield’s view highlighted the recalcitrance of the “human material” involved, but his closing judgment, which called for going slow in social change, nonetheless relied on a filial quotation from Tugwell, dated 1925, voicing the incipient postcapitalist vision of the interwar years: “It would seem that if producers’ cooperation is to develop it will go slowly and will probably develop out of the present tentative rearrangements being made in the world of production to allow the individuals who actually operate industry more and more voice in the management of affairs.”12 Subsequent work by Banfield in the 1950s showed him reluctant to surrender his planner’s disposition, whatever cautionary stories he found to check a reformer’s enthusiasm. In Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest, coauthored with planner Martin Meyerson in 1955, Banfield reviewed the controversies in Chicago that resulted in the concentrated siting of high-rise low-income

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public housing, an outcome they found was resisted by the Chicago Housing Authority but imposed largely by white opposition to desegregating the housing market. Not only did Banfield and his coauthor stress the complexity of planning in concrete, political settings but they also lamented the absence of much planning at all, as the process of rationally considering a significant variety of alternate proposals and their consequences was cut off by the fast-moving demands of machine politics and racial prejudice. With some prescience, Meyerson and Banfield recognized tensions between “lower-middle”-class “ethnic” voters protective of their neighborhood enclaves and the “upper-middle”-class reformers most dedicated to “planning,” tensions often cited decades later as one cause for the post-1960s decline of New Deal liberalism.13 Although they acknowledged the inevitably frustrating play of private “interests,” Banfield and Meyerson still applauded the Housing Authority’s attempt to frame “one view of the public interest” free of racial discrimination and conducive to the good of the city as a whole.14 Whatever difficulties lay before real planning, the authors rejected the “thorough-going individualist point of view” that the market should be left alone: “As a practical matter, this view takes it for granted that the housing market works fairly well or could be made to work fairly well. Even if there were not a serious structural defect in the housing market due to race prejudice, this would be a dubious assumption.” In a theoretical appendix, Banfield himself asserted, like Kenneth Arrow, that the market, left to its own devices, cannot make the judgments of normative legitimacy on which a viable notion of the “public interest” depended.15 Against this background, Banfield’s broadside of 1970, The Unheavenly City, caused a stir with its dramatic dismissal of the government’s ability to significantly remedy urban ills.16 He argued that the social-reform campaigns of the 1960s had unduly exaggerated the public sense of an urban crisis, for “the plain fact is that the overwhelming majority of city dwellers live more comfortably and conveniently than before.”17 Those problems that did exist—decayed housing, crime, drug addiction, poverty—were in part unavoidable side-effects of development, such as in-migration of unskilled laborers and rapid housing turnover. Otherwise, they stemmed from fixed traits of life among the lower class; one could expect those problems to disappear only “if the lower class were to disappear.”18 Banfield relied heavily on a “culture of poverty” thesis, construed by his own lights to suggest that self-destructive and irresponsible behavior—less the consequence of poverty than its cause—were mere facts of “lower class” life, that is, a “class” prone to living for the present, disabled by a high incidence of mental illness and alcoholism, inclined toward violence and dissolute sex, and content to dwell in squalor.19 Thus, by this point in his career, Banfield went all out in damning the “human material” he had faulted in Government Pro-

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ject. Welfare and subsidy programs, he claimed, only eroded the inclination of the poor to work. And in a break from even the basic planner’s ideology he upheld in the 1950s, Banfield wrote, “The government cannot solve the problems of the cities and is likely to make them worse by trying.” Tellingly, he concluded, government inefficacy “does not necessarily mean that calamity impends”: Powerful accidental (by which is meant, nongovernmental and, more generally, nonorganizational) forces are at work that tend to alleviate and even to eliminate the problems. Hard as it may be for a nation of inveterate problemsolvers to believe, social problems sometimes disappear in the normal course of events. . . . One powerful accidental force at work is economic growth.20

With that dramatic declaration of what is “accidental,” and hence essentially beyond human control, the veteran planner heralded the return of autonomous economic forces to the social-scientific imagination. Banfield’s critique signaled a reversal of sentiment in other ways as well. The problems he saw in the debate over urban ills rested either with the persistent misbehavior of the lower class, which could not be “solved,” or in the cultural traits of the “upper class” and “middle class,” which combined an admirable “future-orientation” with an exaggerated sense of “service” to community and commitment to continual “improvement.” They refused to recognize any difficulties as irremediable and always indulged “the impulse to DO SOMETHING! and to DO GOOD!” Thus they stirred the “dissatisfaction with the city [that] is so widespread” and supported “mammoth government programs” that have little “effect on the serious problems” of cities but “to aggravate them.” Paradoxically, it was the middle- and upper-class disposition always to improve things that finds “society responsible for all ills” and thus encourages “the individual to believe that he can do nothing to help himself”—precisely the attitude of the “radically improvident” lower class. Given this complicity of two social poles, where could Banfield find a viewpoint that would meet his standards of moral restraint and selfimprovement without the moralism of compulsive but misguided reformers? His descriptions of class cultures seemed to locate such a favorable disposition in the “lower middle class,” which is committed to self-improvement but shows rather less “taste for public service and reform” than its “upper middle class” cousins; or in the “working class,” which he granted has a rather limited “time horizon” in planning for the future, but at least expects little from “society,” and if given a choice “between more and better community facilities on the one hand and lower taxes on the other,” will “usually [choose] the latter.” In other words, Banfield identified William Graham Sumner’s old ideal of the “forgotten man,” the provident lower-middle-class

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or upper-working-class man who asks little of others, wisely doubts panaceas, and simply meets the greatest moral imperative to “take care of oneself.” If Parsons claimed no one in 1937 read Spencer anymore, the old moral individualism of Sumner—what the culture critics of the 1930s denounced as a bygone ideal of modern personality—thus returned to academic social science by 1970.21 In the spirit of Banfield’s recuperation of old-style moral individualism, and despite his discomfort with “crisis-mongering,” a growing chorus of concern about a “welfare crisis” emerged on the American Right by the early 1970s. Conservative legislators had long denounced the high expense and work disincentives of relief, but a public buzz over waste and fraud in “welfare” rose sharply as recipients of Aid to Dependent Children (ADC, soon renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC) increased through the 1950s and doubled again during the 1960s. Neglecting the multitude of causes for the expanding rolls, critics assailed habitual “dependency” and called for returning the unproductive to work while reducing local relief costs. Republican governors called on president-elect Richard Nixon in late 1968 to rescue them from the budget strains they said AFDC caused them, and Nixon in turn requested a special report on “the welfare mess.” His failed proposal for a miserly Family Assistance Plan was intended to challenge “welfarism” by providing an income floor along with a strict work requirement. After that plan was rebuffed by two successive Congresses, the debate continued through the 1970s, as the Carter administration likewise failed to get a “welfare reform” bill passed that would have supplied income and jobs in place of relief payments.22 Left-wing critics (particularly New Leftists) had also criticized “welfare” for its demeaning and authoritarian implications.23 The Left generally regarded the outburst of vitriol aimed at the poor and the corresponding push for retrenchment in public services not as the result of a “welfare crisis”—if that term implied that the problem stemmed from an unreasonable, insupportable demand on public beneficence—but as a new “crisis of the state,” or the revealed inability of corporate-liberal government to deliver on its own promises of justice and equity.24 This perspective marked out the other road from crisis, a renewed radical critique of capitalism—and hence another challenge to liberal postcapitalist assumptions—that emerged at roughly the same moment that Banfield’s Unheavenly City trumpeted an incipient new conservatism. Various signs told of the left-wing surge. So-called post-Keynesians in Cambridge, England, had begun an argument in the 1950s with U.S. exponents of the neoclassical synthesis, claiming that any attempt to take the measure of Keynes’s teachings, and particularly the fundamental distinction between savings and investment, had to break with the false universalism of conventional eco-

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nomic thought and grasp the historic specificity of the current social system. After more than a decade of often arcane debate, the English post-Keynesian Joan Robinson visited the 1971 meeting of the American Economic Association, rallying all those “dissatisfied with orthodox economics” who sought a “new paradigm.” She found a receptive audience among young dissidents in the profession, veterans of the campus New Left who had formed the Union for Radical Political Economics a few years before. One of Robinson’s U.S. followers, Edward Nell, put it succinctly: “The heart of the matter is the concept of ‘capital’ and its relation to social class and economic power.” In broaching that, “economics” would be made “political” again and “develop a more adequate account of the working and misworking of the capitalist system.”25 Meanwhile, alongside the Cambridge debates over “capital” through the 1950s and 1960s, an independent American Marxist current led by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran had also sustained an economic critique of capitalism—or as Sweezy and Baran put it, the distinctive contemporary form of “monopoly capital.” Although interest in Marxism had stirred anew by the mid-1960s, along with the radicalization of the New Left, it had usually taken a “culturalist” form shadowing the “shift away from economics” in mainstream social-liberal thought. Now, attention began to turn back to a “classic” Marxism focused on economic analysis and the tendency of capitalist economy to suffer disabling, cyclical crises.26 The welfare debate provided the occasion for a neo-Marxian theory of political and social crisis that showed how confidence in social-liberal reform aspirations had begun to falter. A resonant sample was James O’Connor’s 1973 book The Fiscal Crisis of the State. An American radical whose critique of capitalism was informed by Baran and Sweezy’s work as well as by the wider post-Keynesian milieu, O’Connor studied at the Max Planck Institute for social research in Starnberg, Germany, just as Jürgen Habermas, the paramount figure in the “second generation” of Frankfurt School critical theory, was about to assume its leadership.27 Harking back to the World War I–era work by German and Austrian Marxists on state capitalism, O’Connor proposed to uncover the crisis tendencies of the current order not in traditional boom and bust cycles but rather in strains that arose in the realm of taxation, public finance, and government social spending. Very much like the social liberals of the postcapitalist vision, O’Connor assumed a steady, ongoing trend toward a highly organized economy, interknit with central government and marked by the continued growth of social services. He argued, however, that the purposes of the state were not to serve broad social values but rather to foster the private accumulation of capital and provide it “legitimization” at the same time: social expenditures primarily subsidized business or sought to quiet dissent and assure social peace through public relief. The problem was that accumulation and legitimization were contra-

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dictory aims, insofar as growing demands for government services in everything from transportation to incubating technological advances and providing public assistance ran up against monopoly capital’s insistence on shielding its profits from taxation: between them, a fiscal gap was bound to grow over time. There were no easy solutions within the system: attempts to remedy the crisis by a cost-cutting government would likely spur conflict with its employees as well as the service recipients it squeezed. This was a crisis theory written to respond to the recession of 1970 –71, mounting inflation and monetary disorder, and the growing drumbeat for cutting budgets, “welfare,” and bureaucracy, though it did not anticipate the fundamentalist reaction on behalf of “free-market” capitalism.28 Habermas’s “Legitimation Problems in Late Capitalism,” which was published the same year (and enlarged in his 1975 book, Legitimation Crisis), offered a related, but distinct critique.29 Habermas agreed with O’Connor that conflict and crisis had become lodged in the sphere of the state, where “permanent inflation” and “permanent crisis in government finances” loomed. The problem of legitimacy, however, lay not merely in the difficulties of sustaining adequate social services—the dilemmas of a state pretending to meet social needs while serving private interests—but also in the rise of popular social expectations that eroded bourgeois-individualist motives in work, possession, and self-reliance still required by the private economy that the state was pledged to serve.30 In other words, Habermas saw a postcapitalist dynamic leading beyond bourgeois standards toward more mutualist forms of action, a drift residing in the “socio-cultural system”— the combination of values, roles, and personality formation that roughly matched what Parsons defined as the core of the social sphere. In any case, the new discourse showed a sensitivity to limits and obstacles that had not hitherto ranked uppermost in the field of postcapitalist vision. No one could determine whether trends in a time of “crisis” would yield left to transformation or right to restoration. That it would move straight ahead toward realization of a social economy seemed increasingly dubious.

Trouble in the Postindustrial Transition The postindustrial transition hailed in the 1960s with scant attention to the limits to (alongside the prospects for) social change now encountered more stringent circumstances and a more subdued mood. And as it came to appear that the transition would likely be more troubled than smooth, the source of resistance to postindustrial progress was deemed, by various authors, to emerge from the enduring structures of capitalism itself. Returning after a long hiatus of midcentury liberal social thought, capitalism thus

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named a resilient feature of contemporary society not yet quite ready to exit the scene. This conceptual move marked even the thought of postindustrialism’s leading exponent, Daniel Bell, who complemented his masterwork of 1973, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, with a companion volume three years later, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Somehow, the two terms of postindustrialism and capitalism were to work in uneasy conjunction, on different axes of analysis measuring contemporary trends but nonetheless posed in relation to each other. At the same time, a more bracing account of the acute tensions setting capitalist standards against postindustrial progress appeared in the work of a Marxisant New Leftist, Larry Hirschhorn. Taken together, the two writers revealed the ways in which the 1970s set strikingly new terms for imagining social development. Bell once remarked that a major book usually represents an idea germinated roughly ten years before, and indeed The Coming of Post-Industrial Society marked the culmination of his writing on new dimensions of social change that had begun in the reformist flush of the early 1960s.31 Yet the progress of intellectual work is no more smooth and regular than that of social and political affairs, and the subsequent appearance of Bell’s jaundiced view of contemporary life, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, suggested that his perspective had undergone a substantial change as he acknowledged the residual potency of capitalism itself. Bell resisted the imputation that his views had suddenly changed, claiming the two books were drafted at the same time in a concentrated spurt of creative energy in 1969 and 1970. Only the demands of revision and suitable organization accounted for separate publication three years apart, a span that straddled by happenstance the onset of the mid-1970s economic crisis.32 Ever since publication of The End of Ideology, glib critics had belabored him for a Panglossian faith in liberal progress and the apolitical solution of social problems by scientific expertise—views he never truly voiced. Yet his own explanation of the drafting process still suggested that his views of the 1970s assumed more a posture of dismay than his evolutionary prognoses of the prior decade. Bell saw the protest radicalism and countercultural romanticism of the late 1960s as giving vent to an antinomian dynamic of self-gratification that undermined the communal ethos needed for society to take advantage of the new modes of social control made available by postindustrial trends. It is telling, though, that in Cultural Contradictions he attributed that antinomian dynamic ultimately to the individualistic, consumerist passions spawned by capitalism. What better insult for an old leftist to lay against the New Left than to say the youth movement was, in truth, “bourgeois.” Yet by suggesting that the capitalism responsible for vaunting such passions had entered a decadent phase—the new impulses contradicted the moral foundations (in a Protestant work ethic) on which capitalism originally legitimated itself—Bell him-

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self partook of a new mood among left-leaning social and cultural critics in the 1970s, who assailed the U.S. economic status quo more explicitly than at any time since the 1940s. By sundering its ties to moral imperatives to work, capitalism had lost its “transcendent ethic.” Bell claimed “the social order lacks either a culture that is a symbolic expression of any vitality or a moral impulse that is a motivational or binding force.” Capitalism could offer no way forward; it was “ideologically impotent.” What the emerging postindustrial society needed was what Bell called a “public household”—“an effort, in the realm of the polity, to find a social cement for the society,” or better put, the value-laden principles of decision that put a “pilot” in the seat of government, “the cockpit” of the postindustrial order in his view, to steer socioeconomic allocations as the market lost primacy and precedence.33 Bell’s critique of capitalism in Cultural Contradictions hinted at the peculiarity of a postcapitalist vision that could never be certain that the old order had indeed passed away. That vision had always contemplated a transitional or liminal development, and the old socialist side of Bell was prepared to cite a return of the repressed as residual old-order elements impeded the advent of the new. Most idiosyncratically, Bell in the 1970s turned right in his recoil from the New Left and simultaneously turned left in his renewed skepticism of capitalist norms. Surely, he did not share the Marxist or neoMarxist assumptions of writers such as O’Connor and Habermas.34 He denied that there was a general systemic dynamic that made a coming social crisis inevitable. Having earlier dismissed his youthful confidence that socialism was destined to replace capitalism, Bell was prepared to address the crosscurrents of the 1970s as a manifestation of what he now called “the disjunction of realms,” the argument that societies did not hold together according to a central governing logic but incorporated several different axes of development. In the current case, these axes were a social realm governed by postindustrial trends, a political realm determined by liberal principles of individual rights and representative government, and a cultural realm dominated by modernist or postmodernist mass consumer desire. Nonetheless, the tensions between them now seemed to block the most fruitful potentials of development toward a new social economy. Bell’s disconsolate view suggested the old order survived enough to frustrate progress. The postindustrial drift was becalmed. Aside from Bell’s adaptation to a new, more hesitant mood, the radicalization of social criticism and the revival of Marxism since the mid-1960s made possible, by the 1970s, a convergence of postindustrial and anticapitalist themes, as indicated in work by Larry Hirschhorn. Responding to the “welfare crisis” that raised new doubts about the social-reform and social-service capacities of the modern state, Hirschhorn effectively reconfigured the

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theory of postindustrial society in a quasi-Marxist vein. For him, postindustrialism defined not a current order of society but a contradictory passage in which capitalist institutions remained impediments to realizing the kinds of social reconstruction that new forces of production made both possible and imperative.35 He belonged to a late New Left cohort that fostered such theoretical innovations. Born in 1945 to Polish-Jewish refugees in New York City, Hirschhorn took a course with Herbert Marcuse as a student at Brandeis University during the mid-1960s and joined a reading and discussion circle aimed at understanding the role of the ’60s youth rebellion in trends of contemporary social development. He soon embarked on a project exploring the social and cultural impact of recent technological innovations, regarded in Marxian terms as “new productive forces,” and completed his dissertation on “The Political Economy of Information Capital.”36 Thereafter, as a research associate at the Institute of Regional and Urban Development at the University of California at Berkeley, he met Fred Block, a young Marxist in the graduate program of sociology who introduced Hirschhorn to the circle around the journal, Socialist Revolution, a successor to Studies on the Left that sought to infuse late New Left radicalism with up-to-date socialist theorizing. It was there that O’Connor’s original essays on “the fiscal crisis of the state” had appeared. Hirschhorn was influenced also by an essay published a few years earlier by Martin J. Sklar, a principal member of the Socialist Revolution circle. Sklar’s 1969 essay, “On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political-Economic Society,” offered a neo-Marxist version of the 1964 “Triple Revolution” manifesto. With the advent of a “disaccumulationist” phase of capitalist development, the steady displacement of live labor from industrial production sounded the death knell of a system based on the exploitation of labor and the measurement of value in labor time.37 Sklar’s essay made an early stab at a Marxist postindustrial theory, though he did not yet identify his thesis in such terms. Hirschhorn’s fusion was more explicit.38 Hirschhorn began his analysis in the 1970s by distancing himself from most previous postindustrial thought, marking the shift to a new period after the optimism of the 1960s had begun to pale. “Contrary to most theorizing,” he wrote in one of his first “working papers” at Berkeley, “postindustrialism does not automatically promise new levels of affluence.” He sought to make “the transition to post-industrialism” problematic, insisting that this development was bound to be marked by bottlenecks, stresses, and “convulsive conflict,” if it was not obstructed entirely. It was “possible and conceivable,” he wrote, “for an economy to fail to make the transition to post-industrialism.”39 Hirschhorn offered a simple, provisional definition of postindustrialism as the condition of a society in which a declining proportion of the national

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workforce is engaged in manufacturing goods (following Sklar’s “disaccumulationist” model) and a growing proportion is employed in government services, or the “public sector.” His first Berkeley paper concerned the inflation caused by the maintenance of comparable wage rates in the public and private sectors while productivity gains in the former lagged far behind those in the latter—a point O’Connor had also stressed, based on work by economist William Baumol.40 Yet Hirschhorn sought to rebut the common view that labor-intensive public-sector services resisted significant productivity gains because they could not be automated; he argued that improved productivity in these fields was possible but only by means quite different from those customarily applied to mechanized industry. The “production of health,” for instance, could be made more “efficient” in part by applying new technologies (e.g., using information sciences to enhance data banks and diagnostics), but the primary path of advance lay in wide-ranging reorganization, that is, a set of new practices including an emphasis on preventive medicine, redesign of health service delivery, and reform of procedures for licensing various kinds of paramedic practitioners. In other words, productivity in those spheres of the occupational system that absorbed a growing share of the workforce—services, particularly public services— depended on the renovation of social institutions, not merely or even primarily in the customary economic terms of adding quantifiable inputs of capital. Moreover, the wider social matrix of factors relevant to the productivity of services called forth a degree of central planning and political action far greater than American society, reliant for growth on automatic “economic” mechanisms, typically contemplated.41 This did not mean that renovating services did not require substantial investments of funds or that the dynamics of the older “industrial” economy had become unproblematic or irrelevant. Hirschhorn’s view of postindustrial society, therefore, differed from earlier versions that either implied “the problem of production has been solved” or depicted a new stage of social evolution as if it had supplanted, rather than combined with, older forms of agricultural and industrial practice. Treating the issue of social structure and social change as one of “combined and uneven development,” Hirschhorn situated the “industrial” economy—and the support or resistance it offered to public-sector services—at the heart of the postindustrial problem. Only by dramatically boosting private-sector productivity, he suggested, could the requisite tax revenues be raised for financing the renovation and transformation of public services (including early retirement pensions for the bureaucrats rendered obsolete by service “efficiency”). Either a slowdown in private accumulation or private resistance to finance public services would leave private and public sector productivity disproportionate, sustain

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inflation, and perpetuate bulky service bureaucracies that demanded high tax receipts. This began a vicious circle, leading to tax revolt, capital flight, stagnating industries, wage austerity for private and public workers, and retrenchment in government-sponsored services. Such, Hirschhorn wrote with prescience in 1972, was the undesirable alternative to an emergent postindustrial order that good public policy would help to foster.42 In subsequent working papers, however, Hirschhorn portrayed social services not merely as a lien on the productive forces in society but as the leading edge of the productive forces themselves. He cited the argument by economist Robert Solow that factors of information and organization (namely, the capacity of the managerial corporation to control complex networks of resources) had been the driving forces of enhanced productivity in the United States since World War I. In that case, Hirschhorn extrapolated, even in the industrial sphere conventional economics no longer comprehended the nature or the prerequisites of “growth”: The new sources of productivity, e.g. information, education, mobility, administration, etc., are organized by a much more complex mélange of private and public, market and non-market activities [than “economic” factors of wage labor and money capital alone]. As a consequence, the purely market model is no longer a very effective tool for analyzing the genesis, production, and “circulation” of these new sources of productivity.43

Moreover, in a mode of production based increasingly on resources of knowledge, demands for creativity and adaptability put pressure not only on productive organizations but also on persons. For personnel in such organizations, the capacity to adjust to change, learn new tasks, and be mobile were as much an element of “basic skills” as the substantive technical knowledge of any special field. Psychological well-being thus became a social resource, and social networks of care and community support became central features of a dynamic economy.44 Social infrastructure of the most “invisible” kind, based not in highways or dams, but in networks of communication and social support, emerges as the dynamic factor that underlies overall productivity . . . [thus] the human services, particularly the health and education complexes, become the social loci for the developmental possibilities of society.45

Relying on a Marxian scheme of analyzing epochal social change, Hirschhorn depicted the logic of social services as the productive forces straining against archaic relations of production, namely the primacy of “economics” in thought and practice that “retard[ed] developmental possibilities.”46

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The fulcrum of Hirschhorn’s social theory was his notion of “developmental logic,” which referred to the form and rhythm of social change as it was linked to dynamics of productive growth and also implied a project of social transformation that helped orient individuals in social space and historical time. As an earlier example of “developmental logic” at work, Hirschhorn examined the origins of modern social services in turn-of-the-century settlement house work and Progressive reform. He used that as a foil for examining the “crisis of social services,” the growing criticism of public welfare programs during the 1970s from the Left and the Right that questioned not only the effectiveness of public relief but also the legitimacy of the aims and standards such services professed to uphold. A consensus on the meaning of “welfare” had been reached in the first case, he suggested, and ruptured in the second. Reconstructing a new “developmental logic” around the meaning and purpose of public services promised to clarify and help society escape its current impasse. Turn-of-the-century social services, Hirschhorn wrote, represented both a “countermovement” (in Karl Polanyi’s sense) against the communally disintegrative force of market relations and an accommodation to the demands of the industrial workplace. As social workers sought to maximize the (usually male) individual’s capacity to hold a job and thus keep intact the conjugal family, gendered measures of “social control” cohered with social amelioration. This combination gave these early public services their durability and institutional force: conjoined to the “developmental” needs of a growing industrial order, they helped structure daily life around common assumptions of personal identity and its place in the scheme of society at large.47 Loss of such a close tie between persons and social order in Hirschhorn’s own time, he claimed, led not only to the growing dispute over the merit of “welfare” but also to signs of widespread personal disaffiliation from conventional commitments to work, family, and education—whether among “alienated” middle-class youth or the marginalized poor. “To feel superfluous is to feel that development no longer organizes daily life,” Hirschhorn wrote, “and that development is beyond reach and can no longer engage human faculties.”48 Thus the main task was to construct a new “developmental logic” that drew social practices back into a relationship of mutual reinforcement with the real sources of growth. Since the sources of growth were no longer purely “economic” but entailed other such phenomena as science (or the “socialization of intellect”), development now required a panoply of social services (from education to housing and accessible psychotherapy) capable of sustaining a new mode of intellectually creative, adaptable personality. In this sense, the whole field of “social relations” (the organization of learning, of families and communities) and an expanded scope of corresponding welfare services were themselves the “productive

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forces” giving the dynamic force to an order of society still in the process of emerging.49 Hirschhorn’s theory of the stymied postindustrial transition betrayed many of the same weaknesses as prior postindustrial thinking. It neglected global trends that exported the worst of industrial conditions to the poor world beyond, and it failed to show very clearly how desirable terms of social development might be brought to fruition given the present field of interested social groups and their roles in the course of political struggle. Yet the theory of a troubled or stymied postindustrial transition signaled the renewed identification of capitalism as the most telling definition of contemporary society’s most salient features. American society was recognized again as one in which “business” remained the most powerful institutional locus of wealth and influence, where key decisions on the allocation of resources are made privately by property owners for the sole purpose of accumulating wealth, and “economic” affairs, conducted by market exchange, still had a dynamic that eluded concerted social control. These marked the capitalist impediments to the postindustrial transition, the institutionalized limits posed by the rule of private property to realizing the fully social dimension of those emerging forces named postindustrial: the use of resources that were public by nature, generated outside the marketplace; the cultivation of collective and self-governing work practices; the public guarantee of livelihood and provision of services; the need to forecast and plan the allocation of social resources and services; the construction of “social networks” that supported new kinds of flexible personality.50 Here Hirschhorn not only summed up the key aspirations of postcapitalist development but also brilliantly captured the strains of a postcapitalist vision under duress. His vision of transformation—which now required a decisive break from residual capitalist standards—was only one of the possible roads from the sense of crisis marking the 1970s, however. The endgame of the liberal postcapitalist vision played itself out on a different pathway.

The Return of Economism and the Decline of the Social The postcapitalist vision of American social liberalism—descended from reformist energies of the 1910s and World War I years, sustained by Depression-era welfare-state initiatives and the rise of new social sciences, funneled through the cross-currents of totalitarianism, cataclysmic war, reconstruction hopes, and new social movements—had survived half a century. But the exhaustion of Great Society reform, the rise of a radical critique and resurgence of an old-style conservatism, and most of all a lingering eco-

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nomic crisis would bring it down. Once affluence began to appear not so unproblematic as it had atop the 1960s growth wave, public attention and social thought not surprisingly turned toward a renewed concern with “economic” matters such as business cycles, inequality of wealth and income at large (beyond the matter of “poverty” as an ostensibly marginal phenomenon), “class,” and even the “contradictions of capitalism.” Yet beyond the return of the economic, long neglected by the “social” imagination of the postwar years, it was the revival of distinctly economistic views—conceptions of social life and policy that reduced human interaction and relations almost entirely to terms of pecuniary self-interest and market behavior—that made for a startling reversal in social thought during the 1970s. An aging theorist such as Talcott Parsons strove to resist the tide, but the rise of economism was strong enough nearly to swamp that confidence in the priority of the social in modern life, on which Parsons had staked his career. The economistic trend stemmed not so much from the strength of academic economics but from the crisis that gripped the discipline as its postwar “center,” rooted in the Keynesian synthesis, failed to hold under the intractable quandaries of the U.S. economy. Back in 1958, A. William Phillips of the London School of Economics unveiled his famous curve showing a regular trade-off between unemployment and inflation, sustaining the idea of “fine-tuning” policy measures to alternately heat up or cool off the economy. Primarily an econometrician, Phillips was concerned with demonstrating in historical statistics that the two phenomena regularly see-sawed, rather than insisting that public policy be focused on finding the sweet point of balance between the two. One historian of economics has argued that the neoKeynesians were more committed to devise means toward “full employment targets,” until late-1960s price escalation led them to refocus on the inflation problem; they were unduly sensitive to suggestions that their notions of macroeconomic management—rather than gross political errors of Vietnam-war finance—had misfired. Thus the late preoccupation with the inverse relations of unemployment and inflation already signaled a rightward turn against macroeconomic expansion and pro-employment policies.51 In fact, however, the question of how to maintain a “full-employment economy” while also keeping inflation in check had been a perennial concern of almost all advocates of a managed economy, including the postcapitalist theorist Anthony Crosland in the mid-1950s, even when inflation remained relatively low.52 By the 1970s it appeared that their worst fears—an overheated economy, price inflation, and middle-class resistance to government—were coming true. As both inflation and unemployment hung high through the 1970s, and Keynesian policy advisers could no longer recommend tipping the seesaw up on one side to check the rise of the other, contemporary economics confronted what Edward Nell called “the break-up of a vision.”53

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While a variety of liberal and left-wing economists strove to explain the quandaries of the time, the Right was poised for resurgence. The intellectual roots of its rebirth had been planted some time before, even though only the current crisis brought this new dispensation to the forefront. The most influential figure in the return of laissez-faire economics, Milton Friedman, had studied with free-market stalwarts Frank Knight and Henry C. Simons at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. His 1956 paper, “The Quantity Theory of Money,” introduced his anti-Keynesian argument that a relatively constant demand for money and a watchful eye on the growth of the money supply were more germane to understanding macroeconomic affairs, including the Great Depression, than the problem of “oversaving” or the state of “aggregate demand.”54 Though few outside of Friedman’s redoubt at Chicago listened, he and his colleagues continued to compile statistics demonstrating the role of the money supply, and Friedman steadily ascended in stature. Delivering his presidential address at the American Economics Association in 1967, he deliver another blunt challenge to the Keynesians by introducing the notion of a “natural” unemployment rate.55 Contrary to the see-saw of Phillips-based fine-tuning, inflation could be checked by reducing the money supply without causing undue unemployment—precisely because unemployment was only truly excessive if it surpassed something Friedman called its “natural rate,” a mean toward which unemployment gravitated if the labor market was left alone. The scheme clearly pointed to limiting government intervention: government spending only boosted inflation without altering the “natural rate” of unemployment in the long run; minimum-wage laws and unemployment insurance pushed unemployment up by making labor too expensive or giving people an alternative to work; and undisturbed market relations would let individuals make their own decisions about when, and at what rates, to supply their labor to employers. Friedman refined the doctrine by the time of his 1976 Nobel Prize address.56 By then, the Phillips curve appeared broken in practice, not only in theory. In the face of “stagflation,” liberal observers recognized in Keynesian bewilderment “the dissolution of an intellectual establishment, and its fragmentation into conflicting schools,” and the right wing burgeoned.57 The school of “rational expectations” in the 1970s claimed Keynesianism was fundamentally compromised by its misunderstanding of economic choice, for as individual economic actors rationally anticipated the effects of policy initiatives, they typically nullified policy intentions. In The Unheavenly City, Banfield had already made roughly the same argument: “People often respond to government measures by making adaptations the aggregate effect of which is to render the measures ineffective or even injurious.” Employers, for instance, responded to employment-stimulating policies by

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paying more to hold on to valuable employees (thus encouraging wage inflation), rather than hiring more unemployed workers from the low-skill end of the job-hunters’ queue.58 Such market-based skepticism of macroeconomic policy, nurtured throughout the 1960s by University of Chicago economists he knew well, led Banfield to his flat rejection of constructive social policy.59 In the 1970s, an increasingly confident rational-expectations school urged a return to “classical” principles that individuals manage their own welfare best by “optimizing utility” and that “stable policies” are preferable to “activist policies”: choices are bound to be most efficient when players know the “rules of the game,” and “for the consequences of the rules to be well understood [by optimizing individuals], the rules must not change very often.”60 Indeed, observer James W. Dean found that fifteen leading American economists interviewed in 1978 “said they had retreated from activism,” commencing what Dean called an “age of policy nihilism.”61 The rational expectations argument pushed hard in its attack on Keynesian orthodoxy, claiming that the Keynesian fault lay in imagining that macroeconomic phenomena could be disengaged from the optimizing logic of microeconomics. “Because aggregate outcomes are only a sum of individual decisions, the aggregate relationships should have no independent existence,” such a theorist argued, “but they do under the Keynesian approach.”62 In this way, the crisis in economic theory began to reveal its implications for the theory of society, for the revival of pre-Keynesian, laissez-faire market theory also entailed the revival of methodological individualism, the principle that only individuals exist and their sum, as “society,” was purely a nominal aggregate and nothing real. What followed were mounting attempts to extend the sway of economic reasoning. Already, in his 1976 book, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, University of Chicago economist Gary Becker considered children “durable consumer goods,” only one of many gaffes committed in an enterprise that Parsons’s collaborator Neil Smelser now called “economic imperialism.”63 As the revival of market ideology reasserted the dominance of economy over society, the concept of society was under threat. By this time, in fact, Parsons’s vision of studies in “social relations” had collapsed at Harvard University. Parsons’s interdisciplinary department suffered repeated shocks throughout the 1960s.64 Anthropologists showed declining interest in the “culture and personality” school that had contributed so much to the definition of Social Relations; some of Parsons’s closest collaborators died or resigned prematurely; the department was tarred by the scandal over Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s experiments with psychedelic drugs. Other than Parsons, sociologists were restive with continued ties to social psychology as their discipline found a new “center of gravity . . . around the large-scale focus linking with government, economics, international studies, moderniza-

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tion of underdeveloped societies, and the like.”65 In April 1970, the sociologists—with Parsons opposed—voted to secede from Social Relations and constituted their own department as of July 1. As the synthetic aspirations of Parsons gave way at Harvard, moreover, Alvin Gouldner’s bold polemic, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, scored Parsons’s theory itself as an illustration of the field’s principal maladies. While much of Gouldner’s critique was misguided, his sense that the discipline was entering a fractious period of declining confidence had merit. Gouldner bore an odd relation to the mainstream of postwar sociology. A veteran of the young Communist milieu of New York in the early 1940s, Gouldner eagerly jumped into professional sociology and quickly advanced in the 1950s. Two early books on industrial sociology suggested a continuing emphasis on property and class relations when the discipline was turning away from economics, but he also went out of his way at that time to declare his admiration for and debt to Parsons and his sociological theory.66 At Washington University in St. Louis, he helped found the journal Transaction, devoted to spanning “the communication gap between two communities now poorly connected: the social sciences . . . and the general public.”67 And while the journal reflected the general liberal, reformist tenor of the discipline, Gouldner’s inaugural editorial for Transaction expressed an utterly conventional confidence in the power of social science as something like an engineering tool available to “decision-makers.” By the mid-1960s, as the mood of change gripped the country, Gouldner moved to became one of the sociologists best-known as a critic of “value-free” or “value-neutral” notions of social science, insisting instead that all research was value-relative and the moral intentions of social scientists should be selfconscious and open to examination. His attempt to foster a “public sociology” with the foundation of Transaction thus metamorphosed into an increasingly strident insistence on recognizing the role of the sociologist as a social actor, either complicit in present social evils or committed to change them.68 Soon after a radical caucus arose at the Sociological Association’s 1968 meeting, Gouldner was prepared to greet it with claims that the influential Parsonsian presence within the profession represented its deeply “conservative” establishment.69 In The Coming Crisis, Gouldner grossly misconstrued Parsons’s intellectual career in order to justify the “conservative” epithet. Gouldner misread Parsons’s interwar “voluntarism” as an echo of Herbert Hoover’s voluntarism, committed to individualism, moralism, and faith in the spontaneous orderproducing mechanisms of the free market. Furthermore, the reigning doctrine of “Functionalism,” in Gouldner’s view, borrowed from that classic bourgeois liberalism to emphasis the inherent trend toward “equilibrium” in a social “system,” yielding a conservative complacency that what exists in

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social order is right and that the maintenance of that order is essentially unproblematic and perpetual. Given such a distorted reading of midcentury social thought, in utter disregard of the reformist impulses driving the new trends since the 1920s, Gouldner was forced to conclude that Parsons’s firm endorsement of the “Welfare State” after World War II represented a sharp turn away from his putative laissez-faire roots.70 Thus, according to Gouldner, the “crisis” in the discipline began once “functionalists” had to adapt to “welfare-state” reforms, requiring them to broach the phenomenon of social change when their fundamental predilections leaned toward validating a static order. He imagined that “functionalists,” so unfamiliar with phenomena of social change, would seek to explain it by assimilating Marxism; on the other hand, he claimed, Soviet intellectuals showed growing interest in academic sociology due to a combination of “liberalizing” trends in the Eastern bloc and the conservative needs of bureaucratic elites there to “stabilize their leadership.” To be sure, Gouldner grasped the interest of young radical scholars in “the more Hegelian” versions of Marxism as well as the matters of “power, property, conflict, force, and fraud,” and accurately predicted that Parsonsian hegemony would give way to a more pluralized discipline. Yet at least in 1970, he utterly failed to anticipate any right-wing political backlash, and instead expected the “welfare state” (sometimes cited as the “welfare-warfare state”) to continue “burgeoning,” with the greatest intellectual threat being a “Metternichian unity” between Soviet bureaucratic and American liberal interests in “administrative and managerial sociology.”71 Although he misgauged the nature of the crisis, Gouldner knew something was up. By the mid 1970s, figures on faculty growth and student majors in sociology had peaked and begun a descent, signs of a general retrenchment in higher education but also the end of sociology’s heyday, those years of the 1950s and 1960s when it confidently offered itself as the most integrative of the disciplines and the one most in demand as everyone sought to address “social problems.” A critical assault on the very concept of “society” came from all sides during the 1970s—from economics and politics, relativist theories of culture, and even biology—until the central category of the postcapitalist imagination, the idea of organized response to collective needs and aspirations, lost its moorings in academic thought and public consciousness. Parsons understood the drift of things far better than Gouldner and was intent on rebutting the backlash and sustaining his vision. His unfinished manuscript of the 1970s, “The American Societal Community,” defended his view that the social sphere outside politics and economics remained the true locus of ongoing change in the modern world. The “societal community” was the name he gave to that “integrative” component of a social system which defined the prevailing forms of interaction and sol-

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idarity, holding persons together in collective consciousness and endeavor. Situated alongside, and intertwined with the other functional dimensions of the social system—economy, polity, culture, family, and personality—the societal community was the prime concern of his discipline, sociology. Moreover, in Parsons’s view, it represented the dynamic center of change in what he considered the “lead society” of his time, the United States.72 In this last manuscript, Parsons wished to cap the development of his lifelong theoretical project while also responding to some of the key social, intellectual, and political strains of his moment—the ascendancy of Richard Nixon’s retrograde politics and his fall in the Watergate scandal, as well as the upheaval of protest on college campuses, subsiding by the mid-1970s but still tied in Parsons’s mind with the ongoing influence of New Left and countercultural sentiments. Parsons found the tenor of the time disturbing, but in his customary optimism, he expected some “‘rebuilding’ and reorganization” to follow this time of stress, while he objected strenuously to the “crisis” sensibility of the 1970s. Some “extreme . . . opinions,” Parsons wrote, “hold that American society has been, in recent times, in a state of drastic disintegration, a view which of course I do not share.” Instead, he argued “that American society has considerable integrative capacity.” He believed further development in the innovative societal community of American life would overcome strains in culture and politics as it brought new forms of interaction and solidarity into being.73 In naming the “societal community,” Parsons aimed to overcome the hoary dichotomy of “society” and “community.” Solidarity (as opposed to self-interest on the part of individuals and groups) remained essential to understanding social order; it worked, however, not (as in old idylls of gemeinschaft) by binding people together in unanimity or faultless harmony of spirit but rather by offering persons varied means of identity, responsibility, and belonging that adapted fruitfully to the highly “pluralistic” and differentiated landscape of modern life.74 As always in Parsons’s work, such concepts met analytical (i.e., abstract theoretical) as well as empirical needs: the societal community, which functioned to integrate, was in some sense present in all aspects of social life and in the most varied kinds of institutions, from family to corporation; but it also identified a particular empirical segment of social structure. In principle, it defined the quality of “membership” in the society at large, and so was closely wedded to the concept and institutional infrastructure of “citizenship.” Thus it was also the main field in which problems of “distributive justice” were addressed. Concretely, Parsons often associated the societal community with the notion of an “educated public” (or public sphere), with the “private nonprofit sector” (or the field of organizations, often service-oriented, outside both governmental and business worlds) and with the ascendancy of “associational” structures (pro-

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foundly distinct from the norms of markets or bureaucracies) that organized people in voluntary, collegial forms of deliberation and practice. As an abstract category, the functions of societal community could be found in any society, but concretely, societal community figured as a newly differentiated segment of modern society. He sought to describe “the emerging societal community,” best observed, he believed in American life, as the exemplar of contemporary development.75 In defining and describing this sphere of social action, Parsons responded polemically to intellectual trends of the 1970s, particularly the return of economism—or what he repeatedly called, following the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, “the economic ideology.”76 That ideology rested in the assumption that economic interests exhausted the range of motives governing human social action, and Parsons recognized its resurgence in new appeals to the “free market”—accompanied by notions of “the individual” as the sole locus of decision and “marginal productivity” as the sole arbiter of social value—as well as in the revival of Marxism, which he construed as an extreme form of “economic determinism.” Both strains, Parsons insisted, failed to recognize not only the social force of other motives and institutions (particularly the varied forms of “solidarity”) but also the wide range of differentiated social milieus in the fields of social status, leadership, and productive organization that existed in a sphere beyond markets, businesses, and economic class struggle. Parsons devoted more pages to assailing Marxism, but the market theories of Milton Friedman and Gary Becker repeatedly figured in his polemic as an “economic imperialism” that would reduce marriage, childrearing, and professional ethics to terms of price calculation. In an unusual note of sarcasm, he explained that, after all, there are varied legal and cultural limits to market exchange, notably the notion that “constitutional rights” are inalienable, unless, he remarked, “some proponents of the ‘economic approach’ would hold that in the interest of facilitating mutual maximization of advantage, the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments should be repealed.” Parsons noted that “the society has recently shown a strong tendency to generalize the conception of economic cost far beyond its legitimate limits,” yet he insisted such economism was socially and historically in decline. The general theory (not his alone) that recognized a social sphere apart from the assumed primacy of either economic or political dynamics represented “a historic breakthrough in Western intellectual history”; it had brought “the emergence of the era, in the sphere of the intellectual disciplines, of ‘sociology’ as superceding that of ‘economics.’” And while he admitted, along with his somewhat estranged former student Robert Bellah, that “utilitarian [or economic] individualism” is “the most serious and persistent ‘pathology’ or tendency to malintegration in the society” at present, it was

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not, he repeated, “the main orientational tendency of the society,” which he believed was more geared to ideals of freedom, equality, productive service, and solidarity in terms that were not wholly “economic,” market-based, or governed by corporate or class interests. He believed that “numerous kinds of collective provision for household needs” had developed, and as an example of that, “an overall health care program . . . will probably come soon.” Thus Parsons doggedly held to the notion of a “shift away from economics.” Yet he offered no explanation for the recent revival of free-market ideology even as he cried out, “The economic ideology is indeed powerful in this society!” Parsons tacked back and forth: Since . . . collectively organized systems have come to be of such central functional significance to the operation of modern societies, pure individualistic “economism” has surely been fighting a losing battle for domination of the societal definitions of the situation in our day. The vigor of its rear-guard action is, however, impressive.77

Surely the supposed decline of economism—reasserted even in the face of a surging market ideology—did not mean to Parsons the advent of a socialistic or communitarian society. In contrast to these traditions, as he understood them, he was concerned with the persistent dialectic in society between freedom and constraint, on the one hand, and between equality and inequality on the other. In both cases, the former terms ranked higher as normative ideals for contemporary society, Parsons claimed, but the latter remained unavoidable elements of any actual complex society that involved individuals in collective milieus and required various kinds of expertise and leadership (ideally “legitimated” authority) to accomplish practical aims. Parsons was as exercised by the “absolutist” and unrealistic tenor of demands for “participatory democracy” or communal harmony as he was by economic absolutism of the market or Marxist varieties. Yet by the end of the book, he took an unusual turn. After a lengthy account explaining, with the help of Durkheim and Freud, why the “individualism” enshrined in American culture and society was not primarily of the “economic” or utilitarian variety but far more a “humanistic” form geared toward upholding personal dignity and fulfillment, he introduced the idea that his time had witnessed an “expressive revolution” marking yet a new stage of “Western” social development, succeeding a long train of industrial, democratic, and educational revolutions. Following the youth movements of the 1960s that demanded sexual freedom and—in the women’s movement— gender equality, a new scope for personal expression, especially in “affective” rather than “rational” terms, would now reshape society. He was troubled by the “Rousseauistic” duality of such radical demands—on the one

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hand the ideal of an utterly autonomous individual (a “naked self” identified with a “state of nature”), and on the other the subordination of individuality to a uniform “general will.” Yet, when all was said and done, Parsons’s evolutionary optimism kicked in. He had as little patience with “conservative” movements of “fundamentalist” morality as he did with countercultural rebellion, and he predicted that a fairly wide range of new freedoms would be effectively accommodated—without any breakdown—in a society that increasingly relied on constraint more by “influence” and “persuasion” (and internalized self-regulation) than by coercive power or moral unanimity. This sense of balance enabled him to broach the contemporary tension, fostered by the expressive revolution, between emphasis on “feeling,” intimacy, and sensibility, on the one hand, and the commitment to “cognitive rationality” and its pursuit of objectivity, those principles governing science and technology as defined in the modern university, on the other. Having introduced this final problem, Parsons drew the discussion to a close with a resounding reassertion of his own longstanding postcapitalist vision: It is in this context that we see the possibility that, in the aftermath of the great struggles over emphases on objectivity and on subjectivity and on the societal level, over capitalism vs. socialism and the like, there may emerge a new synthesis, which is neither objective nor subjective, but in some sense both, and societally, which is neither capitalism nor socialism but in some sense both and neither.78

He anticipated that a continually evolving modern society would move to “redress” the unbalanced emphasis on rationality, by enabling new forms of emotional expression and exchange, just as he expected collective and collaborative modes to answer, and indeed reshape, individual and economic pursuits.79 Parsons had started work on “The American Societal Community” with the view that “Nixonism” signaled an “era . . . of a regressive, fundamentalist political ‘normalcy,’” though he continued to think social evolutionary trends would soon overrule its force.80 He may not have recognized just how deep the “regressive,” indeed restorationist, impulses of his time were.

The Road to Bourgeois Triumphalism Contrary to Parsons’s conviction that modern social evolution moved beyond “the capitalism/socialism dichotomy,” the trend of the times seemed to run against him, as observers on all sides chose increasingly to dub contemporary society “capitalist” indeed. On the left, the recognition of capi-

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talism and its limits did not require a surrender of hopes for change, but it imagined change more climactic than postcapitalist theorists preferred to contemplate. In this, there arose a temporary shift in the mid 1970s of moderate left-wing sensibilities toward more radical postures. The trend was evident in the distance between two books by Michael Harrington, the activist and writer who had emerged as the new incarnation of “America’s leading socialist.” Harrington had entered the American Left on the downswing in the early 1950s, joining the small-scale, hothouse environment of a far-left group led by the veteran of Communist and Trotskyist movements, Max Shachtman. With the late-1950s revival of social liberalism, Shachtman discarded his residual commitment to revolution and promoted instead a Democratic Party “realignment” of social democrats and liberals free of Dixiecrats. Following Shachtman loyally, Harrington found himself in time standing to the right of the rising New Left, while his exposé of enduring poverty, The Other America—voiced more as a call to conscience than an explicitly socialist critique—made his literary career and brought him to the attention of antipoverty policymakers in Washington. While he remained too radical to forge an effective alliance with Great Society chiefs, Harrington adopted a style throughout the 1960s quite close to the postcapitalist vision. In his book of 1968, Toward a Democratic Left, Harrington suggested that, despite signs already of a revitalized conservatism, the chance was still open to build a large mainstream movement for fundamental social reform—not, he insisted, with a socialist aim (however appealing that goal was to him, it was far from realizable in the near to mid-term future, he said) but toward a society that used its affluence in a planned, indeed as he put it “uneconomical,” way to meet social needs. By 1976, however, Harrington greeted the onset of economic crisis and the more decided conservative turn of the political establishment by embracing Marx in a new book, The Twilight of Capitalism: although capitalism dominated American life, he believed it was reaching its end.81 Similarly, Christopher Lasch rooted his pessimistic 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, in a depiction of senescent capitalism, bourgeois individualism having entered a decrepit and decadent phase. Robert Heilbroner declared ever more surely that “the civilization of business—the civilization to which we give the name capitalism—is slated to disappear,” while prominent liberal social scientists chose to recall the left-wing politics of their youth in the 1940s.82 By the 1970s, a leading postwar political scientist, David Easton, who had begun his career in the late 1940s as a Deweyan radical democrat, welcomed left-wing caucuses in political science by conceding that scientistic motives had blunted the critical edge and political relevance of his field. Kenneth Arrow wrote “A Cautious Case for Socialism” in 1978, and the pluralist theorist who hailed the demise of all “isms” in

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1953, Robert A. Dahl, appeared at the Socialist Scholars Conference in 1983 and returned to his own youthful commitments to promote an alternative “economic democracy.”83 Of course, renewed recognition of capitalist reality was far from the exclusive property of the Left, as Forbes magazine pushed its marketing slogan as “Capitalist Tool,” a puckish response to Maoist rhetoric of the late 1960s, declaring frankly the promotion of private business interests free of alloys with welfarist reform.84 By around 1980, the idea that modern society had entered a transitional era, in which “capitalism” no longer grasped the structure of social relations and an as yet unlimned form of social economy steadily emerged to subordinate the rule of the market and of private wealth, had lost its cogency. This new development could not be greeted simply as a return to realism after a long-enduring conviction in ill-founded hopes. Somehow the ground had shifted both in politics and in the realm of social theory. Capitalism was not merely recognized as the current shape of Western society: soon, it would be declared triumphant. In the Anglo-American world, political leaders arose who boldly and bluntly consigned the postcapitalist vision to the dustbin. Margaret Thatcher assumed office as British Prime Minister in 1979, intent on reversing Labour Party social-welfare reforms and suppressing the socialist aspirations of the Labour Party’s left wing. Assuming the naturalistic position of orthodox economics, she declared that “there is no alternative” to market economics. Ronald Reagan took the U.S. presidency in the same spirit. As if fleeing an inhospitable environment, Talcott Parsons left Cambridge in May 1979 to attend a conference in Munich, Germany, commemorating fifty years since he received his doctoral degree in Heidelberg. The new forces of economic dogmatism were bent on reversing his kind of social theory. “There is no such thing as society,” Thatcher declared. “There are only individuals and families.” What place would Parsons’s concept of social relations have in a discursive world such as Thatcher’s? Before speaking in Munich, Parsons died in his hotel room on May 8, 1979.85 And who now reads Parsons?

conclusion

On Transitional Developments beyond Capitalism *

The year Parsons died, another scholar of transatlantic renown—also born in 1902—crowned his career by publishing a massive, three-volume work of early modern economic history. Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century was a landmark in the field, not least for its influential choice of terms. As dean of the Annales school and a historian who pinned the genesis of the modern economic order on expanding trade and finance, Braudel was heir to Henri Pirenne, who helped make “capitalism” a legitimate object of academic inquiry in the early 20th century. Braudel brought it back after years of neglect. One of his contributions, he wrote, was “to introduce the word capitalism . . . as an essential model” for early modern history. The word was “ambiguous, hardly scientific, and usually indiscriminately applied,” and yet, “after a long struggle, I gave up trying to get rid of this troublesome intruder. I decided in the end that there was nothing to be gained by throwing out along with the word the controversies it arouses, which have pertinence to the present-day world.” Amid the 1970s economic crisis, he recognized a turning point that possibly threatened the survival of modern capitalism but more likely merely initiated a new stage in its development. Braudel reflected further on the key term: “Was I right to welcome it in? To use it as an essential model, applicable to several centuries? A model is like a ship: built on land, launched on water. Will it float? Can it sail? If it is seaworthy, perhaps its analytical cargo will be valid too.”1 Braudel was hardly alone in considering the concept essential to contemporary analysis. Defenders such as Milton Friedman, Michael Novak, 247

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and Irving Kristol cheered for capitalism, while the socialist economist Ernest Mandel, writing in Europe, offered his notion of “late capitalism” as a Marxist account of that phase of development that postcapitalist and postindustrial theorists judged (mistakenly in his view) to be transitional. By way of U.S. professor Fredric Jameson’s account of “postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism,” Mandel’s notion was broadcast to the field of literary theory. Capitalism figured in the work of “world-systems” analysts who followed Braudel, such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, as well as their critics, notably the influential historian of early modern Britain, Robert Brenner. In 1986, sociologist Peter Berger, confessing to have turned “right” in his views since the late 1960s, not only assayed the centrality of “the capitalist revolution” in modern times but also bluntly challenged Parsons by insisting that “the capitalism/socialism alternative” framed “the most significant choice of the age,” one he made decidedly in favor of the first. On the sociological Left, a devoted Parsons student, Mark Gould, argued that Parsons’s functional account of social dynamics must be supplemented by a “structural theory of capitalism” that would permit a better purchase on the dynamics and limits of social change in modern times, while a new cohort of economic sociologists began studying the “varieties of capitalism,” an order they insisted was always “regulated” to a greater or lesser extent by institutions that set the context for capital accumulation.2 By the 1990s, therefore, “capitalism” was common coin for any analysis of modern and contemporary social and economic affairs, while even the notion, as Berger put it, that there was a “choice” to be made seemed to fade further away. Following the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and its allied Communist states, U.S. and European commentators rushed to hail the triumph of capitalism. Liberal social critic Robert Heilbroner declared in 1989, “Capitalism has won,” for “the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.” Commentary magazine added that the “global movement toward capitalism has only begun [and] capitalism . . . increasingly looks like the wave of the future.”3 In some respects, these sentiments indeed marked a significant turn in social thought. The term “capitalism” was not always welcomed by defenders of the modern market system, for the name suggested the historical specificity of this manner of economic organization, and hence perhaps its transience. It arose first on the political Left, and even after the business community tentatively accepted the label, it never entirely lost its aura of insult. In the new century, however, the memory of insult has fled. My students define their society as “capitalism” and are surprised to hear that the word ever seemed off-color or that capitalism has a history. They doubt the idea that capitalism may not reflect natural impulses brought to fruition in en-

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lightened modernity. Notwithstanding public expressions of embarrassment over the late-1990s stock bubble and corporate scandals, “capitalism” seems unexceptionable, suggesting permanence, not transience. Nothing better indicates how far the postcapitalist vision has lost its place in the social imagination. The development of social theory since the 1980s has featured a number of responses to the decline of the postcapitalist vision. Against the strident economism that succeeded it, theorists trying to salvage social-liberal perspectives have sought either to refine and retain a noneconomic concept of an independent social realm or to answer both economism and the old noneconomic social theory with a new, synthetic economic sociology. Neither approach has been strikingly successful in overcoming the faults of the postcapitalist vision or in perpetuating its most incisive and critical contributions. Meanwhile, celebrants and many radical opponents of capitalism are too prone to dismiss the postcapitalist vision as the mark of a misguided age, a grand illusion or long detour in the socioeconomic understanding of modern life. That will not do either. The postcapitalist vision in fact perceived trends of modern life that contemporary proponents of capitalism either neglect or distort and that anticapitalist critics might profitably try to understand. Capitalist development is intrinsically ambiguous, fostering contrary tendencies to privatize and to socialize resources of production and means of human interaction, as well as the distribution of goods and services. As long as capitalist development continues, the attempt to understand the combination and long-term implications of these antithetical trends will excite varied expectations of the future—including the possibility that capitalism will give way to social alternatives. Thus the dramatic decline in the influence of postcapitalist ideas, and the social theory associated with them, did not spell their end. A few writers persist in propounding a postcapitalist vision drawn from the mid-twentieth-century heritage, and some as yet fleeting signs suggest perhaps a coming revival in postcapitalist scenarios of reform. For those of us who wish to turn the tables on the capitalist triumphalism that gripped U.S. social and political life at the end of the twentieth century, it is useful to survey the heritage of the postcapitalist vision in hopes of building on its insights and moving ahead to a real, rather than imagined, transition beyond capitalism.

Historicizing the Postcapitalist Vision To take the measure of the postcapitalist vision, we must set it in history, determine what its proponents actually meant, why they were led to fashion it, and what it permitted them to understand (or led them to misconstrue)

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in the span of historical development they inhabited and surveyed. Even mistaken impressions, as they endure over time and galvanize a great deal of intellectual effort, emerge as a consequence of definite historical conditions—and may help illuminate those very conditions, if we can identify the observers’ angle of vision and correct for the refraction. Historicizing the postcapitalist vision in this fashion will provide a causal explanation for its rise, progress, and decline while also clarifying its combination of insights, errors, and blindspots. Reviewing the course of the postcapitalist vision in twentieth-century social thought and action can begin with a second look at Charles Maier’s renowned analysis of efforts to reconstruct the European order of political economy after the debacle of World War I had rendered the status and power of prewar elites “precarious.” Pushing back working-class insurgency and quashing social-democratic plans for nationalizations or empowered factory councils, those elites won a “restabilization” of Europe a few years after the war’s end but “no simple restoration.” In place of the open and direct rule of society and politics by a proud and jealous bourgeoisie, new administrative forms for regulating political economy fell into place that entailed “dealing with unions . . . giving state agencies control over the market, building interest-group spokesmen into the structure of the state,” and in general allowing “the interpenetration of state and economy within each national unit.” Oddly enough, as Maier told this story he self-consciously cited theorists from Rudolf Hilferding to Ralf Dahrendorf—authors from the 1920s to the 1950s of a postcapitalist vision—as those who had most clearly grasped the movement toward a new “organized” political economy. Yet in 1975 when Maier wrote he did not accept their diagnosis. Looking back from the economic crisis of his own time, he saw the struggles in the wake of World War I commencing a “transformation that carried capitalist societies through a half-century transit.”4 Maier’s ironic adoption of postcapitalist theorists to describe a transfigured capitalism sets the stage for rereading the curious career of social-liberal consciousness in the broad middle of the twentieth century. To begin with, Maier’s formulation of the “corporatist” order in Europe, while still unsettled there until after yet another world war, also roughly describes social and political conditions in the United States. By a long process of muddling through that ran from the period of late Progressivism, through its conservative (Hooverian) varieties in the 1920s, and beyond the patchwork of limited reforms achieved under the New Deal and Fair Deal, U.S. capitalism settled into roughly a “corporatist” form: corporate power was secured in the economic sphere by tactical compromise with representatives of labor and by a measure of collaboration with a government that was opened to a relatively wide range of organized interests emerging from a democratic

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public. This long process was indeed awkward, uncertain, and ungainly enough to be interpreted in various ways. Thus, despite the quick reconsolidation of business power after World War I, transatlantic left-liberal reformers and the social theorists allied to them believed that the corporatist shift opened a transitional era in which some degree of collectivism would qualitatively modify market processes. This would lead, they expected, to a social economy—or even an order in which economic concerns were decisively subordinated to social purposes—that no longer meriting the name “capitalist.” Indeed, every temporary revival of reformist political energy, in 1917–1920, the 1930s, 1945 –47, and 1958 – 68, reheated the air under this high-flying balloon of theoretical conjecture. Such conjectures arose on both sides of the Atlantic due to the transfiguration of class, status, and power in the shift from prewar bourgeois power to the postwar “corporatist” regime. In Maier’s European portrait, the prewar regime rested on rigid principles of laissez faire that bespoke the hegemony of a class asserting “self-consciousness of proprietorship, the desire to ‘remain master chez soi,’” that is, possessing the crucial “aristocratic” consciousness of one’s propertied domain that Schumpeter understood as central to a vital bourgeoisie.5 This same combination of aristocratic pretension, laissez-faire obstinacy, and antidemocratic leanings had figured in the processes of bourgeois class formation during America’s “Gilded Age.”6 Veblen’s insistence in the 1890s that the American elite was “barbaric” or feudal in spirit captured the same mingling of bourgeois and aristocratic norms—even in the absence of an actual “feudal heritage”—that was familiar in European social structure and politics from England to Germany and beyond.7 The new administrative forms of the “restabilized” capitalist order that Maier found in interwar Europe have also been described by U.S. historians offering an “organizational” synthesis of the Progressive era: a trend of political development that drew government into economic affairs while also displacing decision making from legislatures to a semi-public sort of bargaining between organized interest groups and lobbyists on the one hand and lawmakers or federal commission officials on the other.8 While this trend bolstered the political efficacy of business influence, it also shunted the direct agent of influence from social groups of wealthy men to the more “professional” model of corporate-business advocates—while also presenting, in the regulatory apparatus, the impression that policy-making hewed to a concept of the “public interest.” Moreover, the more organized forms of enterprise and influence, while veiling the exercise of business power, also signaled a decisive shift by the forces of American wealth away from its reactionary, aristocratic tropism of the Gilded Age toward an ever more decided conviction to stake its claims of legitimacy on purely “modern” (or “liberal”) premises. Hence the intellectual construction of a dis-

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tinctly modern middle-class liberalism, drifting away from laissez-faire absolutism while resting on principles of individualism, opportunity and equity (hence meritocracy), public service, and expertise.9 Explicit appeals to class privilege, evoking premodern (“feudal”) standards of right and authority over sectoral domains, could not be sustained. That shift was many-sided and prolonged. It was not until the Supreme Court confirmed the Wagner Act in 1937, for instance, that labor law was freed from essentially premodern, common-law notions of business as a sectoral fief within which a “master” rightly held sway over his “servants,” according to political scientist Karen Orren. In her view, U.S. law and social relations remained burdened by a “belated feudalism” well into the twentieth century (comparable to Europe’s “persistence of the old regime”); put otherwise, a genuinely liberal, or modern, model of public access and universalistic legal standards arrived “belatedly.”10 Meanwhile, the continuing retreat from the spectacular claims to prestige that stimulated Veblen to skewer the conspicuous consumption of the very rich helped confirm the apparent lapse of bourgeois class assertion. The great sociologist of manners Erving Goffman wrote in the late 1950s, “We have records of the social history of particular American towns, telling us of the recent decline in the elaborateness of domestic and avocational fronts [i.e., appearances presented to others] of the local upper classes.” George Homans, in memoirs of his beginnings among Boston Brahmins, similarly wrote that the 1920s was the last time the rich could really flaunt their wealth.11 It was this lapse of “classwise rights” that Schumpeter assailed as the bourgeoisie’s surrender of the necessary “buttress” that quasi-aristocratic norms provided capitalist wealth, but he did not grasp how that movement, beyond the bourgeoisie in the old sense, could also have the obverse effect, strengthening rather than weakening the political clout of wealth. Noting the waning public evidence of class rule, Jackson Lears writes, “By 1930 the shift from highly visible robber barons to faceless executives had already occurred; the invisibility of corporate leadership became one of the keys to its hegemony.”12 This movement beyond the bourgeoisie may be regarded as a very effective form of trompe l’oeil, since the capital-owning rich in the West have never yet surrendered their prestige or their control, even if the complexity of economic, political, social, and ideological arrangements in modern life allows them, for the most part, to dwell in the wings, just off the public stage. In the United States, indeed, great wealth has long benefited from structural modes of disguise. Its dominance seems to be shared with affluent professional circles and the voices of small property, which hold some social, cultural and political influence. Its power is even occasionally modulated by popular or plebeian initiatives that are either suited to propertied interests (such as tax revolt) or when not so suited, too powerful to

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evade (such as civil rights movements).13 Multiparty elections and civil liberties, however imperfect, and a measure of social mobility further veil the power of capital. No doubt U.S. society—like other “modern societies”—appeared by the mid-twentieth century far more pluralized in the disposition of prestige, power, and modes of access to productive resources and means of subsistence than it had in the late nineteenth century. But the very plurality of “interest groups” in fact provided the most misleading images of property and power in American life. Rather than lessening the hold of capitalist standards on U.S. political and social life, this country’s unusual degree of decentralized and competing circles of business interest helped make the grip of those standards stronger in the United States than in any other comparable modern society. Recent historians such as Sven Beckert have recognized at the height of the Gilded Age the consolidation of bourgeois class power (and its mimicry of aristocracy at the same time). Writing of the same period in the 1940s, Daniel Bell argued that it represented a historically exceptional concentration of political power in a self-conscious body of wealthholders. The hegemony of bourgeois power symbolized by William McKinley’s decisive win and the heft and influence of Marc Hanna’s corporate coffers in 1896 was fleeting, Bell claimed: the sheer complexity of competing interests on a broad national plane would soon trump, and deconstruct, such a compilation of bourgeois purpose into a single, unified “ruling class” will.14 Yet a careful analysis of twentieth-century social and political history shows that the more pluralized system Bell and other postcapitalist observers saw coming after McKinley (and making way for Progressivism and the New Deal) was not in fact the surrender of capitalist power they imagined. As historian Colin Gordon has compellingly argued, it was the very decentralization of the political order and of capital in the United States that ended up giving large property owners—in lieu of common programs—a unique degree of autonomy, an unusually deep ideological commitment to more or less undiluted free-market processes, and the means to resist socialregulatory initiatives that threatened to check the self-control of capital.15 Thus the difficulty in locating a concentrated and coherent elite formulation of bourgeois will paradoxically made the U.S. political-economic order the world’s strongest bastion of capitalist power. Nonetheless, rhythms of social change in the wake of World War II proved conducive to the social-liberal imagination of a postcapitalist order. The second great war of the twentieth century confirmed the transformation Maier saw after the first. In Marxist terms, the postwar years saw the long-deferred completion of “democratic tasks,” those liberal reforms Marx associated in principle with the bourgeois revolution but saw stalled by the reactionary drift of business classes after 1848, or in the United States, after 1870. Those

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democratic tasks rested first of all on the achievement of universal suffrage in all western countries (excepting Switzerland’s exclusion of women until 1971) plus the expansion of “public” assurances of access to opportunity starting with schooling and compounded by the extension of social provision in reconstructed Europe.16 Socialists, starting with Marx in 1850 and continuing to Trotsky’s updated notion of permanent revolution in the early twentieth century, frequently argued that democratic tasks had been left for a proletarian revolution to enact in a telescoped process of liberal and social transformation.17 Other currents on the Left, from the Fabians to the increasingly reformist social democracy after the Great War, construed the same process in an inverted form: by identifying their cause with bourgeois-radical opposition to aristocratic privilege and the extension of liberal ideals of equality from political to economic spheres, social democrats were inclined to hail the completion of “democratic tasks” as tantamount to socialist success, or at least, as in Anthony Crosland’s view, the breakthrough beyond capitalism that brought socialism in some form onto the agenda. Reversal of the bourgeoisie’s reactionary drift of the late nineteenth century, generalization of “modern” and “liberal” standards, and extension of “democratic” rights sustained the widespread impression that some sort of tectonic shift in class order and property regimes had occurred by the mid-point of the twentieth century. The move to breach the corporation’s “private” walls and subject it to “public” norms, as in Orren’s analysis of labor law, also marked for postcapitalist theorists the opening to an order in which democracy and social needs trumped private property. Welfare-state provision of general services such as national health care looked very much like the transformative accomplishment social democrats desired, cracking the stranglehold of old-fashioned privilege on the political order. Thus British sociologist T. H. Marshall argued in 1949 that modern society in the course of its evolution added “social rights” to the earlier achievements of “civil” and “political” rights, and in these terms, a gradualist notion of moderate social democracy became an established part of the transatlantic, postwar sociological vision of modernity and its prospects for social change.18 Postcapitalist reformers were not unequivocally wrong about the social dynamics of their time, since capitalist development itself fosters such perceptions. Even as it fashions new avenues and new means to accumulate private wealth, long-term growth under capitalism also persistently organizes systems of production, distribution, and exchange into forms that are effectively socialized—moved out of the hands of lone, self-willed individuals into networks of cooperation that mingle large-scale planning with practices of market exchange. For Marx and Engels, capitalist development thus fostered a continual, and in some ways ever-growing, tension between so-

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cialized organization and private action in exchange and wealth accumulation. So paradoxical are these phenomena that Marxist theory, especially since the emergence of the large corporation, has tended to vacillate in its emphasis on either the socialized or privatized thrust of development. Different relative emphases on one or the other of these dimensions underlay the split between “revisionist” and “revolutionary” currents, and the postcapitalist vision of the twentieth century was close kin to the “revisionist” currents that saw the collectivizing trend of capitalist development in the ascendant. The postcapitalist vision was of course uncertain that “socialism” defined the outcome; if anything, thinkers in this milieu took seriously Eduard Bernstein’s famous aphorism—“The goal nothing, the movement everything”—to mean that the fluidity of change defeated all attempts to classify outcomes, except to say that the future clearly lay beyond the old order, beyond the bourgeoisie and its system of property and exchange. American postcapitalist thought strove to go beyond both Marx and the market. Its proponents, though they sometimes emerged from or consorted with Marxist political and social ideas, generally did not acknowledge either the necessity of a revolutionary break between capitalism and socialism or even the premise that modern society was fundamentally shaped by a “mode of production” called “capitalism”; nor, on the other hand, did they accept the absolute primacy of market relations as the governing principle of social organization in the present or future. Usually, then, they were not socialists (though their visions of a social economy might appear so to conservative antagonists). But neither were they fundamentally committed to capitalist norms. They were, in the twentieth-century sense, “liberals” who welcomed government intervention, though it is important to specify, as Parsons always did, that theirs was a social liberalism. They were convinced that social relations so profoundly structured personal life that nineteenth-century individualism, strictly speaking, was baseless, and that modern liberal flexibility—regarding change as a constant—also welcomed a large measure of socialized resources and forms of administration.19 Their impulses, while often inclined to support liberal governments, usually stood to the left of the practical reforms U.S. politicians were willing to embrace—since most government reforms remained tethered to bourgeois conventions of private property, individualism, and “opportunity.” In sum, modern U.S. capitalist development generated institutional forms—particularly the image of the welfare state sustained by Maier’s “corporatist” model of politico-economic regulation—that could, understandably, be misinterpreted as signs of postcapitalist trends by theorists shaped by the heritage and milieu of social liberalism. In turn, however, the postcapitalist vision suffered eclipse amid shifts in the institutional organization of capitalist production from a “corporatist” to some kind of “global” form

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that has been in the making since the wrenching economic crisis of the 1970s.20 First, the crisis undermined social-liberal confidence in the waning force of economic affairs on social life and the ability of social and political measures to deprive modern economy of its automatism, the hope of rendering it an instrument of social and political choice rather than a force beyond social control. Second, the crisis altered the course of political and economic development, leading to the vigorous promotion of unregulated market forces and a rapid flow of money, goods, and people across national borders. Thus the main drift since the 1970s not only reversed the socialliberal expectations of postcapitalist evolution but also breached the customary frame of reformist development, the bounded “society” more or less identified with modern nation-state borders. Third, social liberalism, buoyed by tentative hopes of revival in a “new politics” at the end of the 1960s, suffered a dramatic loss of political standing by the end of the 1970s. Social-liberal consciousness had begun as a political bloc compounded of unions’ efficacy as a reformist force and middleclass professional ideals of service and a democratic civil society. Already in the 1950s and 1960s, the radical reformism of intellectual life had grown increasingly distant from the concrete labor affiliations that had characterized its emergence in period from the 1910s to the 1930s (hence the relative autonomy of the New Left from labor and working-class affinities). Despite the deep breach between the new social movements of the 1960s and the conservative trade union officialdom, tentative signs of a revitalized labor movement appeared by the early 1970s in wildcat strikes, union democracy campaigns, and a growing sense of workers’ identity. All that was set back by the economic crisis, and attempts to respond to that crisis by reviving the push for labor-friendly government regulation ground to a halt in the late 1970s, marked by the effective failure of the Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill and the frustration of attempts to enact “labor law reform” that would combat union busting.21 The labor-liberal alliance within the Democratic Party was impotent, and the union movement headed into steady decline. By the 1980s, intellectualized reformism proceeded in terms almost wholly apart from a labor base.

Liberal Social Thought in the Aftermath of the Postcapitalist Vision Social liberal ideas nonetheless continued in a weakened state, and after the heyday of the postcapitalist vision had come to an end, they found expression (1) in the economic discourse of “industrial policy,” a statist program of rekindling growth after the historic watershed wrought by the

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economic disabilities of the 1970s; (2) in a frustrated exploration of “civil society” as the incubator of new social movements and new conceptions of the public good; and (3) in attempts to cultivate a new field of economic sociology that would overcome the breach between economy and society that had handicapped the postcapitalist vision. None of these programs, however, effectively surpassed the failings of that vision or built upon its achievements. Rather, the social-liberal initiatives that emerged in the aftermath of the postcapitalist vision during the 1980s and 1990s manifested the uncertainty and confusion that hobbled the reform imagination in those years. In fact, the new initiatives generally marked a retreat from the most vigorous midcentury aspirations for a new society. As an alternative to the resurgent “free market” absolutism of the Right, the liberal program of “industrial policy” found its most compelling expression in work by a small set of economists and public policy scholars at Harvard University and MIT. Back in the 1970s, both Edward Banfield and Talcott Parsons had resisted the exaggeration of American social and economic woes, but by the 1980s, few liberals doubted that a “crisis” had occurred. The 1980 book by MIT’s Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society, dwelled on the problems of reinvigorating economic growth at a time when the United States faced “relative economic decline” compared to other nations and when the problem of allocating losses (e.g., who bears the cost of increased oil prices) confronted a society accustomed to think that everyone shared in an ever expanding pie of output. The end of that easy assumption marked the onset of the zero-sum society, where someone’s gain is always someone else’s loss, and economics as a dismal science was back in the saddle. Thurow was quite willing to endorse deregulation to liberate price competition in certain sectors (particularly oil), though mainly he argued that current economic problems “demand that government gets more heavily involved in the economy’s major investment decisions” rather than less. Midcentury reform ideas remained in Thurow’s toolbox. He claimed the new economic stringency made social questions of “equity” ever more pressing and that government should express a value consensus on who should bear heavy costs and who deserved “compensation” as they struggled through the transition from “sunset to sunrise industries.” He even urged the creation of “a socialized sector of the economy” that would “give work opportunities to everyone who wants them but cannot find them elsewhere,” helping reduce the unconscionable (and ultimately unproductive) gaps in income and wealth between those lucky enough to be included and those shut out of the dynamic sectors of the economy. If Thurow’s ability to imagine a “socialized sector” showed that left-wing influences lingered when he wrote in 1979, the book nonetheless promoted investment planning and social services in order to save “capitalism” as a competitive, profit-driven en-

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gine of growth, a theme that grew ever more prominent as industrial-policy literature developed in the mid-1980s.22 The Next American Frontier (1983) by Robert Reich of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and The Second Industrial Divide (1984) by Michael Piore and Charles Sable of MIT both followed Thurow in judging slow growth since the 1970s as evidence that the old industrial economy was obsolete. This diagnosis suggested an affinity for “postindustrial” analyses, especially as these writers advocated planned investment in education, technology, and human resources along with “learning-based” work teams that they thought would foster productive innovations.23 In both these accounts, the main economic obstacle lay in American addiction to “Fordist” mass-production standards (and the rigidity of union-backed work rules, hierarchical managerial control of production processes, and government protection and regulation geared to market stability). Elsewhere, the dynamic industrial countries of the world had adopted “flexible” (or “postFordist”) production based on new technologies, specialized high-end (and small-batch) products, enhanced worker skills and participation, and an appreciation of perpetual change and innovation in technique and organization. Reich as well as Piore and Sable combated the right wing by posing “social” and “communitarian” needs and resources against pure “economic” market equilibration. They insisted that the integration of social and economic concern was the way forward to renewed growth, indeed that expansion required a greater measure of equity and social security. If they thus spoke the language of midcentury social liberalism and mimicked the rhetoric of postindustrial speculation, however, their “industrial policy” resolutely avoided explicit “postindustrial” speculation. The issue for them was not one of surpassing industry per se but moving on to a new formula of industrial growth, and in so doing, they also forcefully reinstated the priority of a competitive search for profits. Reich’s reversal of postindustrial aspirations was most dramatic. He argued that “business enterprises are rapidly becoming the central mediating structures in American society,” directly contrary to Daniel Bell’s and Talcott Parsons’s predictions that the university complex would overtake the corporation as the key model of social process. Reich proposed perfecting social service delivery by federally subsidizing programs in worker training, day care, and health care offered by private companies. Piore and Sabel rejected this proposal “to dissolve the polity into the business enterprise” and appealed instead (not unlike Arthur Penty) to a resurrection of “craft” mentalities on a communitarian scale and a latter-day populist notion of a “republic of small producers.” Still, Piore and Sable’s strategy was no less enterprise-based than Reich’s, urging competitive adaptation to “flexible markets” in ways already devised by other “advanced capitalist countries.” Reich framed his goal as “well-designed ad-

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justment policies . . . through which government seeks to promote market forces rather than to supplant them.” And Thurow’s well-argued brief for “industrial policy” in his 1985 Zero-Sum Solution likewise appealed to “flexible” models of work and innovation, facilitated by government aid and labor-management collaboration—in order to gear the nation to more competitive engagement with the world economy. The aim was to “improve one’s market performance,” and while Thurow made a refrain of insisting that “social organization” (in service provision, collaboration in work, and public means of strategizing) was as economically important as the signals given by market price, the goal was to find the most “efficient [i.e., growthfostering] form of social organization.”24 In this way, industrial-policy writers stumbled upon a fundamental problem of the social-liberal heritage. As the “welfare state” appeared to meld political and economic forces around “social” needs, the question facing midcentury analysts and critics was whether the social realm supervened over economic logic or whether economic logic came to dominate more and more sectors of social life. In their insistence, aimed against market purists, that the social and economic went together, industrial-policy advocates—at best—fudged on this question. Generally, by regarding social services and collaborative effort essential to “efficiency” and the need to pursue “competitive advantage [among] industrialized countries,” they opted for the subordination of social to economic process. Indeed, the “shift away from economics” that had rendered postcapitalist theory blind to the continuing force of capitalist dynamics was also a virtue, for it built a transformative vision of the future on the premise that social needs could trump economic logic, or even (as Michael Harrington put it in the late 1960s) that social policy might rightly pursue “uneconomic” aims. This new literature on industrial policy, despite its advocacy of limited “planning,” signaled the involution of postindustrial discourse. All the old themes—that production increasingly rested on knowledge, creativity, flexibility in a future-oriented society, egalitarianism and collaboration—now fed into selfconscious strategies of market-based industrial growth. Social-liberal theory yielded to schemes of capitalist advance rather than contemplating postcapitalist transformation. By the 1990s, Thurow and Reich wrote books offering advice on “preparing ourselves for 21st-century capitalism,” by no means imagining a new postcapitalist order.25 These legatees of postindustrial reasoning unwittingly buried it. Thus, despite their best efforts, the work of industrial-policy advocates revealed the degree to which the rise of economism from the 1970s on put the concept of “society” on the defensive. The new prominence of market theory—reversing the hoped-for “shift away from economics”—so emphasized self-interested action as to “reconstitute the dichotomies,” two critical

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observers wrote: it redrew a sharp line between the individual and the collective after modern sociology had tried so hard to demonstrate their integration.26 Moreover, after the 1970s, the preferred means of accounting for the collective dimension of human experience lay not in the concept of “society” but rather in “culture” (especially in structuralist or poststructuralist terms as a supraindividual field of signs and symbols governing perception and action) or in “politics” (particularly the study of law and the ethical dimensions of political philosophy).27 Despite all this, the second main effort of the 1980s and 1990s to perpetuate social liberalism—theoretical campaigns to grant new meaning to notions of “civil society” and “the public sphere”—strove to hold on to the social realm in an economistic age, that is, to maintain the conceptual autonomy of society as such. Discussion of “civil society” was inspired by movements for democracy in Eastern Europe as well as a tentative revival of social protest at the same time in Western countries. Dissident Polish intellectuals allied with the Solidarity workers movement, which came on the scene so dramatically in the Gdansk shipyard strikes of summer 1980, used the notion of “civil society” to describe a free space of social interaction and institution-building denied by the totalitarian state. Where the state owned all productive property and used its party apparatus to prohibit any independent locus of social organization (and hence legitimate dissent), “civil society” became the slogan of freedom.28 Theorists of civil society regarded this space—an intermediary one, between the state and private life, where voluntary association prevailed—as the necessary precondition for the development of democracy. In another twist on this notion, dissent in the West, then focused on nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, gender equality, and antiracism—all of which sparked hope for a revival of a Left stuck in the doldrums since the 1960s—seemed to take on the shape of “civil society” as well: intermediary in the sense of standing between and apart from the state on the one hand (because they were generally not focused on electoral or parliamentary politics) and the economy on the other (because the issues had little explicitly to do with “economic” interests conventionally defined, such as inequality of wealth and income). Between the “new social movements” that left the politics of class conflict behind and the agitation for democracy in Eastern Europe, “civil society” helped make social theory relevant to political action again. Before long, however, profound ambiguities within the theory of “civil society” became apparent—both in the epistemic status of the category, as well as its implications for concrete social analysis. On the one hand, “civil society” was intended to denote and describe a structural sector of social systems very much like Parsons’s “societal community”: it was described as a field of “horizontal” relations between equals, a seedbed of pluralistic voluntary as-

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sociations, that was distinct from the state and at least for some of its analysts from the realm of the economic as well. It was the sphere that promised some kind of inclusion and belonging to individuals apart from fixed status or unequal (“vertical”) rank in political and economic affairs. On the other hand, civil society became a normative concept referring to standards of “civility,” toleration, permission for diversity—all typically regarded as either the consequence or condition of democracy and deemed intrinsic to a “Western” or “liberal” model that authoritarian, traditionalist, or theocratic regimes could not meet or foster. Within a short period of discussion, the indefiniteness of the term and the competition between differing interpretations of it only grew. Some analysts came to identify civil society with familiar, Eurocentric notions of “civilization” based on the history of bourgeois society; others claimed instead that civil society’s principles of diversity and choice stood at odds with the standardization, homogeneity, and work regimentation central to capitalist development. Moreover, the intermediary, independent character of “civil society” looked increasingly dubious as analysts disclosed its close ties with other spheres. One could hardly describe civil society as a more or less unified body of citizens, without recognizing how much it was shaped by the state and by the history of modern nationalism, forces that both fostered civil society (by establishing a conversant community) and undermined it (by suppressing pluralism in favor of unanimity and unitary “national” identities). On the other hand, if understood as the field of voluntary action apart from state control, civil society was interpreted by some as naturally including the phenomena of private property and market exchange. In this view, then, rather than standing apart from economy, civil society was in fact built upon it.29 Discussion of the “public sphere” joined that of “civil society” following the late English translation (in 1989) of Jürgen Habermas’s 1962 study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.30 For Habermas the idea and institutional reality of a “public sphere”—or what might more simply be called “the public” or “public opinion”—was an offshoot of bourgeois experience, whereby the newly self-conscious individuals of early modern society imagined themselves to constitute a single body conversant with culture and politics, placing their generic “human” interests against those coercive authorities disinclined to respect the autonomy of the person. Despite this origin as the intimate cousin of new definitions of “privacy,” the notion of the public sphere was taken up in the 1980s and 1990s by intellectuals now reduced to faint protest against the radical regression toward privatization of all economic resources. Against the current of the time, the “public sphere”—the realm of the citizen, of basic rights, and of the public good— promised to provide a hedge against the economic reduction of all things,

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and Habermas’s phrase, the “public sphere,” was associated with a “republican” notion of citizens who recognized the virtues of self-sacrifice and the priority of the common welfare. With the incorporation of the Habermasian concept, the civil-society debate went on. Was the principal trait of “civil society” the degree of autonomy and pluralist variation offered to individuals and groups, or the element of consensus that binds people together in concern for the common good? Some writers insisted that the “republican” notion of the “civic good” was in principle hostile to modern civil society, for its assumption that virtue lies in putting the general will ahead of private interest suppressed individual freedom, which could only be grounded in market institutions assuring privacy and choice. Others challenged the growing identification of civil society with the free market, which (they claimed) encouraged not social engagement but private withdrawal and thus, in effect, opened the way for a strong, domineering state.31 In effect, this debate was stretched between a recall of the Scottish Enlightenment origins of “civil society,” born conceptually in close conjunction with market exchange, and the mid-twentieth-century concept of a noneconomic sphere of social relations. Yet another variant of civil society, one clearly wedded to the old postcapitalist vision, emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in the communitarian doctrine developed by sociologist Amitai Etzioni. As a concerted attempt to vindicate the assumptions and conclusions of midcentury “social relations” theory, Etzioni offered a direct rebuttal to economistic logic in his book, The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics. He confidently assailed the “neoclassical” individualist-utilitarian views of conventional economics in classically Durkheimian and Parsonsian terms that bore repetition in the late 1980s: The insights and findings of psychologists and sociologists indicate that individuals who are typically cut-off and isolated, the actors of the neoclassical world, are unable to act freely, while they find that individuals who are bonded into comprehensive and stable relationships, and into cohesive groups and communities are much more able to make sensible choices, to render judgment, and be free.32

Moreover, Etzioni insisted that present-day conviction in the efficiency of untrammeled markets and the harm done by government intrusion were unwarranted by the facts. Markets, or economic action in general, were always embedded or “encapsulated” in a moral, social, and political context without which competition ran riot and wrecked social bonds. Modern society could hardly afford not to protect “the commons” (material and social resources essential to the public good) by controlling the “externalities” of economic life such as pollution. Nor could it ignore the inequities of power

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that gave great corporations as much a distorting effect on social and economic affairs as government had, if not more. Finally, any effective social theory should acknowledge that moral duty exerted a force on individual behavior and could be mobilized to check socioeconomic abuses. The new moral economics would recognize the harm done society by the incessant propaganda for selfishness that utilitarian economics offered.33 Etzioni’s drive for moral economics reinvoked the common sense of midcentury social-liberal thought. Yet he was perplexed by the vigorous resurgence of an extreme individualistic utilitarian doctrine in social science and public policy in the 1980s, despite the fact that recent polls found that 60 percent of the American people agreed that “government should limit profits” of corporations. He wistfully called for “the rise of a new political power,” like that which had marked the Progressive era, to check the “interventionist” power of great corporations. But he seemed to have no explanation of how and why such a political force had first arisen between 1900 and 1917, or why it proved so weak or lacking in the 1970s and 1980s despite public sentiment in its favor.34 Having neither a social-historical explanation for the quandary of social-liberal reform nor the robust confidence in the socializing trends of modernity that he and like-minded theorists possessed in the 1960s, Etzioni’s communitarianism fell back on nearly plaintive moralistic appeals. It marked the endgame of the twentieth-century’s social-liberal postcapitalist vision. A third move was available to a beleaguered social liberalism, and this one chose not to rescue the autonomy of the social realm but instead to redress the weakness of a midcentury social theory that had “shifted away from economics” and thus lost any purchase on the dynamics of capitalist development. Sharing many of Etzioni’s assumptions and intent on going beyond moral exhortation, a new “economic sociology” cultivated a structural analysis of capitalist economies in the 1990s. Like earlier radical critics, many economic sociologists believed that issues of interest and power had gone too long unexamined in mainstream sociology, while economics on the other hand had neglected the crucial role of social context. Seeking a new synthesis, these writers looked back to “classical” social theorists such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber for examples of those who had always tied social analysis to the problems of understanding industrial, capitalist society—and to more recent figures such as Joseph Schumpeter, who left considerable room for institutional forces in his understanding of economy. Most of all, Karl Polanyi’s work stood as a model. Led by such figures as Richard Swedberg, Mark Granovetter, and J. Rogers Hollingsworth, the new economic sociology found its center of gravity in a revived, “neo-Polanyian” perspective insisting on the “embeddedness” of economic life in social institutions.35 As understood in this milieu, Polanyi had demonstrated that all human

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societies situated economic activity within institutions that determined or channeled its course by varied means of custom, law, morality, and social structures, ranging from systems of kinship to modern voluntary associations and state intervention. Since the modern market system had never truly been “free,” but was in fact created by political will and limited by social concern, capitalism had to be understood as a system of production and distribution within markets molded by standards of social interaction characterizing a particular place and time. Embeddedness thus became the watchword for challenging the neoclassical dogma that markets, left alone and due entirely to their own endogenous forces, achieve equilibrium and fuel growth. Hollingsworth found that modern economies typically rested on varied forms of regulation: complex managerial hierarchies administering resources, alliances of economic actors based on affinity, trust or custom (especially in local or regional milieus where guildlike norms governed a particular specialty in production), and government sustenance (whether in old-style protectionism or in the education of work forces). These provided elements of stability, security, innovation, and balance beyond the capacities of markets themselves to produce. And since differing institutional formulas, none of them perfect, promoted some economic virtues among others, Hollingsworth and his French collaborator Robert Boyer explored the “varieties of capitalism,” such as the U.S. system known for market primacy and low levels of regulation, the German model of highly centralized corporate-union negotiations and paternalistic social services, and the East Asian state-led developmental regimes. Each had its own particular historical circumstances, its own set of advantages and shortcomings. The polemical point was to argue that institutional innovation, while almost always slow paced and driven by trial and error, had a wider potential range than market “absolutists” allowed and in fact often demanded organizational or governmental solutions the purists had ruled out of court.36 The neo-Polanyians’ “embeddedness” betrayed a critical ambiguity, however. Was this an analytical principle explanatory of all economic situations, so that even those settings that appeared to foster individualistic, competitive, and anti-statist practices proved in fact to be institutionally regulated in latent ways? Or was it an empirical trait more or less present in one or another setting—hence one economy could be more embedded or disembedded than another? Polanyi’s original critique asserted the latter, and intended to cast doubt on the future of capitalism, because its (fallacious) attempt to permit the market a very high degree of autonomy deeply eroded the social structures that provided people assurance of their well-being. In contrast, the neo-Polanyians were more inclined to accept all economies as variously embedded, and hence, more modestly than Polanyi himself,

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claimed only to raise questions about the mix of institutional choices in one capitalist economy or another.37 Indeed, the “varieties of capitalism” school treated the whole field of observable economies as “capitalist,” focusing their attention on the national distinctions among them, and showed little if any interest in the question of whether “varieties” of economic order were imaginable in noncapitalist forms. By treating the variability of institutional forms for regulating markets, and assuming that all such cases were (unproblematically) defined as “capitalist,” the “varieties” school had little to say about the structural or development traits of capitalism as such. Since the term figured as the effective definition of any modern economy, the school might just as well have dispensed with it entirely. Despite the return of the concept of “capitalism” to common parlance in this branch of the social sciences, then, the terminological fashion failed to accomplish what earlier critics imagined was the point of naming the system as such—that is, to recognize its peculiarities, its relativity, and its limits.38 Hollingsworth and Boyer showed their hand when their critique of pure markets led them to conclude that “the resilience of coordination mechanisms other than markets is a prerequisite for the continuing dynamism of capitalism.”39 Thus they demonstrated how the social and political imagination had narrowed: resurrecting the concept of “capitalism” in these terms surely eclipsed the postcapitalist vision, for here, the gesture of naming only foreclosed possibilities of a noncapitalist future.

Survivals and Reinventions The midcentury social-liberal postcapitalist vision lost its sway over American social theory, but what rose and fell from the era of World War I to postVietnam America has not entirely disappeared. At the outset of the twenty-first century, amid the triumphal embrace of “capitalism” as the name for what its most enthusiastic proponents regard as not a passing but a fixed form of modern economy, it is the persistence of the postcapitalist imagination in old and new forms that deserves special attention. The neoPolanyian Fred Block, for instance, is a veteran of the New Left and of radical postindustrial theory in the 1970s who has held on to postcapitalist principles in making arguments for expanded programs of social provision and more equitable wealth distribution, including the provision of a basic income to all—an idea suggested by reformers in the 1930s and 1940s, promoted by radicals and liberals in the 1960s, and recently embraced as a frontier of social policy by a transatlantic Left. Block casts doubt (not unlike Tugwell) on the concept of “capitalism” for exaggerating the system coherence of the profit-oriented market system, with the purpose of widening the

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bounds for experimentation in social policy along collectivist lines.40 Although his commitment demonstrates the leftward valence that postcapitalist visions have most typically possessed since the mid-twentieth century, there are other versions as well. A conservative version surfaced in the 1993 book Post-Capitalist Society by Peter Drucker, then the aging dean of management theory in the United States. Still carrying hints of the authoritarian (though antifascist) corporatism he shared as a young man of the European Right before his emigration, Drucker’s “post-capitalist society” came loaded with a number of predilections quite consistent with the customary procapitalist policy of the resurgent post-1970s market ideology. His was an antilabor, antistatist vision that built on the apparent primacy of organization, knowledge-based innovation, and teamwork to cast corporations as organic communities of order, inspired leadership, and deference. While hailing from the same historical moment, the 1930s and 1940s, that fostered much of the midcentury postcapitalist vision, he stood far apart from the main social-liberal current that had done most to promote that vision in the United States.41 More akin to the main line of the postcapitalist tradition are historians Martin J. Sklar and James Livingston and their unique take on postindustrial scenarios in the 1990s. Like Block, their intellectual provenance lies further to the left than most of the liberal postcapitalist and end-of-ideology theorists who played a prominent role in this discourse from the 1940s to the 1960s. Sklar and Livingston are far friendlier to the tradition of Marx as a guide: they argue that the emergence of socialism is a feature of modern social development that continues apace, typically unrecognized amid corporate life but actually conjoined with capitalist development itself. The result, according to Sklar, is a “capitalism-socialism mix” that has set the mold of American social change ever since the Progressive Era. While not dispensing with the concept of “capitalism” and its developmental trajectory, Sklar nonetheless claims that the “mixture” of elements amid an ongoing trend toward socialization will neither permit an unambiguous naming of the current system’s character nor warrant a revolutionary overthrow of the old order to bring about the new. In this sense, the scenario clearly falls within the postcapitalist orbit. In Sklar’s reading, the “corporate reconstruction of American capitalism” at the outset of the 20th century represented a move toward “socializing” business ownership and organization, far from the individualistic, proprietarian standards of early industrial capitalism. The scale and scope of production and distribution permitted and demanded a great deal of “planning” within corporate boundaries and hence displaced market imperatives. Like Berle and Means, Sklar has argued that the breakdown of older bourgeois notions of private and public made the corporation a kind of public entity,

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which in effect invited, or required, government to enter the economic realm as a regulatory and coordinating body. Moreover, administered price structures (and hence a break in “the old tie between cost and price”) provided a flow of surplus that not only serves to expand popular consumption via higher wages but also sends revenue into philanthropy and, via taxation, into government coffers. The result is a “new social discretion through taxation and spending, banking, monetary, and credit measures, public works, subsidies, and production and marketing agreements, as well as by regulatory law and administration.” Like Parsons too, Sklar claims that this new “discretion”—a measure of emancipation from scarcity and market allocation—is evident in “a growing ‘nonbusiness’ sector of society—cultural, civic, educational, political, charitable associations—[that makes] claims upon, or appeals to, the allocation of corporate revenues.”42 Because “public policy and law” has come to play an ever greater role “in defining social goals, requirements, and conveniences,” Sklar argues, “the scope of freedom and contingency, as against determinism, necessity, or fate, expanded, and the substance of human freedom changed, developed, and deepened in what may be considered a qualitative break with the past.”43 Modern life has entered “a stage pushing beyond capitalism . . . a stage both national and transnational and still in search of a name . . . something more evocative than postindustrial or service or information society—a ‘social market society,’ for want of a better term, representing the ‘synthesis’ or outcome of the capitalist-socialist mix.”44 James Livingston shared this view in his provocative work Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850 –1940. Like Sklar, he challenged those “radicals” preoccupied with revolutionary, utopian images and prone to dismiss all traits of modern capitalist development as oppressive. In a move much like Parsons’s critique of C. Wright Mills’s implicit “individualism,” Livingston assailed what he regarded as the conventional Left’s “romantic” hankering after a vision of free volition either apart from market relations entirely or identified with a precorporate ideal of small producers.45 Instead, he hailed an American pragmatist vision—of William James even more than Dewey—for promoting a notion of the “social self ” always bound in interaction and increasingly free from determination by mere economic interests. This vision, he insisted, faithfully captured the course of social evolution under corporate development, as growth stemmed from technical, organizational forces irreducible to increments of capital and labor and as professional and bureaucratic “roles” diminished the force of monetary incentives. By recognizing in these trends “a new climate, [a] new era,” Livingston wrote, pragmatism implied a “historicist socialism” that was a “promising way of conceiving the transition to a postmodern, postindustrial, and perhaps postcapitalist society as ‘con-

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tinuous,’ that is, as the extrapolation of tendencies observable in corporate capitalism.”46 Like the mid-twentieth-century social-liberal vision, however, Livingston’s view persistently obscures whether the transition to a new order has already occurred, waiting only for us to “learn to call” it postcapitalist, as he writes at one point, or whether the dynamics he perceives in modern society allow us to “conceive” a transition to postcapitalist order that remains incomplete, awaiting purposeful action aimed at realizing that potential. In a related fashion, Sklar’s notion of “the capitalist-socialist mix” never makes entirely clear how to assess the balance between the distinct elements of the mix (capitalist and socialist), the tendency of change as the balance shifts, or the prospective outcome of development under the impact of social conflict and political action. As Sklar frequently notes, Marx saw the emerging era of large corporations as a “phase of transition to a new form of production,” but Marx’s phrasing typically indicated where he thought predominance lay and what political tasks remained ahead: the corporate form meant “the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself,” and while the spread of corporate organization “aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals . . . the conversion to the form of stock still remains ensnared in the trammels of capitalism.”47 Indeed, without a means of critically assessing the recipe of the mix, or marking the point at which a shift of balance permits the fuller growth of social self-determination, Sklar risks lapsing into evasive, even Panglossian political standards.48 In his reading of contemporary affairs, even “privatization” of government enterprises “may be understood instead as ‘publicization,’ corresponding with a society’s greater developmental maturity allowing associated people to do what had before been done ‘in trust’ for them by government.”49 To be sure, capitalist development continues to foster, despite itself, the means and ends of socialist achievements, but to avoid the danger of collapsing into mere affirmation of the way things are going, Sklar’s theory must return to a critical standpoint of assessing how socializing trends are affected by the capitalist “framework” and how their fullest development might be freed from the constraints of that framework.50 It is hardly premature, then, to venture a summary evaluation of the midtwentieth-century social-liberal postcapitalist vision. The political virtue of the postcapitalist vision was its focus on the potential for dramatic change in modern society; its fault was too great a readiness to believe that this potential had been realized in reforms already achieved. The critical virtue of the postcapitalist vision was its recognition of the limits of economics, both the methodological limits of market-centered theories of social action and the practical limits of the market system’s ability to meet social needs;

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its fault was a tendency to overlook the determining force of economic affairs—the order of property, distribution of wealth, volatility of markets, and the powers that derive from these—in society as it currently exists. The theoretical virtue of the postcapitalist vision was its ambition to overcome the dichotomies and make an attempt at “multidimensional” theory comprising the individual and the collective, rational interests and meaningful values; its fault was the truncated form of totality grasped in the noneconomic concept of society. And the moral virtue of the postcapitalist vision was its sustenance of hope for a new society, increasingly more egalitarian and inclusive; its fault, an unrealistic and possibly complacent neglect of the limits blocking achievement of these aims. Underlying the pros and cons on this balance sheet were three persistent theoretical and political flaws. The first was the inclination to rewrite a critique of political economy, of the sort Marx proposed, as a “shift away from economics,” a shift that urged a methodological turn away from economic analysis rather than a social transformation that practically subjected economic affairs to human control. The second was an evasion of the analytical boundary and the political break that can reasonably be expected to divide modern capitalism from a successor regime of social economy, a watershed whose significance cannot be fudged no matter how gradually the enabling conditions and the forms of new social relations emerge in time. The third was a reluctance to develop sharp criteria for judging whether in the course of a developing interaction of politics and market, of public and private agencies, we can expect the social to intrude on the economic sphere or the economic to expand its sway over the social realm. Most social-liberal advocates of the postcapitalist vision have assumed the former, while a range of left-wing critics over the years—including European writers such as Jürgen Habermas and Guy Debord who have strongly influenced the American Left since the 1960s—have emphasized the opposite current as they decried the commercial “colonization of everyday life.”51 The best way of overcoming this polarizing debate is to recognize there is a two-sidedness to capitalist social development that socializes and privatizes simultaneously. In the best sense, Sklar’s notion of a “capitalism-socialism mix” might capture the way the two dynamics are complexly interwoven and far from easily divisible—even if they are in principle contradictory. The ambiguity of this form of social development is such that it may spawn an illusory faith in the progressive promise of the status quo, but it also fosters the confidence, at the heart of Marx’s historical vision, that a break toward a new, genuinely “associated” mode of production can follow on the basis of institutional resources provided by capitalism itself. At present, the designation of contemporary society in the West as “capitalist” is for the most part unchallenged and unexceptional. The present pe-

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culiar conjunction of naming and claiming permanence may pass, however, as the triumphalist post-cold war mood of the booming 1990s fades from memory, as more familiar patterns of conflicting interests return, and as capitalist development continues to incite speculation about the course of change. Already, in the early years of the twenty-first century, a flurry of new books commenced again to imagine successor regimes to capitalism, with titles evoking something of a common mood: Seymour Melman’s After Capitalism (2001), Michael Albert’s Parecon: Life after Capitalism (2003), Gar Alperovitz’s America beyond Capitalism (2005), and Severyn Bruyn’s A Civil Republic: Beyond Capitalism and Nationalism (2005). Although all these authors, unlike midcentury reformers, have assumed the present social order to be capitalist in character, they otherwise share the old vision’s inclination to cite transformative developments within the present that promise gradually to overcome the status quo even as we watch. The mechanisms of change and the constituent elements of a coming new order are judged to be “latent” and far more potent that we typically admit, present in more than embryonic form but obscured by the “cover stories” that falsely identify capitalist management and markets with the whole of social and economic affairs. These authors emphasize different elements, or combinations of them, that forecast a coming social regime: an emerging pluralism of property forms (municipal enterprises, workers’ cooperatives, community development corporations, networks of artisanal production, pension funds); the rise of voluntary associations as watchdog groups that will increasingly agitate for roles setting standards of economic behavior; demands for public management of health-care costs; or the technical capacity for distributed processing, if properly applied, to enhance the participation of production workers in guiding the work process. All the writers portray the outcome they forecast as a departure from both capitalism and (traditionally defined) socialism, offering names for future regimes such as “participatory economy” (or “parecon”), a “pluralist commonwealth,” a “civil republic,” or an “associative economy.”52 Still, the task remains of shaping a viable successor to the midcentury postcapitalist vision, one that takes seriously “transitional” strategies for charting a path beyond capitalism, that is, one that recognizes the potential for socializing change in the present without falling back on undue confidence in the given trends of development. In fact, some of the most compelling debates over social policy in our time offer opportunities for fashioning such a perspective. The British socialist Robin Blackburn has done just that in his magisterial account of the history and politics of pensions, Banking on Death; or, Investing in Life. He sees a crucial lever of social change in the rise of pension funds whose assets are so large they account for nearly half the ownership of publicly traded corporate shares. Blackburn has no illusions that

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these arrangements already represent, as Peter Drucker once wrote, the advent of “pension fund socialism.” Quite on the contrary, “the bourgeoisie is still in place and a cosmopolitan capitalist class commands more assets than ever before.” The beneficiaries of massive pension funds lack any significant control over their accumulated savings, and fund managers not only observe conventional bourgeois standards of investment but even accentuate the most reckless market trends toward making “short-term returns” the end-all and be-all of finance. But like Sklar, Blackburn recognizes the ironic outcomes of capitalist development. Given both the shift in life-cycle patterns toward growing numbers of fit and active retirees, and questions about the security of government old-age insurance and private pension funds, Blackburn argues that the formal socialization of assets in large pension funds might be converted into real mechanisms for the “socialization of investment.” He has reclaimed a bygone proposal of Swedish social democrats to create worker-controlled social funds, financed by legally mandated corporate contributions of stock, that would invest in socially useful development projects. In view of the instability or collapse of many existing pension funds, a public levy on corporate shares might be considered legitimate as a way of returning to commitments, now repudiated, that major corporations made to union-bargained pension plans in the “golden age” of postwar growth. The new funds could be administered by a plurality of nongovernmental, nonprofit associations that people join in their workplaces or neighborhoods, audited under rigorous public standards. Their assets can be devoted to such purposes as “well-judged investment in physical plant, or social infrastructure, or research and development, or urban renewal, or education and training.”53 Blackburn works on a terrain not unfamiliar in the corpus of twentiethcentury postcapitalist theory. Like Talcott Parsons, he even cites well-run college endowment funds as partly a model of what expertly managed pension funds with noncapitalist, social objectives might look like. He recommends a “professional rather than commercial approach to fund management,” clearly identifies the social fund as an institution of the private, nonprofit sector, and imagines it as “a solidarity fund” that, once required by law to open decision making to the full view and participation of its members, promises to revive both the spirit of “social citizenship” and the provision of public services that such citizenship demands. Thus the guiding motives and regulatory oversight of the funds will be based on “civic monitoring . . . lodged with civil society itself” rather than a paternalistic state. The political realism of the plan lies in a campaign to tap what Blackburn calls “the new mood” in Europe and the United States, the popular sentiment that vigorously resists tampering with inherited standards of social security and shows disgust at the financial malfeasance of corporations.

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Moreover, in the long run, the growth of such social funds could “progressively diminish the importance of the capital disposed of by very wealthy individuals,” and in league with “a concerted reform across a broad front, under the pressure of awakened social movements, might overflow capitalist constraints.” This aspiration, based on strong practical motives of the present, follows a longstanding tradition in Marxian and other anticapitalist traditions “which have identified a progressive side to the complex organization of capitalist society.”54 Such “willingness to seize the progressive potential” of the present society has not always been apparent in self-consciously “revolutionary” criticism, but Blackburn insists on the need to adopt such a view toward the future. Of course, while the socialization of investment thus appears eminently practicable, it has by no means been yet achieved: such an outcome, made feasible but not given by current conditions, will depend on “debates, conflicts, and campaigns” yet to come and yet to be won. Taking transitional strategy seriously in this sense does not surrender the notion that the achievement of a social economy will indeed require some sort of “break” beyond capitalism, though the nature of that transformation can hardly be defined precisely in advance. Nonetheless, the legacy of the midcentury postcapitalist vision, if transfigured by a critical point of view like Blackburn’s, may demand an end to the hoary divide within socialist tradition between reformist and revolutionary currents. The concern shared by the Marxist theory of capitalism and the social-liberal postcapitalist vision has been the focus on “transitional” phenomena. Historical evidence surely suggests that transitions in social forms are likely to be prolonged and muddy, full of tentative initiatives, setbacks, false starts, intermediary forms, and unexpected institutional innovations. While no one knows what course the supersession of capitalism, if achieved, will take—whether accompanied by climactic, insurrectionary outbursts or not—it would nonetheless demand the retirement from power of those social forces interested in the profitable leadership and perpetuation of capitalist production. Thus, as Joseph Fracchia writes, “the renunciation of politics based on revolutionary [apocalyptic insurrectionary] expectations” need not, in Eduard Bernstein’s sense, “require renunciation of the socialist goal.” Meanwhile, there is some heritage to cite in making “transitional” expectations the stuff of political programs looking beyond capitalism.55 That is what Blackburn has done, in effect, by pushing a program that latches on to present needs, feasible goals, and available social resources, with the hope that tapping these resources in pursuit of practical reform may yet lead to a qualitative social transformation of a revolutionary sort. Perhaps a new critical social theory, trying to grasp the terms of the global order that has emerged since the decline of the “postclassical” welfare state in the 1970s, can recognize the re-

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ality of capitalism while also perceiving the potential to surpass it. Such a critique might challenge economism without disregarding the weight of economic facts; grasp the cultural meanings people grant to their experiences and their aspirations without denying their utilitarian interests; and nurture hope for a better future without fostering illusions about the present. If so, the ability to imagine a world beyond capitalism might really help muster the capacity to overcome it.

Notes



introduction 1. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York, 1970); Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley, 1980), 3; and Eric Larrabee, The SelfConscious Society (Garden City, N.Y., 1960). Paul Potter, quoted in James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York, 1987), 232. On “fighting words,” see Francois Perroux, Le Capitalisme (Paris, 1962), 5, quoted in Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 2: Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley, 1992), 231. 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1969), xi, 81, 112, 131. Later a sharp critic of modern capitalism, Du Bois in 1903 did not use the word and voiced a genteel contempt for “commercialism,” the valuation of “cash” over “character.” 3. Laura Desfor Edles, Scott Appelrouth, eds., Sociological Theory in the Classical Era (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2005); Journal of Classical Sociology (London, 2001–); Jeffrey C. Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, vol. 4: The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons (Berkeley, 1983). 4. C. A. R. Crosland, “The Transition from Capitalism,” in New Fabian Essays, ed. R. H. S. Crossman (New York, 1952), 42; Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996), 244 – 45; Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History (New York, 1997), 201–28; G. L. Arnold, “Britain: The New Reasoners,” in Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas, ed. Leopold Labedz (New York, 1962), 300; Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, 1959). 5. Stephen Marglin and Juliet Schor, eds., The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience (New York, 1990); Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945 –60 (Urbana, Ill., 1994). 6. Thomas Mann, “The Making of The Magic Mountain,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1953, reprinted in Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York, 1969), 719. Talcott Parsons, “‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber,” Journal of Political Economy 36 (1928): 641–44, and “‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber—Concluded,” Journal of Political Economy 37 (1929): 31–51; Parsons, “On Building Social System Theory: A Personal History,” Daedalus 99 (Fall 1970): 838, 852, 858.

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276 / Notes to Pages 6–10 7. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1926); Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: The Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. Frank D. Halsey (Princeton, 1952); Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 2:228–29, 374 –76, 433, 464, 466, 504, 619; see also Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley, 1992), 23 –29, 415, 477, 514, 561; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1957); Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1: The Process of Capitalist Production (New York, 1967); Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (New York, 1999); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1930), and Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein (London, 1915). 8. William J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (Glencoe, Ill., 1963), 16, noted “the capitalist use (for the modern scene, read ‘industrial use’) of machinery”—as if the limited case of capitalism no longer sufficed as a target of social criticism. 9. For early notions of mixed economy, see Marquis Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way (New Haven, 1936); E. F. M. Durbin, The Politics of Democratic Socialism (London, 1940); and Lewis Corey, The Unfinished Task: Economic Reconstruction for Democracy (New York, 1942). Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War (Garden City, N.Y., 1954), quoted in C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1964), 63. Kenneth Young, “Asia’s Disequilibrium and American Strategies,” in The United States and Communist China, ed. W. W. Lockwood (Princeton, 1965), 51–52. George Lichtheim, The New Europe: Today—and Tomorrow (New York, 1963), 193 – 94. Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (New York, 1953), 302–17, and The Limits of American Capitalism (New York, 1966). 10. Judith Stacey, Brave New Families (New York, 1990), 17. 11. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation, trans. Edith C. Harvey (New York, 1961); Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx (New York, 1952), 145 – 47. Jaurès, quoted in Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 18. 12. Potter, quoted in Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York, 1973), 187– 88. 13. “Social Scientist David Riesman: What Is the American Character,” Time, 27 September 1954. 14. Talcott Parsons identified key trends in modern society leading toward freedom, egalitarianism, belonging in a broad national community, and social rights to welfare, cutting across “the ideological dilemma of capitalism versus socialism.” In the activist sphere, Martin Luther King Jr. described his goals this way in 1967: “The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truth of individualism and collectivism.” Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 96 – 98, and Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope, ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco, 1991), 630. 15. Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (New York, 1949); Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1982); James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870 –1920 (New York, 1986); Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, 1991); Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings. Some exceptions to this temporal focus include Casey N. Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990); David Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, 1996); Wilfred McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994); Edward Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, Ky., 1973). 16. Purcell, Crisis of Democratic Theory, 241, 253 – 56; Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley, 1994), 1–24. 17. Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865 –1914 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002). 18. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings; Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870 –1920 (New York, 2003); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955).

Notes to Pages 10–16 / 277 19. Martin J. Sklar, “Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern U.S. Liberalism,” in For a New America: Essays on History and Politics from Studies on the Left, 1959 –1967, ed. James Weinstein and David Eakins (New York, 1970); Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900 –1916 (Glencoe, Ill., 1963); James Weinstein, The Liberal Ideal in the Corporate State (Boston, 1968); William Appleman Williams, Contours of American History (Cleveland, Ohio, 1961); Ellis Hawley, “The Discovery and Study of a ‘Corporate Liberalism,’” Business History Review 52 (Autumn 1978): 309 –20; R. Jeffrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890 –1920 (Berkeley, 1982); Guy Alchon, The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and the State in the 1920s (Princeton, 1985); Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002). 20. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, 1996); Doug Rossinow, “‘The Model of a Model Fellow Traveler’: Harry F. Ward, the American League for Peace and Democracy, and the ‘Russian Question’ in American Politics, 1933 –1956,” Peace and Change 29 (April 2004): 177–220; Daniel Geary, “Carey McWilliams and Antifascism, 1934 –1943,” Journal of American History 90 (December 2003): 912– 34. In describing the politics of Henry Wallace and his supporters in the mid-1940s, Norman Markowitz appropriately uses the phrase “social liberalism,” though I apply it more widely (beyond the Popular Frontist “progressive” milieu) than he does. See Markowitz, Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948 (New York, 1973). The anticommunist, social-democratic liberals of the Union for Democratic Action, predecessor of Americans for Democratic Action, also fall within this current: Adam Clymer, “The Union for Democratic Action: Key to the Noncommunist Left” (honors thesis, Harvard University, 1958); Robert Clayton Pierce, “Liberals and the Cold War: Union for Democratic Action and Americans for Democratic Action” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1979). On personal entanglements between social liberals and Communist activists, Landon R. Y. Storrs, “Red Scare Politics and the Suppression of Popular Front Feminism: The Loyalty Investigation of Mary Dublin Keyserling,” Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 491– 524. 21. Mark Kleinman, A World of Hope, A World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism (Columbus, Ohio, 2000), 250 – 53, 265. 22. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, 1995); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, 2004). 23. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America (New York, 1984), 121–26; James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle against Poverty, 1900 –1985 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 135 – 43; Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986), 254 – 56. 24. Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (Berkeley, 1986), 344. 25. Maurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (New York, 2000), 275 –76, 320. 26. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, 2001), and James A. Good, “A Search for Unity in Diversity: The ‘Permanent Hegelian Deposit’ in the Philosophy of John Dewey” (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 2001); Uta Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 2002); W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York, 1989). 27. Howard Brick, “Society,” in Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley Kutler et al. (New York, 1996), 2:917– 39. 28. Howard Brick, “Talcott Parsons’s ‘Shift Away from Economics,’ 1937–1946,” Journal of American History 87 (September 2000): 490 – 514. 29. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley, 1986), 21–22, 131, 169 –71, 189, 192. 30. In the United States, a rare and obscure, genuinely conservative, Spenglerian kind of postcapitalist vision came from the pen of Edwin Franden Dakin. See “American Communique, 1940,” 305 –50, in Today and Destiny: Vital Excerpts from The Decline of the West of Oswald Spengler, arranged with an introduction and commentary by Edwin Franden Dakin (New York, 1940).

278 / Notes to Pages 16–25 31. Sternell, Neither Right nor Left, xvi. 32. Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880 –1980 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). 33. Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1988); Nancy Cott, “What’s in a Name? The Limits of ‘Social Feminism’; or Expanding the Vocabulary of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 76 (December 1989): 809 –29; Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 145 – 82. 34. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: The Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1982), xviii. Nonetheless, these disciplines were effectively masculinized by the middle of the twentieth century, with a number of distinguished women practitioners but few compared to the men in the fields. 35. See Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Women, Culture, and Society (Stanford, 1974), whose opening theoretical essay is cast distinctly in the mold of Parsonsian structural-functionalism, and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley,1978), 36 – 38. 36. Ben Keppel, The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Anthony M. Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, N.J., 1991); Christopher A. McAuley, The Mind of Oliver C. Cox (Notre Dame, Ind., 2004); John H. Bracey Jr. et al., eds., The Black Sociologists: The First Half Century (Belmont, Calif., 1971); James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz, eds., Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Chicago, 1974). 37. Marie Jahoda, Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis (Cambridge, 1982); Rose Laub Coser, ed., The Family: Its Structure and Functions (New York, 1964); Rose Laub Coser, Laura S. Anker, and Andrew J. Perrin, Women of Courage: Jewish and Italian Immigrant Women in New York (Westport, Conn., 1999); Patricia Cayo Sexton, Education and Income: Inequalities of Opportunity in Our Public Schools (New York, 1961); Sexton, Spanish Harlem (New York, 1965); Sexton, The American School: A Sociological Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967); Sexton, Women in Education (Bloomington, Ind., 1976). 38. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York, 1970); Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863 –1877 (New York, 1988); Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy (Urbana, Ill., 1983). 39. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, 1936).

1. capitalism and its future on the eve of world war i 1. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 2: The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley, 1992), 237. 2. Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study in the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, trans. Morris Watnick and Sam Gordon, ed. Tom Bottomore (London, 1981), 304. 3. Joseph Fracchia, “Marx’s Aufhebung of Philosophy and the Foundations of a Materialist Science of History,” History and Theory 30 (1991): 153 –79; Stuart Hall, “A ‘Reading’ of Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse,” Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1973. 4. Astute Marxists have warned against relying too heavily for political guidance on “the abstraction ‘capitalism.’” Martin Nicolaus, “The Universal Contradiction,” New Left Review 59 (January–February 1970): 3–18, and Ernest Mandel, “The Laws of Uneven Development,” New Left Review 59 (January–February 1970): 19 – 38, esp. 28. 5. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 2:232– 33; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 2, trans. David Fernbach (London, 1978), 436. 6. Marx, Capital, 2:556. 7. Braudel, Capitalism and Civilization, 2:232– 38, 388, 624n48; Talcott Parsons, “Der Kapitalismus bei Sombart und Max Weber” (diss., Heidelberg, 1929), 4; Tom Bottomore, Theories of Modern Capitalism (London, 1985), 3n1; Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism” (New York, 1983), 98 –124.

Notes to Pages 25–33 / 279 8. Shanin, Late Marx, 98, 171. 9. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (Caldwell, Idaho, 1952), 56, emphasis added. 10. See “Capital,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 5, 278. 11. Willard Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian Socialist Doctrine, 1881–1889 (New Haven, 1975), 16. 12. Margaret Schabas, A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons and the Rise of Mathematical Economics (Princeton, 1990), and Schabas, “From Political Economy to Positive Economics,” in Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870 –1945, ed. Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge, 2003), 235 – 44. 13. G. Bernard Shaw, ed., Fabian Essays in Socialism (Gloucester, Mass., 1967), 145, 188. 14. Ibid., 92, 99, 247– 48, 261– 62; Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism, 243. 15. Shaw, ed., Fabian Essays, 131, 156. 16. Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany (New York, 1973), 151, 217. 17. Sombart, in his 1900 lectures, Dennoch!, quoted in Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement, 176 –79, 183. 18. Engels to Schmidt, 12 March 1895, Selected Correspondence of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (New York, 1942), 530, quoted in Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement, 220; Schmoller, quoted ibid., 157. 19. Ibid., 222, 237–64. 20. Robert Heilbroner, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (New York, 1985); Marx, Capital, vol. 2, on “the metamorphoses of capital,” 109 –229. 21. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles, 2002), 17, 28 –29, 71–72, 115 –18. 22. John A. Hobson, The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (London, 1894); Hobson, Evolution, rev. ed. (London, 1910), v. 23. “Les périodes de l’histoire sociale du capitalisme,” in Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres (Brussels, 1914); “The Stages in the Social History of Capitalism,” American Historical Review 19 (1914): 494 – 515; Les périodes de l’histoire sociale du capitalisme (Brussels, 1922). 24. Bryce Lyon, Henri Pirenne: A Biographical and Intellectual Study (Ghent, 1974), 174 –75, 198 –99. 25. Ibid., 338–39. 26. Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York, 1949), 77– 81. 27. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York, 1947), 35. 28. Pirenne, “Stages in the Social History of Capitalism,” 503 – 4, 495 – 96; Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. Frank D. Halsey (Princeton, 1952), 117–18. 29. Pirenne, “Stages in the Social History of Capitalism,” 495. 30. Max Weber, “Prefatory Remarks,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1 (Tübingen, 1920), trans. Talcott Parsons in Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 1930), 13 –31; trans. Stephen Kalberg, in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Los Angeles, 2002), 149 – 64. 31. Brentano, Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus (1916), quoted in Parsons, “Der Kapitalismus,” 15 (my translation). 32. Parsons, “Der Kapitalismus,” 12 (my translation). 33. Hobson, Evolution of Modern Capitalism (London, 1894), 117, 175. 34. Cunningham, The Progress of Capitalism in England (Cambridge, 1916), 24, 105 –9, 112– 14. 35. Henri Sée, Modern Capitalism: Its Origin and Evolution, trans. Homer B. Vanderblue and Georges F. Doriot (New York, 1928), 1–3. 36. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (London, 2003), 204, 411. 37. Dobb, Studies, 200, 209. 38. As an indication of both the timing by which the term capitalism came into common us-

280 / Notes to Pages 33–39 age and its adoption by defenders of the private-property market system, Britannica first included an entry on “capitalism” in the first of three “new volumes,” added in 1922 to the standing volumes of the eleventh edition to make up a new twelfth edition. The entry, written by Hartley Withers, a former editor of the Economist and author of the book, The Case for Capitalism (New York, 1920), began, “The meaning of ‘capital,’ in economics, is analyzed in the earlier article under that heading (5.278). But the working of ‘capitalism’ or the ‘capitalist system,’ as such, had by 1921 become so highly controversial a question as to require here more detailed examination.” See Britannica, New Volumes, 12th ed. (London, 1922), vol. 30, 565 –71. 39. James Warren Prothro, The Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920s (Baton Rouge, 1954), xiv–xv. John Ihlder, “The Business Man’s Responsibility,” Nation’s Business 13 (November 1925): 52, quoted in Prothro, 216; William English Walling, “Capitalism—Or What?” Bankers Magazine 113 (September 1926), cited in Richard Schneirov, “The Odyssey of William English Walling: Revisionism, Social Democracy, and Evolutionary Pragmatism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2 (October 2003): 421. 40. Francis X. Sutton et al., The American Business Creed (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 28, 32, 46; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2002), 99, 224. The clear conflation of laissez-faire norms with the definition of “capitalism” is evident in George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Ill., 1990), which cites the heritage of Austrian economics from Carl Menger to Ludwig von Mises. 41. Writing to an editor at Alfred Knopf, anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser stated, “At the present moment . . . Marxian ideologies and theories of capitalism in general are being thrashed over with renewed vigor.” Goldenweiser to Paul B. Thomas, n.d., Parsons papers, Harvard University Archives, folder “Weber: Correspondence on Translation, c. 1930,” box 1, section 42.45.2. Charles Beard, Contemporary American History, 1877–1913 (New York, 1914); Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, 1927); Thurman W. Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven, 1938); Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (London, 1939), 155; Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York, 1982), 95, 126, 129; Henry Ford, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (Dearborn, Mich., 1920). 42. Dobb, Studies, 11. 43. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (New York, 1999); Robert Heilbroner, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (New York, 1985), 13 –77. 44. Wood, Origin, 47. 45. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York, 1978), 475 –76. 46. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (New York, 1967), 72– 3, 75. 47. Marx, Capital 3, quoted in Bottomore, Theories of Modern Capitalism, 15. 48. István Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition (London, 1995), 488. 49. Mark Gould, Revolution in the Development of Capitalism: The Coming of the English Revolution (Berkeley, 1987), 121. 50. Marx, Capital, 1:312– 507. 51. Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York, 1942), 254 – 86; Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, vol. 2, trans. Brian Pearce (New York, 1970), 393 – 440; Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1979), 7–10, 22–23; M. C. Howard and J. E. King, A History of Marxian Economics, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1989), 90 –126, 243 – 66; Howard and King, A History of Marxian Economics, vol. 2 (Princeton, 1992), 109 –27. 52. Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 473. 53. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York, 1967), 80. See also Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 473. 54. Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, trans. Emile Burns (New York, 1939), 295 –303. 55. Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, vol. 1, trans. Brian Pearce (New York, 1968), 170 –71. 56. Marx, Capital 3, quoted in Bottomore, Theories of Modern Capitalism, 17–18. 57. C. L. R. James et al., Facing Reality (Detroit, 1958). 58. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nico-

Notes to Pages 39–53 / 281 laus (New York, 1973), 704 – 5; Nicolaus, “The Unknown Marx,” New Left Review 48 (March– April 1968). 59. Nicolaus, “Unknown Marx,” 58. 60. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Part One (New York, 1970), 68 – 81. 61. Marx, Capital, 1:751–54 and 713 – 41. 62. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York, 1970), 20 –21. 63. Paul Sweezy et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1976); Wood, Origin of Capitalism, 28 –35; and Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review, no. 104 (July–August 1977): 25 – 92; T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985). 64. Robert Brenner, “Dobb on the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 2 (1978): 121–140; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 709–16. 65. At one point, describing the emergence of modern capitalist society, Marx referred to a centuries-long “huge interval which covers a whole series of successive economic revolutions and evolutions,” quoted in Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, 102. See also Barrington Moore Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, 1966), 426 –27. 66. Sombart, quoted in Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement, 178, 180. 67. Hilferding, Finance Capital, 107. 68. William Smaldone, Rudolf Hilferding: The Tragedy of a German Social Democrat (DeKalb, Ill., 1998). 69. Ibid., 22. 70. Cf. Marx, Capital, 2:355– 57. 71. William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, 1997). 72. Hilferding, Finance Capital, 121–22. 73. Ibid., 123, 114, emphasis added. 74. Ibid., 180, 121, 199; Brandeis, Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It (New York, 1914). 75. Hilferding, Finance Capital, 234, 331, 335. 76. Ibid., 149, 235, emphasis added. 77. Ibid., 261, 368, 234. 78. Ibid., 294–96. 79. David Seckler, Thorstein Veblen and the Institutionalists: A Study in the Social Philosophy of Economics (London, 1975); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991), 204 –16. 80. See Veblen, “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (July 1898): 373 –97. 81. Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, 1934), 312. 82. Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990), 106, 218, 171, 209, 278 –79, 213, 206, 282, 290, 229n, 307. 83. Ibid., 205, 307, 315, 342, 227, 355, 193, 347. 84. Ibid., 25; Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2001), 1. 85. Charles P. Steinmetz, America and the New Epoch (New York, 1916); Sender Garlin, Three American Radicals (Boulder, Colo., 1991), 51– 96. 86. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York, 1914), 73, 35, 49, 115, 309, xxv, xvi. 87. Ibid., 81, 257– 58, xix, 21, 35, 114. 88. Ibid., 36, 51, 57–58, 50, 57–60, 107, 61– 63, 309 –11, 247– 54. 89. Ibid., 292– 93. 90. Lippmann, “Notes for a Biography,” New Republic 63 (16 July 1930): 250, quoted in David W. Levy, Herbert Croly of the New Republic: The Life and Thought of an American Progressive (Princeton, 1985), xi. 91. Levy, Herbert Croly, 171, emphasis added.

282 / Notes to Pages 53–60 92. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York, 1916), 283, 318 –19; Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991), 167– 82. 93. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, 1980), 60 – 62, 66 – 67, 97. 94. Congress of Arts and Science: Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904 (Boston, 1906), ed. Howard J. Rogers, vol. 7, 791, 803 –12. 95. Parsons, “Der Kapitalismus,” 4– 5. 96. Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 306 –20. 97. John Michael Boles, “Progressive-Era Reform and Social Thought and the Coming of the First World War,” unpublished paper, Washington University in St. Louis, 2005.

2. the american theory of organized capitalism 1. John Dewey, “The Future of Pacifism,” The Middle Works, 1899 –1924, vol. 10 (Carbondale, Ill., 1985), 285. 2. Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 26 –42; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, 1980), 33 –185. 3. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996), 32. 4. Quoted in Paul W. Glad, “Progressives and the Business Culture of the 1920s,” Journal of American History 53 (June 1966): 82. 5. Christopher Lasch, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (New York, 1962), 139 –40, 210 –11; Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915 –1922 (Minneapolis, 1955). 6. John A. Hobson, Incentives in the New Industrial Order (London, 1922), 5. Hobson’s book was issued as volume 15 in the publisher’s New Era Series. 7. Herbert Hoover, The New Day (Stanford, 1928), 207; Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Forgotten Progressive (Boston, 1975). 8. Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, 1975), 11–12. 9. Nelson Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris, Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise (Cambridge, 1993), 9; Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997); Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (Cambridge, 1998), 242– 82. 10. McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 27, 12; Fink, Progressive Intellectuals, 105. 11. McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 36 –37. 12. Ibid., 131, 136, 148. 13. Ibid., 90, 119. 14. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York, 1995), 38, 41, 67; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (Oxford, 1980), and Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations during World War I (Baltimore, 1973). For a contemporary embrace of the war-proved potential for a “new economy,” even by a sharp critic of the war’s outcome, see Arthur F. Bentley, Makers, Users, and Masters (Syracuse, N.Y., 1969), 224. 15. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 73 –76. 16. Sidney Ratner, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Bentley, Makers, Users, and Masters, xi–xii. 17. Cf. Robert Johnston’s The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, 2003). 18. Bentley, Makers, Users, and Masters, 187– 88. 19. Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left (New York, 1993), 86 –88, 99, 111–14; Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale, 1927–1960 (Chapel Hill, 1986), 45 – 46. 20. Laski, quoted in Kramnick and Sheerman, Harold Laski, 103.

Notes to Pages 60–66 / 283 21. Ibid., 102–7. 22. McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 172–75, 188. 23. Ibid., 30, 86. 24. On the rightward movement after 1920 by some of the old Progressives, see Otis Graham, An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal (Oxford, 1967), and Robert M. Crunden, The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock (Chicago, 1964). 25. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 135; James Weinstein, “Radicalism in the Midst of Normalcy,” Journal of American History 52 (March 1966): 773 – 90; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865 –1925 (New York, 1987). 26. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 296; James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870 –1920 (New York, 1986); Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, 1934), 412; Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 399 – 400; Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Church and the Industrial Crisis,” Biblical World (November 1920): 590; Alan Lawson, The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930 –1941 (New York, 1971), 29, 67–68, 54. 27. Mary White Ovington, Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of a NAACP Founder (New York, 1995), 107; Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst, Mass., 1998), 34 – 39, 50 –54; Thomas C. Mendenhall, Chance and Change in Smith College’s First Century (Northampton, Mass., 1976), 18, 26 –27; Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, 1985), 47– 49; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Women and Education,” in Reclaiming the Past: Landmarks of Women’s History, ed. Page Putnam Miller (Bloomington, Ind., 1992), 129. 28. Harry Laidler papers, Tamiment Library, New York University. 29. William Smaldone, Rudolf Hilferding: The Tragedy of a German Social Democrat (DeKalb, Ill., 1998), 69 –70, 72, 96, 104. 30. Hilferding, quoted in Smaldone, 104 – 5; David Beetham, ed., Marxism in the Face of Fascism (Manchester, 1983), 251– 52. 31. Smaldone, Rudolf Hilferding, 106, 117, 101. 32. Veblen, Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise in Recent Times; The Case of America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), 3 – 4, 72, 82. 33. Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America, 438, 524; Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New Brunswick, N.J., 1983). 34. Veblen, Absentee Ownership, 210, 431, 409, 108, 289, 213, 268, 372, 390, 309. 35. Ibid., 425, 433– 44. 36. Theodor Adorno, “Veblen’s Attack on Culture,” in Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 79. 37. Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America, 422. 38. Despite the apparent boom in consumer goods during the mid-1920s, a more careful reading of Veblen’s work would have found his analysis of institutionalized salesmanship and the crisis tendencies of finance rather more germane. See Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America, 7th ed. (Clifton, N.J., 1972), 484 –85; Marion J. Levy, “Introduction to the Transaction Edition,” in Absentee Ownership, xvi. 39. Geoffrey Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (London, 2001). 40. Rexford Guy Tugwell, ed., The Trend of Economics (New York, 1924), viii–x. 41. Bernard Sternsher, Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal (New Brunswick, N.J., 1964), 3 –10; Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2001), 52– 58. 42. Rexford G. Tugwell, “Guild Socialism and the Industrial Future,” International Journal of Ethics 32 (1921–22): 282–88. 43. Both Beard and Tugwell fit well within the framework of Morton White’s Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (New York, 1949). 44. In this sense, Tugwell’s view was akin to the historical argument, contra laissez-faire ab-

284 / Notes to Pages 67–74 solutism, advanced in William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996). 45. Sternsher, Rexford Tugwell, 12, 17, 21. Tugwell, “Experimental Economics,” in Tugwell, ed., Trend, 421. 46. Sternsher, Rexford Tugwell, 5 –6. 47. Ibid., 360 –61, 425 –26, 19, 364. For a comparable contemporary view of the emancipatory potential of “quantified facts about economic and social conditions,” promoted by Viennese socialist Otto Neurath, see Conevery A. Bolton, “ISOTYPE and the Project of Universal Graphic Language,” in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York, 1998), 380. 48. Tugwell, ed., Trend, 26, 21, 29, 30. 49. On Wolfe, see McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 209 –10; Tugwell, ed., Trend, 448, 106. 50. Tugwell, ed., Trend, 153 – 88, 464. 51. Ibid., 81, 31– 33, 481, 360, 367, emphasis added. 52. J. M. Clark, “Recent Developments in Economics,” in Recent Developments in the Social Sciences, ed. E. C. Hayes (Philadelphia, 1927), quoted in Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen, 7th ed., 499. 53. Joseph Schumpeter, “Mitchell’s Business Cycles,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 45 (November 1930): 158 –59. 54. Paul T. Homan, Contemporary Economic Thought (New York, 1928), 450 – 62. 55. Mary S. Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford, eds., From Interwar Pluralism to Postwar Neoclassicism, annual supplement to vol. 30, History of Political Economy (Durham, N.C., 1998), 7. 56. Yuval Yonay, The Struggle over the Soul of Economics: Institutionalist and Neoclassical Economists in America between the Wars (Princeton, 1998), 72–73. See also Bernstein, Perilous Progress, 41–48. 57. C. E. Ayres, “The Nature and Significance of Institutionalism,” Antioch Review 26 (1966): 70 –90. Yonay, Struggle over the Soul, disagrees, seeing strength in the institutionalist camp through the 1930s and 1940s: 159 –61, 197– 98, 215 –16. 58. “Economic Theory—Institutionalism: What It Is and What It Hopes to Become,” American Economic Review 21 (1931): 134 – 41; Eveline M. Burns, “Does Institutionalism Complement or Compete with ‘Orthodox Economics’?” American Economic Review 21 (1931): 80 – 87, 287; Paul T. Homan, “An Appraisal of Institutional Economics,” American Economic Review 22 (1932): 10 –17. 59. See Meg Jacobs, “‘Democracy’s Third Estate’: New Deal Politics and the Construction of a ‘Consuming Public,’” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 55 (Spring 1999): 27–51. 60. Yonay, Struggle over the Soul, 184 – 95; Kathy Donahue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Baltimore, 2003), 151–275; David Riesman, Thorstein Veblen (New York, 1960), 168. Charles Maier suggests that before the 1920s, in Europe as well, restrictionism was bourgeois orthodoxy and abundance the program of reformers, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 76, 545. 61. Lawson, Failure of Independent Liberalism, 67– 84. 62. Tugwell, review of Communism by Harold Laski, New Republic, 22 February 1928. 63. Tugwell, “The Condition of an Agricultural Policy,” address to a meeting of the League for Industrial Democracy, “Rural America in Distress—Is There a Way Out for the Farmer?” New York, 30 January 1932, typescript, 3, Tugwell papers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library [hereafter FDR Library], Hyde Park. 64. Ibid., 4. 65. Letter, Tugwell to Soule, 22 October 1932, Tugwell papers, FDR Library. 66. Letter, Soule to Tugwell, 14 January 1932, Tugwell papers, FDR library. For an orthodox Socialist view on planning under capitalism, see August Claessens, The Blue Eagle Is Dead— So What? (New York, 1936). 67. Tugwell, “The Crisis of Freedom,” Common Sense, October 1941. 68. For Marxist critiques, see the example of Maurice Zeitlin, “Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class,” American Journal of Sociology 79 (March 1974): 1073 –1119.

Notes to Pages 74–80 / 285 69. McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 82. 70. On Insull’s reputation during the Depression, see John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (Boston, 1997), William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York, 1963). 71. William Z. Ripley, Main Street and Wall Street (Boston, 1927), vi–vii. 72. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York, 1914), 54, 57. 73. Ripley, Main Street, 117, 131, 45, 156 – 57, 46. 74. Ibid., 131. 75. Adolf Berle, “Reminiscences” (Columbia University oral history, interview 1), 14 –15, in Berle papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park. 76. Ibid., 6, 27. 77. On the resignation of the Bullit team, see Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (New York, 1967), 800; Michael Cassella-Blackburn, The Donkey, the Carrot, and the Club (London, 2004), 55; Richard Billings and Will Brownell, So Close to Greatness (London, 1987), 94. 78. Berle, “Reminiscences,” 18, 29 –31; see Berle, “Betrayal of the Peace,” Nation, 9 August 1919; letter, Berle to “Dear Mother,” n.d., Berle papers, FDR Library. 79. Berle, letter to the editor, New York Tribune, 16 December 1919. 80. Letter, Berle to Henry Cabot Lodge, 14 September 1920; letter, Berle to George Noble, 10 February 1920, Berle papers, FDR Library; Berle, “Reminiscences,” interview 1, 39. 81. Letter, Berle to Roger Baldwin, 19 June 1923; Berle, “The Foreign Policy Association Urges the De Facto Recognition of the Soviet Government” (June 1922), Berle papers, FDR Library; letter, from James G. McDonald, 16 September 1921, Berle papers. 82. Letter, Berle to “Dear Mother,” n.d., Berle papers. 83. Typescripts, n.d., Berle papers, box 166. 84. Letters, Roger Baldwin to Berle, 14 February 1920; George Noble to Berle, 10 February 1920; circulars from the Willard Straight American Legion post, Berle papers. Later, in the 1930s, this unusual American Legion post sponsored a talk by arms opponent Gerald Nye and debates over the Popular Front by leftists A. J. Muste, Robert Minor, and Bertram D. Wolfe 85. Carl Van Doren, “The Revolt against Dullness,” Survey 57, no. 1 (1 October 1926): 35 – 39; “After Dullness—What? A Miscellany of Brief Answers from People in Their Thirties,” Survey 57 (1 November 1926): 152– 54, 181– 86. 86. Ibid., 153. In the same brief essay, Berle listed Charles Steinmetz, the socialist engineer of Schenectady who viewed the corporation as the incubus of collective organization, as one of his heroes. 87. Jordan A. Schwarz, Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era (New York, 1987), 1–17. 88. Quotations from Berle, “The Next American Revolution,” typescript, Berle papers. Also see Berle, “How Labor Could Control,” New Republic, 7 September 1921, 37–29. 89. Letters, James McDonald to Berle, 16 September 1921; Villard to Berle, 15 August 1921. 90. Interview with Gardiner Means, by Norman Silber, 23 –25 February 1978, Vienna, Virginia, typescript, in Caroline Ware papers, #174, FDR Library. 91. Gardiner C. Means, “Is There a New American Political Economy—A Comment,” typescript, 4 April 1963, in Gardiner Means papers, #89, FDR Library; Means, “Is the American Economy Becoming More Capitalistic?” manuscript, n.d., Means papers, #93, FDR Library. 92. Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880 –1980 (Cambridge, Mass. 2002), 148 –54, 185 – 86. 93. Berle, “Reminiscences,” interview 3, 9 January 1970, by Douglas Scott, typescript, #114, Berle papers. 94. Ibid., 116 –21; Schwarz, Liberal, 50 – 51; 1932 preface, xxxix–xlii, in Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, rev. ed. (New York, 1968). 95. Berle and Means, Modern Corporation, 18. 96. Ibid., 206. 97. Ibid., 116, 311, 310.

286 / Notes to Pages 81–89 98. Ibid., 305, 116, 306, 46. 99. Ibid., 45. 100. Ibid., 297, 116, 309, 312. 101. At Osawatamie, Kansas, on 31 August 1910, Roosevelt declared, “Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” Theodore Roosevelt, Writings, ed. William H. Harbaugh (Indianapolis, 1967), 327–28; Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890 –1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge, 1988), 354. 102. Berle and Means, Modern Corporation, quoted in James Burnham, “Comment,” Symposium 4 (1933): 273. 103. Ibid., 271–72. 104. W. L. Crum, “On the Alleged Concentration of Economic Power,” American Economic Review (1933); Thomas K. McCraw, “In Retrospect: Berle and Means,” Reviews in American History 18 (1990): 578 – 96. 105. Chase, “Ticker Tapeworms,” New Republic, 25 January 1933, 299. 106. Ernest Gruening, “Capitalist Confiscation,” Nation, 1 February 1933, 117; Laidler, Survey Graphic 22 (June 1933): 330 –31; Chase, “Ticker Tapeworms,” 300; Burnham, “Comment,” 259, 267. 107. Arthur R. Burns, “American Diary,” 4 August 1928, Rare Book and Manuscripts, Butler Library, Columbia University. 108. Ibid., 11 January 1927. 109. Guy Alchon, The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and the State in the 1920s (Princeton, 1985); Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development in Social Science: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor, 1993). 110. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 11–12. 111. Ibid., 43, 3, 82, 9, 594, 12–13. 112. Yonay, Struggle over the Soul, 118, 178. 113. McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 79; see David C. Engerman, “Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, and the Soviets: A Soviet Document on an Episode in American Intellectual History,” Intellectual History Newsletter 20 (1998): 68 –70. 114. Alchon, Invisible Hand of Planning, 90, 94, 131, 134, 161, 168.

3. the interwar critique of competitive individualism 1. Wesley C. Mitchell, “Thorstein Veblen: 1857–1929,” New Republic (4 September 1929), 66, quoted in Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, 1934), 119 –20. 2. George W. Stocking Jr., “The Santa Fe Style in American Anthropology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 18 (1982): 6; Regna Darnell, Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist (Berkeley, 1990), 244. 3. Cf. definitions of “expressive” and “structural” causality in Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981), 27– 41. 4. Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” in Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, ed. David G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley, 1949), 315. See also Darnell, Edward Sapir, 168 –69. 5. Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” 316, 318. 6. Harold E. Stearns, ed., Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans (New York, 1922), vii. 7. On residual romantic critiques of industrial capitalism in American cultural criticism, see Casey N. Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990). 8. Gerald Izenberg, “Reconciling Individuality and Individualism: Humboldt to Habermas,” Intellectual History Newsletter 24 (2002): 23 – 37. 9. “War and Reorientation,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman (New York, 1930), vol. 1, 203; Alfred Kroeber, “The Anthropological Attitude,” American Mercury 13 (April 1928): 491; John S. Gilkeson, “From ‘Middletown’ to ‘Yankee City’ and Beyond,” American Historical Association annual meeting, 8 January 1995, Chicago.

Notes to Pages 89–95 / 287 10. Letters, National Civil Liberties Union to Boas, 3 April 1918; Franz Boas to Norman Thomas, 3 April 1918 and to Edward Sapir, 10 July and 23 July, 1918, in Franz Boas papers, Professional Correspondence, Tozzer Library, Harvard University. Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman, “‘The Foundation of All Future Researches’: Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American Texts, and the Construction of Modernity,” American Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1999): 479 – 528. 11. Letters, Boas to Nicholas Murray Butler, 12 April 1918; Butler to Boas, 13 April 1918; Boas to Tozzer, 20 April 1918, 27 April 1918; Boas to Kroeber, 19 September 1919; Cattell to Allyn Young, 11 November 1917, all in Boas papers, Professional Correspondence, Tozzer Library, Harvard. See also Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York, 1955), 499 – 500. 12. Boas to Robert Lowie, 3 December 1917, Boas papers, Professional Correspondence. 13. Boas to Lowie, 3 December 1917, “Science as Spies,” typescript dated 8 October 1919, in Boas papers, Professional Correspondence; George W. Stocking Jr., “Ideas and Institutions in American Anthropology: Thoughts Toward a History of the Interwar Years,” Selected Papers from the American Anthropologist, 1921–1945, ed. Stocking (Washington, D.C., 1976), 1– 53. 14. Boas, lecture typescript, Professional Correspondence, Reel 18, dated November 1917. 15. Stocking, “Ideas and Institutions,” 15. Darnell, Edward Sapir, 185. Julia E. Liss, “Patterns of Strangeness: Franz Boas, Modernism, and the Origins of Anthropology,” 127–28, in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford, 1995). 16. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York, 1983). 17. Robert Redfield, “The Folk Society and Culture,” in Eleven Twenty-Six, ed. Louis Wirth (Chicago, 1940), quoted by Oscar Lewis in his Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlan Restudied (Urbana, Ill., 1951). See also George W. Stocking Jr., ed., Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility (Madison, 1989). Darnell, Edward Sapir, 156, 169, dissents from a “romantic” characterization of Sapir’s holistic views, which she identifies more with a “classicist” or “Renaissance humanist” point of view. 18. Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York, 1995); Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (Oxford, 1977). 19. Margaret Caffrey, Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land (Austin, Texas, 1989), 79 – 90, 100 –104; Lois Banner, Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle (New York, 2003), 43 –65, 124 – 52. 20. Barnard Bulletin (edited by Mead’s friend Léonie Adams and, as of summer 1922, Mead herself), 15 October 1921, 9 June 1922, 6 October 1922, 13 October 1922, 27 October 1922, in Mead papers, Library of Congress, General Correspondence. Years later, Mead’s early mentor at Barnard, William Ogburn, approvingly cited a remark of Mead’s that “the radicals of an earlier day in college turned out to be pretty good.” Letter, Ogburn to Mead, 20 November 1940, Mead papers, C6 “O.” 21. “Dot” to Margaret Mead [hereafter MM], 6 August 1921; “Melville” to MM, 9 June 1923, Mead papers, Library of Congress, General Correspondence; see “The Obligation of the Colleges,” Barnard Bulletin, 16 February 1923, p. 2, published under a masthead with Mead listed as editor in chief; letter, Scott Nearing to MM, May 6 (1922 or 1923), Mead papers, C1 (General Correspondence—1927, “N”). Also, letter by “L. A.” [likely Mead’s friend and prior Bulletin editor, Léonie Adams], Barnard Bulletin, p. 3, defending a 7 November dining hall celebration by “ten red diners.” 22. Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Lowell Don Holmes, Quest for the Real Samoa: The Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond (South Hadley, Mass., 1987); James Côté, ed., “The Mead-Freeman Controversy in Review,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 29 (2000), and Phyllis Grosskurth, Margaret Mead (Harmondsworth, England, 1989). 23. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (New York, 1949), 95 – 96, 92, 69, 80. 24. Franz Boas to MM, 14 July 1925, Mead papers. 25. Mead, Coming of Age, vii–viii. 26. Ibid., 155– 62; letter, MM to Freda Kirchwey, 20 January 1928, Mead papers, LC. 27. Coming of Age, 162. 28. Ibid., 125, 117, 134, 145, 144.

288 / Notes to Pages 95–103 29. Maureen Molloy, “Margaret Mead, the Samoan Girl and the Flapper: Geographies of Selfhood in Coming of Age in Samoa,” in Reading Benedict/Reading Mead: Feminism, Race, and Imperial Visions, ed. Lois Banner and Dolores Janiewski (Baltimore, 2004). 30. Mead, Coming of Age, 145, 141. 31. Ibid., 142; Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York, 1963), 15. In Growing Up in New Guinea, Mead repeatedly compared the conjunction between “puritanical” suppression of sexuality and an extreme emphasis on private property as a comparable feature of Manus and American societies, however different they were in scale and complexity. Margaret Mead, Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education (New York, 1975), 173. 32. Ruth Benedict, “Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest,” Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Congress of Americanists (New York, 1928), 572– 81. 33. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston, 1934), 249. 34. Ibid., 232, 248. 35. Banner, Intertwined Lives, 415, 423 –26. 36. Benedict, Patterns, 277–78. 37. Ibid., 223; Regna Darnell, “Personality and Culture: The Fate of the Sapirian Alternative,” in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (Madison, 1986), 156 –83; Edward Sapir, The Psychology of Culture: A Course of Lectures, ed. Judith T. Levine (Berlin, 1994). 38. Benedict, Patterns, 229– 30. 39. Ibid., 274, emphasis added. 40. Redfield, cited in Stocking, “Ideas and Institutions,” 5, 23; Robert Redfield, introduction to Social Anthropology of North American Tribes, ed. Fred Eggan (Chicago, 1955 [1937]), xii. 41. Darnell, Edward Sapir, 237. 42. On Mead’s motives in seeking functionalist allies, see Banner, Intertwined Lives, 257. 43. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (New York, 1961), 511. 44. Ibid., 25. 45. Ibid., 10n, 11. 46. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (New York, 1964 [1922],)vii–x. 47. Malinowski, Argonauts, 110, 83. 48. Ibid., 58– 60. 49. Ibid., 61–62, 62n, 97, 167n. 50. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls, foreword by Mary Douglas (New York, 1990), 99n18. Though Mauss’s 1925 book Essai sur le don was not available in this English translation until 1954, American anthropologists were likely aware of his work. He and Boas were in touch, and in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York, 1935) Mead refers to “the gift relation” as a formal type of exchange. 51. Mauss, Gift, 21–25. 52. Douglas, foreword to ibid., viii. 53. Mauss, Gift, 69, 75 –76. 54. Marquis Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way (New Haven, 1936). 55. Mauss, Gift, 67, 65, 78. 56. Argonauts, 175 –76, 510 –13. 57. George W. Stocking Jr., “Radcliffe-Brown and British Social Anthropology,” in Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology, ed. Stocking (Madison, 1984), 157, 169. 58. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (New York, 1952), 186 – 87; Meyer Fortes, preface to Social Structure: Studies Presented to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ed. Fortes (Oxford, 1949), vi; Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York, 1972), 290. 59. George W. Stocking Jr., “Dr. Durkheim and Mr. Brown: Comparative Sociology at Cambridge in 1910,” in Functionalism Historicized, ed. Stocking, 119 –20. 60. Ibid., 120. 61. Stocking, “Radcliffe-Brown and British Social Anthropology,” 166. 62. Radcliffe-Brown on gift relations, quoted in Mauss, Gift, 19.

Notes to Pages 103–110 / 289 63. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function, 2, 4. 64. Ibid., 180– 81. 65. Stocking, “Radcliffe-Brown and British Social Anthropology,” 173–75. 66. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function, 183. 67. Radcliffe-Brown [hereafter R-B] to MM, 4 October 1935, Mead papers, B15. 68. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function, 183n. 69. John H. Provinse, “The Underlying Sanctions of Plains Indian Culture,” in Social Anthropology of North American Indian Tribes, ed. Fred Eggan (Chicago, 1937), 341–76 (esp. 355 – 59 on “shame”). For a review of the social science literature from the 1930s to the 1950s regarding the distinctions of “shame” and “guilt,” see Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York, 1958), 20 –26, 261– 64. 70. Darnell, Edward Sapir, 249–50. 71. Ogburn to MM, 16 November 1932, Mead papers, box C4. 72. MM to John Dollard [hereafter JD], 3 December 1934, Mead papers, box C2. 73. Mead, Blackberry Winter, 155 – 80. 74. R-B to MM, 1 January 1929 [likely 1930], MM to R-B, 8 February 1930, Mead papers, B15; Mead, Blackberry Winter, 193. 75. Mead, “Radcliffe-Brown’s Point of View as I See It,” Mead papers, B15. 76. MM to R-B, 20 May 1935, Mead papers, box I12; R-B to MM, n.d.; MM to R-B, 1 July 1935; R-B to MM, 4 October 1935; MM to R-B, 29 October 1935; R-B to MM, 1 November 1935, all Mead papers, box B15. 77. Darnell, Edward Sapir, 334– 35. 78. MM to Scudder Mekeel, 31 March 1935, Mead papers, box I9; see Darnell, Edward Sapir, 299– 308. 79. Cf. Mead, Sex and Temperament, 15 – 30. 80. Margaret Mead, ed., Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples (Boston, 1961), 15, 461–63, 481–82. 81. Ibid., 481–82. 82. Ibid., 480. 83. Ibid., 496, 480. 84. Ibid., 37– 50; Mead, Sex and Temperament, 164; also, letter MM to Fromm, 28 March 1937, on lack of innovation among the cooperative Balinese, cited by Gerald Sullivan, “Of Feys and Culture Planners: Margaret Mead’s Balinese and Purposive Activity,” in Banner and Janiewski, eds., Reading Benedict/Reading Mead. 85. Mead, “Introductory Statement,” for Hanover Seminar, 1934, Mead papers, box F31. 86. Malcolm Cowley, “News from New Guinea,” New Republic, 5 June 1935, 107. 87. MM to Robert S. Hale, 25 August 1937, Mead papers, box I11. 88. According to Mead, “personality” flourished in cooperative Arapesh or Tchambouli societies, permitting a wide “range of individuality,” Mead, Sex and Temperament, 142. 89. Mead, Cooperation and Competition, 525. 90. Susan Quinn, A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney (Reading, Mass., 1988), 245, 249 –50, 273, 277; Jack L. Rubins, Karen Horney: Gentle Rebel of Psychoanalysis (New York, 1978); Bernard J. Paris, Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-Understanding (New Haven, 1994), 99. 91. Quinn, Mind, 269 –70, 278; Daniel Burston, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 15 –18, 23; Paris, Karen Horney, 101. 92. MM to Ogburn, 3 December 1934; MM to Ogburn, 1 July 1935, Mead papers, box C4. 93. Steven Weiland, “Life History, Psychoanalysis, and Social Science: The Example of John Dollard,” South Atlantic Quarterly 86 (Summer 1987): 273; MM to JD, 15 February 1934; JD to MM, 9 May 1934; JD to MM, 30 January 1935, Mead papers, box C2. 94. Rubins, Karen Horney, 167; Dollard to MM, 14 January 1935; MM to JD, 21 January 1935; MM to JD, 11 February 1935; JD to MM, 28 March 1935, Mead papers, box C2. 95. MM to JD, 20 June 1935, Mead papers, box C2; Caffrey, Stranger, 249. 96. Rubins, Karen Horney, 219; Paris, Karen Horney, 101; Quinn, Mind, 308; Caffrey, Stranger, 251.

290 / Notes to Pages 110–122 97. MM to JD, 20 June 1935; see also Caffrey, Stranger, 248 – 49; JD to MM, 2 May 1935; JD to MM, 22 June 1935; MM to Ogburn, 1 July 1935; MM to JD, 3 September 1935; JD to MM, 10 September 1935; JD to MM, 27 September 1935; MM to JD, 30 September 1935. Caffrey, Stranger, 250–51; JD to MM, 7 June 1937, Mead papers, box C2. 98. Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York, 1937), 33, emphasis added. 99. Ibid., vii, 34, 83, 84n, 62– 63, 159, 22–23. 100. Ibid., 22–23, 41, 84n, 71, 89, 101, 227. 101. Ibid., 59, 33 –34, vii, 20n, 188. 102. Ibid., 192 (emphasis added), 286, 290, 278 –79, 284 –85. For a recent example of a Benedict-Horney critique of achievement ethics and competitive norms, see Andrew Hacker, “Patriot Games,” New York Review of Books, 24 June 2004, 31. 103. John Dollard, Criteria for the Life History (New Haven, 1935), quoted in Weiland, “Life History, Psychoanalysis, and Social Science,” 274. 104. John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 58 – 59, 72– 79, 440 –43. 105. Du Bois’s appreciation appeared in “Southern Trauma,” North Georgia Review (1937– 38): 9 –10, cited in Jay Garcia, “Lillian Smith, Psychoanalysis, and the Culture of the Color Line,” unpublished manuscript (2005), in author’s possession. Kenneth Stampp, “The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery,” American Historical Review 57 (April 1952): 613 –24; Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993). Cf. Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (October 2001): 3 – 32. 106. Dollard, Caste and Class, 438. 107. Clyde Kluckhohn, “Ralph Linton,” Biographical Memoirs (Washington, D.C., 1958), 245. 108. Fred Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology (Montreal, 1977), 131; Ralph Linton, The Study of Man: An Introduction (New York, 1936), 73; Linton and Wagley, Ralph Linton, 73. 109. Linton, Study of Man, 3, 490. 110. Ibid., 3, 155, 304. 111. Ibid., 56, 51–52, 58. 112. Ibid., vii, 105– 6, 207, 358, 364, 420, 172. 113. Ibid., 401, 114–15, 108 – 9. 114. Ibid., 131. 115. On the association of the “closed frontier” and liberal theories of a “mature economy” in the 1930s, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995), 131–35. 116. Linton, Study of Man, 142–45. 117. Ibid., 286, 111, 230. 118. On the Agrarians, see Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001). 119. Ibid., 230, 287, 252.

4. talcott parsons and the evanescence of capitalism 1. John S. Gilkeson, “The Domestication of ‘Culture’ in Interwar America, 1919 –1941,” in The Estate of Social Knowledge, ed. JoAnne Brown and David K. van Keuren (Baltimore, 1991), 153 –75; Gilkeson, “American Social Scientists and the Domestication of ‘Class,’ 1929 –1955,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 31 (October 1995): 331–45; Richard Wightman Fox, “Epitaph for Middletown: Robert S. Lynd and the Analysis of Consumer Culture,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880 –1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York, 1983); Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor, 1993); Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York, 1958). 2. Parsons’s translation of Weber’s German has often been faulted, most notably by

Notes to Pages 122–125 / 291 Stephen Kalberg, who corrects Parsons’s famous idiom of “iron cage” to “steel-hard casing” (stahlhartes Gehäuse). See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles, 2002), 123 –24. Although perhaps more accurate, Kalberg’s translation of the phrase loses the implicit allusion in Parsons’s translation to the “Iron Cage of Despair” that figured in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, an allusion that combined Americans’ critiques of “puritanism” and of conformist restraint in the 1920s. See John O. King III, The Iron of Melancholy: Structures of Spiritual Conversion in America from the Puritan Conscience to Victorian Neurosis (Middletown, Conn., 1983), 3, 11, 37. 3. The most noted assaults on Parsons’s conservatism are C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford, 1959), and Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York, 1970). 4. Fred Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (Montreal, 1977); Andrew Abbott, Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (Chicago, 1999); Robert C. Bannister, Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880 –1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987). 5. Talcott Parsons, “Notes on Research in the Social Sciences,” n.d., Parsons papers, Harvard University Archives [hereafter “PP”], section 15.70 (“Manuscripts and typescripts, notes, etc.”), box 2. 6. Thomas Le Duc, Piety and Intellect at Amherst College, 1865 –1912 (New York, 1969), 2, 13 –21, 27–28, 34, 94 – 98, 109, 141–45. On the moral definition of Anglo-American liberal Christianity, see James Turner, Without God, without Creed (Baltimore, 1985), 82– 96; Edward S. Parsons, The Social Message of Jesus: A Course of Twelve Lessons (New York: National Board of the YWCA, 1912). 7. Martin U. Martel, “Talcott Parsons,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 18, ed. David Sills (New York, 1979), 609 – 30. Amherst College Biographical Record: Centennial Edition, 1821–1921 (Amherst College, 1927); The Decennial Record of the Class of Eighty-Three: Amherst College 1883 –1893 (New York, 1893); National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 33 (New York, 1947). Author’s interview with Charles D. Parsons, New York, 23 November 1987; author’s interview with Helen W. Parsons, Somerville, Mass., 15 October 1987. 8. LeDuc, Piety and Intellect; David O. Levine, The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915–1940 (Ithaca, 1986), 54, 128. 9. Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education (Pasadena, Calif., 1923), 432. 10. Cynthia Stokes Brown, ed., Alexander Meiklejohn: Teacher of Freedom (Berkeley, 1981), 1– 56; Ross Terrill, R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 56 –57; Max Horn, The Intercollegiate Socialist Society, 1905 –1921: Origins of the Modern American Student Movement (Boulder, Colo., 1979), 67. On Amherst faculty, see The Olio 1924, and Amherst Student, 17 January 1921, 21 September 1922. 11. Amherst Student, 4 October 1920, 1; The Olio 1924. 12. Charles Camic, “Introduction: Talcott Parsons before The Structure of Social Action,” in Talcott Parsons, The Early Essays, ed. Camic (Chicago, 1991), xiii. 13. Richard M. Jones and Barbara Leigh Smith, eds., Against the Current: Reform and Experimentation in Higher Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 326, 337– 39; Claude M. Fuess, Stanley King of Amherst (New York, 1955), 127–28, 136, 139, 141– 42, 144 – 46; Addison T. Cutler and Talcott Parsons, “A Word from Amherst Students,” New Student (20 October 1923), 6 –7; “Controversy over President Meiklejohn Over-Aired,” Amherst Student, 16 June 1923. 14. George P. Rawick, introduction to New Student (Westport, Conn., 1970). See founding statement of the National Student Federation, New Student, 19 April 1922, 2; reports on workers’ education, New Student, 3 March 1922, 7 June 1922, 20 October 1923; on industrial jobs, New Student, 5 May 1923, 2 June 1923; on students and labor, New Student, 6 October 1923, 17 November 1923, 5 January 1924, and esp. Paul Blanshard (Student League for Industrial Democracy), “Facing toward Labor,” vs. J. E. Ozanne, “Labor’s Tyranny over Thinkers,” New Student, 19 January 1924; on the role of big business in higher education, The Student Conference at Hartsdale, N.Y., December 26 –29, 1922, supplement to New Student, 13 January 1923. See also Barnard Bulletin, 1 December 1922, Margaret Mead papers, Library of Congress, container A16.

292 / Notes to Pages 125–131 15. Letter, Talcott Parsons [hereafter TP] to Harry Laidler, 8 September 1958, Harry Laidler papers, Tamiment Library, New York University; “Student Economists—An Adventure in ‘Workers Education,’” New Student, 15 March 1924, 3; Talcott Parsons, “Clarence Ayres’s Economics and Sociology,” in Science and Ceremony: The Institutional Economics of C. E. Ayres, ed. William Breit and William Patton Culbertson Jr. (Austin, Texas, 1976), 176. 16. Cutler and Parsons, “Word from Amherst Students,” 6. 17. Letter, John M Gaus to TP, 21 June 1924, PP, section 42.8.2, box 2. 18. Letter, Helen McGregor to TP, 16 January 1930, PP, section 42.8.2, box 2 (“Miscellaneous correspondence, 1925 –29”). 19. F. M. Godfrey, “The Salin Festschrift,” Contemporary Review, November 1962, 250 – 51. 20. Talcott Parsons, “‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber,” Journal of Political Economy 36 (December 1928): 652– 53, 658 – 59 [reprinted in Camic, ed., Talcott Parsons, 3–36]. 21. Ibid., 653, emphasis added. 22. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). 23. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (New York, 1968), 43 –125. 24. Ibid., 424, 399, 254 – 55, 168. 25. Ibid., 99–100, 102, 114, 120 –22, 165 – 67. 26. Talcott Parsons, “Pareto and the Problems of Positivistic Sociology,” PP, II–III–35; Parsons, Structure, 4. 27. Tugwell, “The Condition of an Agricultural Policy,” address to League for Industrial Democracy luncheon, “Rural America in Distress—Is There a Way Out for the Farmer?” New York City, 30 January 1932, typescript, Tugwell papers, 4. 28. Talcott Parsons, “Service,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 13 (1933), 672–74. 29. Talcott Parsons, “H. M. Robertson on Max Weber and His School,” Journal of Political Economy 43 (October 1935): 688– 96. 30. Talcott Parsons, “Outline of a Study on the Sociological Background of Alfred Marshall’s Economic Theory” and “Marshall and Laissez-Faire: A Sociological Study” (typescript), PP, section 42.45.4, box 11, pp. 1–6. Talcott Parsons, “On Certain Sociological Elements in Professor Taussig’s Thought,” in Explorations in Economics: Notes and Essays Contributed in Honor of F. W. Taussig, ed. Jacob Viner (New York, 1936), 363 – 64. Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism, ed. F. A. Hayek (London, 1935). 31. Cf. Talcott Parsons, review of Economics and Sociology by Adolf Lowe, American Journal of Sociology 42 (1937): 477. 32. Talcott Parsons, “Thrift,” in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 14 (1934), 623 –26, and Parsons, “Outline of a Study on the Sociological Background of Alfred Marshall’s Economic Theory.” 33. Parsons, “On Certain Sociological Elements in Professor Taussig’s Thought,” 377–78, emphasis added. 34. Talcott Parsons, “Some Reflections on ‘The Nature and Significance of Economics,’” Quarterly Journal of Economics 48 (1934): 540. 35. The key statement of “market socialist” principles, Oskar Lange’s “On the Economic Theory of Socialism,” a direct response to Collectivist Economic Planning, appeared in Review of Economic Studies 4 (1936 –37). Lange’s essay was reprinted in Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism, ed. Benjamin E. Lippincott (Minneapolis, 1938). See also H. D. Dickinson, “Price Formation in a Socialist Community,” Economic Journal 43 (June 1933); A. P. Lerner: “Economic Theory and Socialist Economy,” Review of Economic Studies 2 (October 1934); “A Note on Socialist Economics,” Review of Economic Studies 4 (October 1936); and “Statics and Dynamics in Socialist Economics,” Economic Journal 47 (June 1937). 36. Parsons, “Outline of a Study on the Sociological Background of Alfred Marshall’s Economic Theory” and “Marshall and Laissez-Faire: A Sociological Study.” 37. Talcott Parsons, “Revisiting the Classics throughout a Long Career,” 183 – 94, in The Future of the Sociological Classics, ed. Buford Rhea (Boston, 1981), and Talcott Parsons, “A Short Account of My Intellectual Development,” Alpha Kappa Deltan 29 (1959): 1–12.

Notes to Pages 131–138 / 293 38. Talcott Parsons, “Prolegomena to a Theory of Social Institutions,” PP, section 42.41, box 1 (“miscellaneous manuscripts, 1929 – 33”). Published in American Sociological Review 55 (June 1990): 319 –33. 39. Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work (Stanford, 1985), 16 –24, and Jeffrey C. Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, vol. 2: The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim (Berkeley, 1982), 75 –160, 211– 96. 40. Talcott Parsons, “Sketch of a proposed study of the informal functioning of social institutions as an agency of control over the individual interests and activities of members of the medical profession,” n.d., PP, section 15.75, box 3. Parsons began the study in the fall of 1934, according to a letter, TP to Sorokin, 4 October 1935, PP, section 42.8.2, box 2. 41. Talcott Parsons, “The Professions and Social Structure,” Social Forces 17 (1939): 457–67. 42. Thomas Haskell, “Professionalism versus Capitalism: R. H. Tawney, Emile Durkheim, and C. S. Peirce on the Disinterestedness of Professional Communities,” The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory, ed. Haskell, 180 –225 (Bloomington, Ind., 1984). Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, 1977), 53 – 63, cites the “antimarket and anti-capitalist components” of professional organization, with reference to Karl Polanyi’s notion of the “counter-movement” of social protections checking the expansion of market relations. 43. Cf. Lewis Corey, The Crisis of the Middle Class (New York, 1935). 44. Lewis Corey, The Unfinished Task: Economic Reconstruction for Democracy (New York, 1942). 45. Lewis Corey, “Program for a New Party?” Antioch Review 4 (Fall 1944): 465 –69. 46. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, vol. 4: The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons (Berkeley, 1983), 133, 195, 389. Charles Parsons defined his father politically as a kind of New Dealer with social-democratic leanings, who continued after World War II to express his admiration for the British Labor Party government of 1945 – 51 and for Swedish social democracy. Author’s interview with Charles Parsons. 47. Letter, TP to William Pinkerton, 30 June 1941, PP, section 15.2, box 15. 48. Talcott Parsons, typescript reviews, n.d., of What It Means to Be a Doctor by Dwight Anderson (1939) and American Medicine Mobilizes by James Rorty (1939), in PP, section 42.41, box 2. 49. Talcott Parsons, “Remarks on Education and the Professions,” International Journal of Ethics 47 (1937): 365 – 69. 50. Parsons, Structure, 445 – 50. 51. Parsons, “Some Reflections on ‘The Nature and Significance of Economics,’” 528, 543; Parsons, “On Certain Sociological Elements in Professor Taussig’s Thought,” 366 – 68; Parsons, “Sociological Elements in Economic Thought,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 49 (1935): 430; Parsons, Structure, 109. 52. In the early 1930s, Parsons defined his viewpoint as “that of getting at the development of society and social life as a whole—particularly the relation of the ‘social,’ economic, political, etc. to religion, philosophy, science.” Notes, n.d., PP, section 42.41, box 1, folder “Miscellaneous MS, 1929–1933.” See also Parsons, Structure, 757–75; J. T. Dunlop, M. P. Gilmore, C. K. Kluckhohn, Talcott Parsons, and O. H. Taylor, “Toward a Common Language for the Area of Social Science,” PP, section 42.62, box 2, folder “Course Material Misc 1947.” 53. Parsons cited Karen Horney, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York, 1939), as an example of this welcome revision. 54. Talcott Parsons, “Actor, Situation, and Normative Pattern,” PP, section 42.45.4, box 1, 132, 139 – 40. 55. Talcott Parsons, “The Motivation of Economic Activities,” in Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, rev. ed. (New York, 1954), 50 – 68. Parsons credited Elton Mayo with coining the phrase “the acquisitiveness of a sick society,” in contrast to R. H. Tawney’s critique of “the sickness of the acquisitive society” in The Acquisitive Society (New York, 1920). Parson, “Motivation,” 67n. 56. Parsons, “A Short Account of My Intellectual Development,” 9. 57. Dwight Anderson, The Other Side of the Bottle (New York, 1950); Merrill Moore, A Miscellany: First Series, I–X (Boston, 1939).

294 / Notes to Pages 138–142 58. TP to Dr. Abraham Myerson, 8 March 1941, in PP, section 15.2, box 15; obituary, “Dr. Charles Parsons, Ex-Aide of Grenfell,” New York Times, 1 January 1941, 23; Amherst College Biographical Record, Centennial Edition 1821–1921 (Amherst, 1927). 59. TP to P. A. Sorokin, 24 February 1941, PP, section 15.2, box 1, folder, “Alcoholism”; “Actor, Situation, Normative Pattern,” section III–B, 58 – 60. 60. Letters, TP to Ralph Linton, 11 July 1941, PP, 15.2, box 13, “L 1941”; TP to Merrill Moore, 30 July 1941, 26 November 1941, and 7 March 1942; Moore to TP, 4 December 1941 and 31 March 1942, in PP, section 15.2, box 1, folder “Alcoholism”; TP to G. Devereux, 9 July 1942, PP, section 15.2, box 16, folder “Professional Colleagues.” 61. Parsons signed a petition for lifting the U.S. arms embargo on the Spanish Republic, reported in the Daily Worker, 4 February 1939. The episode was cited years later in spurious government charges of disloyalty laid against him in 1953. See Parsons’s response in “Loyalty Investigation Papers,” PP, section 42.8.4, box 2. See Uta Gerhardt, ed., Talcott Parsons on National Socialism (New York, 1993), 13. 62. In 1942, Frank Kingdon was president of the social-democratic Union for Democratic Action (UDA), forerunner of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Mark Kleinman, A World of Hope, A World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism (Columbus, Ohio, 2000). 63. Richard W. Steele, “Preparing the Public for War: Efforts to Establish a National Propaganda Agency, 1940 –1941,” American Historical Review 75 (1970): 1640 – 53. Other prominent “morale” advocates included Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and the activist playwright Robert Sherwood. See The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes: The Lowering Clouds, 1939 – 1941 (New York, 1954), 426, 444 – 45, 484, and Allen M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda (New Haven, 1978), 27–28. See also Goodwin Watson, ed., Civilian Morale (New York, 1942), a compilation of social science work sponsored by the reform-minded Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, especially articles by Otto Klineberg and Kenneth B. Clark emphasizing national inclusion of scorned or oppressed minorities. 64. Peter H. Odegard and Alan Barth, “Millions for Defense,” Public Opinion Quarterly 5 (1941): 399 –411, quoted in Steele, “Preparing the Public for War,” 1643. On the Harvard Left, see John Lydenberg, ed., A Symposium on Political Activism and the Academic Conscience: The Harvard Experience, 1936 –1941 (Geneva, 1975); Granville Hicks, Part of the Truth (New York, 1965), 154 –96; and Frederick C. Stern, F. O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 17. 65. Carl J. Friedrich and Ellsworth Bunker, “American Committee of Correspondence on Defense Policy, in Cooperation with the Council for Democracy,” PP, section 15.2, box 7, “General Correspondence”; Gardner Murphy, “Essentials for a Civilian Morale Program in American Democracy,” in Watson, ed. Civilian Morale, 427. 66. Steele, “Preparing the Public for War,” 1640 – 41. Cf. view of the Versailles treaty as “highly egoistic,” letter, Adolf Berle to Henry Cabot Lodge, 14 September 1920, Berle papers, FDR Library. 67. Cf. the distinction of “positive” and “negative” liberty in Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford, 1959). 68. Talcott Parsons, “The Development of Groups and Organizations Amenable to Use against American Institutions and Foreign Policy and Possible Measures of Prevention,” reprinted in Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons on National Socialism, 120 (emphasis added), 114, 110. 69. Ibid., 103– 4; Parsons, “Actor, Situation, and Normative Pattern,” 93 – 94. 70. “Toward a Common Language for the Area of Social Science” (1940), 9. 71. Parsons, “Development of Groups and Organizations,” 112. 72. Ibid., 122–23. 73. Winkler, Politics of Propaganda, 1–5; Carleton Mabee, “Margaret Mead and Behavioral Scientists in World War II: Problems in Responsibility, Truth, and Effectiveness,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 23 (1987): 7. 74. Talcott Parsons, “Propaganda and Social Control” (1942), in Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, 155, 156, 159.

Notes to Pages 142–150 / 295 75. William Buxton, Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State: Political Sociology as a Strategic Vocation (Toronto, 1985), 104 –8. 76. Talcott Parsons, “Sociological Reflections on the United States in Relation to the European War,” PP, section 42.41, box 2. 77. Foucault, quoted in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York, 1993), 102. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977); Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980). 78. This view was suggested to me by Eli Zaretsky. 79. TP to Sullivan, 1 October 1942, PP, section 15.2, box 17, folder “Publications.” 80. TP, notes, n.d., PP, section 42.45.4, box 1, folder “Social Structure and Ideology: Materials 1943.” 81. Benton Johnson and Miriam Johnson, “The Integrating of the Social Sciences,” in The Nationalization of the Social Sciences, ed. Samuel Z. Klausner and Victor M. Lidz (Philadelphia, 1986); Talcott Parsons, “Graduate Training in Social Relations at Harvard,” Journal of General Education 5 (January 1951): 149 –57; William Buxton, “Wartime Origins of the Department of Social Relations,” lecture at Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 11 February 1988. 82. Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences; Cora Du Bois, quoted in Barry Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 24, 26, 159, 163, 198. 83. From such a national focus emerged postwar area studies programs, including American Studies. Philip Gleason, “World War II and the Development of American Studies,” American Quarterly, 36, no. 3 (1984): 343 – 58; Gene Wise, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1979): 293 –337. 84. Lukes, Emile Durkheim, 16 –24. 85. Letters, TP to Frank Hopkins, 2 March 1941, PP, section 15.2, box 11, and TP to A. J. R. Fraser-Taylor, 8 April 1941, PP, section 15.2, box 22; TP, review of Faith for Living by Lewis Mumford (unpublished), n.d., PP; author’s interview with Ai-li and Robert Chin, 9 June 1988, Boston. 86. On Parsons’s use of W. I. Thomas, see Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, and Edward A. Shils, Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Glencoe, Ill., 1953), 44. 87. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill., 1951), 3–112, 201– 325. 88. Ibid., 232. 89. See Talcott Parsons, “Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States,” in Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, 89 –103. 90. Parsons, Social System, 187, 268 –69, 510. 91. Talcott Parsons, “Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World,” in Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory (Glencoe, Ill., 1954), 298 –322. Howard Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism (Madison, 1986), 101–2, 143 –46. 92. Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York, 1986), 333 – 34. 93. Talcott Parsons, Statement, 23 February 1954, in “Loyalty Investigation Papers,” Parson’s papers, section 42.8.4, box 2; Renee C. Fox, “Talcott Parsons, My Teacher,” American Scholar 66 (Summer 1997): 395 – 410. 94. Talcott Parsons, “On Building Social System Theory,” Daedalus 99 (Fall 1970): 837. 95. Social System, 548. 96. Ibid., vii–viii, 42– 43, 548. 97. Ibid., 178, 194n, 297; Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, 259; Talcott Parsons and Neil Smelser, Economy and Society (New York, 1956), 55. 98. Parsons, Social System, 404, 426, 436 – 37, 512, 531, 549. 99. Parsons, “Propaganda and Social Control,” 171, 172n. 100. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995); Alan Wolfe, America’s Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth (New York, 1981).

296 / Notes to Pages 150–159 101. Daniel Bell, “The Breakup of Family Capitalism,” in The End of Ideology (New York, 1962), 39 –45.

5. the displacement of economy in an age of plenty 1. John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941–1960 (New York, 1988). A reading of the 1950s as regressive and conformist appears, for example, in Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988). 2. Recent scholarship on the history of U.S. society and culture has increasingly recognized the 1940s and 1950s less as a breach than as a “bridge” between the early and later twentieth century. See Joanne Meyerowitz, introduction to Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Meyerowitz (Philadelphia, 1994), 11. 3. Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York, 1989), 11–12. 4. On “decommodification,” see Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990), 21–23; Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 30. 5. See Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in TwentiethCentury America (Princeton, 2001), 101. See also Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor, 1993), 232–33. 6. Adam Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor: A Biography (London, 1994), 137, 139, 170, 187; Hugh Thomas, Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945 –1946 (New York, 1986), 319 –20; Raphael Abramovitch, “Can the Choice Be Evaded?” Modern Review 1 (December 1947): 772– 74. 7. See David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Secret of These New Times (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995). 8. On his understanding of the current crisis, see Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London, 1940), 3– 35; Kettler and Meja, Karl Mannheim, 149 – 51, 168. 9. Kettler and Meja, Karl Mannheim, 158, 193 –246; Daniel Schaefer Geary, “The Power and the Intellect: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Science” (PhD diss., University of California–Berkeley, 2004), 1– 46. 10. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (London, 1944); Fred Block, “Karl Polanyi and the Writing of The Great Transformation,” Theory and Society 32 (June 2003): 275 – 306; Michael Burawoy, “For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi,” Politics and Society 31 (June 2003): 193 –261. 11. George Dalton, “Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Karl Polanyi’s Contribution to Economic Anthropology and Comparative Economy,” in Essays in Economic Anthropology: Dedicated to the Memory of Karl Polanyi, ed. June Helm, Paul Bohannan, and Marshall D. Sahlins (Seattle, 1965), 7. 12. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996), 84, 93, 140. 13. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, with a new introduction by Tom Bottomore (New York, 1976), 3 – 4, 61– 63. 14. Ibid., 73, 137– 38, 142. 15. Ibid., 84, 127, 142, 139, 5, 159, 162, 163n. 16. Daniel Bell, in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 84. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, 1944). 17. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (New York, 1941); John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York, 1975). 18. Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 200 –225; Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (Oxford, 1947). Gregory D. Sumner, Dwight MacDonald and the politics Circle: The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy (Ithaca, 1996). On late-1940s intellectual radicalism as a predecessor to the New Left of

Notes to Pages 159–164 / 297 the 1960s, see Penina Migdal Glaser, “A Decade of Transition: A Study of Radical Journals of the 1940s” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1970). 19. Paul Sering [Richard Löwenthal], Jenseits des Kapitalismus [Beyond Capitalism: A Contribution to the New Socialist Orientation] (Nuremberg, 1946), 203: “The image that we have outlined is the image of the birth of a new social order from the decline of the old” (my translation). Karl Renner, Wandlungen der modernen Gesellschaft: zwei Abhandlungen über die Probleme der Nachkriegszeit (Vienna, 1953). Peter Baker, The Silent Revolution (London, 1946); E. H. Carr, The New Society (London, 1951). 20. Sassoon, One Hundred Years, 112, 190 – 91, 245, 247. 21. C. A. R. Crosland, “The Transition from Capitalism,” New Fabian Essays, ed. R. H. S. Crossman (New York, 1952), 33 – 68; C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1964). 22. Cf. Sassoon, One Hundred Years, 242– 43. 23. Crosland, “Transition from Capitalism,” 35, 37, 42, 39, 44. 24. Ibid., 43– 44, 57–59. 25. Crosland, Future, 346 –51. 26. Crosland, “Transition from Capitalism,” 65 – 67. 27. Crosland, Future, 354 –55. 28. Ibid., 347; Sassoon, One Hundred Years, 245. 29. Crosland, Future, 361. 30. Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, 1959), 261. 31. Ibid., 245, 277, 237–40. 32. Ibid., 301, 309, 292; David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker: A Study in Class Consciousness (London, 1958), quoted in Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict, 298. 33. “Interview with Daniel Bell, May 1972,” in Job Leonard Dittberner, The End of Ideology and American Social Thought, 1930 –1960 (Ann Arbor, 1979), 326 –27. 34. The phrase grew out of Dwight Macdonald’s 1952 article, “I Choose the West,” reprinted in Macdonald, Politics Past: Essays in Political Criticism (New York, 1957), 197–200. 35. Bell to Howard Brick, personal correspondence, 11 June 2001. On the impact of union legitimacy on the formation of an expansive welfare state, see Seymour Martin Lipset, “Europe: The Politics of Collective Bargaining,” in Decline of Ideology? ed. Mostafa Rejai (New York, 1971); on the breakup of a wealth-power-status unity held by a bourgeois class, see Daniel Bell, “Has America a Ruling Class?” Commentary (December 1949): 603 –7; Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Class, Status, and Power: A Reader in Social Stratification (Glencoe, Ill., 1953). Research on new middle classes first gained ground in the interwar years, particularly among social-democratic and left-wing writers. Emil Lederer and Jacob Marschak’s “Der neue Mittelstand,” Grundriss der Sozialökonomik 9 (1926), was one of the early German studies translated into English under WPA auspices (The New Middle Class, WPA Project No. 165 – 97– 6999 – 6027, New York, 1937). An early U.S. study, also on the left, was Lewis Corey’s Crisis of the Middle Class (New York, 1935). All of these works fed into the material cited by C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford, 1951), and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, 1950). 36. Albert Camus, “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” politics (July–August 1947): 141– 47; Arthur Koestler, “The Outgrown Dilemma,” in his The Trail of the Dinosaur and Other Essays (New York, 1955), 186 – 95; H. Stuart Hughes, “The End of Political Ideology,” Measure 2 (Spring 1951): 146 – 58; Otto Kirchheimer, “Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 264 – 89, and “The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes,” Social Research 24 (1957): 127– 56; Michael Polanyi, “On Liberalism and Liberty,” Encounter 4 (March 1955): 29 – 34; Edward Shils, “The End of Ideology,” Encounter 5 (November 1955): 52– 58; Raymond Aron, “The End of the Ideological Age?” in The Opium of the Intellectuals, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York, 1962), 305 –24; Seymour Martin Lipset, “The State of Democratic Politics,” Canadian Forum 55 (November 1955): 170 – 71; Lipset, “The End of Ideology?” in Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York, 1960); Lipset, “Ideology and No End: The Controversy till Now,” Encounter 39 (December 1972): 17–22; Lipset, “The End of Ideology and the Ideology of the Intellectuals,” in Culture and Its Creators: Essays in Honor of Edward Shils, ed. Joseph Ben-David and Terry Nichols Clark

298 / Notes to Pages 164–170 (Chicago, 1977), 15 –42. Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy; Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York, 2000). 37. Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton, 1967), 193. 38. Yuval P. Yonay, The Struggle over the Soul of Economics: Institutionalist and Neoclassical Economists in America between the Wars (Princeton, 1998), 195; W. W. Rostow, Theorists of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present: With a Perspective on the Next Century (New York, 1990), 331; Ira Katznelson, “A Lost Opportunity?” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, 1989); Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, 2001); Bernstein, Perilous Progress, 88; S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, 2003). 39. John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago, 1993). 40. The phrase “bastard Keynesianism” was Joan Robinson’s: Marjorie S. Turner, Joan Robinson, and the Americans (Armonk, N.Y., 1989), 100 –101. 41. John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York, 1964), 373; Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929 –1964 (New York, 1981), 8. 42. Keynes, General Theory, 376, 378. 43. Ibid., 379, 381. 44. John Strachey, Contemporary Capitalism (London, 1956), 214. 45. Ibid., 253, 233, 277. 46. Collins, Business Response to Keynes, 111. 47. Lynn Turgeon, Bastard Keynesianism: The Evolution of Economic Thinking and Policymaking since World War II (Westport, Conn., 1996), viii. 48. Collins, Business Response to Keynes, 11, 51. 49. Theodore Rosenof, Economics in the Long Run: New Deal Theorists and Their Legacies, 1933 –1993 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 61. Outside the policy arena, economists in the United States outlined a left-wing Keynesianism in Abba Lerner’s Economics of Control: Principles of Welfare Economics (New York, 1944) and Lawrence R. Klein’s The Keynesian Revolution (New York, 1947), the latter deemed “socialist” by some in the discipline. Bernstein, Perilous Progress, 106. 50. Collins, Business Response to Keynes, 53 –172. 51. Robert Lekachman, The Age of Keynes (New York, 1966), 287. 52. Paul A. Samuelson, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, 3rd ed. (New York, 1955), 212. 53. Olivier Jean Blanchard, “Neoclassical Synthesis,” New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics (London, 1998), vol. 3, 634– 36. 54. Harrod, “An Essay in Dynamic Theory,” Economic Journal 49 (March 1939): 14 – 33; F. H. Hahn and R. C. O. Matthews, “The Theory of Economic Growth: A Survey,” Economic Journal 74 (December 1964): 779 – 902; Walter Eltis, “Harrod-Domar Growth Model,” New Palgrave, vol. 2, 604. 55. Clark, National Income and Outlay (London, 1938), 272; Rostow, Theorists of Economic Growth, 212–21. 56. Rostow, Theorists of Economic Growth, 334. See Samuelson, Economics, 212. 57. Kenneth J. Arrow, “A Cautious Case for Socialism” (1978), in Irving Howe, ed., Beyond the Welfare State (New York, 1982), 265, 268. 58. Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Justice: Collected Papers of Kenneth J. Arrow, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), vii. 59. E. J. Mishan, “A Survey of Welfare Economics, 1939 – 59,” Economic Journal 70 (June 1960): 201, 218. 60. “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare,” Journal of Political Economy 58 (1950): 328 –46, reprinted in Social Choice and Justice, 1–29; Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York, 1951). 61. Cf. Hugh Stretton and Lionel Orchard, Public Goods, Public Enterprise, Public Choice (New York, 1994), 52, 48. 62. Arrow, “Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare,” 25.

Notes to Pages 171–179 / 299 63. Robert A. Dahl, “Socialist Programs and Democratic Politics: An Analysis” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1940). 64. Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom, Politics, Economics, and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes (New Haven, 1953), 4– 5, 16. 65. Ibid., 25–54. 66. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson, eds., Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe, Ill., 1957); Karl Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies, ed. George Dalton (Garden City, N.Y., 1968); Economic Development and Cultural Change (Chicago, 1952–). 67. David E. Orlinsky, “Chicago General Education in Social Sciences, 1931– 92: The Case of Soc 2,” in General Education in the Social Sciences: Centennial Reflections on the College of the University of Chicago, ed. John J. MacAloon (Chicago, 1992), 115. 68. Ibid., 119–20. 69. David Riesman, “My Education in Soc 2 and My Efforts to Adapt It in the Harvard Setting,” in MacAloon, ed., General Education in the Social Sciences, 190. 70. Howard P. Becker, Man in Reciprocity: Introductory Lectures on Culture, Society, and Personality (New York, 1956). 71. David Riesman, “A Personal Memoir: My Political Journey,” in Conflict and Consensus: A Festschrift in Honor of Lewis A. Coser, ed. Walter W. Powell and Richard Robbins (New York, 1984). Author’s interview with David Riesman, Cambridge, Mass., 26 January 1988. 72. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, 1950), 173. Riesman, “My Education in Soc 2,” 179–80. 73. David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer, Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics (New Haven, 1952), 415, 486. 74. Riesman, “A Personal Memoir”; Riesman, “My Education in Soc 2.” Charles DeBenedetti, with Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, N.Y., 1990), 45. 75. Riesman to Mead, 12 July 1948, Mead papers, LC, box C19: Correspondence 1948 R. 76. Frank W. Notestein, “Population—The Long View,” in Food for the World, ed. Theodore W. Schultz (Chicago, 1945). Before Notestein, the population S-curve had been described in Raymond Pearl’s The Biology of Population Growth (New York, 1925). 77. Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 34 –35; Riesman, Faces in the Crowd, 7. 78. On early interactions between Mills and Riesman, see Geary, “The Power and the Intellect,” 187–90. 79. Riesman cited Löwenthal’s “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” Radio Research, 1942– 43, ed. Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (New York, 1944), in Riesman, Lonely Crowd (1950), 239; Horkheimer, ed., Studien uber Autoritat und Familie (Paris, 1936), cited in Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 314n. Riesman cited Harry Stack Sullivan on the role of peer groups in Riesman, Faces, 7–8. 80. Ruth Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword (New York, 1974), 223. 81. Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 115, 46 – 47, 134 – 35. 82. Ibid., viii (my emphasis). 83. On Sewell Avery in 1944, see David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929 –1945 (New York, 1999), 641– 42. 84. Ibid., 254– 55, 239, 250, 252, 260. 85. Riesman, Faces, 37– 38. 86. Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 102. 87. Riesman, Faces, 33; Riesman, Lonely Crowd, abridged ed. (New Haven, 1961), xxxii– xxxiii; David Riesman, “Some Observations on the Limits of Totalitarian Power,” Antioch Review 12 (1952): 155 –68, reprinted in David Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered (Glencoe, Ill., 1954), 424 –25. 88. Riesman, Lonely Crowd (1950), 115; Riesman, Faces, 412n; Riesman to Mead, 12 July 1948, Mead papers, LC C19: Gen Corr 1948 R. Riesman continued to criticize “conformity” and in certain respects to defend “individualism”—see his essay, “Individualism Reconsidered,” in Religious Faith and World Culture, ed. A. William Loos (New York, 1951), reprinted in Ries-

300 / Notes to Pages 179–187 man, Individualism Reconsidered. Riesman’s “individualism,” like Mead’s in the 1920s and 1930s, might be better understood as a concept of “individuality” distinguished from economic individualism. 89. Mark Kleinman, A World of Hope, A World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism (Columbus, Ohio, 2000), 298. 90. Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 279 –81. On radical critics who also imagined modern authority as evanescent, see Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (New York, 1998), 135, 144 –45. 91. Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 285 –306, 368 –73. 92. Ibid., 321, 310, 323, 372–73. 93. Ibid., 317; Riesman, Faces, 42; Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 310. 94. Talcott Parsons, “The Integration of Economic and Sociology Theory,” with an introduction by Richard Swedberg, Research Reports from the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University 4 (1986); reprinted in Sociological Inquiry 61 (Winter 1991). 95. Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, and Edward A. Shils, Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Glencoe, Ill., 1953), esp. 237–69. 96. Parsons, “Integration of Economic and Sociology Theory,” 46 – 47, 41. 97. Talcott Parsons and Neil Smelser, Economy and Society (Glencoe, Ill., 1956), 20. 98. Ibid., 39–100, esp. 75; 22–23. 99. Ibid., 22–24, 29, 57, 92– 93, 139, 143; George Ritzer, “Talcott Parsons’s Marshall Lectures: Contemporary, but Flawed,” Sociological Inquiry 61 (Winter 1991): 76. 100. Parsons and Smelser, Economy and Society, 83 – 84, 158, 176, 281– 82, 285. 101. Talcott Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 11–14. 102. Parsons adopted a cybernetic view in Talcott Parsons, “An Outline of the Social System,” in Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, ed. Parsons et al., vol. 1 (Glencoe, Ill., 1961), 38. 103. Hansen, quoted in Collins, Business Response to Keynes, 184. 104. I have drawn the phrase “social Keynesianism” from Michael Harrington, Toward a Democratic Left (New York, 1968), 55, and Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, “State Structures and the Possibilities for ‘Keynesian’ Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol (Cambridge, 1985), 108, 151n. 105. On the persistence of stagnationist theories, see Turgeon, Bastard Keynesianism, xi–xix, 1–16. 106. Brick, Age of Contradiction, 2–3. 107. Bernard Sternsher, Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal (New Brunswick, N.J., 1964), 398 – 408; see Barbara Ward, “The Great Silence in the Great Debate,” New York Times Magazine, 8 May 1960.

6. the heyday of dynamic sociology 1. On the 1958 elections and their impact, see Chester Bowles, The Coming Political Breakthrough (New York, 1959). On left-realignment efforts, see Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer . . . : The Death of the Old Left and Birth of the New Left (New York, 1987), 69 –70, 177– 80. On early antinuclear activism, Charles DeBenedetti, with Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, N.Y., 1990), 24 – 37. 2. Gardiner C. Means, Pricing Power and the Public Interest: A Study Based on Steel (New York, 1962); Lynn Turgeon, Bastard Keynesianism: The Evolution of Economic Thinking and Policymaking since World War II (Westport, Conn., 1996), 14; Theodore Rosenof, Economics in the Long Run: New Deal Theorists and Their Legacies, 1933 –1993 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 115 –18. Estes Kefauver, with the assistance of Irene Till, In a Few Hands: Monopoly Power in America (New York, 1965). 3. Warren G. Bennis, Kenneth D. Benne, and Robert Chin, eds., The Planning of Change: Readings in the Applied Behavioral Sciences (New York, 1964), v. 4. Ibid., 2–19.

Notes to Pages 187–196 / 301 5. Ibid., 18. William Ogburn, On Culture and Social Change: Selected Papers (Chicago, 1964); Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929 –1981 (Baltimore, 2000). 6. On long wave theory, see Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London, 1975). 7. Don K. Price, The Scientific Estate (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 22. Alvin Hansen, testifying before Congress “that scientific research and invention provided a more important basis for long-term growth than capital accumulation,” quoted ibid., 283n16. 8. Cf. the critique of capitalist production for its denial of foresight, its reliance on a post festum social rationality, in Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, trans. David Ferbach (London, 1992), 390. 9. Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier (Washington, D.C., 1945). 10. Price, Scientific Estate, 15, 22–23, 34, 44, 5, 37, 283n24. 11. Ibid., 5, 49, 43, Goldwater quoted, 170. On science as a social force incompatible with traditional forms of capitalism, see Robert Heilbroner, The Limits of American Capitalism (New York, 1966). 12. Eric Larrabee, The Self-Conscious Society (Garden City, N.Y., 1960); Daniel Bell, “The Post-Industrial Society,” in Technology and Social Change, ed. Eli Ginzberg (New York, 1964); Amitai Etzioni, The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes (New York, 1968); Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York, 1970). 13. Price, Scientific Estate, 158. 14. Radovan Richta et al., Civilization at the Crossroads: Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution, 3rd ed., trans. Marian Slingova (Prague, 1969), 38n5, 102–3. 15. Ibid., 7–10. 16. Arthur J. Penty, Old Worlds for New: A Study of the Post-Industrial State (London, 1917); Penty, Post-Industrialism (London, 1922); Jay P. Corrin, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle against Modernity (Athens, Ohio, 1981). Even before his 1917 book, Penty had met the historian of Indian and Ceylonese art, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy; Penty said Coomaraswamy coined “postindustrial society” as the two of them convened a 1914 “symposium of prophecy concerning the future of society.” Roger Lipsey, Coomaraswamy: His Life and His Work (Princeton, 1977). 17. Arthur J. Penty, Guilds and the Social Crisis (London, 1919); Penty, A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History (London, 1920); Penty, Towards a Christian Sociology (London, 1923). By the last book, Penty’s antimodernism increasingly tended toward a celebration of agrarian values and church hierarchy, hostility toward the mainstream socialist movement, and sympathy for right-wing movements, ranging from Mussolini’s fascism to American “distributivism,” a doctrine publicized in American Review, where some of Penty’s later articles appeared. On American Review, see Alan Lawson, The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930 –1941 (New York, 1971), 135 – 47; Paul Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001); Albert E. Stone, “Seward Collins and the American Review: Experiment in Pro-Fascism, 1933 –37,” American Quarterly 12 (Spring 1960): 3 –19; Graham Carey, “Arthur J. Penty: 1875 –1937,” American Review 8 (1936– 37): 550 – 58. 18. Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1963), 466. 19. Casey N. Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), 207. 20. Mumford, Technics, 258, 227–28. 21. Ibid., 241, 276, 218. 22. Ibid., 403–5, 267. 23. Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York, 1964), 50, 65, 67– 68, 126. 24. Ibid., 429, 393, 14, 217, 219, 221. 25. Riesman, “Leisure and Work in Post-Industrial Society,” in Mass Leisure, ed. Eric Larrabee and Rolf Meyerson (Glencoe, Ill., 1958), 379 – 81. 26. Bell, “Post-Industrial Society,” 52. 27. Richta, Civilization, 157–62. 28. Ibid., 37, 151, 160, 215.

302 / Notes to Pages 196–204 29. Ibid., 237– 38. 30. Ibid., 267–70. 31. Bell claims to have used the phrase “postindustrial society” on the heels of Riesman, in lectures in 1959. There his theme was the growth of the service sector. The first time his remarks on the topic appeared in print, however, his theme had changed to the significance of science in contemporary society. See Bell, “Post-Industrial Society.” Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York, 1976), 36. 32. Daniel Bell, The Reforming of General Education (New York, 1966), 70 – 88. 33. Bell, Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 481. 34. Ibid., 344. 35. Larrabee, Self-Conscious Society, 172. 36. Etzioni, Active, 16, 29, 177. 37. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford, 1959), 165 – 66; Margaret Rose, The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial (Cambridge, 1991), 9–10. 38. Rose, Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial, 172–73. 39. Etzioni, Active, 617, 633, 244, 267. 40. George Lichtheim, The New Europe: Today—and Tomorrow (New York, 1963), 193 – 94, 178, 194. 41. Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 173. The “newness” of the movement was noted by the middle of the decade in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals: A Report with Documents (New York, 1966), and Jack Newfield, A Prophetic Minority (New York, 1966). See also Carl Oglesby, “The Idea of the New Left,” 1–20, in The New Left Reader, ed. Oglesby (New York, 1969). 42. Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London, 2002); Christopher Phelps, “Hal Draper” and “Independent Socialist Clubs/International Socialists,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, 2nd ed. (New York, 1998), 197, 348. 43. Stuart Hall, “The ‘First’ New Left: Life and Times,” in Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On, ed. Robin Archer et al. (London, 1989), 14 –15; Lin Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh, 1993). 44. Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, no. 5 (September–October 1960), 18 – 23, reprinted as “The New Left,” in Mills, Power, Politics, and People, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York, 1963), 247–59; Mills, “On the New Left,” Studies on the Left 2 (1961): 63 –72. References to “a new left” appear in The Port Huron Statement, reprinted in James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York, 1987), 373 –74. 45. Nigel Young, An Infantile Disorder? The Crisis and Decline of the New Left (Boulder, Colo., 1977), 39. 46. Ibid., 324. 47. “Tract for the Times,” Liberation, March 1956, 3– 6; James O’Brien, “The Development of a New Left in the United States, 1960 –1965” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971), 21– 25. 48. American Socialist 6 (December 1959), 4, quoted in O’Brien, “Development of a New Left,” 17–18. 49. Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York, 1998). 50. O’Brien, “Development of a New Left,” 223; Young, Infantile Disorder, 3. 51. See Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (London, 1993); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987). 52. O’Brien, “Development of a New Left,” 177, 224 – 30; Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 191– 92. 53. Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”; O’Brien, “Development of a New Left,” 238 – 43; Young, Infantile Disorder, 42. 54. O’Brien, “Development of a New Left,” 199; Gitlin, The Sixties, xxx. 55. O’Brien, “Development of a New Left,” 333 – 90.

Notes to Pages 204–208 / 303 56. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York, 1973), 170 –72, 214; DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal, 112, 121, 134, 156. 57. O’Brien, “Development of a New Left,” 411–20. Cf. Young, Infantile Disorder, 64. 58. See C. Wright Mills, “The New Left,” in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York, 1963), 253. 59. Oral history transcript, Daniel Bell, Oral History Research Office, Butler Library, Columbia University. 60. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope (New York, 1982), 292– 94; Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets,” 126 –35; Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 114–23. 61. Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York, 1969), 144 – 45. The phrase “iron cage” in Talcott Parsons’s translation of Weber’s Protestant Ethic referred not to bureaucracy but to “the powerful cosmos of the modern economic order,” that is, the power of “material goods . . . over people” under “victorious capitalism.” In any case, Weber’s own understanding of “bureaucracy” was less pejorative than Mills’s. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1958), 181; Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in From Max Weber, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 196 –243. 62. Macdonald fell out with Max Shachtman when he insisted in applying “bureaucratic collectivism” to Nazi Germany as well, which Shachtman regarded as a particular kind of capitalist regime. Peter Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist’s Odyssey through the American Century (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1994), 125 –26. Liberation magazine, quoted in Young, Infantile Disorder, 12–13. 63. Antioch student quoted in O’Brien, “Development of a New Left,” 190; Savio, quoted in William Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York, 1989), 22. 64. Oglesby, “Liberalism and the Corporate State,” in Jacobs and Landau, New Radicals, 258 –66. 65. Young, Infantile Disorder, 61. 66. Paul Breines, ed., Critical Interruptions: New Left Perspectives on Herbert Marcuse (New York, 1970). 67. Martin J. Sklar, “Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism” (February 1960), in For a New America: Essays on History and Politics from Studies on the Left, 1959 –1967, ed. James Weinstein and David Eakins (New York, 1970), 89. 68. Maurice Zeitlin, ed., American Society, Inc.: Studies of the Social Structure and Political Economy of the United States (Chicago, 1977); Zeitlin, “Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class,” American Journal of Sociology 79 (March 1974): 1073 – 1119. 69. As James O’Brien argues, most student activism in support of civil rights in 1963 – 64 remained highly moralistic, without a synthetic “analysis” of social problems as a whole, though he notes that Northern activists were “coming to adopt a radical-democratic viewpoint about the powerlessness of ghetto residents.” Yet, as SDS commenced its community organization (under the rubric of the Economic Research and Action Project or ERAP), it missed the most radical force in the cities, the rise of black nationalist sentiment. Indeed, O’Brien concludes, “to a great extent the [ERAP] projects were in the mainstream of American liberalism.” O’Brien, “Development of a New Left,” 272, 279, 291. 70. Hall, “The ‘First’ New Left.” 71. Mills, “The New Left,” in Power, Politics, and People, 256. Also see Peter Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana, Ill., 1994). 72. Oglesby, “Decade Ready for the Dustbin,” quoted in Young, Infantile Disorder, 12. 73. Potter, quoted in Sale, SDS, 187–88. 74. Actually, the main proponents of the “corporate liberal” critique, Martin Sklar and James Weinstein, viewed themselves as socialists outside the New Left, friendly critics who wished it to take socialism and the socialist critique of capitalism seriously. See “Socialism and the New Left,” Studies on the Left 6 (March–April 1966), reprinted in Weinstein and Eakins, eds., For a New America, 317–27. New Leftists who adopted a more traditional left-wing and socialist

304 / Notes to Pages 208–213 posture by the late 1960s had to work their way out of the anti-Marxist, anti-proletarian prejudices that had characterized the New Left. See, for instance, Paul LeBlanc, “Leaving the New Left,” International Socialist Review (1972), and David Tritelli and Sharon Hanscom, “The Formation of an Activist Scholar: An Interview with Alan Wald,” Minnesota Review, no. 50 – 51 (October 1999): 134 – 35. 75. David Riesman and Staughton Lynd, “Preface to the Paperback Edition,” in Riesman, Thorstein Veblen (New York, 1960 [1953]), xvi. 76. The Port Huron Statement, in Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets,” 373 –74. 77. “The Triple Revolution,” Liberation, April 1964, 9–15; also in Priscilla Long, ed., The New Left: A Collection of Essays (Boston, 1969). 78. Massimo Teodori, ed., The New Left: A Documentary History (Indianapolis, 1969), 90. 79. Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman, A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism (New York, 1971), 58 –59, 22–23, 64, 174. 80. James Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism (New York, 1997); Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (New York, 1998), 14 –18, 66 –87. 81. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1965), 73, emphasis added. 82. Sale, SDS, 109 –15, 134; Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962– 1968 (New York, 1982), 81, 143; Jennifer Frost, An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York, 2001). 83. Breines, Community and Organization. 84. Young, Infantile Disorder, 22–23. 85. Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York, 1973), 187. 86. The phrasing likely derived from the writing of C. Wright Mills, who argued “we must reveal the ways in which personal troubles are connected with public issues,” in The Causes of World War Three (New York, 1958), 153. The same idea appeared in Mills’s The Sociological Imagination (Oxford, 1959), 8 –12, 226. Although Mills emphasized the task of reviving “publics” engaged in democratic debate, the experience of the New Left indicated how the relation of “private” and “public” issues ran in both directions. 87. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979); Alice Echols, “Nothing Distant about It: Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism,” 149 –74, in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994). 88. Alan Lawson describes such small-group studies, which intrigued Stuart Chase, as a late, depoliticized offshoot of “independent liberalism.” Lawson, Failure of Independent Liberalism, 269. 89. See Daniel Bell, “‘Screening’ Leaders in a Democracy,” Commentary, April 1948, 372– 75; Alvin W. Gouldner, ed., Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action (New York, 1950). 90. Bennis et al., Planning of Change, 251. 91. Dorwin Cartwright, ed., Studies in Social Power (Ann Arbor, 1959). 92. Marshall Berman, review of Relations in Public by Erving Goffman, New York Times Book Review, 27 February 1972, 10. 93. Some influential early academic feminism was framed largely in Parsonsian functionalist terms. See in particular Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, “Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview,” 17– 42, in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, 1974). 94. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis, 1989), 139 – 58; Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley, 1995), 276 – 303. 95. Etzioni, Active, 516. 96. Ibid., 195, 528, 211, 139, 201, 198. 97. Kenneth Keniston, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (New York, 1968); Philip

Notes to Pages 213–221 / 305 Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston, 1970), 103 – 4, 109. 98. Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society (London, 1971), 426 –27. 99. Etzioni, Active, 139, 244, 268. 100. Cf. the warning by the “Triple Revolution” manifesto that if automation were not used appropriately for social benefit (reduced work hours, expanded opportunities for work on social infrastructure and mutual aid, and a guaranteed annual income), “we may be allowing an efficient and dehumanized community to emerge by default,” turning the potential for a world beyond work into a strictly stratified order where elites kept a constant Orwellian eye on a burgeoning underclass of obsolescent hands. “The Triple Revolution,” in Long, ed., The New Left, 347. 101. Etzioni, Active, 486. 102. Ibid., 394, emphasis in original. 103. Ibid., 399, 375, 467, 491– 94, 482, 356 – 57. 104. Cf. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, 1950), 254 – 55; Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, 1961). 105. Etzioni, Active, 490, 64, 273, 493 –94, 530, 533. 106. Adolf Berle, “Property, Production, and Revolution, a Preface to the Revised Edition,” Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York, 1968), xxvi. 107. Jack Rosenthal, “Income Aid Plan Based on Need Proposed by Presidential Panel,” New York Times, 13 November 1969, 1; “Excerpts from Report of the President’s Panel on Income Maintenance Programs,” New York Times, 13 November 1969, 34. 108. Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism (Boston, 1995), 162. 109. Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York, 2001); Colin Gordon, New Deals (Cambridge, 1994), 298. 110. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 3rd ed., rev. (New York, 1978), 4 –7. 111. A similar ambivalence appeared in the early work of French sociologist Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society: Tomorrow’s Social History; Classes, Conflicts, and Culture in the Programmed Society, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York, 1971), 4 – 6, 25, 54, 84 – 85, 220 –22.

7. the great reversal 1. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York, 1967); National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, To Establish Justice, to Insure Domestic Tranquility (Washington, D.C., 1969). 2. Robert M. Collins, “The Economic Crisis of 1968 and the Waning of the ‘American Century,’” American Historical Review 101 (April 1996): 396 – 422; Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (Oxford, 2000). 3. Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London, 1999), 19 –59. 4. Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London, 2006). 5. Jonathan M. Wiener, “Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959 – 1980,” Journal of American History 76 (September 1989): 424—in 1968 and 1969, the “New Left’s interest in Marxism grew in response” to “a renewed sense of the tenacity of structures of oppression, past and present, a renewed sense of the power of the status quo to perpetuate itself.” 6. See the distinction between a “politics of fulfillment” and a “politics of transfiguration,” in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). 7. Liberals’ recoil from left-wing disruption, either in political affairs or in cultural values, runs through key statements of the time: Daniel Bell, “Columbia and the New Left,” Public Interest (Fall 1968); Nathan Glazer, “On Being Deradicalized,” Commentary 50 (October 1970): 74 –80; Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York, 1979), 302– 3.

306 / Notes to Pages 222–228 8. E. C. Banfield, syllabus for “Introduction to Planning,” winter quarter 1950, in box 45, Tugwell papers, FDR Library. 9. See E. C. Banfield, “Congress and the Budget: A Planner’s Criticism,” American Political Science Review 43, no. 6 (December 1949); James Q. Wilson, “The Independent Mind of Edward Banfield,” Public Interest 150 (Winter 2002): 63 – 88. 10. Edward C. Banfield, Government Project (Glencoe, Ill., 1951), 15, 23, 206, 221, 231– 60. 11. Ibid., 11–12. 12. Tugwell, quoted ibid., 260. 13. Peter Schrag, “The Forgotten American,” Harper’s, August 1969, 27–34; reprinted in Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism (Boston, 1995), 235–45; Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York, 1985); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton, N.J., 1996); Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, 1983). 14. Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest: The Case of Public Housing in Chicago (New York, 1964), 302. 15. Ibid., 302n, 326–29. 16. Banfield’s conservative drift had been clear since his The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, Ill., 1958). Furthermore, his skepticism about activist social policy appeared in several articles before The Unheavenly City: “Why Government Cannot Solve the Urban Problem,” Daedalus 94 (Fall 1968): 1231– 41, and “Welfare: A Crisis without ‘Solutions,’” Public Interest 16 (Summer 1969): 89 –101. Although Banfield’s orientation thus was no surprise in 1970, his book was taken as emblematic of a new conservative turn in public discourse and public policy. Murray Hausknecht, “Caliban’s Abode,” in The New Conservatives: A Critique from the Left, ed. Lewis A. Coser and Irving Howe (New York, 1974). 17. Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston, 1970), 3. 18. Ibid., 244; also see Murray Hausknecht, “Caliban’s Abode,” 194. 19. Banfield, Unheavenly City, 53 –54, 125. Banfield’s understanding of “lower-class” culture, rooted in his earlier book, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, should be distinguished from the “culture of poverty” as discussed by Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York, 1959), and Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York, 1962). 20. Banfield, Unheavenly City, 257. 21. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (Caldwell, Idaho, 1952); Banfield, Unheavenly City, 261, 66, 14, 53, 51, 61. 22. James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York, 1973), 164 –65; Vincent and Vee Burke, Nixon’s Good Deed: Welfare Reform (New York, 1974); Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence, Kans., 1996); James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle against Poverty, 1900 –1994 (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 171–84; Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in TwentiethCentury U.S. History (Princeton, 2001), 203 –8, 215 –16, 219 –25, 237– 41. 23. See esp. Carol B. Stack’s landmark 1974 book, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York, 2000). 24. Michael Harrington, Toward a Democratic Left: A Radical Program for a New Majority (New York, 1968), 32. 25. Edward Nell, ed., Growth, Profits, and Property: Essays in the Revival of Political Economy (Cambridge, 1980), 21, 26, xi, emphasis added. Another early sign of the resurrection of the concept of “capitalism,” stemming from the American circle, the Union for Radical Political Economics, was Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich, and Thomas Weisskopf, The Capitalist System: A Radical Analysis of American Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972). 26. Stanley Aronowitz, “The End of Political Economy,” Social Text (Summer 1979): 3 – 52. 27. Joel Anderson, “The ‘Third Generation’ of the Frankfurt School,” Intellectual History Newsletter 22 (2000): 49 –61. 28. O’Connor, Fiscal Crisis of the State. O’Connor’s book was based on a series of articles first

Notes to Pages 228–235 / 307 published in Socialist Revolution in 1970 and 1971. “Few Marxian writers, if any, had anticipated [the free-market] revival of economic liberalism in the 1980s,” write M. C. Howard and J. E. King, A History of Marxian Economics, vol. 2, 1929 –1990 (Princeton, N.J., 1992), 328. 29. Habermas, “What Does a Crisis Mean Today? Legitimation Problems in Late Capitalism,” Social Research 40 (Winter 1973): 643–667. 30. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975). 31. Author’s interview with Daniel Bell, April 1982. 32. Bell, acknowledgments in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York, 1978), xxxiii; on the alleged shift in spirit between the two books, see Laurence Veysey, “A Postmortem on Daniel Bell’s Postindustrialism,” American Quarterly 34 (Spring 1982): 49 – 69, and Daniel Bell, “Mr. Veysey’s Strabismus,” American Quarterly 34 (Spring 1982): 82– 87. 33. Bell, Cultural Contradictions, 84, 278. 34. Bell, Cultural Contradictions, 221n, 230 – 31, 236, 249n. 35. A peripatetic academic career throughout the 1970s led Hirschhorn into the field of management consulting at the Wharton Center for Applied Research, in the course of which he published two provocative books on technology and organization, which grew out of ideas in his early papers. Yet the “working papers” better reveal the breadth of Hirschhorn’s historical imagination and some of the potentially radical uses of the “postindustrial” idea. See Larry Hirschhorn, Beyond Mechanization: Work and Technology in a Postindustrial Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1984) and The Workplace Within: Psychodynamics of Organizational Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). 36. Author’s telephone interview with Larry Hirschhorn, Philadelphia, 24 March 1992. 37. Martin J. Sklar, “On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political-Economic Society,” Radical America 3 (May–June 1969), 5–12. 38. Author’s telephone interview with Hirschhorn, 24 March 1992. 39. Larry Hirschhorn, “Taxation, Inflation, and the Transition to Post-Industrialism,” Working Paper 169, Institute of Regional and Urban Development (Berkeley, 1972). 40. Hirschhorn started this analysis of differential productivity with reference to a key article by William Baumol, “The Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: Anatomy of Urban Crisis,” American Economic Review 57 (June 1967): 415 –26. 41. Hirschhorn, “Taxation, Inflation, and the Transition to Post-Industrialism.” 42. Ibid., and Larry Hirschhorn, “Two Essays on the Transition to Post-Industrialism,” Working Paper 170 (Berkeley, 1972) and “A Theory of Tax Determined Inflation,” Working Paper 190 (Berkeley, September 1972), 28. 43. Larry Hirschhorn, “Toward a Political Economy of the Service Society,” Working Paper 229 (Berkeley, February 1974), 6 –7. 44. Ibid., 52–53, and Larry Hirschhorn, “The Social Crisis: The Crisis of Work and Social Services: An Approach to the Grammar of Post-Industrial Revolution: Part II: Work, Social Services, and the Crisis of Modern Development,” Working Paper 252 (Berkeley, 1975), 165. 45. Hirschhorn, “Toward a Political Economy of the Service Society,” 10 –11. 46. Ibid., 13. 47. Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), emphasizes the centrality of the “family wage” standard, even among “maternalist” reformers, as the mark of the male breadwinner’s primacy in the Progressive reform imagination. Larry Hirschhorn, “The Social Service Crisis and the New Subjectivity: Social Services in the Post-Industrial Revolution,” Working Paper 244 (Berkeley, 1974). 48. Ibid., 13–14. 49. In emphasizing the new logic of social services, Hirschhorn’s analysis went far beyond the “trade school” argument that contemporary industry requires a highly educated workforce. His view is comparable to John Dewey’s critique of “trade education” in Democracy and Education (New York, 1966), 316. 50. Some of the ideas in Hirschhorn’s mid-1970s “working papers” appeared in published articles: Fred Block and Larry Hirschhorn, “New Productive Forces and the Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism,” Theory and Society 7 (May 1979): 363 – 95, and Hirschhorn, “The Theory of Social Services in Disaccumulationist Capitalism,” International Journal of Health Services 9 (1979): 295 –311. See also Fred Block, Postindustrial Possibilities (Berkeley, 1990).

308 / Notes to Pages 236–241 51. Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2001), 155 – 57. 52. C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1964), 294 – 99; Meg Jacobs, “The Politics of Inflation in the United States, 1945 –1975,” paper presented to the Business History Seminar, Harvard Business School, 22 November 1999. 53. Edward J. Nell, “The Revival of Political Economy,” in Growth, Profits, and Property, 22. 54. Melvin W. Reder, “Chicago Economics: Permanence and Change,” Journal of Economic Literature 20 (March 1982): 1–38. 55. Milton Friedman, “The Role of Monetary Policy,” American Economic Review 58 (1968): 1–22. 56. Milton Friedman, “Inflation and Unemployment,” Journal of Political Economy 85 (June 1977): 451–72. 57. Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, eds., The Crisis in Economic Theory (New York, 1981), viii, xii. 58. Banfield, Unheavenly City, 241, 92–94. See also Bernstein, Perilous Progress, 160, 180, 279n31. 59. Banfield, Unheavenly City, 75, 95, 152. 60. Mark H. Willes, “‘Rational Expectations’ as a Counterrevolution,” in Bell and Kristol, eds., Crisis, 94– 96. 61. James W. Dean, “The Dissolution of the Keynesian Consensus,” in Bell and Kristol, eds., Crisis, 27–30. 62. Mark H. Willes, “‘Rational Expectations,’” 89. Cf. Bernstein, Perilous Progress, 159 – 60, 279n30. 63. Amitai Etzioni, The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics (New York, 1988), 249. 64. Patrick L. Schmidt, “Towards a History of the Department of Social Relations, Harvard University, 1946 –1972” (honors thesis, Harvard, 1978), 55. 65. Cited ibid., 94 – 97; see Robert F. Bales, “Graduate Training of Social Psychologists at Harvard University,” in Higher Education in Social Psychology, ed. Sven Laudstedt (Cleveland, 1968), 109. 66. Alvin Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (Glencoe, Ill., 1954) and Wildcat Strike (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1954). 67. Alvin Gouldner, inaugural editorial statement for Transaction, reprinted in Society 18 (March–April 1981): 82– 83. 68. Alvin Gouldner, “Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Value-Free Sociology,” Social Problems 9 (Winter 1962): 199 –213. 69. Carol Brown, “Sociology: Insurgency at the ASA Convention,” Radicals in the Professions Newsletter 1 (September 1968): 17. 70. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York, 1970), 343 –50. 71. Ibid., 362– 69, 378 –79, 438 – 42, 454 –75, 469, 500. 72. Parsons described the “integrative function of social systems” as “the central core of the concerns of sociological theory” in “An Outline of the Social System,” in Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, vol. 1, ed. Talcott Parsons et al. (New York, 1961), 41. The first specific references to “the societal community” as that differentiated element of social structure that focuses on “integration” appeared in “Some Comments on the Sociology of Karl Marx” (annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 1965) and “Full Citizenship for the Negro American?” Daedalus, November 1965, the first published for the first time and the second reprinted in Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modern Society (New York, 1967). In The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), he named the United States “the new lead society” in the evolution of “contemporary modernity,” 86. 73. Parsons, “The American Societal Community” manuscripts, PP, Harvard, HUG(FP) 42.45.1: chapter 1 typescript, 5– 43; chapter 9 (“Communication and Collective Decision Making”), 55. Hereafter, references cite the manuscript title under the archival title, “TASC,” and indicate chapters by roman numeral, page numbers in Arabic numerals (with added pages identified, as in the drafts, by lowercase letters). 74. From early in his career, Parsons had persistently sought to mediate between gemein-

Notes to Pages 242–248 / 309 schaft and gesellschaft, devising a synthetic third term combining elements of each. See Howard Brick, “The Reformist Dimension of Talcott Parsons’s Early Social Theory,” in The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, ed. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber (Cambridge, 1993), 376, 394. 75. Parsons, TASC, II– 3, 3a, 3b; III–48, 72; IV–14; V–1, 56; VI–73; IX– 65 – 66, 68 – 69. 76. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago, 1977). 77. Parsons, TASC, II–26; III– 9a; IV– 59; VI–25, 36 – 37, 57, 122a-c; VIII–41– 42; IX– 65 – 66, 82, 85, 117. 78. Parsons, TASC, V– 62–63; IX–5, 59, 74, 118 –19; X–1– 33, 44, 48, 57. 79. Talcott Parsons, “Kinship and Associational Aspects of Social Structure,” in Kinship and Culture, ed. Francis L. K. Hsu, 409 –38 (Chicago, 1971). 80. Parsons, notes, “‘Nixonism’ and ‘McCarthyism,’” PP, HUG(FP) 42.45.1, box 2. 81. Maurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (New York, 2000); Harrington, Toward a Democratic Left; Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism (New York, 1976). 82. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York, 1978); Robert Heilbroner, Business Civilization in Decline (New York, 1976). 83. John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago, 1993), 16 –17, 266; Kenneth J. Arrow, “A Cautious Case for Socialism” (1978), in Beyond the Welfare State, ed. Irving Howe (New York, 1982), 261–76; Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley, 1985). 84. The slogan “Forbes: Capitalist Tool” appeared in occasional double-page ads in the magazine starting January 1967 and aimed at boosting advertising revenue by comparing the education, income, high-status purchases, managerial positions, and stock ownership of its readers to that of other business magazine readers. The slogan assumed new prominence in the mid- to late 1970s. Starting November 1, 1976, “Forbes: Capitalist Tool” appeared in almost every issue of the magazine, marking the monthly classified page and printed on novelty items advertised in the magazine, such as the $20 “Capitalist Tool umbrella” and $10 “Capitalist Tool neckties.” 85. Joan Cook, “Prof. Talcott Parsons: Major Social Theorist on Harvard’s Faculty,” New York Times, 9 May 1979.

conclusion 1. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3: The Perspective of the World, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley, 1984), 619; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 2: The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley, 1982), 231; Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3, 619 – 32. 2. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1962; rev. ed., 1982); Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York, 1982); Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York, 1978); Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (London, 1975); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge, 1979); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London, 1994); Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past and Present, no. 70 (February 1976), reprinted in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate (Cambridge, 1985); Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review, no. 104 (July–August 1977): 25 – 92; Peter L. Berger, The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality, and Liberty (New York, 1986), 217–18; Mark Gould, Revolution in the Development of Capitalism: The Coming of the English Revolution (Berkeley, 1987); J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer, eds., Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions (Cambridge, 1997); Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990). 3. Robert Heilbroner, “The Triumph of Capitalism,” New Yorker, 23 January 1989, 98; Radek Sikorski, “The Coming Crack-Up of Communism: Decline or Fall?” National Review 41

310 / Notes to Pages 250–254 (27 January 1989), 28 –30; Jerry Z. Muller, Commentary, December 1997, quoted in Alexander Cockburn, “Who’s Burying Whom?” Nation, 20 February 1989, 222; John Cassidy, “The Next Thinker: The Return of Karl Marx,” New Yorker 73 (20 October 1997), 249 – 51. 4. Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, 1975), 594 (emphasis added). 5. Ibid., 82. 6. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge, 2001). 7. In a variety of ways, historians of Britain and the Continent have stressed the widespread phenomenon of mingled upper-class norms: the role of aristocratic or quasi-aristocratic elites even in capitalist development, once thought a peculiarity of the Germans, as in Barrington Moore Jr.’s treatment of the “Prussian road” to modernization in The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, 1967), has been generalized across Europe. For similar analyses, see Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn’s treatment of the English bourgeoisie’s integration with landed elites, in “Origins of the Present Crisis,” New Left Review, no. 23 (January–February 1964): 26 – 53, and Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981). 8. Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865 –1928 (Oxford, 1986), and Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (Oxford, 1986); Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge, 1992), 43. This is not to deny the striking differences between U.S. standards of industrial coordination and, say, Germany’s, where a long-standing pattern set before World War I permitted a much higher level of concentrated organization in “peak association bargaining [between employer groups and union federations], mediated by the state,” which provided a marked example of what Maier meant by “corporatism.” J. Rogers Hollingsworth, “Continuities and Changes in Social Systems of Production: The Cases of Japan, Germany, and the United States,” in Contemporary Capitalism, ed. Hollingsworth and Boyer, 285 – 86. See also Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 286–87, 294. 9. Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865 –1914 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002). 10. Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law and Liberal Development in the United States (Cambridge, 1991). 11. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 246; George C. Homans, Coming to My Senses: The Autobiography of a Sociologist (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994). 12. T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1994), 229. 13. Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920 –1935 (Cambridge, 1994), 11. 14. Daniel Bell, “America’s Un-Marxist Revolution,” Commentary, March 1949, 207–15; Bell, “Has America a Ruling Class?” Commentary, December 1949, 603 –7. 15. Gordon, New Deals. Cf. J. Rogers Hollingsworth, “The Logic of Coordinating American Manufacturing Sectors,” in The Governance of the American Economy, ed. John L. Campbell et al. (Cambridge, 1991), 35 –73; J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer, “Coordination of Economic Actors and Social Systems of Production,” in Contemporary Capitalism, ed. Hollingsworth and Boyer, 29. Also see Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” Socialist Review 7 (May– June 1977), and on the relative incapacity of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class, Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 2: The Politics of Social Classes (New York, 1978), 266 –70. 16. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996), 117, 123 –24. 17. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1978), 501–11; Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (New York, 1969). 18. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950). The Austro-Marxist writer

Notes to Pages 254–265 / 311 Eduard Heimann argued in 1929 that “social rights push back the frontiers of capitalist power,” cited in Esping-Andersen, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, 16. 19. Talcott Parsons, “The Distribution of Power in American Society,” in Parsons, Structure and Process in Modern Society (New York, 1960). 20. Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 288. 21. Michael Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago, 1987); Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (London, 1986), 102– 53, 256 –300. 22. Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change (New York, 1980), 8, 17–18, 23 –24, 191–94, 206. 23. Due to these principles, Nelson Lichtenstein called the “industrial-policy” scenario “a first cousin to the post-industrial idea,” in Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, 2002), 217. 24. Robert Reich, The Next American Frontier (New York, 1983), 14, 20 –21, 119, 130, 134, 173, 201, 206 –7, 223 – 33, 240, 247– 48, 254; Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York, 1984), 6, 16 –17, 211, 214 –15, 274, 300 – 305; Lester C. Thurow, The Zero-Sum Solution: Building a World-Class American Economy (New York, 1985), 24, 107, 109, 182, 210, 259, 263, 318. 25. Lester C. Thurow, The Future of Capitalism: How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World (New York, 1996); Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism (New York, 1991). 26. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Bernhard Giesen, “From Reduction to Linkage: The Long View of the Micro-Macro Debate,” in The Micro-Macro Link, ed. Jeffrey Alexander et al. (Berkeley, 1987), 26 –27, 31, 37. 27. Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander, eds., The New Social Theory Reader: Contemporary Debates (New York, 2001). 28. Flora Lewis, “The Rise of ‘Civil Society,’” New York Times, 25 June 1989, 27. 29. John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London, 1988); John A. Hall, ed., Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison (Cambridge, 1995); Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London, 2004), 219 –26. 30. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). 31. Hall, ed., Civil Society, 209, 345. 32. Amitai Etzioni, The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics (New York, 1988), 10, 181. 33. Ibid., 34. 34. Ibid., 207– 35. 35. J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer, “From National Embeddedness to Spatial and Institutional Nestedness,” in Contemporary Capitalism, ed. Hollingsworth and Boyer, 477. See also Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structures: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481– 510, and “Economic Institutions as Social Constructions: A Framework of Analysis,” Acta Sociologica 35 (1992): 3 –12, as well as The Sociology of Economic Life, ed. Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg (Boulder, Colo., 2001), which opens with a selection from Polanyi, “The Economy as Instituted Process,” 29 – 51. 36. J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer, “Coordination of Economic Actors and Social Systems of Production,” 1– 47. 37. The modest horizon of criticism reveals the tenor of this school. As two scholars writing in a new economic-sociology journal remarked, “The contrast between capitalism and socialism has lost vigour since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites” and hence attention “has shifted to ‘varieties of capitalism.’” Alexander Hicks and Lane Kenworthy, “Varieties of Welfare Capitalism,” Socio-Economic Review 1 (2003): 27–28. 38. Another sociologist who has maintained a perspective closer to Polanyi’s transformative inclinations, Fred Block, charged that while the “varieties of capitalism” approach “deepens our theoretical understanding, it has not had much political impact. It has not managed to explain how these different types work together and create some kind of larger system [beyond the nation-state] nor has it overturned the dominant neoliberal view of global capitalism as ho-

312 / Notes to Pages 265–273 mogeneous and inevitable.” Fred Block, “New Thinking about Capitalism,” Dollars and Sense (November–December 1999), 44. 39. Hollingsworth and Boyer, “From National Embeddedness to Spatial and Institutional Nestedness,” 445. 40. Fred Block, “Rethinking ‘Capitalism,’” in Economic Sociology, ed. Nicole Woolsey Biggart (Cambridge, 2002). 41. Drucker, nonetheless, did have followers who shared his definition of postcapitalist society. See Willard F. Enteman, Managerialism: The Emergence of a New Ideology (Madison, 1993), 149 –93. 42. Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890 –1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge, 1988); Sklar, “Periodization and Historiography,” in Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country. 43. Sklar, United States as a Developing Country, 20 – 30. 44. Ibid., 24, 18. 45. Cf. Parsons, “The Distribution of Power in American Society.” 46. James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850 –1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), xix, 21, 172, 174, 255, 271, 279 (emphasis added). 47. Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1959), 430 – 31, quoted in Sklar, United States as a Developing Country, 32–33nn16–17, emphasis added. 48. Mark Gould offers suggestive theoretical concepts for helping determine the degree to which a particular mode of economic production, coexisting with other modes, may be judged to occupy a “predominant” or “dominant” position within a wider, complex social formation. See Gould Revolution in the Development of Capitalism, 116 –17. 49. Sklar, United States as a Developing Country, 32– 33nn16–17. 50. Ibid., 33. 51. See the manifesto issued by a San Francisco collective known as “Retort”: “Afflicted Powers,” New Left Review, n.s., no. 27 (May–June 2004): 6. 52. Seymour Melman, After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Democracy (New York, 2001), 390, 429; Michael Albert, Parecon: Life after Capitalism (New York, 2003), 8, 12; Gar Alperovitz, America beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy (New York, 2005), 20 –23, 70 –72, 152–53, 162; Severyn Bruyn, A Civil Republic: Beyond Capitalism and Nationalism (Bloomfield, Conn., 2005), 20, 72. 53. Robin Blackburn, Banking on Death; or, Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions (London, 2002), 6, 473. 54. Ibid., 448– 49, 471–78, 523 –28. 55. See the definition of “transitional demands” in Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (New York, 1973), as well as the notion of “radical reforms” in André Gorz, Strategy for Labor, trans. Martin Nicolaus and Victoria Ortiz (Boston, 1967). Joseph Fracchia, “The Untimely Timeliness of Rosa Luxemburg,” in Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism, ed. Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (Burlington, Vt., 2005), 128.

Index

*

Abbott, Lyman, 124 Abramovitch, Raphael, 155 Absentee Ownership (Veblen), 49, 63 –64 ACCF (American Committee for Cultural Freedom), 175 ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), 89 The Active Society (Etzioni), 212 “Actor, Situation and Normative Pattern” (Parsons), 137 Adamic, Louis, 139 ADC (Aid to Dependent Children), 226 Adorno, Theodor, 65 AEA (American Economic Association), 65, 70 –71, 227, 237 AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), 226 The Affluent Society (Galbraith), 184 AFL (American Federation of Labor), 61 African Americans, contribution to social sciences, 16 –17 After Capitalism (Melman), 270 Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), 226 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 226 Albert, Michael, 270 Alexander, Franz, 108 –9 Allport, Gordon, 105, 144 Alperovitz, Gar, 270 Alpert, Richard, 238

America and the New Epoch (Steinmetz), 50 America beyond Capitalism (Alperovitz), 270 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 89 American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), 175 American Defense—Harvard Group, 139 An American Dilemma (Myrdal), 173 American Economic Association (AEA), 65, 70 –71, 227, 237 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 61 American League for Peace and Democracy, 138 American Medical Association, 134 American New Left. See New Left American Review, 16 Americans for Democratic Action, 11 “The American Societal Community” (Parsons), 240 – 44 Amherst College, 62, 124 Les Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale (Febvre and Bloch), 29 Anthropological Association, 90 anticommunism, 14, 148, 150, 153 – 54, 163, 195. See also McCarthyism; red scare anti-Keynesians, 220 Arapesh, 105 – 6, 106 –7 Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski), 99, 125

313

314 / Index Arnold, Thurman, 33 Aron, Raymond, 6, 153, 163 Aronowitz, Stanley, 210 Arrighi, Giovanni, 248 Arrow, Kenneth, 168 –70, 245 Arrow Impossibility Theorem, 169 –70 Austin, Mary, 76 Ayres, Clarence, 70, 124, 125 Bales, Robert F., 138, 181 Banfield, Edward C., 219, 222–26, 237– 38, 257, 306n16 Banking on Death (Blackburn), 270 –72 Baran, Paul, 227 Bateson, Gregory, 139 Beard, Charles, 33, 53, 62 Beard, Mary, 62 Becker, Gary, 238 Becker, Howard P., 174 Beckert, Sven, 253 behaviorism, 126 Bell, Daniel, 253 end of ideology and, 162, 164 postindustrial society and, 195, 197– 98, 217, 229 – 30, 302n31 Bellah, Robert, 242 Bellamy, Edward, 47 Belloc, Hilaire, 191 Below, Georg von, 31 Benedict, Ruth, 89, 92, 104, 105, 177 interdisciplinary circle of cultural criticism, 108, 109, 110 Patterns of Culture, 93, 96–98, 110 Benne, Kenneth, 186–87 Bennis, Warren, 186 –87, 211 Bentley, Arthur F., 53, 59 Berea College, 75 Berger, Peter, 248 Berle, Adolf A., 19 –20, 56, 73 –74, 75 –78, 79 –82, 216 Berle, Adolf A., Sr., 75, 76 Berle, Beatrice (Bishop), 79 Berle, Mary Augusta (Wright), 75 Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, 108 Berman, Marshall, 211 Bernstein, Eduard, 25, 41–42, 44, 255 Blackburn, Robin, 270 –72 Blanc, Louis, 25 Bland, Hubert, 27 Bloch, Marc, 29 Block, Fred, 231, 265 –66, 311–12n38 Boas, Franz, 86 –87, 89 – 91, 93 –94

Boasians, 87, 104 – 6. See also Benedict, Ruth; Mead, Margaret Bourdet, Claude, 201 Der Bourgeois (Sombart), 28 Boyer, Robert, 264, 265 Brandeis, Louis, 33, 57– 58, 75, 175 Braudel, Fernand, 23, 25, 29, 247 Brenner, Robert, 41, 248 Brentano, Lujo, 27, 30 – 31 Briffault, Robert, 109 Brissenden, Paul, 84 Bruyn, Severyn, 270 Bullitt, William, 76 Bunche, Ralph, 17 Bureau of Ethnology, 89 Burnham, James, 82, 158 Burns, Arthur Robert, 82 Burns, Eveline M., 70 –71 Bush, Vannevar, 188 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 89 Calvert, Greg, 208 Camus, Albert, 163 capital evolution of meaning, 25, 27 Marx’s definition of, 29, 34 capitalism, 3, 23 – 53, 151, 153 corporatist form, shift to, 250 – 52 doubt as to significance of, 5 –7 as economic system, 29 – 31 Fabian socialists and, 25, 26 –27 free market ideal, 32– 33 French historical literature, 31– 32 German historical school, 27–29 Marx and, 23 –24 naming of, 25 resurrection of concept, 21, 244 – 46 See also organized capitalism capitalism, interwar critique. See competitive individualism, cultural critique of; institutionalists capitalism, postwar critique, 155 – 58 Mannheim, 155 –56 Polanyi, 156 – 57 Schumpeter, 157– 58 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter), 157 capitalism, theories of transformation, 43 – 53 Hilferding, 43 – 47 Lippmann, 50 – 52 Veblen, 47–50

Index / 315 capitalism, transitional developments, 33 – 43 feudalism, end of, 40 – 41 industrialization, move toward, 36 –37 market exchange, 34– 36 socialism, foundation for, 37– 39, 41– 42 capitalist, as pejorative term, 25 Capital (Marx), 25, 35, 36 –37, 38, 40 Carter, Jimmy, 226 Cartwright, Dorwin, 211 Casa Grande, Arizona, 222–23 Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Dollard), 112–14 Cattell, J. McKeen, 89 The Causes of World War Three (Mills), 304n86 “A Cautious Case for Socialism” (Arrow), 245 CCF (Congress for Cultural Freedom), 163 CDU (German Christian Democratic Union), 157 Chase, Stuart, 82, 304n88 Chesterton, G. K., 191 Chicago, public housing in, 224 –25 Chicago Housing Authority, 224 Chin, Robert, 186 – 87 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Benedict), 177 CIA, 163 Civilization and Capitalism (Braudel), 29, 247 Civilization at the Crossroads (Richta), 190, 195, 196 A Civil Republic (Bruyn), 270 civil rights movement, 303n69 civil society, exploration of, 260 –63 Clark, Colin, 168, 175 –76 Clark, John Maurice, 70 Clarke, William, 27 Clémentel, Etienne, 58 cold war, 11, 147–48, 152, 159, 163 – 64 end of, 248, 270 Cole, G. D. H., 66 collectivism, 184 –85 Collectivist Economic Planning (Hayek and Mises), 129 Collier, John, 76 Collins, Robert, 167 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Gouldner), 239 –40 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead), 93 –95, 111 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (Bell), 197, 229 Commentary (magazine), 248

Committee for National Morale, 139, 144 Committee of Forty Eight, 61 Commons, John R., 62 Communism, 11, 72, 147– 48, 153. See also primitive communism The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 37, 40 Communitas (Goodman and Goodman), 180 competitive individualism, cultural critique of, 20, 92– 98, 100 –108, 111–14, 117– 20, 137– 41 Benedict, 96–98 Dollard, 113–14 Horney, 111–12 Linton, 117–20 Malinowski, 100, 101 Mauss, 101–2, 103 Mead, 92– 95, 105 – 8 Parsons, 137–38, 139 – 41 Radcliffe-Brown, 102–4 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 163 Contemporary Economic Thought (Homan), 70 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx), 40 Cooley, Charles Horton, 53 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 301n16 Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples (Mead), 105 –6, 108 Copeland, Morris, 68, 70, 216 Corey, Lewis, 133 Cornell Liberal Union, 203 corporate liberalism, 10, 74, 82– 85, 205, 206 Coser, Rose Laub, 17 Coughlin, Charles, 33 Council for Democracy, 139 Cowley, Malcolm, 107– 8 Cox, Oliver C., 17 Cressman, Luther, 104 Croly, Herbert, 52– 53 Crosland, Anthony, 4 – 5, 153, 154, 159 – 61, 207, 236 Crum, W. L., 81– 82 cultural anthropology, 86 –120, 123 Boas, 86 – 87, 89 – 91, 93 – 94 functionalists, 87, 98 –104 Linton, 114–20 See also Boasians; culture and personality school; Mead, Margaret The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Bell), 229 – 30

316 / Index

Dahl, Robert A., 171–72, 246 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 4, 153, 161–62 Dakin, Edwin Franden, 277n30 Dean, James W., 238 Debord, Guy, 269 Les débuts du capitalisme (Hauser), 31 Dellinger, David, 202 Democracy and Education (Dewey), 53 democratic tasks, Marxist understanding of, 253 –54 Denning, Michael, 11 Deutsch, Babette, 77 developmental logic, 234 –35 Dewey, John, 53, 54, 60, 62, 66, 68 Dial ( journal), 60, 62, 87 Dickinson, H. D., 130 “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare” (Arrow), 169 A Disrupted History (Calvert and Neiman), 208 Dobb, Maurice, 30, 34, 40, 41 Dollard, John, 108, 109, 112–14 Domar, Evsey, 167 Douglas, Dorothy Wolff, 62 Douglas, Mary, 101 Douglas, Paul H., 62, 69 Draper, Hal, 201 Drift and Mastery (Lippmann), 50 –52 Drucker, Peter, 266, 271 Du Bois, W. E. B., 3, 113 Dugger, Ronnie, 203 Dumont, Louis, 242 Durkheim, Emile, 131, 132, 139

economic thought, postwar, 164 –72 Arrow, 168 –70 business community’s response to, 167 Dahl and Lindblom, 171–72 growth economics, 167– 68 Hansen, 166 – 67 Keynes, 165– 66 Samuelson, 164, 167 See also social Keynesianism, revival of economism critique of, 36, 170, 177–78, 220, 249, 262– 63 defined, 36, 220, 236 Parsons’s response to revival of, 240 – 44 rational expectations school, 237–38 resurgence of, 21, 164, 236 – 44 See also homo economicus, concept of Economy and Society (Parsons and Smelser), 181–83 “Education and the Professions” (Parsons), 134 Ellis, Havelock, 102 Ellul, Jacques, 190, 193 – 94 Ely, Richard T., 53 embeddedness of markets, 264– 65 Encyclopedia Britannica, 26, 280n38 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 88, 129 end of ideology, 162– 64 The End of Ideology (Bell), 229 Engels, Friedrich, 28, 35, 37, 38, 40 ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project), 303n69 ethnography. See cultural anthropology Etzioni, Amitai, 198 – 99, 212–16 communitarian doctrine, 262– 63 Europe organized capitalism, theories of, 56, 62– 63 postcapitalist visions, 15 –16, 154 – 55, 159, 250 Evolutionary Socialism (Bernstein), 42 The Evolution of Modern Capitalism (Hobson), 29, 31

Easton, David, 245 The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Becker), 238 Economic Program for American Democracy (1938), 166 Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), 303n69 economic sociology, 263 – 65

Fabian Essays (Shaw), 26 –27 Fabian socialists, 25, 26 –27 Faces in the Crowd (Riesman), 175 Fanon, Frantz, 209 Farmer-Labor parties, 61 Farm Security Administration, 223 fascist postcapitalism, 15 –16 Febvre, Lucien, 29

“Culture, Genuine and Spurious” (Sapir), 87– 88 culture and personality school, 88 – 98 Benedict, 96–98 Boas, 89 –91 Mead, 92–95 The Culture of Narcissism (Lasch), 245 Cunningham, William, 31 Cutler, Addison, 125

Index / 317 feminism, 211–12 Fenichel, Otto, 109 feudalism, end of, 40 –41 Filene, Edward, 167 Finance Capital (Hilferding), 43 –44, 62 The Fiscal Crisis of the State (O’Connor), 227 Fitzpatrick, Ellen, 16 Forbes magazine, 246, 309n84 Ford, Henry, 33 forgotten man, ideal of, 225 –26 Fortune, Reo, 104 Foucault, Michel, 142–43 Fracchia, Joseph G., 24, 272 France Observateur (newspaper), 201 Frankfurt School, 159 Franklin, Benjamin, 122 Frazier, Franklin, 17 “Freedom Budget” (Randolph), 12 free labor ideology, 21 Friedman, Milton, 237, 247 Friedrich, Carl, 139, 174 Fromm, Erich, 108, 109–10 functionalists, 87 Boasians, interactions with, 104 – 6 Malinowski, 87, 98–100, 101, 104, 125 Radcliffe-Brown, 87, 98, 99, 102– 4 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 184, 194, 217–18 Geddes, Patrick, 191 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes), 165 –66 George, Henry, 26 George, Lloyd, 10 German Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 157 German historical school, 27–29 The German Ideology (Marx and Engels), 40 German Social Democratic Party (SPD), 28, 63 Gerth, Hans, 156 Die Gesellschaft ( journal), 63 Giddings, Franklin, 122 Gideonse, Harry D., 173 Gilded Age, 251, 253 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 92, 94 Glaser, Otto, 124 Glazer, Nathan, 162 Goffman, Erving, 211, 252 Goldberg, Jack, 201 Goldenweiser, Alexander, 92, 280n41 Goldwater, Barry, 189, 212 Gompers, Samuel, 61

Goode, William J., 276n8 Goodman, Paul and Percival, 180 Goodrich, Carter, 62, 124 The Goose Step (Sinclair), 124 Gordon, Colin, 253 Gordon, Linda, 307n47 Gould, Mark, 248, 312n48 Gouldner, Alvin, 219, 220, 239 Government Project (Banfield), 222–23 Granovetter, Mark, 263 The Great Transformation (Polanyi), 156 – 57 Grenfell, Wilfred, 124, 174 Growing Up in New Guinea (Mead), 104–5, 288n31 growth economics, postwar, 167– 68 Gruening, Ernest, 82 Grundrisse (Marx), 38 – 39 guaranteed income, 12, 141, 208, 216 –17 Habermas, Jürgen, 227, 228, 261, 262, 269 Hall, G. Stanley, 93 Hamilton, Walton, 65, 124, 125 Hanna, Marc, 253 Hansen, Alvin, 157, 166 –67, 184, 301n7 Harrington, Michael, 245 Harrod, Roy, 167 Harvard University, Department of Social Relations, 136, 144, 145, 220, 238 – 39 Hauser, Henri, 31 Hayden, Tom, 204 –5 Hayek, Friedrich, 129, 157, 158 Heidelberg University, 125 Heilbroner, Robert, 6–7, 208, 245, 248 Heiman, Eduard, 311n18 Herskovits, Melville, 93 Hightower, Jim, 203 Hilferding, Rudolf, 25 capitalism, theory of transformation of, 43 – 47 organized capitalism, conception of, 56, 62– 63 Hirschhorn, Larry, 229, 230 – 35, 307n35, 307n49 Hobbes, Thomas, 127 Hobson, John A., 29, 31, 56, 57 Hollingsworth, J. Rogers, 263, 264, 265, 310n8 Homan, Paul T., 70, 71 Homans, George, 252 homo economicus, concept of, 87 critique of, 100, 177–78 See also economism

318 / Index Hoover, Herbert, 56– 57, 83, 84 Horkheimer, Max, 109, 176 Horney, Karen, 108 –12 Howard, M. C., 307n28 Howe, Irving, 205, 208 “How Labor Could Control” (Berle), 77–78 Hughes, H. Stuart, 163 Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill, 256 Hunt, George, 89 Hutchins, Robert, 173 Ifugao, 106 industrial democracy, 57–58 industrial policy, liberal program of, 257– 59 inner-direction, 176 The Instinct of Workmanship (Veblen), 48 – 50 “Institutionalism: What It Is and What It Hopes to Become” (AEA roundtable discussion), 70 –71 institutionalists, 65 –73, 123 orthodox economists, method debate with, 70 –71 Parsons and, 126, 129 –30 Tugwell, 65 – 67, 71–73 See also socioeconomics Insull, Samuel, 74 “The Integration of Economic and Sociological Theory” (Parsons), 181 Intercollegiate Socialist Society, 124 Jahoda, Marie, 17 James, C. L. R., 38 James, William, 60 Jameson, Fredric, 248 Jaurès, Jean, 7 Jenkins, Roy, 154 Jenseits des Kapitalismus (Löwenthal), 159, 297n19 Jevons, William Stanley, 26 Johnson, Lyndon B., 216 Journal of Political Economy, 47 Kalberg, Stephen, 291n2 Kallen, Horace, 62 Kautsky, Karl, 44 Kefauver, Estes, 186 Keniston, Kenneth, 212–13 Kerr, Clark, 13 Kerwin, Jerome, 173 Keynes, John Maynard, 165 –66

Keynesianism, 165. See also social Keynesianism, revival of Keyserling, Leon, 71 Khrushchev, Nikita, 203 King, J. E., 307n28 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 12, 276n14 Kingdon, Frank, 139 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 144 Knowledge for What? (Lynd), 121 Koestler, Arthur, 163 Komarovsky, Mirra, 17 Kristol, Irving, 248 Kroeber, Alfred, 88 –89 Kropotkin, Peter, 102 Kula, 99, 100–101 Kuznets, Simon, 168 labor activism, 11, 57– 58, 60 – 61, 256 Labour Party (UK), 159 LaFollette, Robert, 61 Laidler, Harry, 82 laissez-faire market theory critique of, 66 revival of, 237– 38 Lamont, Thomas W., 76 Lange, Oskar, 130 Lannoy, Richard, 213 Larrabee, Eric, 198 Larson, Magali Sarfatti, 293n42 Lasch, Christopher, 245 Laski, Harold, 59 – 60, 125 Lasswell, Harold, 109 Laughlin, Laurence, 47 Lawson, Alan, 71, 304n88 League for Industrial Democracy, 62, 66 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 252 Leary, Timothy, 238 Lederer, Emil, 125 “Legitimation Problems in Late Capitalism” (Habermas), 228 Lerner, Abba, 130 “Letter to the New Left” (Mills), 202 Leuchtenberg, William, 58 Liberation (journal), 202, 205 Lichtenstein, Nelson, 311n23 Lichtheim, George, 6, 199 –200 Liebknecht, Karl, 44 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 25 The Limits of American Capitalism (Heilbroner), 6 Lindblom, Charles, 171–72

Index / 319 Linton, Ralph, 114 –20 Lippmann, Walter, 25, 43, 54, 56, 75 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 162, 164 List, Friedrich, 125 Livingston, James, 266, 267–68 Locke, John, 127 Lockwood, David, 162 Locomotive Engineers’ Journal, 62 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 76 The Lonely Crowd (Riesman), 172, 174, 175, 176, 179 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 47 Löwenthal, Leo, 109, 176 Löwenthal, Richard, 159, 297n19 Lowie, Robert, 89, 90, 124 Luxemburg, Rosa, 44 Lynd, Robert S. and Helen Merrell, 97, 121 Lynd, Staughton, 208 Macdonald, Dwight, 158 –59, 175, 176, 205, 303n62 The Magic Mountain (Mann), 5 Maier, Charles, 55, 57, 61, 83 – 84, 250 – 51 Main Street and Wall Street (Ripley), 74 –75 Makers, Users, and Masters (Bentley), 59 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 87, 98 –100, 101, 104, 125 The Managerial Revolution (Burnham), 158 Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (Mannheim), 155–56 Mandel, Ernest, 38, 248 Man in Reciprocity (Becker), 174 Mann, Thomas, 5 Mannheim, Karl, 125, 155 – 56 Marcuse, Herbert, 206 Markowitz, Norman, 277n20 Marot, Helen, 62 Marshall, T. H., 254 Marx, Karl, 23 –24, 25, 34 –43, 280n65 capital, definition of, 29, 34 commodity fetishism, critique of, 35, 151 democratic tasks, 253 –54 materialist science of history, proponent of, 24, 34, 42–43 political economy, critique of, 36 revolution and evolution, 41–43, 272 transition from capitalism, 36 – 39, 41 transition to capitalism, 39 –40

Masses magazine, 57, 89 Mauss, Marcel, 101–2, 103, 288n50 McCarthyism, 148, 152, 201, 205, 207. See also anticommunism; red scare McCartin, Joseph, 60 McKinley, William, 253 Mead, George Herbert, 146 Mead, Margaret, 89, 92– 95, 104 – 8, 111, 139, 288n31, 288n50 functionalists and Boasians, mediator between, 104 – 6 interdisciplinary circle of cultural criticism, 108, 109 –10 Means, Gardiner C., 19 –20, 56, 73 –74, 78 – 79, 79 – 82, 186, 216 Meiklejohn, Alexander, 62, 124 –25 Melman, Seymour, 270 Menand, Louis, 12 Merton, Robert K., 122 methodological individualism, 238 Meyerson, Martin, 223 –24 micropolitics, 210 –11 Middletown (Lynd and Lynd), 97, 121 Mills, C. Wright, 176, 199, 202, 204, 207, 304n86 Mises, Ludwig von, 129 Mitchell, Broadus, 62 Mitchell, Wesley C., 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 83, 84 mixed economy, 6 The Modern Corporation and Private Property (Berle and Means), 20, 56, 73 –74, 79 – 82, 216 Der moderne Kapitalismus (Sombart), 27, 28 Moley, Raymond, 33 Moore, Barrington, Jr., 204 Moore, Merrill, 138 The Moral Dimension (Etzioni), 262 Morgan, J. P., 44 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 76 Morris, William, 91 “The Motivation of Economic Activities” (Parsons), 137 Mowrer, O. H., 144 Mumford, Lewis, 60, 191– 93 Murphy, Gardner, 105 Murray, Henry, 144 Mussolini, Benito, 61 Muste, Rev. A. J., 202 Mutual Aid (Kropotkin), 102 Myrdal, Gunnar, 173, 208

320 / Index Nation (magazine), 10, 55 National Association of Social Workers, 216 National Student Forum, 125 National Training Laboratories (Bethel, Maine), 210 National War Labor Board (NWLB), 58, 60 Nearing, Scott, 66, 67 Neilson, William Allan, 62 Neiman, Carol, 208 Nell, Edward, 227, 236 neo-Polanyians, 264– 66 Block, 231, 265–66, 311–12n38 neurosis, 110 –12 The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (Horney), 110 New Deal, 71, 135 new era, 49 –50, 56 – 57, 73, 267, 282n6 New Left, 8, 9, 21, 186, 200 –215, 303 – 4n74 American society, critique of, 204 anti-anticommunism, 207 anti-bureaucracy of, 205 – 6 civil society, focus on, 208 –10 defined, 200 –201 feminism and, 211–12 postcapitalist society, links to, 206 –7 postindustrialism and, 208, 230 – 31 social-democrats, antagonism toward, 204 –5 social liberalism and, 202– 4 transatlantic origin, 201–2 welfare crisis and, 226 New Left Review, 202 new order, anticipation of, 9, 15 –16, 49 – 50, 62, 126. See also new era The New Republic ( journal), 10, 52, 53 new social regulation, 217 new social sciences, 13 –14, 136 – 37, 141– 43, 145 – 49, 173 –74. See also cultural anthropology; social psychology; sociology New Student (National Student Forum publication), 125 The Next American Frontier (Reich), 258 “The Next American Revolution” (Berle), 77 Nicolaus, Martin, 39 Nixon, Richard, 216, 217, 220, 226 Non-Partisan League, 55 Notestein, Frank, 175 Novak, Michael, 247 NWLB (National War Labor Board), 58

O’Brien, James, 203, 204, 303n69 O’Connor, James, 227–28 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 144 –45 Ogburn, William F., 62, 104 Oglesby, Carl, 205, 206, 207 Olivier, Sydney, 27 “On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political-Economic Society” (Sklar), 231 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 175 organized capitalism, 54 – 85 ambiguity of, 82– 85 corporations, separation of ownership and control, 73–75, 77– 82 corporatist form, 57– 60 Hilferding, 56, 62– 63 social liberalism and, 55 – 56, 61– 62 Veblen and, 63 – 65, 67 See also institutionalists Les origines du capitalisme moderne (Sée), 31– 32 The Origins of Modern Capitalism (Brentano), 30 –31 Orlinsky, David, 173 Orren, Karen, 252 orthodox economists, 70 –71 Parsons’ critique of, 129 – 30 OSS (Office of Strategic Services), 144 – 45 The Other America (Harrington), 245 other-direction, 176 –77, 178 Parecon: Life after Capitalism (Albert), 270 Parrington, Vernon, 33 Parsons, Charles (brother), 124, 136, 138 – 39 Parsons, Charles (son), 293n46 Parsons, Edward S., 124 Parsons, Mary Augusta (Ingersoll), 124 Parsons, Talcott, 20, 31, 121– 50, 236, 246, 257, 276n14, 293n52, 294n61, 308– 9n74 academic achievements, 122–23 background, 123–25 capitalism-socialism dichotomy, irrelevance of, 5, 244, 248 communism and, 147– 48 competitive individualism, critique of, 137– 38, 139 –41 Department of Social Relations, 136, 144, 145, 220, 238 –39 economic and social theory, integration of, 13 –14, 181– 84

Index / 321 economic ethics and, 129 – 32 four-function model, 181– 82 “iron cage” phrase, 291n2, 303n61 new social sciences, incorporation of, 13 – 14, 136 – 37, 141–43, 145 – 49 professionalism, model of, 133 – 34 societal community, 240 –44 structural-functionalism, 122, 145 – 50 voluntaristic theory, 126 –28, 134 – 35 war debate, 139–40 “Part of the Way with LBJ” (SDS), 206 Patman, Wright, 186 Patten, Simon, 66 Patterns of Culture (Benedict), 93, 96– 98 pension funds, socialization of, 270 –72 Penty, Arthur J., 190 – 91, 301nn16 –17 Les périodes de l’histoire sociale du capitalisme (Pirenne), 29 Perlman, Selig, 62 Phillips, A. William, 236 Pinchot, Amos, 55, 60 – 61 Pinchot, Gifford, 139 Piore, Michael, 258 Pirenne, Henri, 29, 30, 247 The Planning of Change (Bennis, Benne and Chin), 187 Plough, Henry, 124 pluralism. See political pluralism Polanyi, Karl, 155, 156 –57, 172, 263 –64 “The Political Economy of Information Capital” (Hirschhorn), 231 political pluralism, 59 – 60, 170 –72, 177 critique of, 215 –16 Politics, Economics, and Welfare (Dahl and Lindblom), 171–72 Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest (Banfield and Meyerson), 223 –24 politics magazine, 158 –59, 175, 176, 205 Popular Front, 11 Popular Front Communism, 11 Porter, Noah, 47 Port Huron Statement (SDS), 202, 204, 207, 208, 210 postbourgeois society, 6, 199 –200 Post-Capitalist Society (Drucker), 266 postcapitalist vision, 154 –64 adherents, 8 ambiguity of, 21–22 change, conception of, 7 Crosland, 4–5, 159 –61 Dahrendorf, 161–62 decline of, 21, 220 –21, 235 – 36, 256

defined, 2 Europe and, 15 –16 Mannheim, 155 – 56 maturity of, 123, 150 – 51 naming of, 153, 155 New Left, links to, 206 –7 persistence of, 2– 3, 265 – 69 Polanyi, 156 – 57 political lability of, 7– 8 prototypical elements, 123 Schumpeter, 157– 58 Taylor, 154 – 55 See also competitive individualism, cultural critique of; end of ideology; postindustrial society; social liberalism postcapitalist vision, historicization of, 249 – 56 corporatist form of capitalism, 250 – 53 global form of capitalism, 256 – 57 Marxism and, 253 – 55 Post-Industrialism (Penty), 191 postindustrial society, 20 –21, 186, 189 –200, 228 – 35, 301n16 Bell, 195, 197– 98, 217, 229 – 30, 302n31 defined, 197, 231– 32 Ellul, 193– 94 genealogy of, 190 – 91 Hirschhorn, 230 – 35 Mumford, 191– 93 New Left and, 208 Penty, 190 – 91 Richta, 195–97 Riesman, 194 –95 post-Keynesians, 220, 226 –27 post-modern society, 199, 212–15 Potter, Paul, 1, 8, 207– 8 Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution (Livingston), 267– 68 President’s Commission on Income Maintenance Programs, 216–17 Price, Don K., 188 – 89, 189 – 90 primitive communism, 100, 102 Primitive Society (Lowie), 124 The Process of Government (Bentley), 59 “The Professions and Social Structure” (Parsons), 132 The Progress of Capitalism in England (Cunningham), 31 “Propaganda and Social Control” (Parsons), 141– 43 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber), 27, 122

322 / Index Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 25 psychoanalysis, 136–37, 142 Public Interest ( journal), 197 public sphere, notion of, 261– 62 “The Quantity Theory of Money” (Friedman), 237 RA (Resettlement Administration), 222–23 racism, 113 –14, 115 –16 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 87, 98, 99, 102– 4 radicalism, 10 –13. See also New Left: social liberalism and Randolph, A. Philip, 12, 139 Rathenau, Walther, 58, 83 rational expectations school, 237–38 Reagan, Ronald, 217, 246 “The Reality of Non-Commercial Incentives in Economic Life” (Douglas), 69 “reality principle,” 142 “Recent Developments in Economics” (Clark), 70 Redfield, Robert, 98 red scare, 11, 54 Reich, Robert, 258– 59 Reich, Wilhelm, 111 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Tawney), 32 Renner, Karl, 159 Research Center for Group Dynamics (Ann Arbor), 210 Resettlement Administration (RA), 222–23 revolution, in socialist transition. See Marx, Karl revolution, silent, 18, 51, 81, 150, 159 revolution and evolution in Marxism, 41– 43, 272 Richta, Radovan, 190, 195 – 97 Riesman, David, 8, 153 – 54, 172–75, 179 – 80, 194 – 95, 208 inner- versus other-direction, 176 –79 Ripley, William Z., 74 –75 Ritschl, Hans, 63 Robinson, Joan, 227 Rodgers, Daniel, 61 Roosevelt, Franklin, 33, 135, 145 Roosevelt, Theodore, 33, 81, 286n101 Rosenberg, Rosalind, 17 Ross, Dorothy, 33, 62 Rossinow, Doug, 203 Ruml, Beardsley, 167 Rustin, Bayard, 202, 208

Sable, Charles, 258 Sachs, Hanns, 108 Salin, Edgar, 125 Samoans, 93 – 95 Samuelson, Paul, 164, 167 Sapir, Edward, 87– 88, 92, 97, 104 Sassoon, Donald, 55 Savio, Mario, 201, 205 Schlesinger, Arthur M., 62 Schmoller, Gustav, 27, 28 Schumpeter, Joseph, 70, 157–58, 251, 252 Science: The Endless Frontier (Bush), 188 scientific-technological revolution, 187– 89, 189 – 90. See also postindustrial society “Scientists as Spies” (Boas), 90 SDS. See Students for a Democratic Society The Second Industrial Divide (Piore and Sable), 258 Sée, Henri, 31– 32 The Self-Conscious Society (Larrabee), 198 sensitivity training, 210 –11 Sering, Paul. See Löwenthal, Richard “Service” (Parsons), 129, 131 Seven Arts journal, 60 Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (Mead), 107, 110, 288n50 Sexton, Patricia Cayo, 17 Shachtman, Max, 205, 245, 303n62 Shapley, Harlow, 62 Shaw, George Bernard, 26 –27 Shils, Edward, 162, 181 silent revolution, 18, 51, 81, 150, 159 Sinclair, Upton, 124 “Skepticism” (Deutsch), 77 Sklar, Martin J., 206, 231, 266 – 67, 268, 303n74 Slater, Philip, 213 SLID (Student League for Industrial Democracy), 124, 186 Small, Albion, 53 Smelser, Neil, 181– 83, 238 Smith, Adam, 32 Smith, Lillian, 113 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 201 Social Choice and Individual Values (Arrow), 169 social economy, signs of, 216 –17 social indicators, 216, 217 socialism capitalism, transition from, 37– 39, 41– 42 defined, 27, 160 – 61

Index / 323 Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (Engels), 38 Socialist Revolution (journal), 231 social Keynesianism, revival of, 181–85, 186 social liberalism, 4, 10 –14, 20, 212–18, 256 –65 civil society, 260 –63 economic sociology, 263 – 65 Etzioni, 212–16 Galbraith, 217–18 industrial policy, 257– 59 New Left and, 202–4 organized capitalism and, 55 –56, 61–62 See also Parsons, Talcott; postcapitalist vision The Social Message of Jesus (Parsons), 124 social psychology, 109 –10, 112–14, 144, 208 –9, 212–13 social relations concept, 14, 145 – 49 Social Science Research Council, 105, 144 social sciences, contribution of women and minorities to, 16 –18 The Social System (Parsons), 145–49 social thought, 9 –14. See also postcapitalist vision; social liberalism social thought, interwar, 9 –10. See also cultural anthropology; institutionalists; political pluralism; socioeconomics; structural-functionalism social thought, modern, 4 postclassical phase, 13 social thought, postwar, 121–22, 150, 153–54 crisis in, 219 –20, 221–28, 238 –40 See also new social sciences societal community, 240 –44 society naming of, 1–2 nineteenth century definition of, 13 Parsons on, 144 –45, 148 – 49 social liberals understanding of, 13 –14 See also civil society socioeconomics, 56, 65 –66 The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 56, 73 –74, 79 – 82, 216 quantitative method, adoption of, 67– 68 science of welfare, 68 –69 See also institutionalists The Sociological Imagination (Mills), 199, 304n86 sociology, 121–23, 127–28, 136, 144 – 49, 186 –89 crisis in, 239 –41, 260 See also economic sociology

Solow, Robert, 168, 233 Sombart, Anton, 27 Sombart, Werner, 27–29, 30, 43, 53, 63 Soule, George, 62, 67, 68, 69, 73, 86 SPD (German Social Democratic Party), 28, 63 SPU (Student Peace Union), 203 Stearns, Harold, 88 Steinmetz, Charles P., 50, 285n86 Sternhell, Zeev, 16 Sternsher, Bernard, 184 Stocking, George, Jr., 90 Storey, Moorefield, 75 Strachey, John, 166 structural-functionalism, 122, 145 – 50 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas), 261 The Structure of Social Action (Parsons), 122, 126 –27, 128 –29, 134, 136, 137 Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), 124, 186 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 201 Student Peace Union (SPU), 203 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 186, 201, 203 – 4, 205 – 6, 209, 303n69 Port Huron Statement, 202, 204, 207, 208, 210 Studies in Social Power (Cartwright), 211 Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (Laski), 59 Studies on Authority and the Family (Horkheimer), 176 Studies on the Left, 202 The Study of Man (Linton), 114 –15 Sullivan, Harry Stack, 109 Sumner, William Graham, 26, 47, 225 –26 Supreme Court, U.S., 252 Survey magazine, 77 Swedberg, Richard, 263 Sweezy, Alan, 166 Sweezy, Paul, 40 – 41, 166, 227 Swope, Gerard, 58 Tawney, R. H., 32, 124, 125, 132 Taylor, A. J. P., 154 – 55 Taylor, O. H., 71 Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 191 The Technological Society (Ellul), 190 Teller, Edward, 175 Teodori, Massimo, 208 Texas Observer, 203

324 / Index T-groups, 210–11 Thatcher, Margaret, 246 The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen), 47 Thomas, W. I., 146 Thurow, Lester, 257– 58, 259 Tolman, Edward C., 147 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 28 Toward a Democratic Left (Harrington), 245 Townley, A. C., 55 Transaction ( journal), 239 transatlantic method, 15 –16 “transference,” 142 The Transformation of Modern Society (Renner), 159 transitional demands, 269 –72 The Trend of Economics (Tugwell), 65 –70 “Triple Revolution” manifesto, 208, 305n100 Trobrianders, 99, 100 –101 Tugwell, Rexford, 65 –67, 71–73, 82–83, 129 Casa Grande and, 222–23 Twilight of Capitalism (Harrington), 245 unemployment, 17, 62, 84, 166, 168, 182 Friedman on, 237 Phillips curve and, 236 technology and, 187, 192, 209 The Unfinished Task (Corey), 133 The Unheavenly City (Banfield), 224–25, 237–38 Union for Radical Political Economics, 227 unionism, 11, 57– 58, 60 –61, 256 United States Commission on Industrial Relations (1915 report), 57–58 Unites States Steel Corporation, 44 U. S. Supreme Court, 252 University of Chicago, 122, 172, 173 –74 utilitarian theory, 127, 128 Van Kleeck, Mary, 84 varieties of capitalism approach, 264 – 65, 311–12nn37– 38 Veblen, Thorstein, 13, 25, 43, 62, 86, 251

capitalism, theories on transformation of, 47– 50 organized capitalism and, 63 – 65, 67 Verein für Sozialpolitik, 27 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 55, 78 voluntaristic theory, 126 –28, 134 –35 Wagner, Adolf, 27 Wagner Act (U.S., 1937), 252 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 248 Walsh, Frank, 57– 58 “War and Reorientation” (Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences), 88 Ware, Caroline, 79 Washingtonian Hospital, 138 Weber, Max, 13, 27, 28 –29, 30, 53, 122, 303n61 Weinstein, James, 206, 303n74 Weld, William Earnest, 67 welfare crisis, 221, 226 welfare economics, 169 welfare state, 4, 13 whiteness, critique of, 113 Wiener, Jonathan M., 305n5 Williams, Raymond, 91 Wilson, Woodrow, 33, 50, 57, 60, 141 Wirth, Louis, 173 Withers, Hartley, 280n38 Wolfe, Albert B., 68, 69 Wolfe, Willard, 26 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 92 women, contribution to social sciences, 16 – 18 Women and Economics (Gilman), 92 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 34 – 35 “Work and Leisure in Post-Industrial Society” (Riesman), 194–95 The Worldly Philosophers (Heilbroner), 7 Wright, G. Frederick, 75 Young People’s Socialist League, 203 Young Radicals (Keniston), 213 The Zero-Sum Society (Thurow), 257– 58 The Zero-Sum Solution (Thurow), 259