American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

During the flush decades of America's unrivaled dominance of the global economy following World War II, it was easy for intellectuals in and out of the academy to imagine a postcapitalist society no longer hampered by life-and-death ideological struggles. Social theorists from a wide variety of backgrounds offered predictions about what America's political economy might look like in the future, ranging from an optimistic liberalism rooted in social structures and their functions to the nightmare of state capitalism. These probing, mostly biographical essays, the majority of which were originally presented at a 2003 conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, examine the visions of such important liberal thinkers as Talcott Parsons and John Kenneth Galbraith as well as such left-wing critics as C. Wright Mills and C. L. R. James. The principal theme of the collection is provided in Howard Brick's stimulating overview of postcapitalist theorizing in the twentieth century. He argues that every burst of reformist political energy revitalized a social-liberal consciousness that “insisted on interpreting the institutional form of liberal corporate capitalism as a transitional stage promising something beyond capitalism itself” (p. 45). Thus, even at its height, American capitalism appeared to many intellectuals as a problem. Liberal contributions to the efforts to imagine a more fulfilling economic society ranged from Clark Kerr's knowledge economy to Peter F. Drucker's post-Fordism. But the most intriguing essays treat those who offered a critique of American capitalism from the Left. Mills turned Parsons's interest in total social structures and transnational convergence on its head, disparaging American society for its “big chains of authority” (p. 153). Likewise, James pointed to the similarities between the Soviet and American state bureaucracies and to the threat they each posed. Oliver C. Cox drew on his youth in colonial Trinidad to criticize America's economic imperialism for sustaining the exploitation and dependence of nonwhite peoples. For Cox, the promise of redemption rested in Third World revolutions. Finally, Daniel Horowitz surveys the pioneering scholars in the field of women's history, showing that their work was also rooted in a critique of American capitalism.