HOWARD BRICK. Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 324. $39.95

Abstract

Howard Brick's two previous books are Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (1998) and Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s (1986). His purpose in the book under review is to remind us that capitalism is not a timeless universal. He wants us to remember that many social scientists in the United States and in other modern nations from around 1900 until the 1970s saw capitalism as a momentary phase in world history that was being superseded by a more humane society. These economists, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists were prophets, therefore, of a “postcapitalist” society. Although influenced by Karl Marx, they rejected his belief in the need for violent revolution. They also envisioned a new world with both public and private property. Brick's book, then, is an intellectual history of a postcapitalist vision that almost disappeared in the 1990s. For him the crucial weakness of this tradition was its faith in spontaneous transformation that did not require political organization and a systematic plan of transition. Nevertheless his book is a labor of love. Postcapitalism, for him, provides a usable past in spite of its weakness. And so he declares, “For those of us who wish to turn the table on the capitalist triumphalism that grips 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” (p. 249).