The Reconstruction of Constitutional Privacy Rights and the New American State

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Scholars have accorded the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a uniquely important place in the annals of American political development. During this period, the nation underwent transformations from a rural and agricultural to an urban and industrial society. Underlying these transformations was a revolution in the nature of the country's political economy, which shifted rapidly from a longstanding proprietary-competitive order to an unwonted corporate-administrative one.Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3. Specifically Sklar defines “proprietary-competitive” as capitalist property and market relations in which the dominant type of enterprise was headed by an owner-manager (or owner-managers), or a direct agent thereof, and in which such enterprise was a price-taker, rather than a price-maker, price being determined by conditions of supply and demand beyond the control of the enterprise short of anticompetitive inter-firm collusion. By the new “corporate-administrative” order, he means a political economy characterized by the capitalization of . . . property in the form of negotiable securities relatively widely dispersed in ownership, a corresponding separation of ownership title and management function, and management of the enterprise by bureaucratic-administrative methods involving a division, or a specialization of managerial function, and an integration, or at least a centralization, of financial control. It is meant to designate “a process occurring not merely in a few notable firms, or in a sector of the economy . . . but pervasively, and hence involving the change in the broader economy from price-competitive to administered, or ‘oligopolistic,' markets” (Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, 4 n.1). This transformation fundamentally altered traditional forms of work and management in the private sector, leading to the preeminence of a wage-labor system, the separation of corporate ownership from control, and the rise of bureaucratized and professionalized business management.See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism: 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977). At the same time, a “new American state” was formed with its own analogous cadres of governing professionals, professionals who in the new administrative agencies asserted increasingly centralized control over the nation's economy and civil society.Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).