Trachtenberg, Haskell, & Livingston, Inc.

Abstract

My title refers to three of four critics who have had most influence on me during 10 years or so that I've been drafting a book on paternalism in early corporate era. Its title, Paternalism Incorporated, bows to book we're revisiting today. Perhaps less agreeably, I'm putting Alan Trachtenberg's book in uneasy partnership with two more recent and more positive studies of corporate transformation. Thomas Haskell's Capitalism and Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility, a two-part essay in 1985 American Historical Review, makes still startling argument that capitalist markets expanded perceptions of causal relations, moral responsibility, and imaginative sympathies.' James Livingston's 1994 book, Pragmatism and Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940, argues that capitalism first established, then undermined, priority of principle of class. And, he says, that's not a bad thing.2 I won't talk much about Haskell, except to say that his sometimes abstracted argument pushed me to question whether neo-Marxist trinity of alienation, reification, and commodification fully explains corporate capitalism's social impact. Instead I'll focus on Trachtenberg and Livingston, whose book appeared in a series edited by Trachtenberg, with a foreword by him. The fourth member of my imaginary firm, Walter Benn Michaels, did so well with The Gold Standard and Logic of Naturalism in 1987 that he left to form his own company. I'll start with one of most reverberating sentences in The Incorporation ofAmerica. Trachtenberg begins by observing that when critics tried to explain corporate transformation of American life, they reached for the familiar but already outmoded language of individualism (5). From Charles Francis Adams, Jr., onward, their critiques make manly entrepreneur and individual producer metonyms for healthy nation, while blaming and shaming corporations not only for corruption,