Between February 28 and March 1, 2003, an interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered at the University of California, Santa Barbara to consider the evolution of Americans' thinking about capitalism in the last half of the twentieth century. The conference, organized by Nelson Lichtenstein (University of California, Santa Barbara) and entitled “Capitalism and Its Culture: Rethinking Twentieth-Century American Social Thought,” focused on the years between 1938 and 1973, when capitalism as an idea and a system moved from a term of some contestation to an almost naturalized phenomenon that equated the market with progress, democracy, and civil society. In these mid-century decades, intellectuals increasingly substituted a discourse involving bureaucracy, modernization, and mass culture for earlier concerns over class conflict, social inequality, and the place of the large corporation in the democratic polity. The conference provided an opportunity for scholars of the family, academia, radicalism, feminism, and conservatism to explore the development of and challenges to capitalism and its culture.

Howard Brick's (Washington University) keynote address on the “postcapitalist” vision of many twentieth-century intellectuals helped to set the agenda for conference discussions. Brick argued that from the Progressive Era through the New Left, social theorists like Talcott Parsons, David Riesman, and Daniel Bell have often seen capitalism as a transitional system destined for a new kind of political economy beyond the unalloyed rule of market exchange. American intellectuals joined their European counterparts in identifying a system designed to generate a new kind of political economy displacing property relations as the most identifiable and distinctive characteristics of western economic life. Though critical of the postcapitalist vision and its limitations for understanding deeply entrenched political and economic inequalities, Brick embraced those aspects of such postcapitalist prognostication that sustained the reformist imagination and challenged market triumphalism.

A session devoted to understanding changes in American liberalism in the postwar era provided a rich historical context for understanding the decline of the New-Deal critique of capitalism. In an analysis of the political ramifications of fears concerning inflation in postwar decades, Meg Jacobs (Massachusetts Institute for Technology) argued that middle-class fear of inflation, in part linked to fear of labor power, eroded the mass electoral base of the Roosevetlian coalition. Kevin Mattson (Ohio University) used an examination of John Kenneth Galbraith's work in the 1950s to demonstrate the diversity of ideas that constituted postwar liberalism, while Nils Gilman described management theorist Peter Drucker's role in shifting the conception of the mid-century corporation from one that focused on the productive capacity of business to a recognition that the integrative social and political nature of the corporation was paramount. Commentator Walther Licht (University of Pennsylvania) noted themes in all of the papers that took the erosion of a liberal critique of capitalism back to the 1940s and expanded the explanation for the demise of the New-Deal coalition to include more than the cultural and political backlash thought characteristic of the years after 1968.

A number of conference participants highlighted social scientific efforts to decenter capitalism as the operative model for understanding fundamental features of American society. Paddy Riley (UC Berkeley) provided a reexamination of Clark Kerr that emphasized his shift from labor economics and mediation to his later celebration of the university as the point of production for a new knowledge economy. David C. Engermann (Brandeis University) examined the emergence of postwar theories of US/USSR convergence, demonstrating how social scientists used the example of Soviet industrialization as a tool to formulate a non-capitalist understanding of the industrialization process among nations with quite different political and economic systems; interestingly, Talcott Parsons and area studies scholars approached this task, and generated much theory our of their work, with little actual understanding of the Soviet Union. Christopher McAuley (UC Santa Barbara) scrutinized the work of Oliver Cox as an example of an intellectual whose declining hopes for anticapitalist politics in the industrialized west led to the development of world systems theory and the abandonment of the western working-class as a vehicle for radical change.

A number of panels highlighted the importance of the university, knowledge and expertise in shaping conceptions of capitalist culture, reform, and industrial relations. Jeffrey Sklansky (Oregon State University) identified the work and ideas of Henry Carey, Henry George, and Simon Patten as exemplars of a larger shift toward a societal, rather than an individual, frame of reference in economics. Christopher Newfield (UC Santa Barbara) described efforts by Cold War era scientists, often using the institutional protection provided by the postwar university, to draw upon longstanding craft-labor traditions to insulate themselves from market and military pressures. Andrew Jewett (UC Berkeley) used the late 1930s work of Robert K. Merton to describe the reinvigoration of the idea that scientific methods and resources should be used to promote Enlightenment ideals across society. Shannan Clark's (Columbia University) examination of the Design Laboratory in New York City illuminated the difficulties experienced by an institution that combined professional training with democratic ideals in a bold attempt to challenge the emerging culture of corporate capitalism.

A panel on feminism and the family traced way in which a gendered understanding of the women question came to displace, advance, and transform the way leftwing writers and intellectuals have thought about the relationship between class, culture, and the family. Daniel Horowitz (Smith College) described the importance of labor struggles and radical politics in shaping the thinking of postwar women's history pioneers Betty Friedan, Carl Degler, Gerda Lerner, Aileen Kraditor, and Elenor Flexnor. Judith E. Miller (University of Massachusetts-Boston) used the work of Arthur Miller and Lorraine Hansberry to show how representations of gender and race in the lived experience of the postwar lower-middle class proved a more subtle means of generating social criticism than had the more orthodox Marxist frame in which both of these authors were initially steeped. Robert Genter (Columbia University) placed Norman O. Brown's early work in the context of a postwar discourse concerned with the fate of the nuclear family during an era when traditional male roles were shifting because of occupational change and the rise of a white collar workforce.

Unlike many of the papers and panels that focused on intellectuals and experts, another group of scholars looked outside of the academy in order to better assess the role of workers and radicals in challenging the dominance of a culture of capitalism. This theme was particularly evident in a panel entitled “Cultural Politics,” which featured presentations by George Lipsitz (UC San Diego) and Alan Wald (University of Michigan) with commentary from Adolph Reed (New School University). Lipsitz used the experiences of Stanley Wier, a participant in maritime union struggles for more than fifty years, to demonstrate how “business unionism” had compromised working-class solidarity and culture. Wald's examination of the novels written by a cohort of black Communists during the era of the Popular Front uncovered the tensions that arose when these African-American intellectuals sought to square their increasingly self-assertive racial advancement agenda with the requirement for an antifascist unity, especially during the second world war.

A panel of scholars closely scrutinized important elements of postwar conservative thought, ideology, and institutions. Juliet Williams (UC Santa Barbara) offered an important revision of F. A. von Hayek's intellectual journey that uncovered a tension between Hayek's reputation as an anti-statist philosopher and his uneasy defense of some state intervention and regulation of the market. Jennifer Burns' (UC Berkeley) discussion of Ayn Rand's 1958 expulsion from conservative ranks (in a blistering National Review attack by Whiticker Chambers) made clear the tensions that existed within the early postwar right between market libertarians and “fusionist” efforts to combine Christian traditionalism with laissez-faire principles. Kimberly Phillips-Fein's (Columbia University) talk described the important role of General Electric's human resource manager, Lemuel Boulware, in crafting an ideologically aggressive corporate response to organized labor's New Deal Era power. Likewise, Alice O'Conner's (UC Santa Barbara) examination of the conservative attack upon large foundations like Ford and Rockefeller, which the right portrayed as a “shadow government” hijacked by New Deal liberals, demonstrated how the push for philanthropic accountability in the 1950s and 1960s constricted the liberal reform imagination and led to the rise of a right-wing philanthropic/think-tank nexus in the years after 1970.

The conference concluded with a spirited session examining C. Wright Mills and his legacy in the social sciences and beyond. Dan Geary (UC Berkeley) and John Summers (University of Rochester) traced Mill's career from precocious graduate student in the 1930s and early 1940s to his radicalization and apparent alienation from the discipline of sociology. Both put Mill's early work within the context of mainstream sociology, which suggests that Mills still thought of social sciences, including that influenced by Weber and Parsons, as an effective tool to critique corporate capitalism. Richard Flacks (UC Santa Barbara) and Russell Jacoby (UC Los Angeles), both of whom first encountered Mills in the 1950s, defended a view that Mills was above all a forceful and inspiring critic of Parsonian social science.

The conference proved a success on a number of fronts. It advanced the work of historicizing thought about a system that now seems so dominant as to be nearly invisible. By reminding participants of this varied set of political and economic analyses of western capitalism, the conference provided an alternative means of periodizing much twentieth century social thought, de-emphasizing the Cold War and the “Sixties” per se, and instead viewing the whole era from the first world war to the 1970s as a moment when postcapitalist and postindustrial ideas were in play. Finally, the conference succeeded in increasing the visibility of market capitalism and rallying scholars to continue scrutinizing and studying this highly contingent and constructed system. A selection of conference papers will be published by University of Pennsylvania Press.