Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)

Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)

Triumphant capitalism seems nowadays to be a fact of nature, requiring no name and admitting, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, of “no alternative.”Footnote ¹ Neither American Capitalism nor Transcending Capitalism shrinks from “naming the system,” as perplexed New Leftists once struggled to do when trying to articulate their own alternative. But having named it, neither book takes as its primary task to define or fully describe that economic and sociocultural system. Rather, both are concerned principally with how twentieth-century American intellectuals, broadly construed, oriented and addressed themselves to the idea of capitalism in light of their respective historical moments’ shifting economic and social realities. Some reformist thinkers came to deny the efficacy of “capitalism” for describing a political–economic order which they believed to be rapidly passing away; their rivals to the right, meanwhile, mounted a reinvigorated defense of the term and its classical implications. While Daniel Bell announced in his 1960 essay on “The End of Ideology in the West” that post-World War II intellectuals had achieved a “rough consensus” on the desirability of the welfare state and political pluralism, the essays in American Capitalism suggest a more complicated picture. The “age of consensus,” that favorite punching bag of recent historians of the United States, takes a few more ritual knocks in the Lichtenstein volume. But the book's essays, in conjunction with Howard Brick's monograph, do establish that the lively discourse on the future of American society which proceeded in the aftermath of World War II was also part of a continuous debate that ran across most of the century's course. Bell suggested one theme of that debate when he argued that Western intellectuals must turn their attention away from political economy in order to address “the stultifying aspects of contemporary culture,” which could not be adequately framed in traditional right-versus-left terms.Footnote ² If Bell's generation, along with the younger New Left thinkers who were soon to appear, found the contradictions of capitalism to be decreasingly pressing, they would find sufficient challenge when they engaged instead with the knotty social and cultural issues of modern America.

Both books invite us to think differently about periodization, as the American Capitalism contributors tend to stress the interwar roots of their subjects’ postwar ideas, and Brick writes of a “long wave” of developing critical social thought which encompassed many of the thinkers addressed in these two works; indeed, his generously proportioned “long ‘middle’” of the twentieth century ran from 1914 into the 1970s (9, 18). And both books share the hope expressed by editor Nelson Lichtenstein in his introduction to American Capitalism that by historicizing the idea of capitalism—by naming the system in ways that denaturalize it and suggest its potential for amendment and transition—they may “unsteady” some current “verities” (17). The contributions to Lichtenstein's volume, which began as papers delivered at a 2003 conference on “Capitalism and Its Culture,” address social thought from the left, center, and right, while Brick's monograph brings to fruition a set of ideas and themes that he has advanced in a series of articles that are frequently cited in American Capitalism, to which he also contributed.Footnote ³ Together, these books offer readers an already influential interpretation of twentieth-century “postcapitalist” social thought, and a series of more specialized studies, most of which reflect recently published or forthcoming monographs. They demonstrate the achievements and suggest the considerable potential of this emerging body of work on the history of ideas about capitalism and (contra Thatcher) its alternatives.

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Because Howard Brick's distinctive terminology—that a “postcapitalist vision,” underwritten by an intellectual “shift away from economics,” allied itself with a “social liberal” politics—helps to frame several of the essays in the Lichtenstein collection, I will begin by considering his Transcending Capitalism. “Transcending” is here meant to suggest “moving beyond,” but in the absence of a sharp break or revolutionary overthrow as envisioned in classical Marxist theory. Brick argues that across much of the twentieth century, postcapitalist thinkers in academia, government, journalism, and oppositional social movements such as the New Left believed that as Western European and North American capitalist systems became more organized, bureaucratized, corporatized, and integrated with the political realm, they were naturally outgrowing their individualistic and privatistic premises—if (and this was always an ambiguity) they had not already done so. This theoretical vision of an impending postcapitalist order developed and flourished in tandem with a political stance that Brick calls social liberalism. Adherents of this position fused liberal with social-democratic ideas and located themselves at the left edge of American reform movements, from progressivism and the New Deal through the Great Society.

While acknowledging that there were no self-proclaimed postcapitalist thinkers until the 1950s, when the term emerged from British Labour Party circles, Brick finds the developing lineaments of a tradition of postcapitalist social thought as early as Walter Lippmann's 1914 perception that the “quiet revolution” fomented by corporate capitalism was reshaping American institutions and life in collectivist directions. Interwar developments in institutional economics, cultural anthropology, and social psychology fuelled scholarly skepticism that the emergent order could properly be called capitalism, and that a system by that name could best meet the needs of a healthy and dynamic modernity. Such thinking reached a peak between the post-World War II years and the early 1970s, when “industrial” or “postindustrial society” struck many observers as more accurate descriptors for societies in which the social realm seemed to be taking determinative precedence over the economic. But hopes for the emergence of a more socialized and egalitarian order beyond capitalism foundered amid the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, as the postcapitalist vision's proponents proved unable to resolve its internal weaknesses and evasions, and failed to fight off a resurgent economism in the social sciences and in social discourse more generally. Capitalism—loved on the right, loathed on the left, but denied no longer—was back. Brick advances this storyline across the booms and busts, the world wars and their aftermaths, and the other ruptures usually assumed by historians to have interrupted and diverted the course of social thought. He demonstrates the continuity of this thread of social analysis and expectation, and concludes by suggesting its lessons and legacies for present and future proponents of a world beyond capitalism. Having reconstructed this tradition of thinkers who doubted that capitalism would always be with us, he shows that our intellectual history was not predestined to eventuate in today's “mood of capitalist triumphalism” (3).

While there is much of interest throughout Transcending Capitalism, it is Brick's rethinking of the sociologist Talcott Parsons that will especially strike many readers. Beginning in the 1930s, it fell to Parsons to gather the raw materials provided by the interwar social sciences—especially cultural anthropology and social psychology—and to meld them into the “mature postcapitalist vision” that would dominate postwar social theory (123). The nature and political implications of that vision, and the reputation of its creator, are at the heart of the book's remaining chapters. Those who think of Parsons as a singularly conservative force in social thought, as the target of C. Wright Mills's polemicizing against arid grand theory and of Betty Friedan's assault on the “functional” nature of female domesticity,Footnote ⁴ will be challenged. Brick shows Parsons's thought to have been grounded in youthful progressive activism in the 1920s and mature social liberalism in the 1930s, and rereads his functionalism as moderately dynamic and reformist—far from radical, but not, as his later New Left critics had it, monolithically conservative and complacent either. By the middle and late 1940s, looking through the lenses of the newer social sciences, and buoyed by a postwar confidence in the possibilities for democratic renewal and for the emergence of a “social economy,” Parsons identified and led the way in a scholarly “shift of emphasis away from economics” (123). In a pivotal moment for Brick's argument, Parsons downplayed the putatively reductionist idea of capitalism as a key category for social analysis and prescription, and stressed instead the interdisciplinary study of a largely autonomous realm of social experience. In 1946 such study would achieve academic legitimacy through the organization of Parsons's Department of Social Relations at Harvard. Brick asserts that because Parsonian sociology was so influential, these developments “virtually inscribed the postcapitalist vision in the basic form of postwar social theory” (150).

In the ensuing chapters, Brick conducts the reader through social thought of the 1950s, showing, for example, how David Riesman's Lonely Crowd (1950) exemplified the shift away from economics and articulated a critical cultural analysis by building upon postcapitalist assumptions. Having established that postcapitalist thinking, given its lengthy history, cannot be reduced to timid midcentury intellectuals’ reaction to the Cold War chill, Brick moves thence into the 1960s, convincingly and fascinatingly demonstrating the often unexpected lines of filiation between the postcapitalist tradition, New Left activist intellectuals, and postindustrial theorists. Brick shows that during this climactic era of “dynamic sociology,” with the shadow of Parsons looming in the background, the downplaying of economics in favor of the cultural and the social masked the concrete impacts of capitalism, but also allowed thinkers’ gaze to shift toward other fertile categories such as race, gender, technology, the university, and authenticity. Along the way he explores some, but not all, of the questions raised by his tracing of this intellectual genealogy.

One matter for further consideration is the implication of insisting that social liberals were not “conservative.” Brick is no uncritical defender of the postcapitalist vision: if it valuably projected egalitarian ideas of major social change, it also drastically reduced the ability of social thought to reckon with the power of markets, property, and wealth. He faults postcapitalist thinking for its “idealist” faith that ideas could change the world, and for its “ideological” disposition to blur the line between advocating for desirable changes and assuming that they were already in process, thereby justifying an excessive optimism about the status quo (151). But he wants the tradition's adherents to be properly understood as believers in change, not as “conservatives” in any literal sense of the word. Still, this is tricky semantic business, and it remains plausible to insist that Parsons had a conservatizing impact. Brick shows that in the 1940s Parsons believed that social strain and disharmony not only fomented disruption but served as motors of progress, and that he therefore continued to draw reformist conclusions—supporting a guaranteed annual income, for example—from his functionalist analysis. Yet Brick has also shown that in Parsons's larger conceptual framework, the “ongoing transition in social affairs” had already essentially “rendered the problem of capitalism all but obsolete” (136). This crucial change of emphasis away from his sharper social-liberal criticisms of capitalism in the 1930s would achieve fruition in The Social System (1951)—as Brick notes, a book that lacked the critical edge of Parsons's earlier work, being more accepting of limited future changes and harsher in its Cold War inflected attacks on the “utopian” dangers of radical movements. When we consider Brick's contrast between Parsons's 1942 critique of gender roles and his 1951 acceptance of “modern” gender segregation, we see that Betty Friedan's reproach seems largely justified. Friedan's conclusion that Parsons's goal was “keeping the social structure as it is” would,Footnote ⁵ from her perspective, be the very definition of conservatism. This is to suggest that conservative readings of Parsons's corpus were not always and necessarily tendentious or ill informed, and that a useful outgrowth of Brick's study might be an inquiry into Parsons's reception and influence, not only by scholars but in textbooks and classroom materials (such as formed the basis for Friedan's commentary). If Parsons was the towering figure of postwar social theory, we should know more about how his ideas were read and used.

The question of conservatism raises the broader issue of where Brick's book leaves the interpretation of twentieth-century reform. While Brick makes clear his own preference for a socialist alternative to present arrangements (249, 272–3), much of his argument may be read as a critique of the corporate liberalism thesis, as articulated by early New Left historians. Brick resists their tendency to read reform as ultimately serving the needs of capital and reinforcing its hegemony. At the same time, he hopes to transcend longtime debates rooted in the conflict between “revisionist” or “evolutionary” and “orthodox” Marxists. Such debates have arisen because capitalism, in Marxist theory, is understood to generate the preconditions of its own demise by collectivizing production, privatizing profits, and driving workers toward oppositional organization. Brick wants to give greater weight than have previous disputants to what Marx saw as the coexistence and sometime intermingling of “evolutionary” and “revolutionary” economic and social developments (41–2). Brick therefore emphasizes that social theorists should seek out the “undecided possibilities of change” that are characteristic of transitional periods, rather than pronouncing judgments based upon fixed distinctions between reform and revolution (42).

This approach gives Brick's argument a decidely undogmatic tenor. Where New Left historians condemned postcapitalist intellectuals such as Rexford Tugwell, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, and Talcott Parsons as conservative apologists for corporate-state power—ironically, attacking an intellectual and political tradition which had nourished the New Left's own distinctive modes of postcapitalist social and cultural criticism—Brick carefully traces those figures’ social-liberal backgrounds and political commitments, recovers their critiques of corporate domination (which Berle and Means condemned, for example, as “a new form of absolutism” (80)), and explicates the distinctly reformist implications of their texts. Unlike the theorists of corporate liberalism, Brick sees postcapitalist thinkers as advancing certain important and useful insights about contemporary social development. Unlike the postcapitalists, he underscores, as did Marx, not the automatic preparation of the ground for a collectivized order, but the need to critically evaluate the simultaneous socializing and privatizing dimensions of capitalist development, and to support only those developments that truly point beyond capitalism. Brick further faults the postcapitalists for failing to recognize that a qualitative break must occur between capitalism and its “successor regime” (269). That is, Marx's “‘associated’ mode of production” cannot become reality without the “retirement from power” of those who benefit from the capitalist order (272). But how exactly such a break (with its attendant retirements) might be conceived and accomplished is mainly a matter of conjecture here. From Brick we get a rich and nuanced portrait of the course of twentieth-century social thought that takes quite seriously a range of thinkers, illuminating their specific qualities and places in an intellectual tradition. That social liberals avoided rhetorical assaults on capitalism, and that they maintained personal and political connections ranging across the political spectrum, does not mean they should be reduced to lackeys of the corporate state (even if, as Brick also briefly notes, such “conservative procorporate reformers” did exist, suggesting that the corporate liberal model should not be entirely dismissed). Theirs were “more ambitious goals” (83) than simply justifying the ongoing interpenetration of state and corporate power. To call them postcapitalists is not to sloppily label them socialists or radicals, neither of which they were; it is to do justice to the complexity of US reform. Brick's book shows the efficacy of careful, contextualized readings that do not assume in advance their authors’ enfoldment in a hegemonic project.

Transcending Capitalism may be expected to shape future work on the history of twentieth-century social thought, especially on its midcentury variants. In the book's limitations it offers manifold possibilities for future scholarly inquiry. Some of the genealogical links run rather thin; for example, can the development of postindustrial thought be given more heft than is attained by tenuously connecting Arthur Penty, an obscure British guild socialist of the 1910s, to Lewis Mumford's 1930s work by way of a citation to Penty in the bibliography of Technics and Civilization (1934), after which we are apprised that Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (1964) contained “unconscious echoes of Penty's original concerns” (193)? On a different note, the fascinating material on the New Left raises possibilities for mapping the circulation of postcapitalist ideas through that movement's grass-roots discourses, such as the left and underground press and the massive literature of pamphlets, manifestos, and broadsides. Brick hints at how such connections could be made when he links the late 1940s studies in group dynamics that produced “T-groups” and “sensitivity training” to the emergence of feminist consciousness-raising. The book suggests endless opportunities for exploring the roles of postcapitalist thought at particular conjunctures of politics, culture, and counterculture in the era of dynamic sociology and New Left activism.

Finally, it does seem more than a little odd that only in the early twenty-first century would the concept of postcapitalism appear in the monographic literature. Did no one—particularly outright defenders of capitalism—notice what was up from 1914 onward and launch an orthodox assault upon it? One would like to know this tradition in part by its enemies, but there seem not to have been many. Brick makes clear why social liberals largely stopped talking about capitalism, but did their rivals on the right not seek to defend their standard? When Milton Friedman puts in an appearance, it is to proclaim his own views, not to argue against those of others. Edward Banfield figures as a disillusioned acolyte of Tugwell's who switched sides, showing how social liberalism's rivals might criticize it in the name of market solutions for social problems. But Banfield's critique was leveled at social-liberal politics, not (at least in Brick's telling) at the broader postcapitalist vision of a new economic order. Did the believers in capitalism's reality, who might have ranged from anarcho-communists to Marxists to libertarians, not launch a running discursive assault on the illusions of postcapitalism, the recovery of which would tell us much about all sides? Especially pertinent would be whether defenders of capitalism identified and attacked the postcapitalist vision, or whether they remained content to slow-cook their ideas until they rose to a boil in the 1970s. If the latter, this might explain postcapitalist thinkers’ notable failure to recognize that laissez-faire conservatism had stubbornly refused to wither away.

If Brick's book is, as one of the back-jacket blurbs suggests, a work of both intellectual history and social theory,Footnote ⁶ then we might finish by asking what service it does in the latter capacity. Brick has offered a measured and thoughtful critique of a tradition that he thinks may offer limited resources to those who still harbor hopes of seeing capitalism transcended. His final chapter discusses how “transitional” developments might be recognized and advanced—how some kinds of practical reform might open the door to broader transformations. But this has been a book about a tradition whose practitioners consciously eschewed ideas of a sudden or revolutionary rupture with the current system. Logically enough, Brick calls for a “new critical social theory” that can grasp the emergent “globalizing” features of modern capitalism (272–3). But how are theory and practice to be united? Brick does not attempt an analysis of contemporary class dynamics or of the prospects for revolutionary working-class organizing. Indeed, because professedly radical movements are largely bracketed throughout this book, we are left uncertain about what role activist engagement by the disenfranchised and their allies—whether by way of a popular front, a vanguard party, or some other form—has played or might play in bringing to fruition that combination of evolutionary and revolutionary changes that Marx identified as inherent to capitalist development, and as necessary to its transcendence. That, perhaps, is the subject for a book devoted more directly than this one to prescription and politics.

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Turning to the other book under review, the collection of essays on American Capitalism suggests some of the directions that practitioners in this particular branch of US intellectual history—many of them, as noted above, showing the influence of Howard Brick's work—are now exploring. While the book's subtitle refers to “the Twentieth Century,” most of these essays concern individuals who came of age in the Depression era, but whose public careers lay mainly between the 1940s and the early 1970s—the heyday of Brick's postcapitalist vision—with some attention to the century's final quarter, when the idea of capitalism came roaring back and hesitations about naming the system evaporated. In his helpful and comprehensive introduction, Nelson Lichtenstein points out that while the thinkers addressed by these essays held a wide range of political positions, they generally shared a recognition that capitalism had emerged not from nature but from history, and that its history was still in process. Such a “historicized sensibility,” regarded by the editor as “alien” to today's capitalist triumphalists, is one thing that these largely left-leaning essays hope to recuperate (3). If the present was not predetermined, then neither is the future.

There are only faint echoes here of issues that have preoccupied many intellectual and cultural historians in recent years: pragmatism, modernism, religion, gender, sexuality, ethnoracial identities, consumption. Rather, this book explores “imaginative social thought” about capitalism, mainly in the United States (3). The rubric of social thought allows for minimal overlap with cultural history: Ayn Rand's ponderous novels count as evidence, while political murals and avant-garde films do not; C. L. R. James, usually associated with the cultural sphere, is considered here in light of his contributions to political economy. This is not a weakness—the other sort of work is abundantly available—but bespeaks the collection's clear focus. Some historians may think “social thought” a rather old-fashioned category, conjuring the image of Morton White's great work of the 1940s.Footnote ⁷ They will not be surprised to find that the linguistic turn barely registers in this book. On offer here, as in Brick's Transcending Capitalism, are careful readings of texts that are understood to be rife with intended meanings which are now decipherable and susceptible to analysis. Insights of other sorts might certainly be produced by the deployment of deconstructive methods, but they will not be found in this volume.Footnote ⁸ On the other hand, the American Capitalism authors refreshingly broaden the scope of who counts as an actor in intellectual history, and of how ideas may be understood to circulate and have impact. We meet members of the corporate-management intelligentsia and of the foundation elite, we encounter marginalized activists and academics of the left and right, and we strike fresh acquaintances with social scientists and radical theorists whom we thought we knew well.

In an introductory section called “Theorizing Capitalism,” essays by Howard Brick and David C. Engerman show how the idea of capitalism came to be supplanted by such terms as industrial, postindustrial, and postcapitalist society, all of which assumed the existence of a mainly autonomous social sphere in which noneconomic issues such as culture, race, knowledge production, and alienation could be addressed. Brick offers a summary account of the rise and fall of the postcapitalist vision across the twentieth century, while Engerman presents a case study of postcapitalist theorizing as that vision came to maturity after World War II in “convergence theory.” Engerman charts the emergence in early studies of the Soviet Union—again, Talcott Parsons plays a central role—of the idea that US and Soviet societies were developing beyond the “capitalist” and “communist” labels to take on a generically modern “industrial” form. Parsons's travels to the USSR and extensive contacts with Soviet sociologists convinced him that the rise of Soviet scientific (structural-functionalist) sociology both marked and fostered a new stage of Soviet modernization. A natural convergence of bureaucratic forms and productive methods and goals in the two societies was already discernible, nourishing the hope that ideological dissonances would diminish as disciplinary professionalism, operating under the apolitical sign of the scientific ideal, gained prominence. In the most optimistic Parsonian incarnation of convergence theory, scholarly exchange and comparative social forecasting would heighten awareness of the two societies’ increasing similarities, and would thereby actually hasten the Cold War's end. Alvin Gouldner's “nightmare” view of these same developments (66–7), on the other hand, recalls the early New Left's complementary critiques of East and West as similarly repressive and alienating. Engerman's fascinating account makes a strong case for transnational intellectual history; the rise of convergence theory, with its varying political valences, and the expanding use of “industrial society” at the expense of “capitalism,” cannot be grasped without an understanding of how US thinkers engaged with changes in Soviet society and social-scientific practice.

The three essays in the section on “Liberalism and Its Social Agenda” all cast new light on familiar figures. Clark Kerr, regularly glossed as the tribune of the multiversity and implacable opponent of student activism, takes on a postcapitalist third dimension as Paddy Riley charts Kerr's intellectual and professional development from 1940s labor economist and arbitrator to administrator and theorist of the new university-centered knowledge economy in the 1950s and 1960s. From this latter vantage, the labor question appeared to Kerr obsolete, and his research increasingly downplayed it. It would be the university—generator of usable knowledge—not old-fashioned industrial conflict that would provide the impetus and resources for the measured reforms that Kerr valued. Yet the knowledge economy, Riley points out, failed to resolve the questions of poverty and inequality that the sidetracked labor question had addressed. The evasiveness of postcapitalist thinking is also addressed by Kevin Mattson's appraisal of John Kenneth Galbraith, which shows that Galbraith built into his model of the modern economy automatic mechanisms for its amelioration—countervailing powers, a rational and enlightened “new class”—that were more products of “wishful thinking”(another hallmark of postcapitalism) than of concrete analysis (106). Yet Mattson also helpfully recovers Galbraith's provocative uniting of political and cultural critiques into a combative and unassimilated “radical liberalism,”Footnote ⁹ and readers who have been deceived by textbook one-liners that represent Galbraith as a simple celebrant of the affluent society will learn a great deal from this essay. Completing this section on “Liberalism,” and looking just slightly out of place in it, is Nils Gilman's account of the self-proclaimed “conservative” management theorist Peter Drucker, who strove to provide moral legitimation for the modern corporate enterprise by reimagining it as (within limits) a self-governing community. Gilman quite rightly calls for more attention by intellectual historians to management thought,Footnote ¹⁰ and sketches Drucker's intellectual debts to conservative political philosopher Friedrich Julius Stahl and to Søren Kierkegaard, who provided the grounding for Drucker's conviction that capitalism's problems were less explicitly economic than existential ones of soullessness and alienation. The Kierkegaard material, though less developed than one might wish, makes Gilman's one of only two essays in this volume that take religious influences seriously—an odd lacuna in a collection heavily engaged with moral and ethical critiques of economy.Footnote ¹¹

In “A Critique from the Left” we encounter several radical social scientists, some of whom shared more ideas with their liberal peers than we might have expected. Daniel Geary downplays C. Wright Mills's outsider image as Columbia's cowboy rebel, and instead deploys a careful reading of Mills's early work to root the sociologist's obstreperous 1950s radicalism in his engagement during the 1940s with central issues in mainstream sociological discourse. Mills's academic brand of radicalism was therefore not reducible to the “lonely and compelling protest” of a frustrated outsider, but was forged from ideas developed “within the disciplinary matrix of American social science,” and then given “his own distinctive radical twist” in the hope that the field would realize its historic potential (150, 155, 141). Geary also shows the unexpected affinities between Mills's and Parsons's thinking, as both contributed in contrasting ways to the ascendancy in postwar radical and reform thought of Weberian cultural–psychological analyses over Marx-inspired economic perspectives. Although he does not emphasize the point, Geary's essay is broadly suggestive about how the fateful shift away from economics described by Brick could come to authorize New Leftists’ expansive social critiques. But radical perspectives on race and gender did not originate with the New Left, as Daniel Horowitz shows in his essay on the origins of women's history in the Popular Front engagements of four of that field's pioneers. Horowitz explores how the Old Left commitments of Eleanor Flexner, Carl Degler, Gerda Lerner, and Aileen Kraditor nourished a “common cast of mind” which prompted each to think about women's and racial oppression in connection with capitalist development. But as those political commitments faded in the 1950s and 1960s, the salience of capitalism in their thinking likewise diminished in favor of emphases on “women, families, beliefs, and culture” (208). Horowitz shows how these scholars shifted away from economics and found ways to foreground their new emphases as they produced some of the foundational texts of US women's history. Historians of the left will find Horowitz's essay engaging not only for its subject matter, but also for its argument that the Popular Front nurtured a distinctive way of thinking that here carried over into the writing of history, and elsewhere, as Michael Denning has shown, into multiple modes of expresson.Footnote ¹²

The other two contributions to this section on the left feature Caribbean-born radicals for whom capitalism remained an indispensable category. Christopher Phelps invites readers to make the daunting “imaginative leap” back to the era when C. L. R. James's Trotskyist analysis of state capitalism in the Soviet Union was part of a vital debate on the left over the futures of international capitalism and socialism (157–8). Phelps's able critical explication of James's developing views is compelling for those capable of the leap, and clearly demonstrates the subject's relevance for later New Left thought. But his closing comments on James's study of Melville, which are intended to show that James's better-known cultural criticism can only be fully grasped in connection with his views on political economy, are too abbreviated to be fully convincing. Capitalism's course was also the principal concern of the Trinidad-born socialist sociologist Oliver C. Cox. Those unfamiliar with Christopher A. McAuley's book on Cox will gain a useful introduction to his career and significance,Footnote ¹³ especially to the ways in which his theory of international capitalism grew both from earlier scholarship and from Cox's lived experiences as a colonial subject and as an immigrant to the US. Yet the author's attempt to link Cox's ideas to the rise of world-systems theory—the main subject of this article—demonstrates anticipation, but not real genealogical connection.Footnote ¹⁴ McAuley might have better served this end by more fully locating Cox in his teaching and scholarly contexts, about which we learn little here. The closing assertion that Cox “led a generation of fellow leftists” in rethinking the terms of “revolutionary engagement” remains frustratingly ungrounded (190).

Shifting to the right, Juliet Williams's contribution on Friedrich von Hayek will be helpful to those who wish a better understanding of the disjunction between Hayek's philosophical position and his surprisingly varied stances on particular policy issues. It will do less to help them understand how Hayek's ideas functioned historically in “The Rise of the Right,” as the book's final section is titled. Williams shows that Hayek was far less committed to libertarian antistatism than is commonly supposed, giving greater dimension to a thinker who is often reduced to a gloomy prophet of the coming “serfdom.” But Williams's goals are more philosophical and political than historical. She wants to assess the situation of liberal political thought “in the wake of the battle between welfarists and libertarians” (215–16), so she devotes no attention to how Hayek's ideas traveled, what roles they played in the resurgent conservative movement, or whether they were misread in those quarters as she shows them to have been by recent liberal critics.Footnote ¹⁵

More deeply grounded in their historical contexts of debate and conflict are the other three essays in this section. Alice O'Connor examines politically motivated postwar congressional investigations into the practices of philanthropic foundations such as Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, which heightened conservative suspicions that an East Coast, social-engineering, liberal elite was sluicing corporate profits and tax dollars into projects intended to undermine American values by promoting economic planning, racial integration, and similarly subversive schemes. Right-wingers’ decision to carry their struggle against collectivism to the terrain of societal and cultural values superficially resembled the strategies of the liberal and left postcapitalists, but, as O'Connor notes, the conservatives saw the cultural realm as a ground on which to continue fighting old battles, not to transcend them. Their efforts set the stage for the rise of what William Simon called in 1978 a “powerful counterintelligentsia” (247), ensconced in the new right-wing foundations and think tanks, and bearing aloft the banner of triumphant capitalism. This is a story of which one would like to know more, but following her richly detailed account of the investigations and their outcomes, O'Connor can only sketchily outline their denouement. Meanwhile, Kimberly Phillips-Fein shows that while O'Connor's conservatives were taking to the cultural ramparts, postwar conservative businessmen were still quite willing to fight the battle for capitalism at the traditional sites of class conflict. Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, personnel director at General Electric during the 1940s and 1950s, lacked Peter Drucker's finicky moral reservations about corporate legitimacy. Boulware saw himself not just as a union-buster but as a fiery crusader for unregulated markets and against the incipient socialism of the welfare state. In Phillips-Fein's fascinating example of intellectual history at the ground level, we see how conservative ideas about economy were circulated and promoted by Boulware's aptly named “thought leaders” through every level of GE's plants, producing victories for the company and a model that would be emulated throughout American industry. Boulware's crusade extended beyond the plant to the broader mobilization of businessmen as conservative political activists. Speaking and writing indefatigably, he constructed an image of the businessman as weak and beset, yet valiantly persevering against the looming power of the unions and the welfare state. As Phillips-Fein points out, claims for the populist origins of conservatism are belied by the fact that Boulware built “a conservative grassroots movement from the top down” (270) to battle unions at GE and the New Deal order everywhere. But her own top-down rendition does leave the reader wondering whether a complementary bottom-up version of this story could be constructed to complete the tale: what was the balance between sheer coercion and accommodation or acceptance among the working-class targets of Boulwarism, at GE and elsewhere? As Phillips-Fein and Gilman have both demonstrated, we have much to learn about the operations of ideas and ideology in the world of managers and workers.Footnote ¹⁶

Finally, Jennifer Burns returns us to the more traditional terrain of intellectual history with her analysis of the challenge presented by atheistic “radical for capitalism” Ayn Rand (286) to William F. Buckley, Jr.'s postwar efforts to forge a working coalition of economic libertarians and traditionalist (usually religious) conservatives. Considering a popular intellectual who has almost never been taken seriously by intellectual historians, Burns engages one of the most interesting and persistent questions about American conservative thought: how to reconcile capitalism's propensity to prize novelty, instability, and materiality with the high value conservatives place on continuity, tradition, and religious faith. Rand's unapologetic atheism, combined with her undeniable star appeal as a best-selling author and icon of a rapidly growing crowd of admirers, made her a genuine problem for a conservative movement that benefited from her notoriety but simply could not swallow her whole. Laudably, Burns does take Rand seriously as a thinker. She offers valuable accounts of Rand's intellectual and political development and of her difficult interactions with Buckley's group, and shows how such important defectors as Whittaker Chambers and Garry Wills clarified their differences with others on the right through their encounters with Rand. If Burns cannot finally explain just how Buckley's side did reconcile religion with capitalism—there seemed to be no logical solution, but “repetition would help the problem fade” (290)—this is perhaps more their failure than hers. It was not, in any case, a problem for Rand, who remained confident that capitalism was a legitimately moral system. Readers of this journal who missed an earlier version of Burns's article on RandFootnote ¹⁷ will be fortunate to find this incarnation conveniently gathered with the many other provocative and suggestive essays that make up American Capitalism.

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Do these two books, considered together, tell a single story? Lichtenstein disavows any attempt to recount in full the tale of twentieth-century capitalism or of intellectuals’ reflections upon it, and Brick insists that postcapitalism was only one strand of social thought, albeit “one of the prevalent moods” among postwar intellectuals (Brick in Lichtenstein, 27). But Brick also rightly argues that a proper understanding of postcapitalism will require a broader rethinking and reperiodizing of the history of US social thought. His book certainly constitutes a first effort at that task, and many of the chapters in American Capitalism build usefully upon his insights. Most prominently, what Brick calls the “hidden sympathy between postwar liberalism and radicalism” (27) is already fruitfully explored in the essays by Mattson, Geary, and Horowitz, and seems bound to inspire further work. In the writing and teaching of US intellectual history, easy generalizations about the conservatism of Talcott Parsons, the liberalism of John Kenneth Galbraith, and the radicalism of C. Wright Mills, for example, will be much harder to sustain in light of these two volumes. More broadly, any future effort to construct a synthetic overview of US intellectual history will surely take account of the postcapitalist impulse and its latter-day travails, while the standard compendium of primary documents might well incorporate new selections to represent the likes of Parsons, Galbraith, Drucker, and Mills, as well as those who stood outside the tradition such as James, Cox, and Rand. Perhaps US historians will then stop announcing the shocking discovery that there actually was no “liberal consensus” in postwar America.

But for all of its usefulness, postcapitalism does run the risk of becoming an almost infinitely expandable category into which any figure of moderately to radically reformist bent might be squeezed. It should be emphasized that Brick does not meld liberals, progressives, and radicals into a homogeneous, forward-marching mass. This was a diverse and internally divided tradition, but one that was marked by the constant re-emergence of identifiable social ideas and political dispositions. By tracking commitments and careers and carefully analyzing texts, Brick makes the case that the individuals he discusses did believe in, hope for, and expect the arrival of a postcapitalist order. The writers in Lichtenstein's collection mainly do likewise, though with varying degrees of specificity. Any individual's or group's connection to the postcapitalist vision should remain a question for investigation, not a predetermined answer. The category will need careful handling and scrutiny if it is to retain its usefulness and open doors in future scholarship to a fuller understanding of that system which so many have refused, or failed, or preferred not, to name.