When I was about ten years old, and living in Queens, I took many trips to the 1964–1965 world's fair in Flushing Meadows. I was bedazzled by the big exhibits from DuPont, IBM, General Motors, and the like, all the avatars of midcentury American capitalism on display. But I remember being puzzled by the fair's Hall of Free Enterprise, a Parthenon in concrete, with an ever-lighted “torch of truth” above its Doric columns. I wasn't entirely sure what free enterprise was and wondered if the hall was yet another tribute to big business or was some sort of unfamiliar religious sect. Now that I have read Lawrence B. Glickman's Free Enterprise, I know the answer was both.

Unless I overlooked it, the Hall of Free Enterprise is not included in Glickman's book, but few other mentions of free enterprise are missed in his comprehensive, intellectually challenging book. It opens with a chapter on soon-to-be U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.'s famous 1971 memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” which many historians have argued was a blueprint for the revival of a conservative business ideology in the 1970s. The book then traces the history of the phrase “free enterprise” from its roots in nineteenth-century notions of “free labor” and the evolution of “enterprise” from a personal virtue to the basis of an economic system. For Glickman, free enterprise as an ideology was an “inverted populism,” invoking the power of the worker but positing class harmony rather than class antagonism and masking the power of capital: pro–working man but generally anti-union (p. 20).

If, as Glickman shows, “free enterprise” became firmly established as a catchword and cliché during the Progressive Era, it was not until the New Deal that it emerged as a conservative battle cry. The book notes that a number of old progressives, such as Mark Sullivan and Albert Beveridge, were in the forefront of promoting “free enterprise” as an anti–New Deal ideology in the 1930s. If the New Deal stood for intolerable government interference with business, and the relation between labor and management, free enterprise came to be seen as everything the New Deal was not. Advocates of free enterprise often cast themselves as subject to “elite victimization” at the hands of the Moloch of big government and organized labor (p. 21). A sense of imminent catastrophe was crucial to the appeal of free enterprise as an ideology, usually with no connection to the substantial political influence of business organizations. Glickman's account is one more demonstration that American conservatism emerged as a coherent and powerful ideology in the 1930s, and not in the 1950s, and not in the leading journals of intellectual opinion but through the efforts of organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.

What did happen in the 1950s is that free enterprise became less of an oppositional ideology and was adopted, in different ways by both political parties and even, in modified form, by organized labor. (I would have liked to see more on how “free enterprise” undergirded the notion of the “free world.” Glickman subtitled his book “An American History,” but I would have liked to see the extent to which, during the Cold War, the ideology of free enterprise became an international story.) The Cold War aside, as Glickman shows, for its true believers, the real enemy of free enterprise was less the Soviet Union than the lingering influence of the New Deal. He has an interesting discussion of the influential free enterprise tract “I, Pencil,” (1958) written by Leonard Reed, a paean to what Glickman calls “the mystical faith in the market” and the “spontaneous coordination” of market forces that needed to come together to create a pencil (pp. 21, 180–93). He traces the ideology of free enterprise from its 1950s heyday, to the turbulence of the 1960s, through Lewis Powell's 1971 memorandum and its subsequent revival. The abiding irony of “free enterprise” as an ideology is that to its adherents, the more powerful it became, the more they claimed it was beleaguered, with its clock inching ever closer to midnight.

Free Enterprise exhibits many of the strengths, and a few of the weaknesses, of our new digital abilities to search databases for key words and phrases. Our ability to search comprehensively in relatively obscure newspapers and journals has expanded exponentially in recent years, and Glickman makes extensive use of these sources. The book has a thick profusion of examples of the use and abuse of “free enterprise” as a phrase and ideology, capturing its many shades and subtle transitions of meaning. Glickman includes a fairly humorous account of how the promoters of free enterprise in the 1940s were worried about the lack of a precise dictionary definition of the term but, as for all such “keywords” as Raymond Williams called them (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society [1976]), the elasticity of meaning aided rather than hindered its wider dissemination.

However, at times, I found myself a bit overwhelmed by the multiple examples Glickman uses to demonstrate specific points and wondered if his argument was bogging down in a raft of Oxford English Dictionary–like citations. A problem with research of this sort is that it can become disembodied, the term existing in its own lexical universe, relatively untethered to actual people and historical contexts. If Glickman doesn't always avoid this pitfall, his broader argument throughout always illuminates the way a phrase can shape political thought. At the same time, I sometimes found myself wishing for a bit more historical lexicography, especially on the contrast between “free enterprise” and its nearest synonyms, especially “capitalism,” and wondering why (if I am correct) the use of “capitalism” has been on the rise, even among business ideologues who once shunned the term because of its perceived Marxist taint, and the use of “free enterprise” has been on the decline.

The book ends, like all conversations nowadays, and most books as well, with a discussion of “the man in the White House.” Glickman notes that the 2016 Republican platform made less use of the phrase “free enterprise” than any platform since 1932 and that Donald Trump, first as candidate and then as president, seemed little interested in invoking “the magic” or “the faith” inherent in the ideology of “free enterprise” (p. 238). Glickman speculates that this is because the redemptive, socially harmonious vision of midcentury free enterprise plays little role in Trump's worldview. There is something to that, but this probably also reflects broader trends. There is no doubt that “free enterprise,” in the second decade of the twenty-first century, sounds a bit old-fashioned and prissy. (Ask someone under sixty-five to do word association with “enterprise” and the first answer is likely to be “starship” rather than “free.”) Perhaps in an era that often celebrates its capitalists as disruptive, transgressive, snarky, and self-centered, capitalism no longer needs to justify its existence with the pretense of making the world a better place. As we glumly contemplate our present situation, Glickman's Free Enterprise is an excellent and unsparing guide to understanding how we arrived at this particular social and historical moment.