Suchergebnisse

This essay considers Piketty's characterization of U.S. economic development in Capital and Ideology in the decades between 1860 and 1900, a period that historians have begun to call the "Second Great Divergence." It contends that Piketty's characterization of this period rests on outdated assumptions about the relationship between economic development and political contestation, and that Piketty's neglect of historical writing on this topic raises questions about his policy proposals. To highlight the limitations of Piketty's approach, it includes case studies of the telegraph industry and the telephone industry. For all of its erudition, range, and literary panache, Piketty's Capital and Ideology is, at its most persuasive, an updated restatement for a twenty-first century audience of the Polanyian critique of nineteenth-century economic liberalism. This is a worthy project, yet it is less novel in its conception and more problematic in its execution than might at first appear.

Review of: Laura Phillips Sawyer, American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890-1940 (2017). "American Fair Trade" is an impressive contribution to the burgeoning literature on the history of the American political economy, a literature energized since the 2008 financial crisis by the emergence of a new subfield known as the "history of capitalism."

This essay surveys the history of freedom of expression from classical antiquity to the present. It contends that a principled defense of free expression dates to the seventeenth century, when it was championed by the political theorist John Locke. Free expression for Locke was closely linked with religious toleration, a relationship that has led in our own day to a principled defense of pluralism as a civic ideal. For the past several hundred years, the domain within which free expression has flourished has been subject not only to spatial boundaries and temporal limits, but also to political regulation and social control. The essay concludes by underscoring the challenge to traditional conceptions of free expression that are posed today by social media platforms.

What is the relationship between the corporation and American democracy? This provocative and timely question informs the ten essays that Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak have assembled in a tightly edited volume that has attracted a good deal of attention from specialists in the history of U.S. public policy. In an age in which the political influence of big business has once again thrust itself onto the political agenda, this collection should also prove to be of great interest to the many historians, legal scholars, and jurists who are trying to understand the long and complex relationship between business, law, and the state. This is a review of Corporations and American Democracy. Edited by Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. viii + 517 pp. Maps, figures, tables, notes, index. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN: 978-0-674-97228-5.

This essay challenges the theory-driven approach to early American statecraft that was popularized by political scientist Stephen Skowronek by surveying recent historical writing on the early American state. Much of this writing falls into one of three overlapping genres that sets out to answer a different question. Was the early republic a prelude to things to come; a project with a distinctive character; or a promise that a later generation might wish to redeem? The first genre analyzes the early American state as a prelude to later events such as the New Deal and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The second genre treats governmental institutions in the early republic as a project that had a coherence and integrity that has been overlooked, disparaged, or forgotten. The third genre follows the lead of colonist John Murrin and tries to recover the promise of the early American state by emphasizing the founders' ideals, the magnitude of the challenge they confronted, and the distinctiveness of the governmental institutions that they built. While this historical writing is diverse, it shares three premises that Murrin rejected. First, that the Jeffersonians were not the only or even necessarily the primary actors even on the national stage; second, that governmental institutions, as distinct from the interests of specific social groups, can be agents of change; and, third, that the state in the early republic diverged in substantive ways from the state in the colonial past.

Thomas K. McCraw is justly admired as a consummate prose stylist, a talented editor, a perceptive historian of the United States, and an inspiring teacher whose mastery of the biographical form led to a string of elegantly written prize-winning publications that are widely read and often taught. The publication one month before McCraw's death in November 2012 of his last book,The Founders and Finance, provides the occasion for this essay, which contends that McCraw also deserves to be remembered as a founder of two thriving academic subfields—policy history and the history of capitalism—despite the fact that he trained relatively few history PhD students, and rarely appeared in public during the final years of his life as the result of a debilitating illness that greatly limited his mobility.