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The Discovery and Study of a “Corporate Liberalism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Ellis W. Hawley
Ellis W. Hawley
Affiliation:
Professor of History, University of Iowa
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Abstract

Once the story of modern America seemed relatively simple. On one side stood a business elite defending a market system to which it owed its power and position. On the other stood the “common man,” economically weak but politically capable of forging tools that could alter the workings of market discipline. And between them, waxing and waning in response to “reform” and “counter-reform,” stood the aggregation of political tools that the “common man” had been able to forge. Such was the story told in “liberal” history; and with reversed heroes and villains, the same story was told in “conservative” history. Both assumed a business-government dichotomy, and both ignored or slighted those aspects of modern America that could not be fitted into it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1978 , pp. 309 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1978

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References

1 For the development of the organizational school of, history, see Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review, XLIV (Autumn 1970), 279–290CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cuff, Robert D., “American Historians and the ‘Organizational Factor’,” Canadian Review of American Studies, IV (Spring 1973), 19–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A recent anthology that pulls together and comments on key articles is Perkins, Edwin J., Men and Organizations: The American Economy in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

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3 As used here, the term “corporative” signifies a particular kind of socio-political organization. A corporative system is one whose basic units consist of officially recognized, non-competitive, role-ordered occupational or functional groupings. It is also one with coordinating machinery designed to integrate these units into an interdependent whole and one where the state properly functions as coordinator, assistant, and midwife rather than director or regulator. In such a system there are deep interpenetrations between state and society, and enjoying a special status is an enlightened social elite, capable of perceiving social needs and imperatives and assisting social groups to meet them through enlightened concerts of interests. It is these features that distinguish corporative structures from other kinds, and it is the development of such a corporative component in a society's organization that I refer to as “corporatization.” On the forms that this has taken in liberal-capitalist societies, see Lowi, Theodore, The End of Liberalism (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; McConnell, Grant, Private Power and American Democracy (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Shonfield, Andrew, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Harris, Nigel, Competition and the Corporate Society (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Beer, Samuel H., British Politics in the Collectivist Age (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Schmitter, Philippe, “Still the Century of Corporatism,” Review of Politics, XXXVI (January 1974), 85–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Collaboration between Public Authorities and Employers' and Workers' Organizations,” International Labour Review, LXXVI (August 1957), 167–187.

4 The story of the organizational revolution in business has been masterfully told in Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).Google Scholar For a survey and analysis of recent work on governmental regulation, see McCraw, Thomas K., “Regulation in America: A Review Article,” Business History Review, XLIX (Summer 1975), 159–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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7 See Sklar, Martin J., “Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism,” Studies on the Left, I (1960), 17–47.Google Scholar See also Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston, 1968).Google Scholar

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11 See especially Lodge, George C., The New American Ideology (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Rostow, Walt W., Getting from Here to There (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Mansen, R. Joseph, “Social Responsibility and the Corporation,” Journal of Economic Issues, VI (March 1972), 125–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Chamberlain, Neil W., Remaking American Values: Challenge to a Business Society (New York, 1977).Google Scholar