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Comment on William J. Novak: Institutional Economics and the Progressive Movement for the Social Control of American Business

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2020

Susie J. Pak
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Extract

William J. Novak's engaging historiography is at once a recovery project and a prolegomenon to a revised history of political economy. His article chronicles the achievements of Progressive Era institutional economists and critiques the way they have been obscured by the shadow of the Chicago School of economics. Why do the Progressives deserve to be recovered and remembered? According to Novak, it is because they “underwrote one of the more fundamental governmental revolutions in modern times” and created the foundations for the “social control of business” (pp. 676, 672).

Type
Article Commentary
Information
Business History Review , Volume 93 , Issue 4: New Perspectives in Regulatory History , Winter 2019 , pp. 697 - 699
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2020

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References

1 Leonard, Thomas C., Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton, 2016), ixCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Cavalieri, Marco, review of Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 39, no. 4 (2017): 601Google Scholar; Steinbaum, Marshall I. and Weisberger, Bernard A., “Intellectual Legacy of Progressive Economics: A Review Essay of Thomas C. Leonard's Illiberal Reformers,” Journal of Economic Literature 55, no. 3 (2017): 1065CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 One example of a Progressive plan to bring regulation and order to social and economic life is the Dawes Act of 1887, which “provided for allotments of land to individual Native Americans as a first step toward granting U.S. citizenship.” These efforts to create and promote property ownership were saturated with values based on white forms of family organization and gender practices. In the end, the Dawes Act created the basis for “a forced transference of a large portion of Indian land from tribal control to the United States government.” Newman, Louise Michele, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York, 1999), 125Google Scholar.

4 Rothstein, Richard, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York, 2017), ixxGoogle Scholar. See also Race: The Power of an Illusion, episode 3, “The House I Live In,” produced by Llewellyn Smith (California Newsreel, 2013).

5 Hilt, Eric, “Economic History, Historical Analysis and the ‘New History of Capitalism,’” Journal of Economic History 77, no. 2 (2017): 512CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 514, 515. See also Olmstead, Alan L. and Rhode, Paul W., “Cotton, Slavery, and the New History of Capitalism,” Explorations in Economic History 67 (Jan. 2018): 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E., They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, 14 Aug. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.

7 Hilt, “Economic History,” 514–15.