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The Premises Of Business Revisionism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Gabriel Kolko
Gabriel Kolko
Affiliation:
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Abstract

The Revisionist trend in American business history has been shaped by values, premises, logic, and procedure that bear certain striking similarities to Marxism, most clearly seen in the Revisionists' acceptance of the inevitability of abuse in capital accumulation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1959 , pp. 330 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1959

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References

1 There have been innumerable participants in the battle, but some representative discussions can be found in Cohen, Morris R., The Meaning of Human History (LaSalle, Ill., 1947), p. 80 ff.Google Scholar; Nagel, Ernest, “The Logic of Historical Analysis,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Science, Feigl, Herbert, ed. (New York, 1953)Google Scholar; Loewenberg, Bert James, “Some Problems Raised by Historical Relativism,” The Journal of Modem History (March, 1949)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Myrdal, Gunnar, “The Relation Between Social Theory and Social Policy,” The British Journal of Sociology (Sept., 1953), pp. 238–242 ff.Google Scholar; Beard, Charles A., “A Memorandum on Social Philosophy,” Journal of Social Philosophy (Oct., 1939)Google Scholar; Committee on Historiography, Theory and Practice in Historical Study (New York, 1946), pp. 117, 125–127.Google Scholar

2 Karl Marx, quoted in Child, V. Gorden, What is History? (New York, 1953), p. 78.Google Scholar

3 Martov, J., The State and the Socialist Revolution (New York, 1938), p. 59.Google Scholar (Italics in original.)

4 From “The Communist Manifesto” reprinted in Marx, Karl, Capital, The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings, Eastman, Max, ed. (New York, 1932), p. 323.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., p. 324.

6 Ibid., p. 326.

7 Nevins, Allan, “New Lamps For Old in History,” The American Archivist (Jan., 1954), p. 12.Google ScholarNevins, Allan, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist (New York, 1953), Vol. I, p. viii.Google Scholar [Italics: G. Kolko.] “In the field of business history moral strictures, however enticing, cannot be substituted for a scientific study of rigid economic causes and compulsions. Lloyd, failing to understand that the movement for industrial concentration was primarily a reaction against deep-seated evils and a response to irresistible economic forces … fails to do any justice to its beneficial side.” Nevins, Allan, letter in The American Historical Review (April, 1945), p. 688.Google Scholar [Italics: G. Kolko.]

8 Tarbell, Ida, The Nationalizing of Business: 1878–1898 (New York, 1936), p. 268.Google Scholar

9 Hacker, Louis M., The Triumph of American Capitalism (New York, 1940), p. 434.Google Scholar

10 Nevins, Allan, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise (New York, 1940), Vol. I, p. 683.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 127. See Tarbell, Nationalizing, p. 270, for the same theme.

12 Allen, Frederick Lewis, The Great Pierpont Morgan (New York, 1949), p. 77.Google Scholar See Nevins, Study in Power, Vol. II, pp. 36, 436, and Kirkland, Edward C., Dream and Thought in the Business Community, 1860–1900 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1956), p. 167Google Scholar, for the same theme.

13 Marx, Karl, Capital (Chicago, 1906), Vol. I, p. 15.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., p. 14. This historicism is not restricted to Marxists or Business Revisionists, but has also been explicitly formulated both by conservative Social Darwinians and the dominant “Wisconsin school” of labor theorists under John R. Commons and Selig Perlman, the latter as an alleged alternative to Marxism. For a detailed analysis, see Kolko, Gabriel, “Unionism Reconsidered: A Critical Appraisal of Its Philosophy,” Institute of Social Studies Bulletin, Vol. II (Winter, 1954)Google Scholar, Vol. III (Spring, 1955).

15 Sawyer, John E., “The Entrepreneur and the Social Order,” in Men in Business, Miller, William, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 9.Google Scholar This is a systematic statement of the formal assumptions of the entrepreneurial historians. See Hield, Wayne, “The Study of Change in Social Science,” The British Journal of Sociology (March, 1954).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hield's criticism of structural-functionalism as being concerned with presumably static social structures, and being essentially conservative in its beliefs in doctrinal and institutional continuity, is just as true of the entrepreneurial historians as Talcott Parsons. Robert Merton, in his discussion of deviance in “Social Structure and Anomie,” Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill., 1949), attempts to introduce a concept of dynamics and change into functionalism, and elsewhere he asserts that the theory is neither conservative or radical, but a neutral technique. He admits, however, that most advocates of structural-functionalism (in Merton's term, “Functional analysis”) have been interested in stability and are, implicitly, conservative.

16 Cochran, Thomas C., “The Legend of the Robber Barons,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History (May, 1949), p. 2.Google Scholar

17 Ibid. Ironically, Cochran's own historical studies are the best refutation of entrepreneurial, and his own, theory. The assumption that social and business norms of behavior are not specifically class phenomena, and have wider acceptance throughout the social structure, is effectively refuted by Cochran: “In examining the prescribing group for our nineteenth-century railroad executives we found it composed of other top officers plus the members of the board of directors. And among the latter the opinions of the general entrepreneurs with wealth and power were the most important in defining the executive role…. And among these men [operating managers] themselves the opinions of their fellows, their daily acquaintances of Wall and State Streets, counted for more than those of anyone else.” Railroad Leaders, 1845–1890 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 13–14. “… those who denied the value of these major themes …” may have been “uninfluential,” but this was undoubtedly due to the fact, as Cochran so ably shows (pp. 185–189, 193–197), the railroads purchased editors and maintained “lobbies” whenever public opposition to their goals warranted it. As for the purported unity and implicitly classless social sanctions upon which business action is rationalized: “By 1870, as many writers have shown, the public was becoming highly critical of railroad management. The long depression of the seventies heightened this feeling…. While the hostility to railroads waned somewhat in the prosperity of the eighties, it remained a force to be reckoned with by managers in every section. Added to the popular distrust of railroad entrepreneurs was a suspicion of corporations in general and monopolistic corporations in particular.” Ibid., p. 184.

18 Cochran's Railroad Leaders is one form of this, Kirkland's Dream and Thought, p. viii ff. displays the same tendency. The most systematic discussion of the idea can be found in Leland Jenks, “Role Structure of Entrepreneurial Personality,” Harvard University Research Center in Entrepreneurial History, Change and the Entrepreneur: Postulates and Patterns in Entrepreneurial History (Cambridge, 1949).Google Scholar

For an analysis of related problems in Weber, see Gabriel Kolko, “A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of History,” Ethics, Vol. LXX. In a forthcoming study on “American Business and Germany, 1930–1941,” I shall detail the disparity between business statements and behavior in a specific instance, and its relevance to the validity of entrepreneurial theory.

19 Nevins, Rockefeller, Vol. I, pp. 266–267. Also see Ibid., Vol. II, p. 710.

20 Saveth, Edward, “What Historians Teach About Business,” Fortune (April, 1952), p. 165.Google Scholar

21 In this sense, “ideology” is equivalent to Karl Mannheim's “sociology of knowledge” “… the question when and where social structures come to express themselves in the structure of assertions, and in what sense the former concretely determine the latter,” Ideology and Utopia (London, 1936), p. 239. In addition to “social structures,” I think it correct to add “political parties, status and economic interest groups.” “Ideological analysis” is to be understood as the evaluation of the function ideas play in expressing the needs, sentiments, or aspirations of these groups. Calculations as to the invidious role of ideas consciously manipulated may also come under this heading, although Mannheim declared his sociology was little concerned with criticizing this thought “on the level of the assertions themselves.” “Ideology” is sometimes used as an equivalent for “ideas” without regard to their function, and sometimes freely used in both senses by the same person. See, for example, Adolf Grunbaum, “Science and Ideology,” The Scientific Monthly (July, 1954).

22 Nevins, Rockefeller, Vol. II, p. 515.

23 Hacker, L. M. in Capitalism and the Historians, Hayek, F. A., ed. (Chicago, 1954), pp. 80–81.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., p. 89.

25 See the remarkably similar discussion of the same group of historians in Aptheker, Herbert, Laureates of Imperialism (New York, 1954), pp. 16–17Google Scholar; Saveth, Fortune, p. 118.

26 Ibid., p. 119.

27 Nevins, Allan, Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company (New York, 1954), p. 587.Google Scholar

28 Saveth, Fortune, p. 165.

29 Hacker, Capitalism and the Historians, p. 75. Also see Kirkland, Dream and Thought, p. 167 and Cochran, Thomas C., The American Business System: A Historical Perspective, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 110, 156–157, 186–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar “In a number of ways the problem of business consolidation now presents itself, even to liberals and reformers, in different forms from those in which it appeared to the men of the Progressive generation…. Product competition has in some respects replaced the old price competition. The great distributive agencies, themselves giant concerns, have given consumers some protection from the exactions of monopoly. Big business has shown itself to be what the Progressives of the Brandeis School resolutely denied it would be – technologically more progressive than the smaller units it has replaced. The political power of capital has been more satisfactorily matched by an enormous growth in labor organization.” Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955), pp. 252–253.Google Scholar

30 Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy (London, 1946), p. 816.Google Scholar

31 Plekhanov, George, The Role of the Individual in History (New York, 1940), p. 11.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., p. 16. Plekhanov was familiar with the debate on free will in Christian theology. Plekhanov, obviously, wanted to have his cake (of freedom to inspire political action and condemn the capitalist) and eat it too (by being certain of the outcome of “history”).