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Periodization and Historiography: Studying American Political Development in the Progressive Era, 1890s–1916*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Martin J. Sklar
Martin J. Sklar
Affiliation:
Bucknell University
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Extract

In keeping with the social character of the advancement of knowledge, and in spite of a strong competitive impulse among scholars to magnify small differences into warring schools of thought, the leading historical writings in the past four decades have yielded substantial agreement on the identification of critical trends that were transforming United States society in the period of the 1890s to 1916. Implicitly, at least, they may well have been anticipating the way to resolving some latest of these small differences before they get too far out of hand, such as that between “social history” and “political history” and, in a variation upon the theme, that between “society-centered” (or “movement-centered” or “interest-centered”) and “state-centered” history. The common acknowledgment of critical trends has served newcomers and veterans alike, including partisans on either side of these differences, and historians in the various genres, in the selection of authoritative frameworks of continuing research into the period. In this respect, the historical discipline shares with other disciplines, including those in the physical sciences, attributes held to be common to a “normal science.”

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Fall 1991 , pp. 173 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1. Concerning political-history/social-history schools, see, e.g., Leuchtenburg, William E., “The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” Journal of American History 73 (12 1986): 585–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the works cited in Leuchtenburg's notes. For discussion of the concept “normal science” and its antecedents, see Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962)Google Scholar (also published as vol. 2, no. 2, of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science by the University of Chicago Press). One need not subscribe to Kuhn's theory in its entirety or in general to acknowledge the cogency and value of the concept of “normal science” in the sense suggested by Kuhn (although not necessarily original with him) and as used here. See also note 5.

2. Hays's, Samuel P. statement is representative: “In foreign as well as in domestic affairs …, the decade of the 1890s was a dividing point in American history, separating the old from the new and setting a pattern for much of the future” (The Response to Industrialism: 1885–1914 [1957; rept. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973 paper ed.], p. 192)Google Scholar. For broad cultural, intellectual, and governmental spheres, in addition to the technoeconomic sphere, cf., e.g., May, Henry F., The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (1959; rept. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Commager, Henry Steele, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 41–54Google Scholar; Conn, Peter, The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–17Google Scholar; and Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American Slate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 3–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. See, e.g., Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in Amnica (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955)Google Scholar; Hays, Response; Wiebe, Robert H., “Business Disunity and the Progressive Movement, 1901–1914,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (03 1958): 664–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his “The House of Morgan and the Executive, 1905–1913,” American Historical Review 65 (October 1959): 49–60; Hays, Samuel P., Conservation and the Gospel Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Sklar, Martin J., “Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism,” Studies on the Left 1 (Fall 1960): 17–47Google Scholar; Williams, William A., The Contours of American History (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1961), pp. 345–438Google Scholar; Weinstein, James, “Organized Business and the City Commission and Manager Movements,” Journal of Southern History 28 (05 1962): 166–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wiebe, Robert H., Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Haber, Samuel, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar; and Hays, Samuel P., “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (10 1964): 157–69Google Scholar. For “Triumph of Conservatism” and “Political Capitalism” (the latter discussed in the text, below), as interpretive concepts, see Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), esp. pp. 1–10, 279–305Google Scholar. For “Organizational Society” (discussed in the text, below), see note 19. Let it be noted here that, in discussing certain terms that also serve as titles of works or leading thematic terms therein, I do not assume a necessary equation between the ideas that I am treating and the precise beliefs of the authors of the works. I am concerned with these concepts and their use and impact in scholarly writings, teachings, and discussions, which may or may not accord with the meaning intended by authors whose works may be associated with the terms or concepts. I wish also to emphasize that criticism of the terms or concepts in question is in no way meant to detract from the great value of the associated works; on the contrary, the importance of the works in extending and deepening our historical understanding is evidenced by our continuing interest in critically deliberating over the works' leading terms or concepts.

4. Occupation, sex, race, nationality, religious denomination, or ethnicity will affect our understanding of periodization with corresponding dimensions of inquiry and meaning, but so far none per se nor some combination of them constitutes or represents itself as an adequate periodization concept. Rather than supply the reader here with what would amount to a considerably extensive bibliographical note, with the embarrassing hazard of neglecting one title or another, let me instead cite the following works and symposia, including their extensive notes, as good guides to the most recent (as well as some of the older) literature in the fields mentioned in the text: Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” in The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects, ed. Kutler, Stanley I. and Katz, Stanley N. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 113–32Google Scholar; “A Round Table: Labor, Historical Pessimism, and Hegemony,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 115–61; Orren, Karen, “Organized Labor and the Invention of Modern Liberalism in the United States,” Studies in American Political Development 2 (1987): 317–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goodwyn, Lawrence, The Democratic Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Green, James, Grassroots Socialism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1978)Google Scholar; Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Pollack, Norman, The Just Polity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Kerber, Linda K., “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,” Journal of American History 75 (06 1988): 9–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; DuBois, Ellen C., “Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the New York Suffrage Movement, 1894–1909,” Journal of American History 74 (06 1987): 34–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Franklin, John Hope, “Afro-American History: State of the Art,” Journal of American History 75 (06 1988): 162–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Perspectives: The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” Journal of American History 75 (December 1988): 841–68; “A Round Table: Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 107–30.

5. The difference lies in the forms of reasoning and the character of empirical evidence, not in the role of theory and its relation to the discovery and definition of empirical evidence (or facts). On theory and scientific method in the social realm, analogous to that in the physical realm, see, e.g., Brecht, Arnold, Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth Century Political Thought (1959; rept. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 3rd Princeton paper-back printing, 1970), chs. 1 and 2, pp. 27–72 and 73–116Google Scholar. Cf. Charles S. Peirce: “Induction consists in starting from a theory, deducing from it predictions of phenomena in order to see how nearly they agree with the theory. … by steadily pursuing that method [i.e., experiential theory subjected to testing over time] we must in the long run find out how the matter really stands. … Thus the validity of induction depends upon the necessary relation between the general and the singular. It is precisely this which is the support of Pragmatism.” In this connection, Peirce designated laws as essential to reasoning in both the physical and social sciences, precisely because the sciences of either type have as their fields of inquiry matters that are not predetermined and are in principle open-ended: “The principle of the demonstration is that whatever has no end can have no mode of being other than that of a law, and therefore whatever general character it may have must be describable, but the only way of describing an endless series is by stating explicitly or implicitly the law of succession of one term upon another” (Peirce, 1903 Lectures on Pragmatism, quoted and discussed by Thompson, Manley, The Pragmatic Philosophy of C. S. Peirce [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963], pp. 174–75)Google Scholar. Peirce's view stands in partial contrast to that of Karl R. Popper, who in positing the necessity of theory in the study of history no less than in the physical sciences, drew conclusions warranting a large degree of discretionary license: “For undoubtedly there can be no history without a point of view; like the natural sciences, history must be selective unless it is to be choked by a flood of poor and unrelated material. … The only way out of this difficulty is … consciously to introduce a preconceived selective point of view into one's history; that is, to write that history which interests us. This does not mean that we may twist the facts …, or that we may neglect the facts that do not fit. … But it means that we need not worry about all those facts and aspects which have no bearing upon our point of view and which therefore do not interest us” (Popper, , The Poverty of Histoncism [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961], p. 150Google Scholar [Popper's italics]). For a critical discussion of Popper's fallibiltst view of science, and its contrast with Peirce's “contrite fallibilism,” see Nagel, Ernest, Teleology Revisited and Other Essays in the Philosophy and History of Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 64–77Google Scholar. Nagel (p. 76) nevertheless considers Popper “correct…in pointing out the indispensable role of theories in the conduct of research and the growth of science.”

6. On context as essentially constitutive of meaning, and on the corollary role of theory, or the hypothetico–deductive method, in science, rooted in constructive postulation subject to falsification, see Pagels, Heinz R., The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), pp. 94–95Google Scholar, 126–27, 241–69. Pagels notes that meaning is necessarily context dependent (in his words), and I would add that, in history, periodization critically defines context. See also, Brecht (Political Theory, pp. 28–34) on the role of ideas, “creative imagination,” genius, selective relevance, and hypothesis, in the construction of theory and its relation to the very designation and discovery of facts, and note Brecht's statement (p. 34): “Strictly speaking, there is no scientific observation, however direct, that does not contain … some sort of hypothesis.” For similar perspectives on meaning, see also Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), esp. chs. 3–5, pp. 50–115, and ch. 9, pp. 193–218Google Scholar. While warning against a priori static, absolute laws as the basis for historical interpretation, especially those of a statistical or quantitative kind from the field of economics, Frederick Jackson Turner nevertheless also had this to say about a Rankean faith in facts: “Those who insist that history is simply the effort to tell the thing exactly as it was, to state the facts, are confronted with the difficulty that the fact which they would represent is not planted on the solid ground of fixed conditions; it is in the midst and is itself a part of the changing currents, the complex and interacting influences of the time, deriving its significance as a fact from its relations to the deeper-seated movements of the age. …” (Turner, , “Social Forces in American History,” American Historical Review 16 (01 1911): 217–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Billington, Ray Allen [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961], p. 179)Google Scholar. To similar effect, see Marshall, Alfred, “The Old Generation of Economists and the New,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 11 (01 1897): 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “As the nineteenth century has worn on, there has been a growing readiness among economists, as among students of physical sciences, to recognize that … every inference from one set of facts to another … involves a passage upwards from particulars to general propositions and ideas; and a passage downwards from them to other particulars. We can seldom infer particulars from other particulars without passing through generals, however simple be the subject-matter of our study; and we can never do so in the complex problems of social life.” The essay (pp. 115–35) originated as an address to the Cambridge Economic Club's first meeting, delivered at Cambridge, England, October 29, 1896. In the same vein, cf. Myrdal, Gunnar, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955)Google Scholar, “Preface to the English Edition,” p. vii: “Facts do not organize themselves into concepts and theories just by being looked at; indeed, except within the framework of concepts and theories, there are no scientific facts but only chaos. There is an inescapable a priori element in all scientific work. Questions must be asked before answers can be given. The questions are an expression of our interest in the world; they are at bottom valuations. Valuations are thus necessarily involved already at the stage when we observe facts and carry on theoretical analysis. …” In this sense, Myrdal rejected as “naive empiricism” the idea that value-free facts speak for themselves.

7. Research technique is undoubtedly a basic matter of concern as integral to theory in historical inquiry, but that is different from acquiescing in a tendency to reduce the question of theory to that of information-gathering technique or method, which properly takes its direction from the broader conceptual framework. See Kaplan, Abraham, The Conduct of Inquiry (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1964), pp. 24–27Google Scholar, where in discussing “The Myth of Methodology,” Kaplan referred to the strongly entrenched belief among American intellectuals that equated scientific method with technique. Insofar as a resort to quantitative technique implies an effort at making history more an “exact science” like the physical sciences, by the discovery of indissoluble facts, from which incontestable theory may be derived, it misconceives both the nature of the physical sciences and the relation between fact and theory (notes 1, 5, and 6). Sigmund Freud's characterization of scientific method is relevant here: “It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand only made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to replace the religious catechism by something else, even if it be a scientific one. Science in its catechism has but few apodictic percepts; it consists mainly of statements which it has developed to varying degrees of probability. The capacity to be content with these approximations to certainty and the ability to carry on constructive work despite the lack of final confirmation are actually a mark of the scientific habit of mind” (Freud, , A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis, trans. Riviere, Joan [New York: Liveright Publishing, 1935], p. 47)Google Scholar.

8. The historical literature along these lines on United States history from colonial times through the Civil War era is by now legion. The trend-setting works include Bushman, Richard L., From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Brown, Richard D., Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976)Google Scholar; Lerner, Ralph, “Commerce and Character: The Anglo-American as New-Model Man,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 36 (01 1979): 3–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greene, Jack P., “The Social Origins of the American Revolution: An Evaluation and an Interpretation,” Political Science Quarterly 88 (03 1973): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lockridge, Kenneth A., “Social Change and the Meaning of the American Revolution,” Journal of Social History 6 (Summer 1973): 403–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Curry, Leonard P., Blueprint for Modern America: Non-Military Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Luraghi, Raimondo, “The Civil War and the Modernization of American Society: Social Structure and Industrial Revolution in the Old South before and during the War,” Civil War History 18 (09 1972): 230–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foner, Eric, “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions,” Civil War History 20 (09 1974): 197–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McPherson, James M., Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), esp. ch. 1, “American Modernization, 1800–1860,” pp. 5–22Google Scholar.

9. Perhaps the first sustained application to United States history of social theory oriented to development or modernization came with studies in 19th-century sectional conflict as distinct from studies of specific time periods as such. For example, see the issue of the Journal of Economic History 16 (December 1956), devoted to “The American West as an Undeveloped Region” (and it also includes materials on the South as an undeveloped region). It may be no exaggeration to say that it began with Turner: “The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development. … The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an area” (“The Problem of the West,” reprinted from Atlantic Monthly 78 [September 1896]: 289–97, at Billington, ed., Frontier and Section, p. 63). Indeed, it is plausible to believe that Turner is better understood as a historian of development, as it applies to societies in general, than as a historian of a “Frontier” peculiar to the United States. For this and discussion of a similar outlook of Woodrow Wilson, closely associated with that of Turner, see Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 383–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Benson's, Lee essay on Turner in his Turner and Beard (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press of Glencoe, 1960)Google Scholar.

10. Williams is probably the first United States historian to apply in a systematic conceptual manner key elements of both classical and postclassical social-science modernization theory to the sweep of United States history both in its domestic and foreign relations. See, as well as the works themselves, his acknowledgments in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1959), pp. 217–19, and in The Contours of American History (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1961), pp. 493, 495–96. His attention to the relevance of social theory to the study and teaching of United States history, including the sociology of knowledge and theory of modernization, development, and bureaucracy, which subsequently became de rigueur among many historians in the 1960s and 1970s, was markedly evident in his lectures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the late 1950s. In this connection, the impact of Hans Gerth on young intellectuals like Williams, C. Wright Mills, Warren Susman, Herbert Gutman, and Gabriel Kolko, and through them on United States historical, social, and political studies, in his lectures and seminars in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, in the 1940s and 1950s, cannot be overstated. A similar impact by Fred Harvey Harrington may also be noted, especially with respect to the reinterpretation of United States foreign relations and understanding United States history in the larger context of world history. Williams was one of Harrington's graduate students, as were later such prominent “revisionist” historians as Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, Thomas McCormick, and Carl Parrini. See Williams's, acknowledgments in Contours (p. 490) and his commentary on the sources of his own thinking in “The Confessions of an Intansigent Revisionist,” Socialist Revolution 3 (09–10 1973): 87–98Google Scholar. C. Wright Mills's close relation to Gerth—he had been Gerth's graduate student at Wisconsin—is perhaps better known. Hartz, Louis may also be noted here as among the first to apply systematically the theoretical concept of the bourgeois society type to the interpretation of the history of prevalent American political thought: The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955)Google Scholar; see also Hartz, et al. , The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), chs. 1–4, pp. 3–122Google Scholar. The tendency to label Hartz a “consensus” historian has obscured the significance of his work. Earlier, Richard Hofstadter drew upon the concept of the bourgeois society type decisively, though less systematically, in his The American Political Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). Williams was indebted to Hartz and Hofstadter, and the three were indebted to Turner, Beard, and Parrington, and, although less explicitly apparent, to Lewis Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks and other “Young Intellectuals” of the 1920s. Cf. Sklar, Martin J., “On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political-Economic Society,” Radical America 3 (05–06 1969): 1–41, esp. 23–36Google Scholar.

11. Thomas Jefferson should be included here. But in Jefferson's thought may be discerned an intense conflict between preindustrial (or nondevelopmental) and industrial (or developmental) bourgeois values, which he never resolved to his own satisfaction. As a policy-maker, however, he rather consistently supported proindustrializing (or prodevelopment) policies. This was not necessarily, and probably not in fact, a matter of hypocrisy: His inconsistency flowed from an intense and honest perplexity. Of Jefferson, it might be said that, in his personal preferences, he was an apostle of arrested development, or arrested modernization. Cf. Boorstin, Daniel J., The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), esp. p. 241Google Scholar, concerning Jeffersonian futurism. See also Talcott Parsons's assessment of “the Jeffersonian picture of a system of economic production consisting mainly of small farmers and artisans, with presumably a small mercantile class mediating between them and consumers”: “Clearly this is not a situation compatible with high industrial development. … First, the order of decentralization of production where the standard unit is a family-size one is incompatible with either the organization or the technology necessary for high industrialism. Second, the ‘Jeffersonian’ economy is not one in which economic production is differentiated from other social functions in specialized organizations; instead, the typical productive unit is at the same time a kinship unit and a unit of citizenship in the community” (Parsons, , “The Distribution of Power in American Society,” World Politics 10 [10 1957]: 123–143, at 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. For Weber's conception of the intimate relation between modern bureaucracy and capitalism, see Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Glaus (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), vol. 3, ch. 11, “Bureaucracy,” pp. 956–1005Google Scholar, esp. pp. 963–75; see also Weber, , The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. Henderson, A. M. and Parsons, Talcott, ed. Parsons, T. (New York: Free Press, 1964; originally published in German, 1925), pp. 168–202, 246–50Google Scholar. Weber regarded a developed money economy as a precondition of an enduring, fully articulated bureaucratic organization of social relations on a broad scale; he designated the capitalist corporation (not organs of the state) as representing the ideal type of bureaucracy. Cf. Brady, Robert A., Organization, Automation, and Society: The Scientific Revolution in Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), p. 415Google Scholar: “Long ago, Max Weber made it clear that the generalization of bureaucracy throughout modern society was engendered by the rise of capitalist enterprise ” (see also Zeitlin, Maurice, “Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class,” American Journal of Sociology 79 [03 1974]: 1077–78, 1114–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Durkheim, Emile, in his 1902 Preface to the second edition of The Division of Labor m Society (1893)Google Scholar, judged the corporation to be the logical outcome of the development of national and international market relations, and hence the basic form of social organization in modern societies; he went so far as to predict, and recommend, its becoming the basic representative unit of government (Durkheim, , The Division of Labor in Society, trans. Simpson, George [Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964], pp. 1–31Google Scholar, esp. pp. 3, 4, 24, 27).

13. Wrigley, E. A., “The Process of Modernization and the Industrial Revolution in England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Autumn 1972): 244CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also 228–29. For a comparative study of differences and similarities in the thought of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, emphasizing the historical approach of each to the study of society and to the study of capitalist society in particular, see Giddens, Anthony, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Max Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. xi–xvi, 185–247CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Cf. Tipps, Dean C., “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (1973): 199–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 200–201, 204, 208. Tipp's essay encompasses a review and criticism of the major concepts of modernization theory and some of their origins; it surveys the work of the leading theorists and provides a comprehensive bibliography of their work. Although expressed differently, Tipps's findings corroborate Wrigley's. Wrigley believes that, notwithstanding the great differences in other respects among the schools of thought associated with Smith, Marx, Tonnies, Weber, Freud, and Parsons, a pattern of broad agreement is evident respecting the elements of modernization and industrialization and their interconnections: “Not all analyses of modernization contain all the elements. … In part, this is an accident of chronology. Marx's analysis, for example, obviously could not be cast in a form which took account of the insights of Freud. … In part, it is a matter of terminology rather than substance. Unquestion-ably differences remain, … but there is at least tolerable unanimity that the several changes were closely interlocked and that they tended to reinforce each other. … Smith used a less technical and more telling prose than those who write of modernization today, but there is little in recent discussions of the topic which does not find a parallel in the Wealth of Nations” (Wrigley, “The Process of Modernization,” pp. 236, 238; and see the extended discussion [with citation of relevant works] of, in effect, the essential similarities between classical and postclassical theorists, at pp. 226–39). Cf. Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)Google Scholar, esp. chs. 1–3, for the treatment of the interrelations of industrialization, modernization, and capitalism in the history of Western Europe and Great Britain since 1750.

15. Cf. Giddens, Anthony, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (1973; rept. London: Hutchinson, 1981), pp. 16–17Google Scholar. The tendency toward universalization has to some extent been a response to changing historical conditions, that is, to the spread of capitalism to nonindus-trial societies via the agency of imperialism, to the commitment to development by governments in the growing number of independent nations in the non- and semi–industrial world since World War II, and to the development presided over by noncapitalist authority in Communist-governed countries. Some modernization theorists have therefore allowed for different patterns of modernization embracing, however, many common phenomena. Cyril E. Black, for example, has allowed for seven patterns, with Britain and France and their new world offshoots comprising the first two patterns, which nevertheless “set the pattern to a significant degree for all other societies” (Black, , The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History [New York: Harper and Row, 1966], quotation at p. 106Google Scholar). Others, like Joseph J. Spengler, have preferred to view noncapitalist, or nonmarket, patterns of development as cases of incomplete or ideologically thwarted modernization ( Spengler, , “Theory, Ideology, Non-Economic Values, and Political-Economic Development,” in Tradition, Values, and Socio-Economic Development, ed. Braibanti, Ralph and Spengler, Joseph J. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961], pp. 3–56Google Scholar, esp. pp. 22–23, 31–33, 36–37, 55–56). In light of recent events in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, this view may gain a greater authority among theorists and policy-makers alike, cutting across previous ideological lines.

16. See, e.g., Apter, David E., The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), esp. pp. 26Google Scholar et seq. (Apter identified his method or theory as structural–functional in the tradition of Parsons and Marion J. Levy, Jr., to the latter of whom he dedicated the book; p. viii.) Apter, like Black, regards Western industrial society as having become “a model (or at least a standard) for the comparison of countries elsewhere” (Apter's paren-theses). Apter sees intensive intellectual concern with the problem of modernization as having begun in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century “after the consequences of industrialization had become apparent” (p. vii). Also, exhibiting strongly instrumental, functional, and economic conceptual tendencies are Black, Dynamics of Modernization, esp. pp. 7–26; Parsons, “The Distribution of Power,” pp. 123–43; and Spengler, “Theory, Ideology, Non-Economic Values,” Wilbert E. Moore, “The Social Framework of Economic Development,” and Bert F. Hoselitz, “Tradition and Economic Growth,” in Braibanti and Spengler, eds., Tradition, Values, and Socio-Economic Development, pp. 3–56, 57–82, 83–113. In all of these works, modernization and development are seen as based upon a series of interconnected trends amounting in effect to a transformation in the mode of production.

17. E.g., Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul A. Baran, Robert S. Lynd, Hans Gerth, Hannah Arendt, C. Wright Mills, Barrington Moore, and E. Digby Baltzell.

18. See, e.g., Wrigley, “The Process of Modernization”; see also Lindblom, Charles E., Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 7–8Google Scholar: “The two heroes of this book are Adam Smith and Karl Marx. … the market remains one of the few institutions capable of organizing the cooperation of millions of people. We owe to his [Smith's] Wealth of Xations … much of our understanding of what markets can and cannot do … To the genius of Marx we owe more than can be listed … Even at this late date in the history of social science, we must still turn back to Marx to understand, for example, the adverse effects on democratic government of property rights and of their grossly unequal distribution. …” It might also be noted here that Williams's, William A.The Great Evasion (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964)Google Scholar was an essay on the interpretation of United States history in terms of the leading ideas of Smith and Marx. See also Hicks, John, A Theory of Economic History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 2–3Google Scholar: “In what sense can one attempt a ‘theory of history’? … My ‘theory of history’ will quite definitely not be a theory of history in their [Toynbee's and Spengler's] sense. It will be a good deal nearer to the kind of thing that was attempted by Marx. … What remains an open question is whether [drawing upon general ideas in ordering historical material] … (it) can be done … for special purposes, or whether it can be done in a larger way, so that the general course of history, at least in some important aspects, can be fitted into place. Most of those who take the latter view would use the Marxian categories, or some modified version of them; since there is so little in the way of an alternative version that is available, it is not surprising that they should. It does, nevertheless, remain extraordinary that one hundred years after Das Kapital, after a century during which there have been enormous developments in social science, so little else should have emerged. …” Cf. Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies,” for a wide-ranging reassessment of modernization theory; and Wrigley, “The Process of Modernization,” pp. 237, 242, 248 et seq., for discussion of British and Dutch development, showing that modernization (the rise of the bourgeoisie and capitalism) cannot be simply equated with industrialization, and that industrialization does not necessarily bring with it broader cultural attributes generally associated with modernization. Also see Sklar, Richard L., “On the Concept of Power in Political Economy,” in Toward a Humanistic Science of Politics: Essays in Honor of Francis Dunham Wormuth, ed. Nelson, Dalmas H. and Sklar, R. L. (New York: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 179–206Google Scholar, for an assessment of tendencies in political science theory toward evading the question of power in society and toward economistic models of political systems. For similar assessments among historians comparing the relative value of older and newer theoretical approaches, see Daedalus: “Historical Studies Today,” 100 (Winter 1971): Jacques Le Goff, “Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?” pp. 1–19; E. J. Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society,” pp. 20–45; and Felix Gilbert, “Intellectual History: Its Aims and Methods,” pp. 80–97.

19. See, e.g., Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galambos, , “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hays, Samuel P., “The New Organizational Society,” in Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associalional Activities in Modern America, ed. Israel, Jerry (New York: Free Press, 1972), pp. 13 et seq.Google Scholar; Cuff, Robert D., “American Historians and the ‘Organizational Factor,’” Canadian Review of American Studies 4 (Spring 1973): 19–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hawley, Ellis W., “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928,” Journal of American History 62 (06 1974): 116–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hawley, , The Great War and the Search for a Modem Order (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American Stale; and titles by Wiebe, Hays, and Haber cited in notes 2 and 3; also O'Neill, William L., The Progressive Era: America Comes of Age (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975)Google Scholar; Chambers, John W. II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1900–1917 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Buenker, John D., Burnham, John C., and Crunden, Robert M., eds., Progressivism (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1977)Google Scholar; Oleson, Alexandra and Voss, John, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modem America, 1860–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Thelen, David, The New Citizenship: Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, 1885–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1972)Google Scholar; Thimm, Alfred L., Business Ideologies in the Reform–Progressive Era, 1880–1914 (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and Danborn, David D., The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

20. Cf. Lichtheim, George, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), pp. 139–40Google Scholar. It may be noted here, also, that Marx himself and Engels made far more modest claims to “uniqueness” than have subsequent Marxists and anti-Marxists alike (see, e.g., Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Correspondence, 1846–1895, trans. Torr, Dona (1934; rept. New York: International Publishers, 1936], pp. 56–57, 518)Google Scholar. At one point, Marx exclaimed with some exasperation, “Since the thought process itself grows out of the conditions, is itself a natural process, thinking that really comprehends must always be the same, and can only vary gradually according to maturity of development, including that of the organ by which the thinking is done. Everything else is drivel” (Marx to Kugelmann, 11 July 1868, Correspondence, p. 247 [Marx's italics]).

21. Marx expressed the evolutionary principle of cumulative knowledge, in part, as follows (1857): “The bourgeois society is the most highly developed and most highly differentiated historical organization of production. The categories which serve as the expression of its conditions and the comprehension of its organization enable it at the same time to gain an insight into the organization and the conditions of production which had prevailed under all the past forms of society, on the ruins and constituent elements of which it has arisen, and of which it still drags along some unsurmounted remnants, while what had formerly been mere intimation has now developed to complete significance. The anatomy of the human being is the key to the anatomy of the ape. But the intimations of a higher animal in lower ones can be understood only if the animal of the higher order is already known. The bourgeois economy furnishes a key to ancient economy, etc. This is, however, by no means true of the method of the economists who blot out all historical differences and see the bourgeois form in all forms of society. …” And, “… the laws of abstract reasoning which ascends from the most simple to the complex, correspond to the actual process of history.” (“Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy,” printed as appendix [pp. 265–312] to Marx, , A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Stone, N. I. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), pp. 300, 296)Google Scholar. It is in this “Introduction” that Marx wrote his comment on the ancient Greeks as representing the “social childhood of mankind” (pp. 310–12.) It is in Marx's Preface of 1859 that is to be found his famous formulation of the concept of mode of production (pp. 9–15). The longer passage just quoted is to be found, also, in slightly different English translation, at Marx, Karl, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Nicolaus, Martin (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 105Google Scholar. As the quotation indicates, Marx directed (here as elsewhere) some of his sharpest criticism at the widespread presentist proclivity among economists and other theorists in their reading current Western bourgeois production relations back in history to past societies or across borders to other societies of a different type. The evolutionary idea that the higher, or more advanced, form reveals the lower, or less advanced, form was commonly held among historians and social scientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Woodrow Wilson, for example, applied the concept, in his exemplary and influential theoretical work, to understanding the regulatory role of government, stating that the “birth and development” of modern industry “reveals the true character of the part which the state plays” throughout history; that is, it revealed the “rule … that in proportion as the world's industries grow must the state advance its efforts” (Wilson, , The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics [1889; Boston: D. C. Heath, 1906], pp. 614–15, 626)Google Scholar. For further discussion of Wilson's views along these lines, see M. J. Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, pp. 404–6.

22. Stated differently, and more precisely, it may well be granted that the mode of production is essential to the understanding of all societies. The question remains, however, whether the mode of production determines a society's class formation and class stratification, and what relation class divisions bear to the system of power. For the type of society constituting the United States in the period under review, it may be reasonably hypothesized that the mode of production (or property-production system) did determine class formation and stratification, and that these in turn correlated with the hierarchy of power. For a critique of mode of production as the basis of class formation and class power in less developed and developing countries (as nonindustrial or less industrial societies have come to be called), as well as in Communist-governed countries (whatever their status of development may be taken to be), see Richard L. Sklar, “On the Concept of Power in Political Economy.”

23. See, e. g., Jacques Le Goff, “Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?” and Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, p. xv.

24. For example, in his translator's preface to Marx's Contribution, N. I. Stone (in 1903) explained that although Marx used the term bürgerlich in the work, subsequently in Das Kapital he used kapitalutische in corresponding passages. Hence, “the only liberty taken with Marx's terminology has been in the case of the word ‘bürgerlich.’… As the English speaking reader is more accustomed to hear of the ‘capitalist’ system of production than of the ‘bourgeois’ system of production, etc., the translator considered Marx's own change of this term … a sufficient justification for rendering the word ‘bürgerlich’ into ‘capitalistic’ wherever it seemed more likely to carry the meaning home to the reader” (Marx, Contribution, p. 6).

25. “Capitalism” also has the advantage of designating what kind of market it is; that is, one based on predominantly capital–wage labor relations, with capital in the form of private property and private enterprise, rather than, for example, on worker-owned and worker-managed enterprise, cooperative enterprise, state-owned enterprise, or public service enterprise.

26. Cf. Lindblom, Politics and Markets, pp. 8, 26, 34–35, 116; and Hurst, James Willard, The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States, 1780–1970 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), pp. 58–60, 62, 65, 66, 153Google Scholar. In noting that in the United States market activity has served as the main arena for the pursuit of utility and for the accrual of legitimacy, Hurst (p. 153) points to “our long-term reliance on the market as an institution of social control.” Also, from a somewhat different outlook, see Sturm, Douglas, “Property: A Relational Perspective,” Journal of Law and Religion 4 (1986), pp. 353–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. Parsons defined “power in a political sense” as “the capacity to mobilize the re-sources of the society for the attainment of goals for which a general ‘public’ commitment has been made, or may be made. It is mobilization, above all, of the actions of persons and groups, which is binding on them by virtue of their position in society. …” (Parsons, “The Distribution of Power,” p. 140; Parsons's italics).

28. For more detailed discussion of this point, including a critique of the “base-super-structure” concept, see M. J. Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, pp. 4–14, and, in particular, footnote 7, p. 9. Cf. Veblen, Thorstein, “The Preconceptions of Economic Science. II,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 13 (07 1899): 396–426CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Cf. Lindblom, Politics and Markets, pp. 116, 172, 175–76, 193, 204, 226, 230, 347. A leading architect (along with Robert A. Dahl, with whom he often collaborated in publication) of pluralist political theory, Lindblom represents a current trend among social scientists toward reassessing and rejecting the view of business as simply one among many interest groups. He also notes (p. 8) that “liberal democratic thought remains insensitive to problems of that authority which is embodied in property rights.” Also (p. 356), “It has been a curious feature of democratic thought that it has not faced up to the private corporation as a peculiar organization in an ostensible democracy.” He notes that in a “polyarchy” (pluralist) society like the United States, where there may be many centers of power, business and government exercise a dominant dual leadership, but with business exercising an effective veto power over government, without an equal reciprocal veto power in the other direction. See also Kariel, Henry S., The Decline of American Pluralism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961)Google Scholar, ch. 7, passim; and Baratz, M. S., “Corporate Giants and the Power Structure,” Western Political Quarterly 9 (06 1956): 411–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim, for earlier critiques of pluralism that Lindblom in part now accepts. Lindblom believes that the corporation is replacing “class indoctrination” as manifested in older values of acquiescence, deference, compliance, and the work ethic: But, as he states it, “It is possible that the rise of the corporation has offset or more than offset the decline of class as an instrument of indoctrination. … That it has risen to prominence in society as class lines have muted is clear enough. That it creates a new core of wealth and power for a newly constructed upper class, as well as an overpowering loud voice, is also reasonably clear. The executive of the large corporation is, on many counts, the contemporary counterpart to the landed gentry of an earlier era. …” The trends that Lindblom points to may be taken to manifest new forms of “class indoctrination” superseding older forms, rather than the displacement of “class indoctrination” as such. It may also be that, in Lindblom's terms, this new form represents a crepuscular stage in class indoctrination based on corporate power. Be that as it may, it is a question more pertinent to periodization of United States society since World War II than in the period around the turn of the 20th century, although it is not without some significant relevance for the earlier period. Much of the debate over the existence and power of a capitalist class in the United States has revolved around the question of the corporate division of ownership from control of property, or between formal owners and controlling managers. This division constitutes a characteristic of the change in the form of capitalist property inhering in the corporate reorganization of property ownership, but, in the period 1890–1916, it was still in an emergent state. In any case, Lindblom's view of an upper class based on corporate wealth and power, which he sees as “newly constructed,” corresponds with Baltzell's, concept in An American Business Aristocracy (New York: Collier Books, 1962)Google Scholar, and more recently in Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New York: Free Press, 1979), esp. chs. 1 and 2. and with that in Williams, Contours, pp. 343–478, upon which I also draw. But Baltzell's work, Williams's, and my own studies indicate the emergence of this corporate “upper class” at around the turn of the 20th century and its development since. See also Livingston, James, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Noble, David F., America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar. On the question of the relation of the business corporation to the capitalist class, with a comprehensive discussion of the literature and a full bibliography by the early 1970s, see Zeitlin, , “Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class,” American Journal of Sociology (1974)Google Scholar; Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, esp. ch. I; Richard L. Sklar, “On the Concept of Power in Political Economy”; and M. J. Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, ch. 1, esp. pp. 11–14, 14fn11, 20–33. As to the prevalent tendency among social scientists and historians to avoid the study of the power of capitalists as integral to the interpretation of United States society, William Letwin, the economic and legal historian, has observed: “‘This Nation's business is business’ instantly identifies the nation as the United States. … Business has been the national work of the United States …; and the top of American society is occupied largely by businessmen. Historically, this status is unusual, perhaps unique. … All this should stir the curiosity of historians more than it has. How did American businessmen get to the top? How have they stayed there? And who are ‘they’ anyway? …” (Letwin, , “The Past and Future of the American Businessman,” in The American Business Corporation: Seu< Perspectives on Profit and Purpose, ed. Goldston, Eli, Morton, Herbert C., and Ryland, G. Neal [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972], pp. 17–18Google Scholar).

30. This periodization would not necessarily hold for societies that contained capitalist enterprise, but that did not develop historically as capitalist societies in a manner similar to the United States or Western European societies. For those societies, a different periodization would be appropriate. Some modernization theorists consider such societies as cases of incomplete or arrested development due to effective intercession by anticapitalist or alternatively by antirevolutionary (e.g., “traditionalist,” clerical, ideological, socialist, or imperialist) forces, which are oriented precisely against societal development along capitalist lines or along fully “modern” capitalist lines. To view a society in terms of incomplete or arrested development, however, may be considered inordinately ethnocentric, if not ahislorically ideological, whether it appears among liberal, conservative, Marxist, or radical thinkers, including those associated with “dependency,” “world-systems,” or “core-periphery” theories. See note 15 and, for a critique of this view, Sklar, R. L., “On the Concept of Power in Political Economy,” and his essay, “The Nature of Class Domination in Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 17 (1979): 531–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Becker, David G., Frieden, Jeff, Schalz, Sayre P., and Sklar, Richard L., Postimpenalism: International Capitalism and Development in the Late Twentieth Century (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1987)Google Scholar. At any rate, the United States in the period 1890–1916 corre sponds with neither a case of arrested development nor of anticapitalist intercession in the above-indicated sense.

31. For a good introduction to these and related historiographical issues, see the insightful views of Gutman, Herbert G. in “Interview with Herbert Gutman,” conducted by Merrill, Michael, Radical History Review 27 (1983): 203–22Google Scholar, and the indispensable and penetrating critique of the “social history” genre in some of its more prominent recent manifestations by Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Genovese, Eugene D., “The Political Crisis of Social History,” ch. 7, pp. 179–212, in their book, Fruits of Merchant Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

32. For further detail in definition, application, and implications, respecting this periodization, see M. J. Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, chs. 1 and 2, et passim. Cf. Skowronek (Building a New American State, p. 4), referring to “institutional innovations around the turn of the century” as comprising in general a response to industrialism, and as involving a “pivotal turn” amounting to a “governmental reconstruction.”

33. It may be that a concept of industrialism as a fixed given, to which people passively respond, has contributed to depriving less industrial and nonindustrial countries, including the Communist-governed, of thinking in new ways about industrialization or development, in that it has presented industrialism as a relatively fixed idea, or a prescribed route, embodying an indefeasibly forged wisdom, largely in its Western capitalist form and its derivative bureaucratic statist (“Marxist–Leninist”) form—that is, in having made of industrialization a finished thing to be responded to, as well as development in general, rather than a process of discovery, creation, experimentation, and re-creation, or in the broadest sense, on a society-wide scale, what John Dewey might have designated instrumental democracy.

34. See M. J. Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, pp. 14–20, and especially footnote 12, p. 16.

35. This idea is further explored in M. J. Sklar, “A Note on the Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The United States as a Developing Country,” paper delivered at the February 27, 1989, session of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History, University of California, Los Angeles.

36. The emergence of corporate capitalism as the latest evolutionary stage in the history of capitalism was a common theme by the early 20th century among historians and social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, its American chroniclers and theorists since then ranging from Thoi stein Veblen, Charles A. Conant, and Jeremiah W. Jenks, to Wesley Clair Mitchell, Adolf A. Berle, and Gardiner C. Means, to Paul Sweezy, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. But William A. Williams (Contours, pp. 343–478) established the concept of corporate capitalism as an essential periodization of United States political, social, and intellectual (not only economic) history since the 1880s. (Williams's phrase was “The Age of Corporation Capitalism,” and he dated the period from 1882 to the present.) Other historians, either independently or drawing upon Williams, have contributed works based upon such a periodization, touching both general surveys or interpretations and specific spheres of study. Singly and as a substantial body of scholarship, these works may be taken to indicate the fruitfulness of the periodization for historical inquiry, however much they may differ in consistency, subtlety, complexity, or in understanding the concept in a genetic and dynamic rather than a static sense. For a listing of some of the better known and more frequently cited works in the genre, see M. J. Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, footnote 13, pp. 17–19.

37. Cf. Woodrow Wilson's perception of the general situation of American society in the first decade of the 20th century: “The contest is sometimes said to be between capital and labor, but that is too narrow and too special a conception of it. It is, rather between capital in all its larger accumulations and all other less concentrated, more dispersed, smaller, and more individual economic forces. …” Also, “the things that perplex us at this moment are the things which mark, I will not say a warfare, but a division among classes; and when a nation begins to be divided into rival and contestant interests by the score, the time is much more dangerous than when it is divided into only two perfectly distinguishable interests, which you can discriminate and deal with. …” Wilson, “The Banker and the Nation,” address delivered at the Annual Convention of the American Bankers' Association, Denver, Colorado, September 30, 1908, and “Abraham Lincoln: A Man of the People,” address on the occasion of the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, Chicago, Illinois, February 12, 1909, in The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Baker, Ray S. and Dodd, William E. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1925, 1926), vol. 2, pp. 55, 99Google Scholar.

38. Cf. Hawley, Ellis W., “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928,” Journal of American History, 62 (06 1974): 116–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hawley, , “The Discovery and Study of a ‘Corporate Liberalism,’” Business History Review 52 (Autumn 1978): 309–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. J. Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, footnote 1, pp. 4–5, footnote 32, p. 394, and pp. 431–39; and see Richard Schneirov, Labor's Quest for Power: Knights, Unions and Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).

39. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, …”; and Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order.

40. The systematic de facto and de jure exclusion of African-Americans from the applicability of these organizing principles until the 1960s (and substantially declining but persistent de facto exclusion for many since then) ranks as an obscene and grave injustice, and it also of course underlies African-American civil rights movements, on the one hand, and nationalist or race-centered politics, on the other, as well as the frequent intersecting or mixture of the two currents. Similarly, the exclusion of women underlies the women's and feminist movements throughout much of United States history, movements that since the early 20th century have had growing impact in bringing women increasingly within equal applicability of these principles as compared with men.

41. M.J. Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, ch. 1.

42. See also note 6, Drucker, Peter F., The Sew Realities (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), parts 3 and 4, passimGoogle Scholar.