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To Gild or not to Gild? Revisiting the Transformations of American Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2020

Noam Maggor
Noam Maggor*
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

In what sense are we living in a “New Gilded Age”? Facile analogies between the late nineteenth century and our own era have proliferated in recent years. Pundits such as Paul Krugman inserted this analogy into the public conversation in the early 2000s, drawing on empirical work by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. In underscoring a parallel between the two “gilded” eras, these commentators sketched out two periods marked by economic inequality, with several “anomalous” decades of relative equality in the middle of the twentieth century. This basic U-shaped narrative template has inspired commentators in numerous venues, from The Nation to The Economist, to imagine the shifts of recent decades simply as “a return” to an earlier age. Evoking social, political, and cultural resemblances, these accounts have stressed the resurgence of unfettered markets, economic volatility, government inaction, and the plutocratic reign of money.

Type
Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 278 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2020

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References

Notes

1 For insightful and critical analysis, see Gabriel Winant's essay in this volume. See, for example, Paul Krugman, “For Richer,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 20, 2002; Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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4 On the political significance of the robber barons’ discourse, see Barreyre, Nicolas, “Thomas Piketty en Amérique,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 70:1 (2015): 115–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the political economy of the Gilded Age in comparative perspective, see Link, Stefan and Maggor, Noam, “The United States as a Developing Nation: Revisiting the Peculiarities of American History,” Past & Present, 246:1 (2020): 269–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 My emphasis. Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 2, 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Slobodian, Globalists, 29

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15 See “The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities” in The Age of Reform; from Bryan to F. D. R., ed. Richard Hofstadter (New York: Knopf, 1955).

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18 For the resilience of the Cold War view of populism in the European context, see Jäger, Anton, “The Semantic Drift: Images of Populism in Post-War American Historiography and Their Relevance for (European) Political Science,” Constellations 24:3 (2017): 310–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.