Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T00:45:01.821Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Structure and Virtue in United States Political Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Mary O. Furner
Mary O. Furner
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

During a crucial period of United States history, 1880s–1940s, ideas developed in political economy were the core component of a transformation in the way Americans thought about the social and political order. These decades, the era of the elaboration in the United States and internationally of what historians of liberal reform thought refer to as the New Liberalism, were the site of a general reassessment of the constitutive ideologies, Smithian/Lockean liberalism, and a democratized, commercialized version of classical republicanism hanging over from the agrarian republic. Scary, unexpectedly turbulent conditions in an economy plagued by recurrent cyclical downturns in investment and employment, accompanied by unprecedented levels of social conflict, placed a premium on new knowledge. This need arose just as the academic professionalization of the social sciences, the rise of critical political journalism, and highly mobilized women's and labor movements began providing impressive new analytical talent. Efforts to find answers to pressing issues raised by the “social question” were intended initially by most of those involved as a salvage operation for what remained valid among key tenets of American liberalism regarding individualism, competition, the efficacy of the market, and the role of the state. Instead, they led ultimately to a reconstruction in public philosophy, at least on the scale of the one underway since the 1970s, with the “the return of the market,” the unprecedented sway of neoclassicism, and the multidisciplinary appeal of rational choice theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 13 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, H. C. (1884) On the Education of Statesmen, Princeton Review, 60 (1), pp. 16–35.Google Scholar
Adams, H. C. (1886) Economics and Jurisprudence, Science, Supplement 8, (178), pp. 15–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Adams, H. C. (1887) Public Debts (New York: D. Appleton).Google Scholar
Adams, H. C. (1887) Relation of the State to Industrial Action, Publications of the American Economic Association, 1 (6), pp. 465–549.Google Scholar
Adams, H. C. (1888) Appendix H, Report of Henry C. Adams, Statistician, Interstate Commerce Commission, Second Annual Report, pp. 236–47 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office).Google Scholar
Adams, H. C. (1891) An Interpretation of the Social Movements of Our Times, International Journal of Ethics, 2 (1), pp. 32–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adams, H. C. (1893) The Right of Employment. Typescript, August 24, Henry Carter Adams MSS, University of Michigan Archives.Google Scholar
Adams, H. C. (1896) Economics and Jurisprudence, Presidential Address before the American Economic Association, in: Dorfman, J. (Ed.) Two Essays by Henry Carter Adams, pp. 136–75 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954).Google Scholar
Adams, H. C. (1898) A Decade of Federal Railway Regulation, Atlantic Monthly, 81 (486), pp. 433–43.Google Scholar
Adams, H. C. (1908) Administrative Supervision of Railways Under the Twentieth Section of the Act to Regulate Commerce, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 22 (3), pp. 364–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atkinson, G. and JrOleson, T. (1998) Commons and Keynes: Their Assault on Laissez Faire, Journal of Economic Issues, 32 (4), pp. 1019–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barber, W. J. (1996) Design within Disorder: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American Economic Policy, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benz, G. A. (1981) The Theoretical Background of John M. Clark and His Theory of Wages, Review of Social Economy, 39 (3), pp. 307–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berle, A. and Means, G. (1933) The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: The Macmillan Co.).Google Scholar
Brinkley, A. (1995) The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Depression and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).Google Scholar
Chamberlin, E. (1933) The Theory of Monopolistic Competition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Champlin, D. P. and Knoedler, J. T. (2002) Wages in the Public Interest: Insights from Thorstein Veblen and J. M. Clark, Journal of Economic Issues, 36 (4), pp. 877–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chasse, J. Dennis (1997) John R. Commons and the Special Interest Issue: Not Really Out of Date, Journal of Economic Issues, 31 (4), pp. 933–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1911) Rates for Public Utilities, American Economic Review, 1 (3), pp. 473–87.Google Scholar
Clark, J. B. and Clark, J. M. (1912) The Control of Trusts, rev. edition (New York: The Macmillan Co.).Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1913) Frontiers of Regulation and What Lies Beyond, American Economic Review, 3 (1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, pp. 114–25.Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1917a) The Basis of War-Time Collectivism, American Economic Review, 7 (4), pp. 772–90.Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1917b) Business Acceleration and the Law of Demand: A Technical Factor in Economic Cycles, Journal of Political Economy, 25 (3), pp. 217–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1919) Economic Theory in an Era of Social Readjustment, American Economic Review, 9(1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, pp. 280–90.Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1923a) Some Social Aspects: An Application of Overhead Cost to Social Accounting, with Special Reference to the Business Cycle, American Economic Review, 13 (1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, pp. 50–59.Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1923b) Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. and Bye, R. T. (1925) Problems of Economic Theory—Discussion, American Economic Review, 15 (1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, pp. 56–61.Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1926) Social Control of Business (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1934) Economics and the National Recovery Administration, American Economic Review, 24 (1), pp. 11–25.Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1936) Preface to Social Economics (New York: Farrar & Rhinehart, Inc.).Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1940) Toward a Concept of Workable Competition, American Economic Review, 30 (2), pp. 241–56.Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1941) The Relation of Government to the Economy of the Future, Journal of Political Economy, 49 (6), pp. 707–816.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1942) The Theoretical Issues, American Economic Review, 32 (1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Fifty-fourth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, pp. 1–12.Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1944a) Educational Functions of Economics after the War, American Economic Review, 34 (1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Fifty-sixth Annual Meeting American Economic Association, pp. 58–67.Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1944b) How Not to Reconvert, Political Science Quarterly, 59 (2), pp. 176–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1948) Alternative to Serfdom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).Google Scholar
Clark, J. M. (1957) Economic Institutions and Human Welfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).Google Scholar
Clark, J. M., Davis, W. H., Harrison, G. M., and Mead, G. H. (1937) The National Recovery Administration, 75th Cong., 1st Sess., House Document 158 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office).Google Scholar
Coats, A. W. (1968) Henry Carter Adams: A Case Study in the Emergence of the Social Sciences in the United States, American Studies, 2 (2), pp. 177–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, N. (2002) The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).Google Scholar
Commons, J. R. (1895) Progressive Individualism, American Magazine of Civics, pp. 561–74.Google Scholar
Commons, J. R. (1899–1900) A Sociological View of Sovereignty, American Journal of Sociology, 5 (1), pp. 1–15; (2), pp. 155–71; (3), pp. 347–66; (4), pp. 544–52; (5), pp. 683–95; (6), pp. 814–25; and 6 (1), pp. 67–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Commons, J. R. (1911) Organized Labor's Attitude toward Industrial Efficiency, American Economic Review, 1 (3), pp. 463–72.Google Scholar
Commons, J. R. (1913) Labor and Administration (Reprints of Economic Classics, Augustus M. Kelley: New York, 1946).Google Scholar
Commons, J. R. (1924) Legal Foundations of Capitalism, with a new introduction by Jeff E. Biddle & Warren J. Samuels (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995).Google Scholar
Commons, John R. (1936) Institutional Economics, American Economic Review, 26 (1), pp. 237–49, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association.Google Scholar
Commons, John R. et al. (1921) Industrial Government (New York: Macmillan).Google Scholar
Croly, H. (1909) The Promise of American Life (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Dewey, J. (1927) The Public and Its Problems (Chicago, IL: The Swallow Press).Google Scholar
Donohue, K. (2003) Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press).Google Scholar
Eisenach, E. (1994) The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas).Google Scholar
Ely, R. T. (1914) Property and Contract in Their Relations to the Distribution of Wealth (Post Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1971).Google Scholar
Foster, W. T. and Catchings, W. (1923) Money (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin).Google Scholar
Foster, W. T. and Catchings, W. (1928) The Road to Plenty (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin).Google Scholar
Furner, M. O. (1990) Knowing Capitalism: Public Investigation and the Labor Question in the Long Progressive Era, in: Furner, M. O. and Supple, B. (Eds) The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experience, pp. 241–86 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Furner, M. O. (1993) The Republican Tradition and the New Liberalism: Social Investigation, State Building, and Social Learning in the Gilded Age, in: Lacey, Michael J. and Furner, Mary O. (Eds) The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States, pp. 171–241 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Furner, M. O. (1996) Social Scientists and the State: Constructing the Knowledge Base for Public Policy, 1880–1920, in: Fink, L., Leonard, S. T. and Reid, D. M. (Eds) Intellectuals and Public Life, pp. 145–81 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Furner, M. O. (2002) Policy Knowledge: New Liberalism, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, pp. 11591–599 (Oxford, United Kingdom: Elsevier Science).Google Scholar
Furner, M. O. (2002) New Deal Planning as a Discourse of Democracy and Nation. Paper presented at the St. Louis Policy History Conference, 06 1.Google Scholar
Gaddis, V. (forthcoming) Herbert Hoover and Unemployment: A Conceptual History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America).Google Scholar
Gonce, R. A. (2002) John R. Commons's “Five Big Years”: 1899–1904, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 61 (4), pp. 755–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gruchy, A. G. (1939) The Economics of the National Resources Committee, American Economic Review, 29, (1), pp. 60–73.Google Scholar
Gruchy, A. G. (1947) Modern Economic Thought: The American Contribution (New York: Prentice Hall).Google Scholar
Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).Google Scholar
Hamilton, W. H. (1919) The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, American Economic Review, 9(1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (1919), pp. 309–18.Google Scholar
Hawley, E. (1966) The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayek, F. A. (1944) Road to Serfdom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Hickerson, S. (1981) John Maurice Clark's View of Social Valuation and Accounting: Potential Applications of Policy Assessment Techniques, Review of Social Economy, 39 (3), pp. 289–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickman, C. A. (1975) J. M. Clark (New York: Columbia University Press).Google Scholar
Horwitz, M. (1992) The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jewkes, J. (1948) Ordeal by Planning (London: Macmillan Co.).Google Scholar
Lacey, M. (2001) Federalism and National Planning: The Nineteenth Century Legacy, in: Fishman, R. (Ed.) The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy, pp. 89–145 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press).Google Scholar
Larson, J. L. (2001) Internal Improvements: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).Google Scholar
Lee, F. S. (1990) From Multi-Industry Planning to Keynesian Planning: Gardiner Means, the American Keynesians, and National Economic Planning at the National Resources Committee, Journal of Policy History, 2 (2), pp. 186–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lippmann, W. (1922) Public Opinion (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997).Google Scholar
Livingston, J. (1994) Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).Google Scholar
Lustig, J. (1982) Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890–1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).Google Scholar
McCurdy, C. (1978) American Law and the Marketing Structure of the Large Corporation, 1875–1900, Journal of Economic History, 38 (3), pp. 631–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCurdy, C. (1979) The Knight Sugar Decision of 1895 and the Modernization of American Corporation Law, 1869–1903, Business History Review, 53 (3), pp. 304–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menand, L. (2001) The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. C. (1924) Commons on the Legal Foundations of Capitalism, American Economic Review, 14 (2), pp. 240–53.Google Scholar
Morgan, M. (1993) Competing Notions of ‘Competition’ in Late Nineteenth Century Economics, History of Political Economy, 25 (4), pp. 563–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
National Resources Planning Board (1942) Security, Work, and Relief Policies: Report of the Committee on Long-Range Work and Relief Policies to the National Resources Planning Board (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office).Google Scholar
Novak, W. (1996) The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).Google Scholar
Past Presidents of the American Economic Association (1944) What Should Be the Relative Spheres of Private Business and Governments in Our Postwar American Economy, American Economic Review, 34 (1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Fifty-sixth Annual Meeting American Economic Association, pp. 288–304 (Clark, John M., pp. 296–97).Google Scholar
Pigou, A. C. (1912) Wealth and Welfare (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd.).Google Scholar
Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press).Google Scholar
Ramirez, B. (1978) When Workers Fight: The Politics of Industrial Relations in the Progressive Era, 1898–1916 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press).Google Scholar
Reagan, P. (1999) Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachussetts Press).Google Scholar
Robinson, J. (1969) The Economics of Imperfect Competition (London: Macmillan and Co, Ltd.).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenof, T. (1983) Patterns of Political Economy in America: The Failure to Develop a Democratic Left Synthesis, 1933–1950 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.).Google Scholar
Rosenof, T. (1997) Economics in the Long Run: New Deal Theorists & Their Legacies (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).Google Scholar
Ross, D. (1977–1978) Socialism and American Liberalism: Academic Social Thought in the 1880s, Perspectives in American History, 11, pp. 7–79.Google Scholar
Rutherford, M. (2000) Institutionalism Between the Wars, Journal of Economic Issues, 34 (2), pp. 291–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rutherford, M. (2000) Understanding Institutional Economics: 1918–1929, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 22 (3), pp. 277–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rutherford, M. (2004) Institutional Economics at Columbia University, History ofPolitical Economy, 36 (1), pp. 31–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schweitzer, A. (1981) Social Values in Economics, Review of Social Economy, 39 (3), pp. 257–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sellers, C. (1991) The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Shute, L. (1997) John Maurice Clark: A Social Economics for the Twenty-First Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc.).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1934) A Positive Program for Laissez Faire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Simons, H. C. (1948) Economic Policy for a Free Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Sklansky, J. (2002) The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).Google Scholar
Sklar, M. (1988) The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, Law, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, A. (1759) The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stabile, D. R. (1996) Pigou, Clark, and Modern Economics: The Quality of the Workforce, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 20 (3), pp. 277–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stabile, D. R. (1996) Work and Welfare: The Social Costs ofLabor in the History of Economic Thought (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press).Google Scholar
Stanfield, J. R. (1982) The Instructive Vision of John Maurice Clark, Review of Social Economy, 39 (3), pp. 279–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, W. W., Haney, L. H., Anderson, B. M., and Clark, J. M. (1919) Economic Theory—Discussion, American Economic Review, 9 (1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, pp. 319–24.Google Scholar
Taylor, O. H. (1948) The Economics of a “Free” Society: Four Essays, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 62 (5), pp. 671–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tugwell, R. (1932) The Principle of Planning and the Institution of Laissez Faire, American Economic Review, 22, Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-fourth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, pp. 75–92.Google Scholar
Tugwell, R. (1922) The Economic Basis of the Public Interest (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968).Google Scholar
Veblen, T. (1899) The Theory ofthe Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan).Google Scholar
Veblen, T. (1901) Industrial and Pecuniary Employments, Publications of the American Economic Association, 3d Ser., 2, pp. 190–235.Google Scholar
Veblen, T. (1904) The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Scribner's Sons).Google Scholar
Veblen, T. (1908) Professor Clark's Economics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 22, pp. 147–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veblen, T. (1919) The Vested Interests and the Common Man (New York: B.W. Huebsch).Google Scholar
Veblen, T. (1923) Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (New York: B.W. Huebsch).Google Scholar
Veblen, T. (1925) Economic Theory in the Calculable Future, American Economic Review, 15 (1), pp. 48–55, Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association.Google Scholar
Wieser, F. von (1928) Social Economics, Hinrichs, A. Ford (Trans), with a preface by Wesley Clair Mitchell (London: Allen & Unwin).Google Scholar
Williams, W. A. (1961) The Contours of American History (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co).Google Scholar
Wolman, L., Clark, J. M., Carroll, M. R., Dickinson, F. G., and Gayer, A. D. (1930) Public Works and Unemployment, American Economic Review, 20 (1), Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, pp. 15–29.Google Scholar
Wunderlin, C. (1992) Visions of a New Industrial Order: Social Science and Labor Theory in America's Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press).Google Scholar
Yonay, Y. P. (1998) The Struggle over the Soul of Economics: Institutionalist and Neoclassical Economists in America between the Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar