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The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918

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This book explains the transition from the free-market laissez faire capitalism of the 19th century to the socially liberal, corporate-dominated political economy of the 20th century. It is a book about emerging class consiousness on the part of corporate leaders in the face of political and other agitation by working peopl, the labor movement, and, especially, the Socialist Party of the years from 1900-1918. A well-written book that is accesible to the general reader and that has been a mainstay of graduate and undergraduate university teaching.

Writing in the late 1960s, James Weinstein traces the liberal ideology of his time to the beginning of the twentieth century. This ideology, he writes, "had been worked out and, in part, tried out by the end of the First World War" (p. ix). Installed by a cadre of sophisticated corporate and financial leaders in an effort to create stability, to rationalize industry, and to contain socialism, the "liberal corporate social order" quickly permeated all levels of government and inaugurated a form of political hegemony that reigned far into the twentieth century.

Weinstein identifies two principal components of the Progressive liberal state. First, drawing from Gabriel Kolko, he asserts that since the largest corporations desired stable markets and responsible conduct among businesses, they pressed for government intervention in the national economy. Second, laissez faire gave way to the notion of a fair social system which promised to confer benefits to "all classes" through perpetual economic growth. In short, reform programs served business interests.

Through such strategies, the corporate world cloaked its role in overhauling the political economy. Explaining the ways in which corporations supported the idea that liberalism opposed big businesses, Weinstein writes that "[f]alse consciousness of the nature of American liberalism has been one of the most powerful ideological weapons that American capitalism has had in maintaining its hegemony" (p. xi). Businessmen allowed, for example, for the absorption of radical criticism by conceding "status and influence" to their protesters in exchange for support of "the existing social order" (p. xiv). The more the corporate power base grew (through increased government centralization and the waning of diverse, localized constituencies), the greater the rate of absorption. The National Civic Federation--an organization composed of big business representatives--exemplified this practice. By 1898, the post-Civil War opponents of business--labor, the Populists, anarchists, and socialists--had been largely put down. The "liberalism" of the early twentieth century was the front for a fundamentally conservative movement.