Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan [Hardcover]

Kim Phillips-Fein (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Looking beyond the usual roster of right-wing Christians, anticommunist neo-cons and disgruntled working-class whites, this incisive study examines the unsung role of a political movement of businessmen in leading America's post-1960s rightward turn. Historian Phillips-Fein traces the hidden history of the Reagan revolution to a coterie of business executives, including General Electric official and Reagan mentor Lemuel Boulware, who saw labor unions, government regulation, high taxes and welfare spending as dire threats to their profits and power. From the 1930s onward, the author argues, they provided the money, organization and fervor for a decades-long war against New Deal liberalism—funding campaigns, think tanks, magazines and lobbying groups, and indoctrinating employees in the virtues of unfettered capitalism. Theirs was also a battle of ideas, she contends; the business vanguard nurtured conservative thinkers like economist Friedrich von Hayek and his secretive Mont Pellerin Society associates, who developed a populist free-market ideology that persuaded workers to side with their bosses against the liberal state. Combining piquant profiles of corporate firebrands with a trenchant historical analysis that puts economic conflict at the heart of political change, Phillips-Fein makes an important contribution to our understanding of American conservatism. Photos. (Jan.)
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From Booklist

Although many books have been written about American conservatism, most concern its cultural or political manifestations, and almost all bring bias to the subject. The contribution of Phillips-Fein to this literature is distinctive in two respects: she maintains neutrality and produces original research on American business executives and public-relations specialists who created conservative organizations from 1933 to 1980. Although scholarly in tone (her work originated as a dissertation), the book is highly readable for its absorbing historical background about contemporary conservative advocacy outfits, such as the American Enterprise Institute. In their variety of characters and degrees of indignation about the iniquities of the New Deal and its descendants, the individuals introduced range from the reasonable to the strange, which enlivens a narrative of free-market conservatism’s incubation in the 1940s and 1950s. Detecting a union-busting agenda behind the liberty-proclaiming rhetoric of business leaders, Phillips-Fein nevertheless allows them a fair hearing about their roles in, ultimately, the electoral victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980. A valuable addition to the history of conservatism. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (January 5, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393059308
• ISBN-13: 978-0393059304
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #39,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

  #57 in	Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Political Science > Political Doctrines > Conservatism
  #31 in	Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Political Science > Political History

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reveals the intellectual foundations of the conservative movement, May 23, 2009

By	Malvin (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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This review is from: Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (Hardcover)

"Invisible Hands" by Kim Phillips-Fein is an illuminating account of conservatism's rise from obscurity to become America's predominant ideology during the latter part of 20th century. Combining impressive scholarly research with profound insights into American culture, politics and history, Ms. Phillips-Fein's brilliant work reveals the intellectual foundations of the conservative movement as it has rarely been seen or understood before. The result is a fascinating and highly accessible book that should appeal to a wide audience of inquisitive readers.

Ms. Phillips-Fein recounts how America once perceived conservatism as a mere representation of the upper class' narrow self-interests. She recalls how the collapse of the economy during the Great Depression and its stabilization by the New Deal led to a widely-held consensus that the capitalist system required an interventionist government to function properly, if at all. In fact, the author recounts how some of the conservative-flavored political and public relations projects promoted at that time were rebuffed by a citizenry that was highly skeptical of businesspeople and valued the role of unions and government in securing their economic lives.

Interestingly, Ms. Phillips-Fein suggests that the presumption of an unassailable Keynesian worldview led to increasing levels of mathematical abstractionism in many university economics departments; whereas upstart conservative economists such as Ludwig Von Mises, Friederch Von Hayek and Milton Friedman could remain committed to an economics that retained a strong socio-political identity. Ms. Phillips-Fein shares how individuals such as Ayn Rand, William F Buckley and Billy Graham along with conservative think tanks including the American Enterprise Institute drew inspiration from the conservative economists and gained attention by defining the New Deal as a socialist threat to individual freedom. The author profiles the extraordinary carreer of Lem Boulware who is credited with architecting General Electric's effective and widely influential strategy of union busting and human resource management. While Ms. Phillips-Fein writes that the conservative political project remained unfulfilled as the voting public remained committed to the New Deal on account of its success in ensuring the nation's continued economic expansion and prosperity, she writes that the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign enabled an activist conservative constituency to make significant, long-lasting inroads into the Republican Party.

Ms. Phillips-Fein demonstrates that the convergence of social issues with conservative economics, along with the growing failures of New Deal liberalism to resolve the intractable economic crises of the 1970s, eventually led to the political ascendancy of conservatism starting with the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency in 1980. Among the influential persons who shaped events in this period -- including Arthur Laffer, George Gilder, Joseph Coors, Jack Kemp, Justin Dart, and many others -- Jesse Helms emerges as a pivotal figure for successfully fusing the rhetoric of free markets with the politics of racial segregation, thereby winning over large numbers of southern white voters to the conservative cause. A political realignment was ultimately achieved by gaining the support of religious organizations such as the Moral Majority who leveraged white working-class discomfort with public school integration, busing and other cultural issues into a more generalized hostility against big government. Ms. Phillips-Fein suggests that the Bush Sr., Clinton and Bush Jr. administrations subsequently affirmed the conservative consensus as unions found themselves steadily losing influence and with business lobbyists increasingly shaping the legislative agenda, think tanks defining major issues in the media, and the contributions of businesspeople valued and esteemed.

Today, as we find ourselves witness to yet another financial collapse of the capitalist system and evidence of an increasingly post-racial American society marked by the election of Barack Obama, it might seem that the era of conservative politics is over. But the perspective gained from Ms. Phillips-Fein's book suggests that conservatives will continue to find audiences to market their solutions as long as economic self-interest and social anxieties persist; in this light, to underestimate the appeal of conservative ideas might well be a perilous mistake.

I highly recommend this remarkably insightful, informative and entertaining book to everyone.

67 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yes, Virginia, There Is a Class War., March 3, 2009

By	Nelson A. Smith - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (Hardcover)

First, given my response, I should state explicitly that, no, I do not know the author from Adam, I am not a scholar in American political history, and I am at the moment just over halfway through the book.

I am nonetheless leaping to tack some gold stars onto this Amazon listing because I would like to see this excellent, timely chronicle in as many hands as possible. This is exactly the history of modern conservatism and the GOP we need at the moment, one that swats away all the cultural-religious distractions and traces the programatic efforts by businessmen, bankers, and economic libertarians since FDR to equate America and Capitalism, with the former being merely the means and the latter the true end.

While liberals of my generation have been fretting over gay marriage, deconstruction, and identity politics, the state has been completely retaken from the New Deal compromise in decisive class warfare waged from above. Class warfare? While the author does not harp on the term, I insist on calling it by its proper name, as Lewis Mumford used to say. The facts should be brutally obvious by now. Can anyone deny that the middle class is caught in a veritable Dresden of class war, raining debt, fear, obscurantism, and havoc from above?

By concerted effort and planning, as this book details, a relatively small cadre of blueblood patroons, capitalist absolutists, Hayek disciples, and Chamber of Commerce hacks have succeeded in reversing the New Deal, which they regarded as criminal collectivism, and returning us right back where we started, back in the Great Depression, briefly interrupted. I had read bits of this history elsewhere, but the author does an excellent job of weaving it together. While she can't resist colorful zingers about the zanier zealots (who could?), this is largely a calm, level-headed history without that tone of outraged, preachy sarcasm that inflects so many liberal polemics.

While this dismantling of the New Deal is at one level a perfectly rational act of capitalist self-interest, the book also illuminates its scarier, conflicted, nihilistic side. There is a philosophical lineage leading from Goldwater's expressed willingness (in his ghost-written manifesto) to defend capitalism to the very point of nuclear extinction and Rush Limbaugh's hopes for the failure of our present government. Capitalism is a promethean faith and no one should believe for a second that the true believers are phased in the slightest by our present state of destruction. To the true heroic capitalist a destroyed nation is just one more market opportunity.

Perhaps the most chilling episode in the book is Ayn Rand's internecine attack on Milton Friedman for his all-too-moderate moral compunctions. Rand saw not only government but morality itself as a limitation on the capitalist, whose duty it was to crush the weak parasites and "losers" who feed through the tax system. Note well: Rand is possibly the bestselling pseudophilospher in America, as well as the siren and mentor of the youthful Allen Greenspan. (Makes you wonder. Perhaps an economic Katrina to rid the country of parasites was his plan all along.)

An illuminating, valuable, briskly-paced book. Unless you are already very well versed in this history, I highly recommend it, and do pass it along! It might even up the odds in our current class war, at least to a sporting level, if both sides were clear on who the enemy is. A lot of determined idealists paid a lot of money to get us into our present crisis, and if we ever manage to crawl out they'll be only too happy to do it again.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History of the Highest Order, August 31, 2009

By	Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE)

This review is from: Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (Hardcover)

An extraordinary work of scholarship, INVISIBLE HANDS shows us how a small group of reactionaries who so resented FDR's mildly socialist policies, managed, over a 40 year period, to build a mendacious machine which with the election of Ronald Reagan, succeeded in turning back the smallish tide of pro-human policies that were enacted under the FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, Johnson and Nixon administrations.

Deeply and impeccably researched, INVISIBLE HANDS shows how this small cadre of businessmen were able to promote a noxious mix of free market fables and anti-human libertarianism by funding an assortment of bought-and-paid-for "think-tanks," anti-union consultancies and, of course, vicious skullduggery of every conceivable stripe.

A must-read for every responsible citizen who wants to know how the right, though representing only a small sliver of the American public, gained power and held sway over the American republic for thirty terrifying years. A right wing which even now, though defeated soundly over the last two elections are hoping to arrest the wishes of the majority of the American people for affordable health care.

How are they attempting to do so? As shown by INVISIBLE HANDS, they are doing so as they have done for the last seventy years: by funding a congeries of front groups who, in the present case, through the fallacious assertions of paid shills at town hall meetings and the too-willing mouths of the right-wing media, derail reasonable discussion and subvert the democratic process in the interest of the Almighty Dollar.