Through an examination of the judicial, legislative, and political aspects of the antitrust debates in 1890 to 1916, Sklar shows that arguments were not only over competition versus combination, but also over the question of the relations between government and the market and the state and society.

The untold story of how efforts to hold big business accountable changed American capitalism. Recent controversies around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing and “woke capital” evoke an old idea: the Progressive Era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By midcentury, the notion that big business should benefit society was a consensus view. But as Kyle Edward Williams’s brilliant history, Taming the Octopus, shows, the tools forged by New Deal liberals to hold business leaders accountable, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, narrowly focused on the financial interests of shareholders. This inadvertently laid the groundwork for a set of fringe views to become dominant: that market forces should rule every facet of society. Along the way, American capitalism itself was reshaped, stripping businesses to their profit-making core. In this vivid and surprising history, we meet activists, investors, executives, and workers who fought over a simple question: Is the role of the corporation to deliver profits to shareholders, or something more? On one side were “business statesmen” who believed corporate largess could solve social problems. On the other were libertarian intellectuals such as Milton Friedman and his oft-forgotten contemporary, Henry Manne, whose theories justified the ruthless tactics of a growing class of corporate raiders. But Williams reveals that before the “activist investor” emerged as a capitalist archetype, Civil Rights groups used a similar playbook for different ends, buying shares to change a company from within. As a rising tide of activists pushed corporations to account for societal harms from napalm to environmental pollution to inequitable hiring, a new idea emerged: that managers could maximize value for society while still turning a maximal profit. This elusive ideal, “stakeholder capitalism,” still dominates our headlines today. Williams’s necessary history equips us to reconsider democracy’s tangled relationship with capitalism.

Examines the twenty-year debate on labor-relations and the rapid development of social science it generated at the beginning of the corporatist era in the US, focusing on the dire warnings and recommendations by economic reformer John R. Commons in 1915. Shows how many of his ideas were incorporated into government policy, and contributed to the New Deal 20 years later. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book presents a critical analysis of the corporate university. The author's personal narrative unfolds between the reality of the corporate university and the rhetoric of the entrepreneurial university, which allows the author to reveal how the corporate university is structurally antagonistic to the activities of entrepreneurial intellectuals. The book not only explores the internal contradictions of the corporate university, but the complicity of its bureaucratized intellectuals in reproducing the iron cage of bureaucracy. Drawing on the legacy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Barrow argues that entrepreneurial intellectuals, whether as individuals or in small groups, must take direct action to improve their own conditions by steering a tenuous course between the market and the state.

In this volume, Koistinen examines war planning and mobilizing in an era of rapid industrialization and reveals how economic mobilization for defense and war is shaped at the national level by the interaction of political, economic, and military institutions and by increasingly powerful and expensive weaponry.

Tracing a seismic shift in American social thought, Jeffrey Sklansky offers a new synthesis of the intellectual transformation entailed in the rise of industrial capitalism. For a century after Independence, the dominant American understanding of selfhood and society came from the tradition of political economy, which defined freedom and equality in terms of ownership of the means of self-employment. However, the gradual demise of the household economy rendered proprietary independence an increasingly embattled ideal. Large landowners and industrialists claimed the right to rule as a privilege of their growing monopoly over productive resources, while dispossessed farmers and workers charged that a propertyless populace was incompatible with true liberty and democracy. Amid the widening class divide, nineteenth-century social theorists devised a new science of American society that came to be called "social psychology." The change Sklansky charts begins among Romantic writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, continues through the polemics of political economists such as Henry George and William Graham Sumner, and culminates with the pioneers of modern American psychology and sociology such as William James and Charles Horton Cooley. Together, these writers reconceived freedom in terms of psychic self-expression instead of economic self-interest, and they redefined democracy in terms of cultural kinship rather than social compact.