The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914. By Nancy Cohen. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 318. $22.50, paper

Mark Aldrich

The Journal of Economic History, 2002, vol. 62, issue 3, 894-895

Abstract: In this brief volume Nancy Cohen “offers a new narrative of the origins of modern American liberalism” (p. 4). As this agenda suggests, the book is primarily a history of political thought. Briefly, her argument is that the values and programs of Progressive Era corporate liberalism originated in the debates among two generations of Gilded Age political intellectuals. Men such as Edwin L. Godkin, David A. Wells, and Francis A. Walker represented the first generation in the immediate post–Civil War decades. These were not simply classical liberals but “the pioneering theorists of economic consolidation and the active liberal state” (p. 13). A second generation of liberals emerged around the American Economic Association in the 1880s and was led by economists such as Henry C. Adams, John B. Clark, Richard T. Ely, and Edwin R. A. Seligman. Initially more radical, this group was purged in the 1880s, often with the aid of their older colleagues. Together these two generations “confronted the problem of the relationship between democracy and capitalism” (p. 15), and they provided “ideological legitimization of the novel economic, political and social relationships attendant on the rise of corporate capitalism.”

Date: 2002
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