|
|||||||
|
American Capitalism or the New Pilgrim’s Progress: Proposal for the University of Georgia Capitalism Conference and Collective (Allan Kulikoff)
I follow several principles here: the proposal aims at an American analogue to Joyce Appleby’s Relentless Revolution, albeit with a vastly different vision of virtues of capitalism. It tries to web economic history, history of political economy, social and cultural history, history of Protestantism, and business history into a seamless whole. It should be readable and should have a strong narrative line, one that includes vivid biographies (to show the consequences of capitalism on individuals and groups) and includes both capitalists and workers. Its narrative line (but hardly its details) runs from transitions to capitalism, to monopoly capitalism, to global capitalism. There is obviously a lot missing here, even if the outline and book already appears overly long. It is weakest on the post 1890 era, when I am sure I have missed a lot. It ignores religion, clearly an important component in both justifying and attacking capitalism. I have put in very little about the state and yet the state—the English state in the pre-Revolutionary era, the Hamiltonian system, and the developing legal synergies between capitalists and both the legislative and judicial systems—deserves a far larger role than I have given it. |
||||||
|