A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State

280 Pages·1972·15.858 MB·English

by  Ronald Radosh, Murray N. Rothbard

A NEW HISTORY
OF LEVIATHAN

A NEW HISTORY
OF
LEVIATHAN
Essays
on the Rise
of the
American Corporate
State
EDITED BY
RONALD RADOSH AND MURRAY N. ROTHBARD
A Button Ngjijfly Paperback
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC. | NEW YORK | 1972
Copyright © 1972 by Murray N. Rothbard and Ronald Radosh
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
First Edition
Individual Copyrights
William Appleman Williams: "A Profile of the Corporate Elite."
Printed by permission of the author. Copyright © 1972 by
William Appleman Williams.
Martin J. Sklar: "Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy
of Modern United States Liberalism." Reprinted
from Studies on the Left, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Fall, i960), by
permission of the author. Copyright © i960 by Studies on the
Left.
David Eakins: "Policy-Planning for the Establishment."
Printed by permission of the author. Copyright © 1972 by
David Eakins.
James Gilbert: "James Burnham: Exemplary Radical of the
1930s." Printed by permission of the author. Copyright © 1972
by James Gilbert.
Leonard P. Liggio: "American Foreign Policy and National-
Security Management." Printed by permission of the author.
Copyright © 1972 by Leonard P. Liggio.
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Preface
RONALD RADOSH and
MURRAY N. ROTHBARD
It is now widely understood that the United States in mid-
twentieth century is a Leviathan Corporate State—a politi-
cal economy dominated by giant multinational corpora-
tions whose extensive domain, operating with the levers of
government, extends from the local retail outlet to firms
negotiating for rights to explore oil deposits offshore of
Saigon. But the corporate state, whose pervasive influence
has recently been subjected to sharp critiques by Herbert
Marcuse, Charles Reich, and Phillip Slater (in The Pursuit
of Loneliness [Boston: Beacon Press, 1970]), is by no
means a new phenomenon. The corporate leviathan began
to emerge at the turn of the twentieth century, after an era
of substantial laissez-faire had proceeded to industrialize
and urbanize the nation.
The essays in this book reveal how and in what manner
the corporate state developed in twentieth-century
America. They show how a sophisticated group of large
corporate reformers managed to replace a freely competi-
tive economy and make a new governing class, through the
use of reform mechanisms to mold the government into a
mighty instrument of monopolization and cartelization.
From Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to Franklin
Vi PREFACE
D. Roosevelt to their corporate backers, down to the intel-
lectuals who forged theoretical apologia for the new
corporatism, these essays show how these sophisticated
corporatist reformers sought to stifle the fierce winds of
competition and to achieve what James Weinstein has called
the "stabilization, rationalization and continued expansion"
of the new political economy.
The ideology of these corporatist reformers was liberal-
ism, but this was scarcely the liberalism of popular myth
and image. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a noted spokesman
for the popular image of liberalism, once wrote that liberal-
ism in America has been ordinarily the movement on the
part of the other sections of society to restrain the power
of the business community. This sort of statement assumes
the existence of a broad popular movement, staunchly
opposed by business, that arises to challenge and curb the
one-sided power of corporate enterprise. But new historical
research, much of it presented in this volume, has shown
the fallacy of the popular conception. The new twentieth-
century liberalism was not antibusiness. On the contrary,
new research has shown that liberalism has been the
ideology of the dominant business groups and that these
groups have consistently favored state intervention in the
economy in order to regulate and cartelize business activ-
ity. As Gabriel Kolko has remarked in The Triumph of
Conservatism, we have had regulation not by, of, and for
the mass of the people against large business; rather we
have had regulatory mechanisms designed, operated, and
staffed by the men who run the corporations themselves—a
form of corporate-inspired self-regulation carried on under
government aegis.
Furthermore, liberal historiography has generally de-
picted twentieth-century America as a conflict between
good-guy Democrats, leading a farmer-labor Populist coali-
tion against big business, in conflict with laissez-faire,
business-minded Republicans. This book demonstrates that
Preface vii
both parties have been dedicated to a large, business-
dominated corporate state, with the Democrats perhaps a
bit more sophisticated and intense about establishing and
advancing the corporatist system.
Thus, A New History of Leviathan transcends the ideol-
ogy and historiography of liberalism. One unusual aspect
of the book is that the selections were made by, and three
of the essays written by, two editors, each of whom launch
their joint critique from widely differing perspectives. Mur-
ray N. Rothbard is one of the intellectual leaders of the
new "right-wing libertarian movement"—a movement that
has emerged out of what has come to be called the Old
Right, the American libertarian tradition beginning with
Jefferson and Paine and continuing in the twentieth cen-
tury in the thought and politics of such people as H. L.
Mencken, Garet Garrett, Oswald Garrison Villard, John T.
Flynn, and Senator Robert A. Taft. A firm believer in
laissez-faire capitalism, Rothbard is a free-market econo-
mist, a former contributor to National Review, and a
member of the executive committee of the National Tax-
payers Union.
Ronald Radosh, on the other hand, emerges from the
ranks of the New Left. As an undergraduate and graduate
student at the University of Wisconsin, he was an active
member of the Wisconsin Socialist Club, and functioned as
an associate editor of the radical journal, Studies on the
Left. Working with this group, he was among those who
developed the critique of the system and ideology of corpo-
rate liberalism, a term that came into widespread use and
popularity with the political leadership of Carl Oglesby1 in
the mid-1960s and the emergence of Students for a Demo-
cratic Society. Unlike Murray Rothbard, Ronald Radosh is
a libertarian socialist who believes in the creation of a
1 Carl Oglesby and Richard Schaull, Containment and Change
(New York: Macmillan, 1967).
Vlll PREFACE
radical consciousness as a prerequisite for the forging of a
socialist politico-economic structure.
How is it that an archexponent of laissez-faire capitalism
can coedit a collection on the Leviathan Corporate State
with a firm believer in the necessity of socialist revolution?
The answer is that each, because of his critique of liberal
ideology and concepts, has been able in his own work to
transcend the ideological myths that enable the large cor-
porations to mask their hegemony over American society.
One might look only at the editors' essays on Herbert
Hoover (Rothbard) and the New Deal era (Radosh) to
see how the transcendence of liberalism has enabled each
author to bypass the mythology that has blocked full
comprehension of these respective periods. To liberals,
Hoover was the bad guy and F.D.R. the good guy. Demo-
crats blamed the Depression on Hoover for his allegedly
laissez-faire policies (much as Republicans were later to
blame Harry S Truman for "losing" China), and praised
Roosevelt for taking strong affirmative action on behalf of
the poor and unemployed.
But as the authors show, Herbert Hoover was actually
the precursor of the entire New Deal system, and Roose-
velt only carried out to its logical end the politics de-
veloped by Hoover and other elements of the corporate
economy. Adherence to the liberal framework prevents
others from grasping the fundamental truths about these
periods, as the essays point out in detail. Awareness that
the nature of liberalism has been distorted to mask large
corporate control over American politics is essential for
interpreting our past development, and for understanding
how the Leviathan Corporate State operates today.
There are, of course, major political and philosophical
differences between the editors, and therefore between the
authors of the essays in this volume. Most obviously, one
favors removing the privileges of the large corporations
and returning to laissez-faire, whereas the other favors a
Preface ix
decentralized socialist economy. But political differences
may be submerged when it comes to using basic analytical
techniques, when it comes, in short, to challenging the
preeminent liberal ideology of mainstream corporate
America and its academic and intellectual servants. On this
issue the authors and editors stand together, and it is our
hope that this book will carry forth the challenge to the
intellectual underpinnings of the Leviathan Corporate State.