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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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Review
[...] 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.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Class War., March 3, 2009

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.

http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hands-Kim-Phillips-Fein/dp/0393059308/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236613857&sr=1-1



Just got this thing from the library, guess ya might call it an expanded overview of the Volker saga. Lots of familiar names, Du Pont, Goodyear, Milliken, a bunch. Tho' I haven't finished it yet so far I'm hoping it gets a lot of readers.

She's a youngster, currently teaching at NYU. Here is her Chicago Tribune review of Johan Van Overtveldt's book about the Chicago School. Overtveldt is a tool. Phillips-Fein isn't bad but she could use a little more "radicalism".

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2007/jun/23/books/chi-econbw23_coverjun23


http://Archive for Saturday, June 23, 2007
Monsters of the Midway
Tackling the question of how a roster of U. of C. professors became the superstars of economics

By Kim Phillipsfein and An Assistant Professor Teaching American History At New York University's Gallatin School
June 23, 2007

The Chicago School:
How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics and Business

By Johan Van Overtveldt
B2/Agate, 432 pages, $35

In the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of “Capitalism and Freedom,” Milton Friedman commented on the intellectual revolution he had witnessed since his book was first published in 1962. Then, few of the nation’s newspapers (including the Chicago Tribune) had deemed Friedman’s treatise, soon to be a popular classic, worthy of review.

The nation’s economic policymakers dismissed its arguments against minimum wages and in favor of school vouchers as impractical and bizarre, which reflected the reigning consensus that deregulating markets would not automatically help to improve people’s lives. The aftershocks of the Depression still lingered, a reminder of the last time the nation had listened to people who thought that the business of America was business and that the free market worked in the best interests of all.

But by 1982, the nation had elected a president who believed that cutting tax rates and shrinking the government were the keys to economic growth. No longer did policymakers agree that the market was the problem and the state the solution. No longer did the general public view the market skeptically. In short, few ideas have enjoyed a greater change of fortune in the span of two decades, in the academic and popular realms, than those for which Friedman once had been a lonely champion.

How did this intellectual shift happen? “The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics and Business,” by Johan van Overtveldt, director of a Belgium-based think tank and a contributor to The Wall Street Journal Europe, tells the story through the lens of the University of Chicago, Friedman’s scholarly home.

During the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the Gothic buildings on the Midway housed the country’s most-prominent challengers to Keynesianism. The name of the school became virtually synonymous with the idea that free markets are the most fair and efficient way to distribute wealth, while any government intervention distorts the economic order. And even before the rise of the Chicago School, in the early years of the 20th Century, the University of Chicago was home to many important and influential economic thinkers. Hyde Park has nurtured record numbers of winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences – more than twice the number at either Harvard University or the University of California at Berkeley, the runners-up.

In his history, which is based on extensive interviews with economists as well as archival and secondary research, Overtveldt seeks to understand the secrets of Chicago’s success: “Was this triumphant century just an incredibly long-lasting coincidence, or is there more to it?”

For a book about economic ideas, “The Chicago School” is surprisingly concerned with institutional culture. Overtveldt suggests that the University of Chicago, like the city, has always been an upstart institution. Founded with John D. Rockefeller’s money to lure professors from the Ivy League, the school was forced from its earliest days to cultivate a ferocious seriousness in order to compete with the old East Coast universities for intellectual talent and prestige.

Overtveldt makes special note of the school’s “apparently inspiring isolation.” Cut off from the traditional centers of culture and power – New York City and Washington, D.C. – and divided from the Loop by a 20-minute drive (Hyde Park lacking even decent elevated train service), the leafy Quads have protected scholars from alluring distractions while providing a haven for intellectual iconoclasts. As Deirdre McCloskey, a former U. of C. professor, notes, ” ‘Don’t you know that the greatness of the University of Chicago has always rested on the fact that the city of Chicago is so boring that the professors have nothing else to do but to work?’ ”

Overtveldt argues that the Chicago tradition of dedicated work, intellectual seriousness and academic rigor has helped produce a diverse range of economic thinkers. Indeed, the first crew of University of Chicago economists, in the early years of the 20th Century, bore scant resemblance to the scholars who would later become known as the Chicago School.

The department chair, James Laughlin, was a true believer in the laws of supply and demand (fittingly, he was persuaded to come to Chicago by a $7,000 salary, “at a time when the senior professors at Harvard and Yale were seldom paid more than $4,000”). But the department also included renegades such as Thorstein Veblen, who argued that the calculating individuals portrayed by Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall were a pleasant fiction, and that people are instead motivated by primitive, atavistic drives to demonstrate their social status by wasting great sums of money in craven acts of “conspicuous consumption” (think Louis Vuitton bags). Even thinkers such as Henry Simons, whose writings in the 1930s influenced Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, feared private monopoly nearly as much as state power. Simons suggested that private ambition and greed, not economies of scale, accounted for the creation of “‘gigantic corporations,’ ” and he argued for reducing economic inequality through steep progressive taxation.

The modern Chicago School only developed after World War II, when thinkers like Friedman and George Stigler began to advance their critique of Keynesian economics. Through scholarship on a variety of different theoretical issues – consumption, inflation, economic thought – they reasserted the centrality of price theory and the primacy of the rational individual as the unit of analysis.

Overtveldt is at his best in his depiction of the ruthless yet stimulating internal culture of the department during these years. Workshops that might be polite but sleepy seminars at other campuses became “bloodbaths” at Chicago.Graduate classes were exercises in ” ‘terror.’ ”

Rather than quench debate, Overtveldt argues that for those who could withstand the pressure, the intellectual hazing helped hone their economic analyses. As former faculty member George Neumann observes, ” ‘Chicago has been accused of being a school that not only believes in survival of the fittest, it practices it.’ ”

The school of thought that developed in this hothouse sought to stretch price theory to its logical conclusions, ultimately applying market analysis to parts of society frequently not seen as economic. For example, Gary Becker compared racial discrimination to international trade, described education as a process of building “human capital” and analyzed decisions about marriage and child-bearing in economic terms.

To critics, the willingness of the Chicagoans to analyze discrimination economically or children as an investment often seemed shocking. As economist Robert Solow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says, ” ‘There are some things that should not be analyzed as if they were subject to being bought and sold.’ ” But the frisson of the Chicago School was precisely its stance

of being ever-willing to discard social norms and vague notions of the common wisdom for the crystalline logic of economic laws.

Yet despite the light it sheds on a fascinating corner of academic life, ”The Chicago School” falls short of providing a full picture of the influence of Chicago economics on the discipline, or on American politics more broadly.Overtveldt’s writing about economic ideas is at times too dense for the general reader, while for the specialist it fails to provide an effective synthesis of the common strains linking the different Chicago economists, as well as a sense of how their ideas differed from, and helped shape, the mainstream. His description of the successive influence of one generation of prize-winning thinkers on the next lacks the tension that would have come from a more substantive engagement with the intellectual controversies that the Chicago economists have provoked.

Finally, Overtveldt chooses to focus tightly on the academic work of the Chicago economists, to the exclusion of historical context. This makes it hard to get a full sense of the political significance of their ideas.

The atmosphere of the department may have been one of pristine seclusion, but the Chicago School helped inspire a generation of conservative activists who used the ideas developed there to build political momentum for cutting taxes and social-welfare programs and dismantling the New Deal state. Some of the most influential of the Chicago economists – like Friedman – vigorously popularized their ideas while also producing academic work; in addition to writing mass-market books, Friedman contributed to Newsweek magazine, created a TV series about free-market principles for PBS and informally advised Barry Goldwater during his 1964 presidential campaign.

Overtveldt suggests that the Chicago School of economics helped create “the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions of the 1980s” because its scholars were the best and the brightest. In the marketplace of ideas, Chicago won out. But this explanation evades the hard realities of politics and of power that shape our choices about economic policy. And ultimately, despite the strengths of Overtveldt’s account, his free-market interpretation of the rise of the Chicago School obscures the many ways the fierce debates in those gargoyle-decked buildings on the South Side wound up shaping our world.

———-

Kim Phillips-Fein is an assistant professor teaching American history at New York University’s Gallatin School. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in1997 from the University of Chicago, where she studied history.

So far that's how she looks to me, a dose of the 'radical' is in order. I am impressed with her thoroughness, 45 pages of notes for 269 pages of text. The analysis may be weak but the documentation is good.

One of the things that have jumped out at me thus is how racism was so often intertwined with the anti-socialist agenda. Pretty logical and something to always give the liberals trouble. Roger Milliken, a local luminary around here, is a particularly odious piece of shit. Vicious union buster and best bud of William Fuckhead Buckley, this turd proves that the good die young by continuing to plague the earth.

GOP and Corporate America Bond Loosens

Morning Edition, March 10, 2009 · One constant in American politics has been the bond between the Republican party and corporate America.

But with the change in power in Washington, that's no longer a given. Some of the nation's leading business groups supported President Obama's economic stimulus bill.

Now, business lobbyists who used to be part of the GOP team are acting more like free agents.

Just three of the 219 Republicans in Congress voted for the stimulus package last month. But some of their most loyal allies in business had already joined the other side.

For example, in a recent weekly commentary U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue said the bill would help businesses invest and grow.

"That's why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce strongly supported the economic stimulus package recently signed by the president," Donohue said. "Business investment incentives, along with tax rebates for consumers, will help create new jobs."

It's the same story at the National Association of Manufacturers where Jay Timmons oversees lobbying operations.

"There were a good number of provisions that were helpful to business, and none actually that were harmful," said Timmons, who added that the member-led key vote committee chose to designate the stimulus as a "key vote," meaning one the group uses to determine who its congressional friends are.

As a result, when President Obama signed the bill he could cite a bipartisan list of allies, including business leaders, unions and public interest groups.

This differs greatly from the 1990s when Republicans won control of Congress. During the 1994 campaign Newt Gingrich described the GOP as "the party that believes in less regulation, less red tape, less control by Washington."

Today, there are connections that a few years ago would have been unimaginable.

National Association of Manufacturers President John Engler spent three terms as governor of Michigan. Like Gingrich, he championed tax cuts and privatization.

But now, the manufacturers association isn't so concerned about ideology.

"We're going to continue to work with folks on both sides of the aisle, in both the House and Senate, because in the end we all want the same thing, and that's a better economy and jobs," Timmons said.

The Democrats want to talk, too.

"They have reached out to ask us, particularly on the Senate side, about what our ideas are," says John Castellani, who heads up the Business Roundtable, an alliance of some 140 corporate leaders.

Castellani says House Democrats, such as Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, are also making overtures.

"[He] invited me and some of my colleagues in to brief the freshman Democrats.

Castellani's view of Republicans in Congress is phrased cautiously.

"The one thing the Republicans know from the 2008 elections is that you can't beat something with nothing," he says.

Among lobbyists, there's a feeling that they haven't got the luxury of being purists.

"We're anxious to reach out to everybody and anybody," said Dan Danner, president of the National Federation of Independent Business. Fifteen years ago NFIB lobbyists helped make the Gingrich revolution happen.

His small business membership stayed neutral on the stimulus. And last week, Danner was at President Obama's summit on health care. That's the federation's top issue.

"We have talked with the Obama people starting, I believe, in August, well before the election, about health care. And the president's proposals have a lot of things that we would agree with," Danner said.

Certainly not everything, of course.

It's also true that other issues will reunite business and the GOP.

For instance, the business community hates the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give unions a big boost in organizing workplaces. The bill will probably come up for a vote in Congress this year.

But not even that seems likely to disrupt the business lobby's working relationships with Democrats.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101637322

Ah, the usual suspects. Heard this this morning, how timely.

Not a bad read. The emphasis is on the 'big boys', Du Ponts, Milliken, Goodyear, to mention a few. Lesser known names like Boulware, Baroody and Read were also prominent as agitators within the business community convincing businessmen who might be OK with New Deal how wrong they were. They and others founded various organizations to promote 'the business point of view' often with mediocre results, though they remained in the field. It was the introduction of Hayek and Mises with their veneer of intellectual competence, which allow them to shed the widely shared view of them being a bunch of greedy, self-serving shits. Now they were justified by science, a dismal science, indeed.

The Clinton administration is recognised as a continuation of the Reagan 'Revolution'.

This book is useful mostly for it's detailed documentation. Not only in 'connecting the dots' but also for the numerous quotes from these 'captains of industry', pillars of the community who would spew forth the most vile, racist and classists statements. These statements clearly demonstrate that for all of their claims of the inevitability of their"science' that it was all a facade, that people were right all along, that they are the enemy.

I'm going to look for it, BP. Right now I'm slogging through an introduction to the Manifesto, and reading that again. It is slow-going for us non-scholarly types. :)