Trachtenberg, Haskell, and Livingston, Inc.

My title refers to three of the four critics who have had the most influence on me during the 10 years or so that I've been drafting a book on paternalism in the early corporate era. Its title, "Paternalism Incorporated," bows to the book we're revisiting today. Perhaps less agreeably, I'm putting Alan Trachtenberg's book in uneasy partnership with two more recent and more positive studies of the corporate transformation. Thomas Haskell's "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility," a two-part essay in the 1985 American Historical Review, makes the still startling argument that capitalist markets expanded perceptions of causal relations, moral responsibility,and imaginative sympathies. ¹ James Livingston's 1994 book, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940, argues that capitalism first established, then undermined, the priority of the principle of class. And, he says, that's not a bad thing. ²

I won't talk much about Haskell, except to say that his sometimes abstracted argument pushed me to question whether the neo-Marxist trinity of alienation, reification, and commodification fully explains corporate capitalism's social impact. Instead I'll focus on Trachtenberg and Livingston, whose book appeared in a series edited by Trachtenberg, with a foreword by him. The fourth member of my imaginary firm, Walter Benn Michaels, did so well with The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism in 1987 that he left to form his own company.

I'll start with one of the most reverberating sentences in TheIncorporation of America. Trachtenberg begins by observing that when critics tried to explain the corporate transformation ofAmerican life, they reached for "the familiar but already outmoded language of individualism" (5). From Charles Francis Adams, Jr., onward, their critiques make the manly entrepreneur and the individual producer metonyms for the healthy nation, while blaming and shaming corporations not only for corruption, but also for implementing the economies of scale that undermined fairness as well as self-reliance.

That phrase could characterize aspects of Trachtenberg's book, as David Shumway's essay suggests. But it also applies to the way the book has been received. Even now, some colleagues and graduate students tend to think of it as an example of the familiar but already outmoded language of American studies. Chapter 1, on the West, rethinks Henry Nash Smith. Chapter 2, on the machine, rethinks Leo Marx. But this book appeared in 1982, when Stephen Greenblatt coined the term new historicism as an aside in his introduction to a special issue of Genre. Foucault was replacing Derrida on the cutting edge of theory, and theory had already supplanted close readings and historical contextualizations on the cutting edge of criticism. There's no Foucault in this book. It seems to be a fine example of the "old" historicizing. For one thing, it offVers lots of juicy information. I didn't know that the word strike comes from taking down sails (89). And I was amazed to learn that in 1883, the four time zones were established not by the government but by the railroads, "by joint decision, ... without act of Congress, President, or the courts" (60). Moreover, the compromise that ended Reconstruction was brokered by the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who saw opportunities for more railway lines (76-77). The imperial American state that so many people are writing about these days was just the caboose. But that's still old-style historicism. The book doesn't discuss the discursive intersections of race, class, and gender. It doesn't do the dazzling dance among homologous discourses that made Michaels's Gold Standard the book to contend with in the early 1990s.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that The Incorporation of America has had the more enduring influence. In very diffVerent ways, both Michaels and Trachtenberg challenged the privileged individualism then prevalent in American literary criticism, and resurgent today in claims for aesthetic value. Richard Poirier's 1966 book, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in...