Bringing Political Economy Back in

Like so many of the fields that have flourished in history departments in recent years, business history has an uneasy relationship with political history. When business history first emerged in the United States as a separate field in the 1920s, its founders stressed the importance of lavishing on business records the same reverence that political historians accorded the personal papers of lawmakers. Only in this way, business historians assumed, would it be possible to convince other historians of the centrality of business leaders—and, more broadly, of economic institutions—to the making of the nation.

Much has changed since the 1920s. Yet the adversarial relationship of business historians toward political history persists. This mindset is evident not only in Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s celebrated Visible Hand, but also in Lou Galambos's neglected Public Image of Big Business. Chandler's Visible Hand downplayed the significance of lawmaking on American economic development by highlighting the centrality of technology, markets, and organization; Galambos's Public Image questioned the propensity of historians to craft historical narratives around political movements. The "organizational synthesis" that Galambos has done so much to popularize was, in its initial formulation, explicitly framed as an alternative to politically based narratives of the American past. America's rendezvous, Galambos famously contended, was not with liberalism but with bureaucracy.

The marginalization of governmental institutions and civic ideals by business historians has certain affinities with the ascendancy in the past three decades of social and cultural history as the dominant mode of historical inquiry in the United States. While business history differed from social and cultural history in various ways, it shared the presumption that politics was, at bottom, a product of changes originating in some other realm.

The authors of the three essays in this roundtable challenge the antipolitical animus that informs somuch recent historical writing on the United States. Unlike social historians, their subject is the polity rather than the society; unlike cultural historians, their primary focus is on institutions rather than ideology. Each uses the lens of political economy to reinterpret a major development in American history: for Robin L. Einhorn, this development is post–Civil War business–labor relations; for Richard R. John, the Second Industrial Revolution; for Jason Scott Smith, the response of the federal government to the Great Depression—a response that has come to be known as the New Deal. Each points us, in different ways, toward what one might call a "political economy synthesis" of the history of the United States.

While "political economy" can be variously defined, all three authors understand it broadly to embrace the relationship of the state and the market. We intend it less as a polemical rallying cry to defend a particular methodological approach, than as an analytical category, rather like race, class, or gender. In its broadest sense, the phrase refers, as the intellectual historian John Dunn has aptly written, to "any and every attempt to understand just how the workings of a global system of production and exchange has affected, and does and could affect, the historically possible organization of collective human life."¹

Economic historians have long emphasized the significance of slavery in the early republic. Yet its legacy for post–Civil War business– labor relations is often overlooked. Cultural and social historians have long interpreted the opposition by post–Civil War jurists to labor legislation as an ideological perversion of a pre–Civil War equal rights tradition that had been originally intended to protect artisans and small farmers against aggrandizing politicians. Einhorn contends, on the contrary, that the origins of this doctrine are to be found in the political economy of slavery—and, in particular, in the anxiety of slaveholders that lawmakers might someday mobilize the American state to threaten their enormous investment in slaves. Late-nineteenth-century northern industrialists, she concludes, were heirs to a legal tradition that in the early republic had been championed by southern slaveholders.

Few events have received more respectful attention from business historians than the epochal technological and organizational transformation that has come to be known as the Second Industrial Revolution. Yet this...