Capitalizing on Change: A Social History of American Business (review)

Broad interpretive syntheses are out of fashion among professional business historians these days. Yet they are sorely needed if historians wish to inform the public discourse on the nature and future of capitalism that has accompanied the recent economic crisis. Stanley Buder’s Capitalizing on Change—a sweeping synthesis of American business history from the eighteenth century to the present—is hence especially timely.

Buder argues that since the colonial era American attitudes and values toward business have been characterized by a unique embrace of individual entrepreneurial initiative and economic change. “No other nation has expressed more consistently a preference for unrestrained individualism and diversity over order and stability,” he writes (p. 4). In some ways, the book revives elements of Louis Hartz’s Liberal Tradition in America (1955) and offers an updated interpretation of American exceptionalism based on the claim of a uniquely entrepreneurial national culture. The nation’s core economic values, Buder contends, came to be defined during the colonial era and early republic by a relative lack of social hierarchy, an abundance of land and other resources, the high cost of labor, and high rates of mobility, the combination of which “fostered attitudes that emphasized acquisitive individualism”(p. 51). Though the nation has seen dramatic changes in the structure of business, the scope of government, and the ordering of social life over the last three hundred years “[t]he ideal of a growing economy open to talent and industry [still] constitutes the core of a secular American theology” (p. 466). The persistence of these values, the author contends, help explain American society’s embrace of economic growth as progress and its toleration of the social dislocations that have accompanied incessant economic change.

Buder acknowledges the array of scholarship produced in the last few decades that challenges the notion of an American consensus on values of materialism and individual initiative and, in a limited way, he responds by weaving social divisions and dissenting voices into his narrative. Most notably, Buder acknowledges and at times even highlights the existence of a reform tradition in the United States that emphasizes civic justice and that has historically served to keep a check on acquisitive individualism and ameliorate the effects of disruptive change. “Critics [of American capitalism] too often ignore a historic continuous dialectic between the bottom-line materialism of the capitalist system and the civic and ethical values of the United States, between the economic forces propelling change and the national vision of social justice and the good life,” he writes (p. 3). In Buder’s account, this dialectic plays out most clearly in the rise of the twentieth-century “positive state” in response to the perceived abuses of corporate power during the Gilded Age. Yet, on the whole, the reform tradition plays a distinctly subordinate role in this history to the dominant values of entrepreneurial initiative and material acquisitiveness.

Though Buder’s interpretation remains focused on America’s entrepreneurial culture, the scope of the topics he covers is much broader. The book not only encompasses three centuries of business history but also blends accounts of individual entrepreneurs and firms with developments in technology, finance, government, political thought, culture, and society. Buder asserts early on that “business history is best served by being placed in a broad context that considers social as well as economic developments” (p. 4) and the text delivers on this promise by covering developments both within the boundaries of the firm and outside it. Indeed at times the chapters range into such a broad array of topics that the text feels encyclopedic rather than interpretive, but the range of Buder’s coverage is nevertheless impressive.

Capitalizing on Change also effectively integrates historical reasoning into a discussion on challenges facing American capitalism today. In the final chapter Buder draws on the historical themes he has developed to address what he sees as a series of problems facing American economy and society: growing economic and...