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American Literary History 15.4 (2003) 748-752



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Incorporation and the Disciplines

James Livingston

In 1930, John Dewey published Individualism Old and New, a small book compiled from a series of articles he wrote for The New Republic. It was in many ways a distillation of themes he had been developing since 1890, when he read William James's Principles of Psychology, but it was more decisive, more pointed, in its periodization of subjectivity. In a chapter titled "The United States, Incorporated," for example, he outlined his argument as follows:

There is no word which adequately expresses what is taking place. "Socialism" has too specific political and economic associations to be appropriate. "Collectivism" is more neutral, but it, too, is a party-word rather than a descriptive term. Perhaps the constantly increasing role of corporations in our economic life gives a clue to a fitting name. The word may be used in a wider sense than is conveyed by its technical meaning. We may then say that the United States has steadily moved from an earlier pioneer individualism to a condition of dominant corporateness. The influence business corporations exercise in determining present industrial and economic activities is both a cause and a symbol of the tendency to combination in all phases of life. Associations loosely or tightly organized more and more define the opportunities, the choices and actions of individuals. (36)

The pressing intellectual problem was then to posit a form of subjectivity consistent with the "change of social life from an individual to a corporate affair," for "the absence of mentality that is congruent with the new social corporateness that is coming into being" would only deepen and prolong the "crisis in culture" whose characteristic gesture was the embrace of "romantic individualism" by young intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford and Waldo Frank (83, 138-42, 64). [End Page 748]

Dewey understood that the first step toward the necessary reconstruction of subjectivity was an "acceptance" of the new corporate realities. "Individuals will refind themselves," he insisted, "only as their ideas and ideals are brought into harmony with the realities of the age in which they act" (70). But as Kenneth Burke understood, he was not preaching conformity or promoting acquiescence. 1 Dewey was instead proposing "an acceptance that is of the intellect," which meant "facing facts for what they are" (72). The central fact, as he saw it, was of course the profoundly corporate quality of American civilization, yet facing it meant neither sacrificing individualism nor celebrating capitalism. It meant grasping the corporation, or rather "corporateness," as the terrain on which socialism would be defined. "We are in for some kind of socialism," Dewey announced, "call it by whatever name we please, and no matter what it will be called when it is realized." For the socializing imperatives of the new corporate order were too powerful to be contained by advocates of the older, pioneer individualism—even the Republican Party favored the "extension of political control in the social interest" (109-19). But since there was nothing inevitable about the form socialism would take in the US, its citizens faced "a choice between a blind, chaotic and unplanned determinism, issuing from business conducted for pecuniary profit, and the determination of a socially planned and ordered development." For Dewey, this was "the choice between a socialism that is public and one that is capitalistic" (119-20).

This MLA session strikes me as a provocative and powerful amplification of the intellectual agenda Dewey proposed shortly before the emergence of a "cultural front." It pays homage to Alan Trachtenberg's seminal work of 1982—from which we have all learned and stolen—by first acknowledging the book's synthetic scope and monographic rigor, then asking whether we can get beyond it by merely adding characters and episodes to a story with an ending we already know.

Brook Thomas is right, I think, to remind us of Trachtenberg's precedent in Culture and Society. For Raymond Williams showed us that to explain the invocation and transformation of culture as moments in the development of capitalism was to escape the...

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