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The Popular Sources of American Capitalism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Joyce Appleby
Joyce Appleby
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

Long ago, Louis Hacker noted the anticapitalist bias in American historiography. The tendency of capitalism, particularly marked after the advent of industrialization, to concentrate wealth and to turn that wealth into political power suggests the problem. The Declaration of Independence with its twinned affirmation of equality and liberty provided the ideological underpinnings for national unity. Both seemed threatened during the long transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy as the rich got richer and more and more of America's free citizens were exposed to the unfreedom of the workplace. Progressive historians who systematically analyzed the impact of industrial capitalism in the United States wrote out of sympathy with labor in its struggle for recognition, and no doubt Hacker was thinking of this tendency when he made his remark. This anticapitalist bias in the writing of American history has continued, only now historians decry the steady incursion of commerce and industry out of deference to a traditional way of life.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall 1995 , pp. 437 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

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