Capitalism and Individualism in America PDF Download

Author: Gavin Benke
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000811867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177

View

Book Description
This book provides a concise and accessible history of the relationship between the individual and capitalism in the United States. The text is devoted to tracking the historical development of important themes, whilst addressing key episodes in the progress of American capitalism within these, such as the Great Depression and New Deal. The book will introduce students to the key philosophical principles that have been the most influential in the history of free enterprise in the United States as well as exploring the ways in which these ideas have been popularly understood by Americans from the late eighteenth century to the present. Liberalism and Neoliberalism, entrepreneurialism, slavery and racial capitalism, and business and gender are all assessed. The material in this volume is complimented by a set of primary source documents that bring the subject to life. It will be of interest to students of American history, business and labor history.

Author: Daniel W. Bromley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190062843
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309

View

Book Description
Anxiety and alienation threaten modern democracies. Political anger runs rampant in the United States, Britain voted to leave the European Union, authoritarian governments control several European countries, and millions of desperate migrants are streaming north out of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Many people blame stagnant household incomes and economic inequality. However, Possessive Individualism argues that the origins of world disorder are in the failure of the Enlightenment to anticipate the acquisitive individual as a creature of global capitalism. Daniel Bromley provides a fundamental critique of contemporary capitalism to explain why the world now finds itself in widespread disorder. Capitalism's basic flaw, he argues, is "possessive individualism." Glorification of the rational individual motivated by acquisitiveness prevents the adoption of necessary government programs that would ease the economic burden on beleaguered households. Meanwhile, possessive individualism enables managerial capitalism-controlled by the "one percent"-to suppress wages and salaries, embrace automation, and move jobs overseas. Capitalism is no longer an engine of improved livelihoods and social hope. Drawing on evolutionary institutional economics and political theory this book offers two remedies to the crisis of modern capitalism. Escape from the crisis requires that the isolated acquisitive individual rediscovers a sense of loyalty to others-as neighbors, as colleagues, and as participants in the shared social process of living. Escape also requires that the private firm be reimagined as a public trust in which the economic well-being of employees becomes a central part of its purpose. In the absence of these dual transformations, capitalism as we know it cannot endure.

Author: Tibor R. Machan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

View

Book Description
The purely economic view of individualism, homo economicus, cannot provide a basis for understanding human reality. Machan mounts a robust argument for a conception of the individual that recognizes the values of the free market and civil liberties but avoids licensing the unbridled pursuit of self-interest.

Author: Herbert Hoover
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
ISBN: 1596053461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 81

View

Book Description
[T]he basic foundations of autocracy, whether it be class government or capitalism in the sense that a few men through unrestrained control of property determine the welfare of great numbers, is as far apart from the rightful expression of American individualism as the two poles. -from American Individualism Before he became president of the United States, Herbert Hoover organized massive programs to feed the starving after World War I. This compact treatise is the result of his experience in Europe, a defense of a moderate American liberalism that springs from the kindness, intelligence, and generosity of the people... and a call for the world to follow this example. Hoover would find this optimistic and munificent philosophy, published in 1922, sorely challenged only a few years later, when his new presidency was faced with the stock-market crash of 1929 and the resulting economic depression. With its peek inside the thinking that would eventually bring down Hoover's presidency, this is a remarkable little book, a reminder that the best of intentions aren't always enough. The 31st President of the United States, HERBERT HOOVER (1874-1964) was born in Iowa, educated at Stanford University, and made a fortune in mining interests. He was instrumental in numerous international war-relief efforts. He served as secretary of commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, and was elected to the Oval Office in 1928.

Author: Bryan S. Turner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317650735
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

View

Book Description
In this sequel to their acclaimed The Dominant Ideology Thesis, the authors develop their analysis of the social and cultural underpinnings of modern capitalism. They confront a central assumption of western culture: namely, that the individual is sovereign, and that capitalism above all other economic forms depends on individualism. These ideas have an unbroken history from Alexis de Tocqueville to Milton Friedman. The paradox of the modern world is that the moral emphasis on the individual is contradicted by the actual organization of economy and society. The authors suggest that individualism and capitalism have no enduring or necessary relationship. Their linkage is entirely accidental and was confined to one particular historical period in the West. Against the background of what they term the Discovery of the Individual, the authors show how individualism gave capitalism a particular shape, and capitalism in turn highlighted the possessive features of the individual. Oriental capitalism and late capitalism in the West bear no particular relationship to individualism; indeed, they flourish best in the absence of individualistic culture. Collectivism increasingly dominates both economic and social life. These issues once informed the sociological enterprise, but have not been systematically addressed in recent times. This book revives the classical tradition of the historical and comparative analysis of culture and economy in capitalist society, in the context of the late twentieth-century world.

Author: Alex Zakaras
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691226326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

View

Book Description
A panoramic history of American individualism from its nineteenth-century origins to today’s bitterly divided politics Individualism is a defining feature of American public life. Its influence is pervasive today, with liberals and conservatives alike promising to expand personal freedom and defend individual rights against unwanted intrusion, be it from big government, big corporations, or intolerant majorities. The Roots of American Individualism traces the origins of individualist ideas to the turbulent political controversies of the Jacksonian era (1820–1850) and explores their enduring influence on American politics and culture. Alex Zakaras plunges readers into the spirited and rancorous political debates of Andrew Jackson’s America, drawing on the stump speeches, newspaper editorials, magazine articles, and sermons that captivated mass audiences and shaped partisan identities. He shows how these debates popularized three powerful myths that celebrated the young nation as an exceptional land of liberty: the myth of the independent proprietor, the myth of the rights-bearer, and the myth of the self-made man. The Roots of American Individualism reveals how generations of politicians, pundits, and provocateurs have invoked these myths for competing political purposes. Time and again, the myths were used to determine who would enjoy equal rights and freedoms and who would not. They also conjured up heavily idealized, apolitical visions of social harmony and boundless opportunity, typically centered on the free market, that have distorted American political thought to this day.

Author: Quentin Anderson
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

View

Book Description
What links the hopes of Communist fellow travelers in the 1930s to the work of Emerson a century earlier? Why do we give so much attention to celebrities? And why have we virtually erased the distinction between public and private affairs? Quentin Anderson shows that American individualism goes deeper than we admit. Only in America did writers and thinkers make the claim that a life worth living must subordinate family ties and social obligations to the visionary powers of the self. Drawing on the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, John Dewey, and Henry James - all of whom reacted strongly to the infiltration of money in the national imagination - Anderson finds that in denying the ties and obligations of an existing society each ended up by creating what he calls a "visionary capitalism". Such wholesale appropriations of the American scene, whether in art or systematic thought, discount history and individual action within society. He finds this tendency to grasp the world as an individual imaginative possession in both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and persistent in the claim to an impersonal authority in contemporary literary criticism. Anderson concludes: "We shall not crack the money firmament or attain to the freedom we want until we see that such liberty comes from the quality of our relations with other people and in no other way".

Author: Andrew Bernstein
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761849696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

View

Book Description
This book is a concise explanation of capitalism's moral and economic superiority to socialism, including America's current mixed-economy welfare state. This volume offers a focused, essentialized, and condensed argument ideal for the layman who admires capitalism but lacking a succinct, accessible explanation of its moral and economic virtues.

Author: Alan Greenspan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735222452
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 496

View

Book Description
From the legendary former Fed Chairman and the acclaimed Economist writer and historian, the full, epic story of America's evolution from a small patchwork of threadbare colonies to the most powerful engine of wealth and innovation the world has ever seen. Shortlisted for the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award From even the start of his fabled career, Alan Greenspan was duly famous for his deep understanding of even the most arcane corners of the American economy, and his restless curiosity to know even more. To the extent possible, he has made a science of understanding how the US economy works almost as a living organism--how it grows and changes, surges and stalls. He has made a particular study of the question of productivity growth, at the heart of which is the riddle of innovation. Where does innovation come from, and how does it spread through a society? And why do some eras see the fruits of innovation spread more democratically, and others, including our own, see the opposite? In Capitalism in America, Greenspan distills a lifetime of grappling with these questions into a thrilling and profound master reckoning with the decisive drivers of the US economy over the course of its history. In partnership with the celebrated Economist journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge, he unfolds a tale involving vast landscapes, titanic figures, triumphant breakthroughs, enlightenment ideals as well as terrible moral failings. Every crucial debate is here--from the role of slavery in the antebellum Southern economy to the real impact of FDR's New Deal to America's violent mood swings in its openness to global trade and its impact. But to read Capitalism in America is above all to be stirred deeply by the extraordinary productive energies unleashed by millions of ordinary Americans that have driven this country to unprecedented heights of power and prosperity. At heart, the authors argue, America's genius has been its unique tolerance for the effects of creative destruction, the ceaseless churn of the old giving way to the new, driven by new people and new ideas. Often messy and painful, creative destruction has also lifted almost all Americans to standards of living unimaginable to even the wealthiest citizens of the world a few generations past. A sense of justice and human decency demands that those who bear the brunt of the pain of change be protected, but America has always accepted more pain for more gain, and its vaunted rise cannot otherwise be understood, or its challenges faced, without recognizing this legacy. For now, in our time, productivity growth has stalled again, stirring up the populist furies. There's no better moment to apply the lessons of history to the most pressing question we face, that of whether the United States will preserve its preeminence, or see its leadership pass to other, inevitably less democratic powers.

Author: Kira Kogan
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656476039
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 31

View

Book Description
Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Auslandswissenschaft), course: Hauptseminar: “Who are the Americans? Politics, Business and Culture from New York to California”, language: English, abstract: In the first part of this essay I will contemplate the historical development of the concept of American individualism through the centuries, which created a contextual background for the establishment of a self-made man idea in the minds of Americans. In addition there will be given the biographical examples of self-made men that became a pattern for all the successors in American history. Furthermore I would like to make an overview of the various aspects of self-made man philosophy, which includes the discussion of its positive and negative sides and its influences on personality and society in general. Finally I will debate the ways of realisation of the self-made man idea nowadays and weigh the existing perspectives in the individualistic and contradictory world of now.