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Trachtenberg, Haskell, and Livingston, Inc.

My title refers to three of the four critics who have had the most influence on me during the 10 years or so that I've been drafting a book on paternalism in the early corporate era. Its title, "Paternalism Incorporated," bows to the book we're revisiting today. Perhaps less agreeably, I'm putting Alan Trachtenberg's book in uneasy partnership with two more recent and more positive studies of the corporate transformation. Thomas Haskell's "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility," a two-part essay in the 1985 American Historical Review, makes the still startling argument that capitalist markets expanded perceptions of causal relations, moral responsibility, and imaginative sympathies.' James Livingston's 1994 book, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940, argues that capitalism first established, then undermined, the priority of the principle of class. And, he says, that's not a bad thing.2 I won't talk much about Haskell, except to say that his sometimes abstracted argument pushed me to question whether the neo-Marxist trinity of alienation, reification, and commodification fully explains corporate capitalism's social impact. Instead I'll focus on Trachtenberg and Livingston, whose book appeared in a series edited by Trachtenberg, with a foreword by him. The fourth member of my imaginary firm, Walter Benn Michaels, did so well with The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism in 1987 that he left to form his own company. I'll start with one of the most reverberating sentences in The Incorporation ofAmerica. Trachtenberg begins by observing that when critics tried to explain the corporate transformation of American life, they reached for "the familiar but already outmoded language of individualism" (5). From Charles Francis Adams, Jr., onward, their critiques make the manly entrepreneur and the individual producer metonyms for the healthy nation, while blaming and shaming corporations not only for corruption,