Overview

As recently as 2008, when Presidents Bush and Obama acted to bail out the nation’s crashing banks and failing auto companies, the perennial objection erupted anew: government has no business in . . . business. Mike O’Connor argues in this book: Those who cite history to decry government economic intervention are invoking a tradition that simply does not exist. In a cogent and timely take on this ongoing and increasingly contentious debate, O’Connor uses deftly drawn historical analyses of major political and economic developments to puncture the abiding myth that business once operated apart from government. From its founding to the present day, our commercial republic has always mixed - and battled over the proper balance of - politics and economics. Contesting the claim that the modern-day libertarian conception of U.S. political economy represents the “natural” American economic philosophy, O’Connor demonstrates that this perspective has served historically as only one among many. Beginning with the early national debate over the economic plans proposed by Alexander Hamilton, continuing through the legal construction of the corporation in the Gilded Age and the New Deal commitment to full employment and concluding with contemporary concerns over lowering taxes, this book demonstrates how the debate over government intervention in the economy has illuminated the possibilities and limits of American democratic capitalism.

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9780700619719

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Reviews

With a thorough and learned examination of government policies and the American economy from Hamilton and Jefferson to the 1980s, O'Connor has written a major study for scholars, pundits and those interested in public affairs. --Joyce Appleby, author of Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination

O'Connor has succeeded admirably in showing how previous generations have engaged with the policy controversies that continue to define the character of political economy in America. -- Journal of Interdisciplinary History

-Mike O'Connor takes readers on a meticulously researched, elegantly written, and endlessly fascinating tour of America's great economic brawls. Along the way he explodes one of the nation's most stubborn myths. Forget the visions of a laissez-faire golden age. From the founding to the present day, the Americans have intertwined politics and economics--the United States has always been a commercial republic. This formidable book has much to teach scholars, citizens, and anyone who enjoys a well-told history.---James A. Morone, author of Hellfire Nation and co-author of The Heart of Power

Author Information

Mike O’Connor has taught U. S. history at universities in New York, Pennsylvania and Georgia. His writing has appeared in the scholarly journals Contemporary Pragmatism and The Sixties and in the newspapers Austin American-Statesman and the Daily Texan. One of the original bloggers on the U. S. Intellectual History site, O’Connor later founded (with several others) the Society for U. S. Intellectual History.

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