| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought. By Howard Brick. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. xii, 324 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8014-2590-5.)

Howard Brick's Transcending Capitalism is a bold and penetrating analysis of modern social thought in the twentieth-century United States. It examines a dominant concern shared by a variety of midcentury social theorists that "capitalism" was an outmoded term for an increasingly obsolete economic system and that capitalism failed to adequately characterize the kind of highly developed economy emerging in the United States and Europe. Brick reminds us that "capitalism" is of recent vintage (most credit the French socialist Louis Blanc with coining the term in 1850); even Karl Marx did not use it until the 1870s (p. 25). In the United States, it did not come into widespread use until the 1910s, and, even then, both its proponents and detractors doubted its efficacy for explaining economic dynamics and institutions in modern Western society. Rather than assume capitalism was the economic zenith of modernization, an array of predominately liberal social thinkers considered it a transitory state on the way toward a more organized, service-oriented, and egalitarian "new order" (p. 14). According to Brick, that historicist sense of capitalism's impermanence and imminent transcendence formed a main current of modern social thought from the 1910s to the 1970s. Borrowing and modifying the phrase "postcapitalist society," first deployed by the British writer Anthony Crosland and the German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf in the 1950s, Brick defines that sensibility as the "postcapitalist vision" (pp. 2, 4).

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