Book Review

Canada and the United States

"Who killed American democracy?" remains a favorite question among historians. Nancy Cohen offers a new set of villains: late nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals who preceded the often vilified Progressives in advocating administrative rule by elites as an alternative to authentic popular government. Cohen contends that figures such as E. L. Godkin, George Curtis, Charles Francis Adams, and Charles Eliot Norton should be seen not as champions of laissez-faire but as early prophets of antidemocratic regulation—or "administration"—by the rich for the rich. Fearful of threats to property represented by post-Civil War egalitarians such as Wendell Phillips, by labor activists, and by agrarian radicals, Cohen's liberal publicists "laid the critical practical and ideological groundwork for the creation of a modern liberal democratic state with powers to regulate and intervene in social life—through means almost wholly removed from democratic participation and accountability" (p. 113). A rising generation of "ethical economists," including Richard T. Ely, Henry Carter Adams, and John Bates Clark, initially allied with insurgent challengers to this antidemocratic liberalism. Eventually, however, Cohen argues, the hegemonic power of capital forced these economists into embarrassing personal recantations and shunted their profession into channels useful to the ruling class that had seized control of American universities. Progressive reformers then achieved what their predecessors had envisioned: "the administrative politics instituted to regulate and preserve corporate capitalism eliminated the forms of democratic participation and accountability that, for all their flaws and exclusions, had characterized American politics since the Jacksonian era" (p. 255).

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