Through an examination of the judicial, legislative, and political aspects of the antitrust debates in 1890 to 1916, Sklar shows that arguments were not only over competition versus combination, but also over the question of the relations between government and the market and the state and society.

This book presents a critical analysis of the corporate university. The author's personal narrative unfolds between the reality of the corporate university and the rhetoric of the entrepreneurial university, which allows the author to reveal how the corporate university is structurally antagonistic to the activities of entrepreneurial intellectuals. The book not only explores the internal contradictions of the corporate university, but the complicity of its bureaucratized intellectuals in reproducing the iron cage of bureaucracy. Drawing on the legacy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Barrow argues that entrepreneurial intellectuals, whether as individuals or in small groups, must take direct action to improve their own conditions by steering a tenuous course between the market and the state.

Examines the twenty-year debate on labor-relations and the rapid development of social science it generated at the beginning of the corporatist era in the US, focusing on the dire warnings and recommendations by economic reformer John R. Commons in 1915. Shows how many of his ideas were incorporated into government policy, and contributed to the New Deal 20 years later. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The economics profession in twentieth-century America began as a humble quest to understand the "wealth of nations." It grew into a profession of immense public prestige--and now suffers a strangely withered public purpose. Michael Bernstein portrays a profession that has ended up repudiating the state that nurtured it, ignoring distributive justice, and disproportionately privileging private desires in the study of economic life. Intellectual introversion has robbed it, he contends, of the very public influence it coveted and cultivated for so long. With wit and irony he examines how a community of experts now identified with uncritical celebration of ''free market'' virtues was itself shaped, dramatically so, by government and collective action. In arresting and provocative detail Bernstein describes economists' fitful efforts to sway a state apparatus where values and goals could seldom remain separate from means and technique, and how their vocation was ultimately humbled by government itself. Replete with novel research findings, his work also analyzes the historical peculiarities that led the profession to a key role in the contemporary backlash against federal initiatives dating from the 1930s to reform the nation's economic and social life. Interestingly enough, scholars have largely overlooked the history that has shaped this profession. An economist by training, Bernstein brings a historian's sensibilities to his narrative, utilizing extensive archival research to reveal unspoken presumptions that, through the agency of economists themselves, have come to mold and define, and sometimes actually deform, public discourse. This book offers important, even troubling insights to readers interested in the modern economic and political history of the United States and perplexed by recent trends in public policy debate. It also complements a growing literature on the history of the social sciences. Sure to have a lasting impact on its field, A Perilous Progress represents an extraordinary contribution of gritty empirical research and conceptual boldness, of grand narrative breadth and profound analytical depth.

In this volume, Koistinen examines war planning and mobilizing in an era of rapid industrialization and reveals how economic mobilization for defense and war is shaped at the national level by the interaction of political, economic, and military institutions and by increasingly powerful and expensive weaponry.