A New History of Leviathan
Newly available online from the Mises Institute as a free PDF e-book…
A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State
Before Ronald Radosh was a neo-conservative, he was a New Leftist. In 1972 he and free-market libertarian great Murray Rothbard collaborated on this book.
From the preface:
Share ThisIt is now widely understood that the United States in mid-twentieth century is a Leviathan Corporate Stateâ€â€a political economy dominated by giant multinational corporations whose extensive domain, operating with the levers of government, extends from the local retail outlet to firms negotiating for rights to explore oil deposits offshore of Saigon. But the corporate state, whose pervasive influence has recently been subjected to sharp critiques by Herbert Marcuse, Charles Reich, and Phillip Slater (in The Pursuit of Loneliness [Boston: Beacon Press, 1970]), is by no means a new phenomenon. The corporate leviathan began to emerge at the turn of the twentieth century, after an era of substantial laissez-faire had proceeded to industrialize and urbanize the nation.
The essays in this book reveal how and in what manner the corporate state developed in twentieth-century America. They show how a sophisticated group of large corporate reformers managed to replace a freely competitive economy and make a new governing class, through the use of reform mechanisms to mold the government into a mighty instrument of monopolization and cartelization.
This is a real prize. The Mises Institute should be congratulated for making it available again.