Ten years ago, Martin J. Sklar, a historian and pioneer in the field of American political development, passed away at age seventy-nine. Over the months and years that followed, a handful of essays by former colleagues and students cautiously commemorated Sklar’s life and work.1 Contextualizing both the gravity and limits of his insights was not a straightforward endeavor amid the tepid recovery from the Great Recession and simmering populist discontent on both sides of the Atlantic over globalization. Sklar was a unique, heterodox leftist best known for his evolving and increasingly positive account of the rise and persistence of “corporate liberalism” in the United States, as well as its crucial instrumentality to global development.
Most left-leaning thinkers who recognized Sklar shared the glum conclusion that his trajectory had undermined the reach of his most important and innovative ideas. His interdisciplinary study of political economy, American foreign policy, and the thought of policymakers—a Hegelian-Marxian methodology he, late in life, dubbed “Sklarian”2—was eventually marred by some of the very reductive impulses of which he accused others in his profession. By the end of his career, Sklar had not only traversed the distance between critical study and forceful affirmation of America’s role in world history—he often took positions that did not comport with basic political reality.
To the end of his life, Sklar professed to be a socialist and political thinker on the left. Yet he ended up an outspoken defender of both George W. Bush’s neoconservative globalism and the Tea Party movement. These stances emerged from an increasingly idiosyncratic and expansive understanding of the macro-historical leftward movement of the United States, but also from personal and professional grievances. Drawing on his experiences of the sectarian New Left milieu of the 1970s and within academia, Sklar became a strident critic of what is now known as identity politics. In an era when liberals and progressives had substantial reason to blame government dysfunction and policy inertia on doctrinaire “free market” Republicans, Sklar styled himself a contrarian. He insisted that, in fact, it was the modern Left that was captive to a regressive form of politics, not the post-Reagan Right.3
Conversely, Sklar argued, the actions of Bush and other prominent Republicans were consonant with the aims of the “historical” Left, what Sklar called “the trinity of liberty and equality and progress.”4 Sklar wagered that, with the end of the Cold War, the rise of transnational terrorist networks fueled by Islamism, and the proliferation of essentialist and anti-growth thinking in post–New Left circles, a “transvestiture” of the Left and Right was taking place.5 These and other provocations risked relegating him to the category of eccentrics—another erstwhile academic-cum-revolutionary turned apologist for American empire and the Manichaean logic of the war on terror.
The tenth anniversary of his death along with recent economic and political trends, however, invite a reappraisal of Sklar’s work. Debates over industrial strategy sparked by the Biden administration’s break from the old Washington Consensus, the recent cross-ideological, transatlantic rediscovery of America’s developmentalist tendencies and traditions, and emergent multipolarity in the international system have all challenged key assumptions about globalization and the state’s role in the economy.6 As John B. Judis wrote in a profile of Sklar in 2014, his “highly original views on liberalism . . . and the relation of capitalism to socialism should outlive the immediate political uses to which he put them.”7 Sklar was unafraid to probe the big questions of political economy, to periodize our place in world history. Fundamentally, he tried to answer why we are where we are in the course of modern capitalist civilization.
Explaining Corporate Liberalism
Sklar’s landmark study, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, The Law, and Politics (1988), as well as several essays, some of which are collected in The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (1992), remain essential to understanding how American elites across politics, industry, and the burgeoning social sciences approached the problems of rapid industrialization and their regulation in the early twentieth century. In both works, Sklar elaborated his interrelated theories of “corporate liberalism” and “the capitalism-socialism mix,” at once attesting to the uniqueness of the American polity and its centrality to the spread of social democratic practices, broadly conceived.
First advanced in a 1960 essay on Woodrow Wilson for the journal Studies on the Left, Sklar’s analysis of corporate liberalism would help clarify the most consequential developments of the Progressive Era and how they set the parameters of modern political economy in the United States.8 It explained the relatively “peaceful” transition from “proprietary‑competitive capitalism,” and its attendant, socially disruptive cycles of surplus accumulation and deflation, to a more cooperative mode of administered and centralized markets, supervised, but not overtly directed, by an adaptive and responsive federal government.9 Sklar stressed that the transition was a deliberate, elite-centered process, initiated by business and civic leaders aligned with Republicans and anti-Populist Democrats from the industrial core and consolidated under Wilson’s presidency.10
Sklar’s initial treatment of corporate liberalism reflected his radical convictions. As a scholar, Sklar sought to critically ascertain how American liberalism actually functioned as a form of market governance—to comprehend the nexus of advanced capitalism, law, and public administration.11 As a socialist, he sought to challenge how left-liberals thought about the basis of the welfare state and the possibilities for change permitted by the party system. From an orthodox Marxist perspective, corporate liberalism was the deceptive means by which the capitalist state delayed the final crisis of capitalism; its adjustments under the New Deal had only further co-opted wage earners and the middle class through modest concessions to perpetuate the rule of capital. For New Left radicals, the concept of corporate liberalism unmasked American liberalism’s inner workings and true objectives—conservative, bureaucratic, and imperialist.
But Sklar would gradually depart from this outlook.12 By the time he finished The Corporate Reconstruction, the concept’s original explanatory power was amended to reflect Sklar’s changing views of corporate liberalism’s achievements. It was not merely another, more intricate way to account for the absence of socialism in America and the persistence of what Sklar called “the property-production system.”13 The corporate-merger movement, which served as the basis for the reorganization of industrial capitalism, and the qualified legitimation of the “trusts” by the judiciary and the incipient administrative state, Sklar concluded, marked a necessary stage of development, necessarily shaped by perceptive elites who were responding to conditions that threatened to rend American society.14 In contrast to the radical critique he once advanced, Sklar saw the ascent of corporate liberalism as too complex, and ultimately sufficiently Marxian in its potential to emancipate through investment and abundance, to be rendered simply as a triumph of monopolists over the people. Just as important, it had been supported by a cross-class coalition which intuited the broad economic benefits that the dawn of Fordism augured.15 In short, Sklar concluded that corporate liberalism “contained socialism” in both “the inclusive as well as the exclusive sense.”
Sklar thus revised his analysis to argue that corporate liberalism had catalyzed an epochal change that involved much more than simple co-optation. In seeking to reconcile ideals of American liberty with the demands of modern industrial organization, corporate liberalism had generated new developmental imperatives and processes to maintain its legitimacy. Its emergence was the product of a forward-looking “social movement” by the “pro-corporate” wing of capital to achieve a more rational, stable, and harmonious system of economic management in American society, one that was tolerant of state regulation so long as it preserved capital’s investment prerogative.16 Whatever the limited intent toward social reform, this quest opened up possibilities for widespread economic development that had been previously fettered by earlier phases of capitalist accumulation.17
In turn, the very breadth of corporate capitalism’s overtures to smaller capitalists, new middle-class professionals, and industrial workers allowed it to assume a progressive mantle:
Corporate capitalism could subsume and make room for the interests and developments [of small producers and other classes]. . . . It could exploit and accommodate new technologies, new life-styles, new educational, scientific, and cultural institutions and patterns, on the basis of rising productivity and expanding production rooted in specialization, standardization, and economies of scale. In its very centralizing and standardizing characteristics, corporate capitalism was inclusive of diversity in a way that proprietary‑competitive capitalism was not and could not be.18
This progressivism was further predicated on delivering social peace in a manner that was serviceable to the overall strengthening of the system’s benefits. To ensure America as a capitalist society flourished and matured, corporate capitalism had to (1) identify and prevent the “disintegrative” patterns characteristic of the older, “laissez-faire” capitalism and (2) tame, through various forms and levels of system integration, the forces that, on the one hand, still threatened ruinous competition and, on the other hand, portended spiraling class conflict of a sort that would retard American society’s growth.19
Sklar evidently found this holistic view of reform and development wise. While he acknowledged that trade unions obtained only a few, minor concessions in the Progressive Era, he otherwise took a fairly sanguine view of the “diversity” that corporate capitalism was obliged to satisfy. Its arrival indeed marked an increasingly pluralistic, not just rapid and hierarchical, stage of development. The pro-corporate movement deliberately ensured civil society found representation through a modern market economy—more so, Sklar determined, than civil society had under the outdated competitive model.20 This was possible because corporate liberalism elevated the associational character of economic life—society’s organization through growing trade, civic, educational, philanthropic, religious, consumer, and labor associations—over the older mode of production and its concomitant property relations.21 Regulation toward societal goals, Sklar further observed, had proceeded significantly from private, yet progressively interdependent, initiative.22 This dynamic, he wrote, was suitable to the corporate-liberal outlook and preferable to statist solutions; government had to act carefully lest its regulations paralyze, or supersede, the very interdependencies the corporate economy was building.23 Importantly, this understanding applied equally to the dogmatic anti-monopoly framework, which paradoxically required a juridical statism to preserve maximum competition and prevent the formation of oligopolistic markets, and to bureaucratic interventions which threatened to enervate civil society.24
Cementing the corporate-liberal consensus hinged on a new legal precedent that effectively permitted oligopolies under the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and a new regulatory body that better delimited the state’s rights and responsibilities to support consumer protection.25 Between the Supreme Court’s 1911 “Rule of Reason” decisions, the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, and supporting antitrust legislation, government would ultimately determine in the Progressive Era’s final years that “bigness” or concentration was not inherently deleterious.26 Rather, it was “unreasonable methods” which deliberately undermined competitors and were otherwise injurious to the public interest that required regulation. This was an important distinction that sanctioned the continued growth of large, vertically integrated firms, provided such growth did not rest on egregiously anticompetitive practices, and which therefore recognized that there were lawful forms of privately administered “restraints on competition.”27
The corporate-liberal solution to the trust question consequently opposed, and prevailed over, movements to preserve small-producer republicanism. In the view of large capitalists as well as political leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, these movements had threatened to stifle further modernization, i.e., scientific, economic, and social progress.28
Still, the proper mode and scope of regulation was contingent on party politics. Like the modern corporation itself, the party system had to quell currents of opposition by partially accommodating and absorbing them into coalitions reconciled to the new corporate order. Corporate liberalism, then, was not just the philosophical and legal basis of “the corporate reconstruction of American society,” but its corresponding political form—what determined the new normative axis of electoral competition.
The Legacy of the 1912 Election
The 1912 election resulted in a settlement that reverberated throughout the rest of the century. Unlike some analysts of the Progressive Era who see only modest differences between Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Sklar believed that each, along with then president William Taft, represented divergent pathways for the future of American political development.29 Even though all had outwardly acquiesced to the realities of modern industrial organization, their views of state power were different enough to have major implications for the evolution of state-society and market-society relations.
Sklar’s close examination of Roosevelt’s changing views of business regulation was central to his own reevaluation of corporate liberalism. Toward the end of his presidency, Roosevelt had come to favor supervision of the largest corporations through a Federal License Act, which, according to Sklar, would empower the Bureau of Corporations to impose fines for “noncompliance with the registration provisions” and allow the bureau’s commissioner to revoke the license for operation if “it was found that the corporation had been employing unfair methods of competition.”30
In additional drafted bills and correspondence with his closest advisers, Roosevelt went further. He conceived of a system of “federal incorporation” that granted the executive branch broad discretion to investigate business affairs; the authority to require that businesses obtain government certification to engage in interstate commerce; and the power to enforce a heretofore radical degree of transparency with regard to investment practices, particularly the issue of corporate stock.31 The problem was not bigness in and of itself, for Roosevelt understood the corporate order as the most immediate means of achieving mass prosperity, but destructive financial speculation, fraud, and antisocial aggrandizement.32
Yet while Roosevelt appeared to seek, in some sense, only the most honorable and productive conduct by the country’s leading corporations, “the presidential intent,” Sklar theorized, nevertheless
looked toward an executive agency, as free as possible from judicial restraint, with powers of command over the business operations in general, and the investment activity in particular, of corporate enterprise, backed up by the power of summary dissolution of delinquent corporations. The state would not simply police or regulate the economy; rather . . . corporations would become agents, “controlled and governed,” of the state and of public policy.33
In other words, Roosevelt was conceptualizing a proto-corporatist form of governance, one that was unavoidably statist due to the authority vested in the executive branch to directly supervise and thereby shape and discipline corporate behavior.34 This was a vision pregnant with broad governmental responsibilities for economic planning. By the 1912 campaign, Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” sought to harness corporations in the direction of a “public-service economy” that ensured distributive justice while preserving the advantages of the market and private enterprise.35 But Sklar contended that, however much it was oriented to advancing egalitarian development under a more benevolent, better regulated system of corporate activity, disequilibrium inhered in Roosevelt’s vision of government oversight. By one mechanism or another, the state would ultimately assume a commanding, and absolute, position over the market—and thus over society.
“Indirect government regulation,” by contrast, represented the far less radical alternative.36 The question was what form it would take. Taft’s presidency had, in fact, been marked by an increase in antitrust lawsuits, which ran counter to the relative predictability required by corporations for further expansion and investment.37 A weak and ad hoc regulatory system, then, only portended more case-by-case government intervention (“prosecutorial hyperactivism,” in Sklar’s words);38 government would struggle to keep pace with the growth of corporations, while the ambiguous legal environment threatened to slow or disrupt gains in efficiency, innovation, techniques to smooth the business cycle, and so forth.
Greater market-society stability, in Sklar’s view, was assured by Wilson’s support for a trade commission that more strongly institutionalized certain powers of investigation as well as an ability to issue cease and desist orders against unfair competition (the latter of which would be subject to judicial review, in effect limiting the commission’s activism to the most flagrant and extreme violations of the public interest). Unlike Roosevelt’s proposed licensing system, Wilson’s vision did not threaten to exert permanent control over corporations. The resulting 1914 Federal Trade Commission Act, Sklar wrote, was notable for its overall lack of strong police powers; the government was neither tasked with the challenge of routinely determining the grounds upon which to break up large corporations nor obliged to be an omniscient arbiter of market justice.39 But, in enabling regulatory oversight through an enlarged bureaucracy, and with its authority enhanced by the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act’s prohibition on specific business practices,40 the creation of the FTC diminished the salience of the trust issue. Anti-monopoly sentiment that reflected antiquated notions of the market would no longer drive party politics, while corporate capitalists could proceed with the confidence that the basic rules governing the system would be neither subject to major electoral swings nor a judiciary struggling to legislate in place of Congress.41
As a leftist who increasingly prized, and sought to rescue, a Marxian definition of freedom, Sklar concluded that Wilson had set the broad coordinates for “positive government.”42 In contrast to Roosevelt’s creeping statism, Wilson’s “evolutionary” views of modern development affirmed “the supremacy of society over the state”: social cooperation would continue to be realized primarily through associational activity, as opposed to government mandate.43 Writing toward the end of the Cold War, it is possible in retrospect that the themes of glasnost and perestroika weighed on Sklar’s mind. Had Roosevelt’s sweeping regulatory powers been enacted, Sklar reasoned, they would have introduced experiments in a state-directed economy44 that would have sparked a fundamental crisis over how to discipline, organize, and maximize the means of production.45 In other words, a constitutional crisis over how to preserve the property-production system and the advantages of concentration while dispersing its fruits according to centrally determined criteria.46
The consolidation of corporate liberalism successfully averted this conjuncture without deferring the imperative to spread development and integrate more regions and parts of society into advanced capitalism. Hence Sklar’s belief that Wilson’s approach was uncommonly sagacious.47 The complexity of the modern economy still required modern state administration that could mediate and transcend sectional and class conflict on behalf of long-term national interests.48 In his philosophy and pragmatic reforms, Wilson affirmed the growth of national government and national power commensurate with the United States becoming an industrial society, slowly transforming his party in the process.49 Indeed, while the reform agenda outwardly favored the periphery, Wilson compelled the national Democratic Party to respond to the interests and problems of the nation’s economic core, rather than position itself, as it so often had, as a vehicle of Southern agrarian resistance to the forces of advanced industry—both economic and sociocultural.50
By avoiding a corporatist path in the European (or Brazilian) sense, one can see, as Sklar did, that corporate liberalism largely reinforced the contour and underlying dynamics of public-private economic development as it had already proceeded in the advanced parts of the United States. While Wilsonian Democrats’ reform agenda was nominally redistributive, its key planks—reestablishing the federal income tax and tariff reduction51—were primarily developmental in practice, helping to advance the spread of small and medium-sized firms in the underdeveloped South.52 Corporate liberalism, then, had reconciled the South to the reality of the corporate order while granting it significant leeway to modernize on its own terms. Although subsequent development-oriented reforms over the following decades eventually challenged the autonomy granted to the region’s system of racial hierarchy and racial-economic subordination, the state never superseded the discretion of local associations over growth and regional planning.
On this score, grasping the implications of Theodore Roosevelt’s statism as understood by Sklar is essential to seeing how the New Deal order modified but did not supplant corporate liberalism. In sectors and regions where organized labor was strongest, a moderate form of corporatist (i.e., tripartite) negotiation was advanced during the Second World War and Truman administration, while the federal government became responsible for growing fiscal transfers under one guise or another. Barring emergency wartime measures, the state never seriously competed for control over the economy and ownership of it. Instead, broadened powers of regulation that aimed to establish or raise standards for social insurance, labor rights, public health, environmental protection, nondiscrimination, and other policies became the main means of supporting the general welfare without stifling private initiative. But aside from public utilities and public works projects, the hybrid regulatory and transfer system typically supplemented private investment or incentivized more R&D. The welfare state, accordingly, likewise tended to favor consumption over state-determined care and provision: beyond welfare programs which subsidized goods and services for the poor and elderly, corporate liberalism would favor redistribution through growth and development over explicit decommodification.
Reinterpreting the End of History
Following Sklar’s logic, one could trace a continuum of development under corporate liberalism—at least through the mid-1990s, before deindustrialization accelerated. Instead of stark ideological differences, coalitional politics throughout the twentieth century primarily revolved around proposals and programs that linked together broad constituencies in pursuit of common developmental needs. Sometimes the push was more bottom up, sometimes more technocratic; likewise, certain developmental objectives required more overt forms of state intervention in the market, while others were pursued more obliquely.
Seen this way, one can better understand how corporate liberalism disciplined the party system. Between Herbert Hoover’s associative state (market-making and “scientific” state-market coordination), the proliferation of “supply-side” regional development programs during the New Deal and Cold War (market diversification and national economic integration), and the heavy emphasis on public-private partnerships during the Clinton era (urban renewal through technology-service‑education hubs, “democratizing” credit both domestically and in the Global South), corporate liberalism proved adaptative.53 It regenerated itself through new market-making and market-shaping powers, regardless of the intensity of electoral realignments precipitated by new and recurring debates over individual freedom and state authority.54
The complexity of this continuum, its variations along with its centripetal tendencies, is key to discerning the occasional brilliance of Sklar’s thought but also its analytic pitfalls. Up to a point, his lens can yield insights and uncover developmental patterns that transcend the partisan narratives of recent decades. In our hyper-polarized times, it is all too easy to overlook the less ideologically satisfying details of modern American development and fail to see that social reform and inclusive growth arose from a variety of intellectual wellsprings, civic traditions, social movements, and political-regional alignments.55
As Sklar came to emphasize, the relationship between development and distribution is never as simple as sorting ideas, practices, movements, and leaders into “liberal” and “conservative” camps. This seemingly prosaic yet massive fact of history, studiously ignored by most partisans and pundits, lies at the heart of Sklar’s dialectical concept of “the capitalism-socialism mix.” Corporate liberalism, he concluded, had fruitfully aligned “social capitalists” and “liberal socialists” in a long-arc developmental coalition that, for most of the twentieth century, effectively marginalized both reactionary and fringe-utopian groups in American politics.56 It was a lucid insight in an otherwise overwrought theory—one that is still relevant for those scholars who are rediscovering America’s developmentalist traditions and who hope to avoid the defeatism and obscurantism that have predominated parts of academia.57
At the same time, Sklar’s ever-expanding interpretation of corporate liberalism and “the mix” very likely contributed to his intellectual unraveling. Despite the rise of free market axioms under Ronald Reagan and the collapse of state socialism in Europe at the end of the Cold War, Sklar maintained that America was steadily moving leftwards and that globalization under the auspices of corporate liberalism and American military power would foster social democratic reform abroad.58 These claims betrayed a sense that Sklar had become unbound from empirical observation. Sklar had once backed up his theories with abundant evidence drawn from the communication of policymakers, the actions of interest groups, and socioeconomic data. But the more he insisted upon the evolution of “the mix,” and the more he attempted to square his theories with the dominant trends of American politics (neoconservative in foreign policy, neoliberal and libertarian on most economic questions), the less plausible his arguments were.
By the aughts, Sklar seemed determined to justify how history had unfolded under corporate liberalism, rather than probe why America failed to guarantee social rights extended in other advanced economies. He likewise grew suspicious of the anti-free-trade Left and the erratic push, most notable during the pink tide in Latin America, to revive what he believed were autocratic development models. Markets were not synonymous with capitalism, he asserted,59 but an expression of human needs that reflected the pluralism, rising consumption, and opportunities which made American society dynamic. Evermore integrated markets would, in turn, relieve drudgery and coercive social relations, thereby raising every society’s desire for freedom.60
The most charitable interpretation of these Friedman-esque views is that Sklar must have become convinced globalization would lead to a universal market socialism.61 The specific form socialism took was less important than the spread of rising “shares” of development, as measured by life expectancy, literacy and advanced education, public health, purchasing power that dissolved patrimonial control, and other signs of declining want, servitude, and backwardness.62 But this evolutionary perspective drifted toward economic determinism. In the most polemical parts of his posthumous book Creating the American Century: The Ideas and Legacies of America’s Foreign Policy Founders (2017) and his 2012 e-book Letters on Obama (from the Left), Sklar veered disturbingly close to a social Darwinian justification of “modernity” and “progress” over its challengers. From Sklar’s increasingly aerial perspective, the advent of corporate liberalism had prepared America for a constructive, transformational role in the development and interconnectedness of societies previously regarded as only occupying a strictly subordinate position in wealth creation. As far back as the American annexation of the Philippines, Sklar asserted, American statesmen had anticipated a postimperial age.63 Just as they had done in domestic politics, the architects of corporate liberalism were engineers, knowingly or not, of a grand left turn in world history.64 In the twenty-first century, America thus had a special responsibility to expand the “open-system” of globalization and safeguard it against “party-state” forms of government which limited freedom and imposed “quasi-communal” and “pre-modern” obligations on their societies.65
From there it was no great leap for Sklar to champion the interventionist foreign policies of the George W. Bush administration. This journey from the radical Left to the neoconservative Right would be unremarkable were it not for Sklar’s at once baffling and impressive attempt to affix a philosophy of world history and modern development to his new political sympathies. Despite the apparent triumph of corporate liberalism, Sklar warned that the reemergence of closed-system ideologies and the preponderance of infantile “anti-capitalist,” “anti-imperialist” beliefs in the West jeopardized the foundations of the emerging “universalist-transnational order.”66 The pro-development alliance needed to be strengthened domestically and at the international level to extinguish political Islam, in Sklar’s view the most dangerous new manifestation of the anti-modern, “state-command” polity.67
Perhaps inevitably, Sklar accused mainstream Democratic politicians of “appeasement” vis-à-vis “Islamic Imperialism” and “Arab/Persian Fascism,” parroting neoconservatives’ most incendiary rhetoric.68 Tortured analogies followed: Sklar compared George W. Bush’s “pro-democracy” agenda to Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant’s determination to crush the Confederacy (another version of the closed-system threat); the administration of Barack Obama, who plainly governed as a neoliberal, portended “state-command” policies and much worse.69 After Sklar’s death, those on the left who recollected his life and work hoped to bracket off these provocations.
Lessons for Posterity?
Sklar’s most wild assertions had indeed threatened to cast him into irrelevance. In Letters on Obama, a book rife with bizarre and at times unreadable syntax, Sklar’s focus alternated between comical jabs at both parties, salutations to George W. Bush’s “pro-growth” record, and a feverish obsession with the “totalitarian” future Obama represented. Referencing his own past associations with radical leftists, he warned repeatedly that the sectarian Left’s penetration of the Democratic Party and its “thickness” in media and civil society could lead to “terrorism” and “fascism.”70
Yet Sklar was capable of apposite and sometimes strangely prescient remarks to the very end. Creating the American Century was punctuated with perceptive arguments about the new universalism that had emerged out of American imperialism. The desire of developing societies for state capacity, prosperity, and liberty, essentially a talking point of the Council on Foreign Relations, took on greater ramifications in Sklarian terms; by arguing that “the agenda of US twentieth to twenty-first-century expansionism, imperialism, and internationalism has a distinct left-wing character,” Sklar offered a heterodox, Marxian counterpart to Walter Russell Mead’s influential 2002 book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.71 In effect, Sklar had found his own peculiar way to a Whiggish defense of progress. America’s pivotal role in the “cumulative-evolutionary” phase of modern global development may have partly emerged from rapacious impulses and motives, Sklar acknowledged, but the country’s resolve to spread financial networks, trade, and industrial know-how had transformed the aspirations of billions.72 This “venting . . . of surplus capacities upon the less developed” parts of the world73 was another massive fact of history whose lessons Sklar felt had been all but ignored in recent times.
Such musings had an underlying purpose. Pace those who felt Sklar had lost the plot entirely, his angle did not merely serve to reconcile his professed socialism with the nature of American hegemony. It cleverly reframed the central dilemma over modernity that the post-1960s Left recurrently—perhaps interminably—faces.74 Writing at a time when most on the Left gloomily agreed with John McCain’s claim that America was and always had been a “center-right country,” Sklar insisted that America, more often than not, had been “a historically left-wing society” and that the combined parties of “production” and “distribution” in America had done more to “revolutionize” development than any other political-economic system.75 As ever, Sklar was turning conventions on their head to make a broader point about the meaning and pursuit of freedom and social citizenship. He challenged leftists to not abandon the search for a usable past which upheld universal principles—to resist, in spite of America’s sins and failures, a vulgar anti-capitalism that devolved into contempt for society and a disavowal of the technological changes, goods, and socialistic processes which had made life much less nasty, brutish, and short.76
That challenge has taken on a special resonance since the Great Recession and the defeat of Left populism in the late 2010s. Though it is easy to dismiss all of Sklar’s latter-day provocations and distortions, he did intuit, correctly, that the Left’s resurgent internecine conflict would become a central theme of contemporary politics. A number of stalwart liberals, social democrats, and Marxists who once regarded sectarianism as a trifling distraction have reconsidered the degree to which it has transmuted or undermined the democratic Left’s historical priorities and most persuasive demands for social justice (in other words, the appeals that pulled the pro-democracy Right leftwards, as Sklar would have put it).77 Whatever their differences over reformist approaches to coalition-building and legislation, these opponents of sectarianism believe that identitarians’ strong presence in progressive activist networks on both sides of the Atlantic is squandering an opportunity to build a majoritarian politics centered on worker power and social rights. Political trends since Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign have reinforced this pessimistic view: material conditions and class issues in the West are still much more salient than they were during peak globalization, yet most center-left parties continue to lose their traditional supporters and virtually no left-populist alternative has credibly filled the vacuum.
The philosophical divide on the left extends well beyond the divergence over identity politics and the so-called Great Awokening of recent years. Fundamental disagreements over the kind of country that America has been and can be separate those who endorse a neo-developmentalist turn in public policy and those “progressives” who, post-Sanders, are moving once more toward reflexively anti-American and militant “degrowth” currents. Given the Left’s undeniable cultural muscle and presence in higher education, the strand which decisively shapes the way younger generations construe their world and the possibilities within it will have a disproportionate impact on the direction of the party system. In short, whichever side prevails in current debates will determine the prospects for American social democracy for a long time to come.
On the other hand, there is an emerging school of thought that wagers social democratic policies and outcomes do not depend exclusively on the modern Left reclaiming the role and working-class agency of the “historical Left.” Here, Sklar’s claim about the “transvestiture” of the Left and Right has become somewhat less surreal despite the enduring threat to the rule of law, democratic norms, and social peace posed by far-right extremists in America and elsewhere. Reflecting on vast societal changes since the 1960s, Sklar appeared to sincerely mean that the Right had steadily moved left to embrace equal liberty, equality of opportunity, and global development, whereas the Left, hijacked by sectarian elites, had turned to obsessions with group rights, affirming essentialist identities, and a rejection of modern, pro-consumption principles—positions Sklar identified with the “historical Right” and Volk-like notions of community and social-behavioral control.78 While the phenomena of Trumpism, Orbanism, and Bolsonarismo plainly do not reflect this symmetry, the possibility of a reversal, or realignment, of the Left and the Right now fascinates the commanding heights of the nation’s media, not just niche intellectual circles.
To the extent that it exists, the realignment is foremost evident in the way that political parties in an increasing number of Western countries assemble their coalitions. Building on the studies of French economist Thomas Piketty, several analysts anticipate more political instability and populist discontent on the basis of educational polarization, regional inequality, and the clustering of urban social liberals and knowledge and tech elites in center-left parties. So far, these trends have been haphazardly exploited by political entrepreneurs—right-populist or otherwise. A transference of any overarching principles remains contingent, more often expressed as finger-to-the-wind opportunism over issues like free speech rather than serious ideas about building an egalitarian economy. Significantly, the Right has not become the vehicle of the historical Left, as Sklar boldly argued; on the contrary, our normative definitions of Left and Right remain fairly intact, at least for the time being. Instead, right-populists have jettisoned Bush’s globalism and leveraged a mostly unambitious blend of “social neomercantilist” and pro-natalist welfare ideas to court disaffected workers. To borrow somewhat from Sklar’s phraseology, it is akin to McKinleyism for Bryanites, with a heavy dose of Patrick Buchanan and Marine Le Pen thrown in to terrify progressives. The new garb is neither very alluring nor much different from the old.
The Right’s strategy has nevertheless been enough to compel the liberal-left establishment in the United States to revise several of its positions, most centrally its outlook on the importance of a strong industrial base. Hence, there has been an unusual convergence on the matter of industrial strategy and the urgent need to move beyond the old Washington Consensus in order to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Made in China 2025 agenda. The political advantage will lie with whichever party can forge a developmental coalition that at last reckons with the failure of “postindustrial” corporate liberalism to deliver the gains it promised. Hard as it is to fathom at present, there is nothing in American history that predestinates the Democratic Party’s enduring command of the developmentalist paradigm, nor anything that precludes a post-Trump Republican Party, or some unborn political formation, from becoming the new “party of government.” Though Bidenomics represents a serious attempt at a course correction, the “return of the state” hailed by some left-Keynesians remains quite tentative. However much Atlanticists panic over the fragmentation of the liberal international order, one could argue that Biden’s “neomercantilist” policies are less an abrupt departure from America’s Wilsonian developmental tradition than an ad hoc recalibration—an attempt to salvage corporate liberalism by “venting” investment back into neglected communities, spurring climate-related innovation, and promising a new foundation for inclusive growth.79
Beyond Corporate Liberalism
Given Sklar’s philosophical endpoint, one could imagine stark warnings about this protectionist Left-Right alignment. Perhaps he would concur with those who despair that the American political establishment has capitulated to the “postliberal” Right—and likewise the designs of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping—and overturned the basis of global development in favor of retrograde spheres of influence.80 But it is also conceivable that Sklar would concede that circumstances have enfeebled the reformist currents that prevailed in earlier periods and which he thought would regenerate on account of America’s civil society traditions. By every crucial metric—life expectancy, economic inequality, housing, family formation, and municipal infrastructure—the last twenty years have seen the deconsolidation of developmental benchmarks that were once taken for granted in the West.
The most practical task before the next generation of serious political leadership is to broker some model of social corporatism that both accommodates and restrains Americans’ contradictory ideological impulses. At the bare minimum, “the center” needs to become far more Rooseveltian (both TR and FDR) if it is to inspire confidence in the system, while leaving room for the kind of pluralism and federalism that has distinguished American democracy. Of course, even this rather conservative solution is a very tall order. Despite Biden’s professed goals, rentier interests exert disproportionate power over both political parties, weakening those pro-development voices most amenable to combining growth and redistribution.
That dynamic, which has heightened sectional tension, poses a special problem for any politics that claims continuity with the historical Left. Where the Left is ostensibly strongest, labor-driven politics has shown only fleeting signs of renewed vigor. Meanwhile, liberal pluralism based on equality of opportunity has been slowly warped by an alignment of elites and knowledge economy insiders from consultancies, the nonprofit sector, higher education, and philanthropy; in expensive cities where the middle class seems to be vanishing, this permutation of corporate liberalism has, in a sense, fabricated a parallel “public-service economy” around group identities that has done nothing, in practice, to meaningfully reduce poverty and inequality.81 The decline, meanwhile, of strong civic associations and trade unions in former industrial areas and their replacement by fringe groups and reactionary movements has worsened polarization. When none of the terms of America’s further development can be agreed upon, oligarchic capture of the parties and the state only deepens. On these points, Sklar would likely agree.
The success of the American experiment, Sklar made clear, required a belief in the adaptability of American traditions, a sense, more generally, that there was a usable past for Americans of all persuasions and walks of life. Today, we as a polity struggle to establish a baseline of shared reality. This bodes ill for an equilibrium of associational freedom and social order, of self-determination and shared principles—for the further development of a society that had achieved what Sklar called “the passage from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft,” that is, the journey from traditionalism and hierarchy to liberty and modern citizenship.82 Perhaps to begin anew we might first recall what our best leaders and historians have understood: that progress in a democracy may not always be linear, but it is no mere abstraction. From there we may think more productively—and prudently—about the ends of American statecraft.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 2 (Summer 2024): 109–33.
Notes
1 This essay is primarily concerned with the direction of Sklar’s thinking and reflects on its applicability to present conditions. In addition to discussing his work and changing politics, the following articles describe Sklar’s upbringing, education, radical period, friendships, and career as a journalist and academic: John B. Judis, “Meet the Sarah Palin Enthusiast Who May Have Been the Best American Historian of His Generation,”
New Republic, June 17, 2014; James Livingston, “Vanishing Act,”
Nation, October 15, 2014; James Livingston, “Marty and Me,” Society for U.S. Intellectual History, April 28, 2014; Ronald Radosh, “A Eulogy for Martin J. Sklar, 1935–2014: Historian, Patriot, and Socialist,”
PJ Media, May 10, 2014. See also: Norton Wheeler, “Letter to the Editor,”
Democracy no. 36 (Spring 2015).
2 Christopher A. Olewicz, “‘An Extremely Old Socialist’: Martin J. Sklar on Politics, Socialism, and History,” Telos 186 (Spring 2019): 99–122.
3 Martin J. Sklar, “Sklar: Left and Right,” Telos, June 2, 2016.
4 Martin J. Sklar, Creating the American Century: The Ideas and Legacies of America’s Twentieth-Century Foreign Policy Founders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 190.
5 A summary of trends that Sklar believed attested to this phenomenon can be found in Sklar, Creating the American Century, 195–99. For a discussion of Sklar’s “transvestiture” thesis from the libertarian Right, see: Kim Holmes, “A Man between Two Worlds: Assessing Martin Sklar’s Philosophy of Liberalism,” Heritage Foundation, March 26, 2019. To my knowledge there has been no published response from a liberal-left or Marxist perspective to Sklar’s claim that the Left and Right have switched ideological-philosophical poles despite the recent proliferation of literature on political realignment in the United States and Europe.
6 See, for example: Robert D. Atkinson and Michael Lind, “National Developmentalism: From Forgotten Tradition to New Consensus,” American Affairs 3, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 165–91; Eric Helleiner, “The Revival of Neomercantilism,” Phenomenal World, April 27, 2023; “Stefan Link and Noam Maggor, “The United States as a Developing Nation: Revisiting The Peculiarities Of American History,” Past & Present 246, no. 1 (February 2020): 269–306; Ariel Ron, Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020); Ganesh Sitaraman, “American Revolutionaries,” American Prospect, September 10, 2020; Jacob Soll, “There Is a Secret Hamiltonian in the White House,” New York Times, March 10, 2024.
7 Judis, “Meet the Sarah Palin Enthusiast Who May Have Been the Best American Historian of His Generation.”
8 Reprinted in Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 102–42.
9 Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, The Law, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 20–21, 29–30, 43–44, 66–68.
10 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 24–25, 31, 206.
11 In this endeavor he was successful, if temporarily eclipsed by others: corporate liberalism quickly proved an influential concept among his fellow scholars and a subfield on the topic flowered as part of the new historiography of American business and the Progressive Era. See, for example: Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). For a recent overview, see: Kyle Edward Williams, “Conserving Liberalism,” Baffler no. 59 (September 2021).
12 A rough turning point can be located in the late Carter and early Reagan eras. In 1979, Sklar quit In These Times, the radical labor magazine he founded with James Weinstein, moving on to finish his dissertation on corporate liberalism at the University of Rochester. He later became a professor of history at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
13 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 6–7.
14 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 12, 14, 33–34, 173–75.
15 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 26, 35. In effect, one could venture that corporate liberalism constituted a more capacious and bipartisan developmental coalition than the one forged by the Lincoln-era Republican Party.
16 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 2–3, 12.
17 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 47–49. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country, 125–38.
18 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 22–23, 26. For some examples of this diversity in action, see the discussion of American industry’s growing internationalism and willingness to hire “nontraditional workers” in Jennifer A. Delton, The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 57–61, 89–92.
19 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 22, 394.
20 As evinced in later writings, Sklar came to view Populism as too romantic and too aggrieved, and thus unsuited for the task of advancing the country’s developmental capacities.
21 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 152–53, 434–39. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country 71–77, 216–17. The dyad of capitalist regulation (i.e., increasing corporate governance of markets) and regulated capitalism (i.e., the combined effects of different associations shaping markets and the deeper institutionalization of rule-making and rule-enforcement by the state) acclimated America’s individualist traditions to a more interdependent system of production, commerce, and rising consumption. As Sklar writes, the separation of the ownership and management functions, the increase in different corporate departments requiring technical expertise, the rise of benefits such as pensions, new opportunities for upward mobility, and the surge in consumer-cultural experiences for a growing middle-class further raised awareness of the system’s organizational complexity and the expectations and responsibilities suffused within it.
22 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 17, 29, 31, 34, 181.
23 Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country, 73–75, 215–17. Sklar stresses that the comparatively advanced stage of U.S. industry in the early twentieth century had reinforced an “anti-statist” consensus among capitalists, while labor, for its part, remained rooted in a tradition of republican self-government.
24 That being said, Sklar at various points suggests a number of participants in the movement for corporate liberalism were much more inclined toward social democratic compromise, and hence more government intervention on questions of consumer welfare and basic social protections, not least because maintaining unrestrained competition was impractical.
25 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 153. As summarized by Sklar: “In effect and at law, the restored common-law construction of the Sherman Act in the decisions of 1911 and thereafter meant that unreasonable, and hence illegal, restraints of trade (of which “monopolize” or “attempt to monopolize” remained a subtype or a necessary or intended consequence) became synonymous not with the restriction of competition by private parties, but (a) with unfair methods of competition designed to oppress or eliminate competitors, and (b) with the use of market power to dictate prices or norms of trade or distribution deemed unreasonable, as prejudicial to the public interest.” For a summary of the Supreme Court’s “substantial departure of traditional jurisprudence on restraints of trade and monopoly,” see Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 138. On the executive branch’s efforts to counteract this departure before Wilson’s presidency, see Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 172: “[F]rom 1897 to 1911, the principal maker of government policy on the trust question was neither Congress nor the Supreme Court (or the judiciary), but the executive. Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, and (to a lesser extent) Taft refused to accept the Court’s non-common-law construction of the Sherman Act as sound policy, and by controlling the prosecutorial process and, in Roosevelt’s case, by establishing a rival, executive, agency (the Bureau of Corporations), and entering extralegal understandings with corporate executives, they took determination of antitrust policy away from the judiciary and, in the face of Congress’s inability to act, lodged it with the executive.”
26 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 90, 146–47, 151–52, 167.
27 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 146–47, 149–50, 153–54.
28 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 77–78. On the one hand, all these developments would have a homogenizing effect. Once corporate liberalism marginalized both revolutionary socialism and utopian notions of unregulated competition, most societal conflict conformed to boundaries which generally affirmed the preeminent role that corporations had attained to shape economic life, even as the system granted the state greater power to regulate market behavior on behalf of popularly-determined public interests. On the other hand, pluralism would be retained and, in some ways, strengthened. Corporate liberalism’s technocratic aspects in both the corporate sphere and governmental one were mediated by the emerging order’s need to draw in and pacify different class, occupational, and regional segments of society (and, much later, minority‑ethnic/racial and sex-based concerns).
29 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 173–74, 183–84, 333–34, 420–21.
30 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 198–99.
31 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 199–203.
32 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 335–37.
33 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 203.
34 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 343–46.
35 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 356.
36 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 324–25.
37 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 374–76.
38 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 326.
39 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 327–28.
40 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 330.
41 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 346.
42 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 406.
43 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 436–38.
44 While Sklar only makes passing reference to sectionalism, a few inferences are worth contemplating given the residual strength of agrarian populism through the 1930s and the reality of one-party control in the South until the 1960s. Had it been implemented, Roosevelt’s 1912 vision would have very likely forced the state to confront the stark economic imbalance that had arisen between the North and the South. Quite plausibly, the least-industrialized parts of the United States under such executive authority might have developed much more rapidly than the way history turned out. Or, as Sklar’s analysis intimates, society as a whole might have suffered from the conflicts and entrepreneurial inertia hazarded by Roosevelt’s Bonapartist “state command” path.
45 Put another way, a corporatist state that preserved some aspects of the existing property system would have faced fundamental challenges over the future of American development comparable to those of a socialist movement that had seized the means of production and expropriated the corporate capitalists. In fact, the categorical imperative would have been essentially the same: a socialist government bent on modernization would have had to rapidly deepen and expand state capacities to not only equalize conditions within the country’s industrial core but achieve relative parity between the North and the South. In broad strokes, the actual implementation of Roosevelt’s regulatory agenda would have demanded a similar course and pace. Not least because of the coercive means that such a combined regulatory and developmental state would have likely entailed, it would have set up a collision between the government’s assumed mandate and Roosevelt’s putative intent to deepen democracy.
46 Skeptics of this scenario should remember that the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, the quasi-corporatist centerpiece of Franklin Roosevelt’s “first” New Deal, was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935; at the very least, the enactment of Theodore Roosevelt’s licensing scheme would have triggered a similar challenge.
47 During the 1912 campaign, Wilson stated that politics and the law had not kept up with “the facts” of changing economic conditions. Sklar wrote approvingly that “It was the part of wise statecraft, as Wilson held, to make the law the expression of the necessities and facts of the time; to institutionalize the ground rules of the corporate economy at home and the mechanisms of its expansion abroad, so that day-to-day business, the laws of commerce, and the government’s role with respect to them, might flow smoothly along settled paths, rather than by the fits and starts of fire brigade policy, ad hoc administrative decisions subject to change with elections and administrators, or executive fiat.” Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 400, 426.
48 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 412.
49 Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction, 407.
50 Between the 1910s and the early 1930s, this required an ongoing revision of the Democratic Party’s traditional views of bureaucracy and centralized authority. Rather than maintain a romantic anti-monopoly outlook that defied the plain realities and demands of modern industry, government’s primary task was to improve and build the mechanisms which channeled productive investment.
51 On the sectional nature of the federal income tax, see: Robin L. Einhorn, “Look Away Dixieland: The South and the Federal Income Tax,” Northwestern University Law Review 103, no. 3 (2014): 773–98; on the Populists’ influence on the Federal Reserve and their developmental aspirations, see: Anton Jäger and Noam Maggor, “A Popular History of the Fed,” Phenomenal World, October 1, 2020. Beginning with the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act, tariff reduction aimed to increase American exports while enhancing the South’s share of domestic textile production and other basic industries.
52 This gradual, more “organic” pace exemplified one aspect of corporate liberalism’s accommodation of smaller enterprise and local organization. Whereas Roosevelt’s statism was narrowly focused on ensuring large corporations served social ends, and yet potentially tasked the federal government with vast obligations to deliver “distributive justice” in all its forms (including the rapid development of the periphery), corporate liberalism granted regional markets, business and civic associations, and streams of new consumers wider latitude to establish their role in, and influence upon, the structure of the national economy. Its comparatively restrained approach to regulation translated into a more incremental mode of development when compared to what was possible in Roosevelt’s formula, but “the little guy” remained a more consequential actor.
53 Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Brent Cebul, Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928,” Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (June 1974): 116–40.
54 Corporate liberalism’s relative plasticity, meanwhile, kept it from becoming synonymous with either industrial policy or Keynesian fiscal policy, even as it incorporated and deployed both, depending on the pressures exerted by each party’s dominant coalition partners and foreign policy objectives.
55 See, for example: Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Richard R. John and Kim Phillips-Fein, eds., Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); William J. Novak, The Creation of the Modern American State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022); Charles Postel, Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
56 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 144. Martin J. Sklar, “Thoughts on Capitalism and Socialism: Utopian and Realistic,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2, no. 4 (October 2003): 361–76.
57 For one fairly prominent exception aimed at a general readership, see Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).
58 The obsolescence of the Cold War paradigm, with its rigid binaries, helped to clarify the universal problems encompassing all states and societies. Because nearly all affirmed the principle of development, Sklar wrote, “we have come to understand that all countries of the world are in some ways ‘less developed’: That is . . . less developed than each may want to be, may be [i.e., less than formal growth metrics indicate], or will come to be. . . . We are all LDCs.” The dawn of a new era of globalization, its possibilities for unprecedented abundance and shared human knowledge, but also significant disruption and conflict, had to be met with relative equanimity. Stagnation brought on by the grip of state control was the greater threat: “To a prodevelopment outlook,” Sklar wrote, “the absence of crises is an alarm bell signaling that something is amiss.” Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country, 209–13.
59 Martin J. Sklar, “Capitalism and Socialism in the Emergence of Modern America: 1890–1916,” in Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society, eds. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn (New York: Routledge, 1999), 309–11.
60 This view more or less derived from Sklar’s earlier Marxian theory of the “disaccumulation of capital” that he introduced in the late 1960s. Similar to Keynes, his epiphany, in layman’s terms, was this: the employment challenges of advanced capitalism that were first previewed in the mid-1920s opened the horizon to a postindustrial future in which technological advances freed men and women from labor devoted to the routine elements of modern social reproduction. In a complete stage of disaccumulation—one unimpeded by the creation of new profitable services, new speculative bubbles, and other, more disruptive avenues for rent-seeking—society’s activities would more greatly comprise the free movement of all individuals to realize and pursue their talents. Socially necessary work would not vanish, but material conditions would be such that work could at last be severed from pecuniary needs. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country, 156–58.
61 Sklar succumbed to a tendency to conflate “socialization,” i.e., the underlying market interdependence of rising consumption of advanced goods and services, whether publicly or privately administered, with “socialism,” i.e., what most people would call state or public ownership, or “decommodified” provision. See also: Richard Schneirov, “Martin Sklar’s Beautiful American (Post)Imperialism,” Telos 186 (Spring 2019): 159–74.
62 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 162, 165, 167.
63 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 6, 112. With the United States poised to overtake Britain, the former had acquired the state capacity and commercial authority to interlink the transatlantic world with East Asia in a manner that “extend[ed] and secur[ed] a due share of developmental opportunities” to all that joined the corporate-liberal “open system.”
64 Sklar, Creating the American Century, xv, 163–65, 191, 201; Martin J. Sklar, Letters on Obama (Old Man River Press, 2012), 39, 175.
65 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 143–44.
66 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 163.
67 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 143–44.
68 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 147.
69 Sklar, Letters on Obama, 183, 185; see also, Martin J. Sklar, “Islamic Imperialism,” Telos, May 25, 2016.
70 Sklar, Letters on Obama, 32–37.
71 Sklar, Creating the American Century, xv.
72 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 205–9.
73 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 114.
74 In a sense, Sklar was partially right: notwithstanding America’s darkest chapters and most violent betrayals of its ideals, American power and influence has broadly correlated with an explosion of consumption and an increase in non-hierarchical social relations in many parts of the world. The revolution in development, though stunted and stalled in far too many regions, is hard to imagine in a timeline in which America became isolationist, abandoned the “Open Door” to China and Asia, and left the fate of the transatlantic economic order to its mid-twentieth century rivals.
75 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 121, 143–44, 191, 200–2.
76 Beneath its animating dualities of Left versus Right and markets versus socialism, Sklar theorized, the Cold War had been a conflict between a democratic-associational Left and a closed-system Left. The former, Sklar believed, was able to overcome and avert problems that the latter could not due to civil society principles which encouraged diverse and competing interests to negotiate and cooperate. The Stalinist “state-command” and Third Worldist variants, by contrast, were doomed to degenerate into technological laggards and “right-wing socialism.” Sklar, Creating the American Century, 143–45; See also: Sklar, “Thoughts on Capitalism and Socialism,” 375.
77 See, for example: John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, “The Democrats and the Rise of Racial Radicalism,” Liberal Patriot, March 14, 2024; Adolph Reed Jr., “‘Let Me Go Get My Big White Man’: The Clientelist Foundation of Contemporary Antiracist Politics,” Nonsite.org, May 11, 2022.
78 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 195–99.
79 Similar to how both the nationalist-developmentalist elites in Lincoln’s Republican Party and New Deal liberals set the United States on a course to globalize development, it is feasible that the processes of within-nation and cross-border “regionalization” spearheaded by the Biden administration will mark a period of adjustment that may ultimately raise developmental outcomes in middle-income countries and neglected parts of the Global South.
80 Inu Manak, “The Curse of Nostalgia: Industrial Policy in the United States,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 22, 2024; Branko Milanovic, “Let’s Go Back to Mercantilism and Trade Blocs!,” Global Inequality and More 3.0, October 18, 2022; Adam Posen, “America’s Zero-Sum Economics Don’t Add Up,” Foreign Policy, March 24, 2023; Adam Tooze, “America’s Economic Security Doctrine Has Taken On a Darker Hue,” Financial Times, March 5, 2024.
81 In activist circles, this has been commonly referred to as the nonprofit industrial complex. See, for example: Claire Dunning, “The Origins of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex,” Law and Political Economy Project, May 29, 2023; Benjamin Y. Fong and Melissa Naschek, “NGO-ism: The Politics of the Third Sector,” Catalyst 5, no. 1, Spring 2021.
82 Sklar, Creating the American Century, 209.
