/Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the
Slaveholding Republic/
Ariel Ron
Johns Hopkins University Press, $59.95 (cloth)
<https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/grassroots-leviathan>
In an influential 1943essay
<https://jacobinmag.com/2018/05/political-aspects-of-full-employment-kalecki-job-guarantee>,
Polish economist Michał Kalecki staged a contest between capitalism’s
pursuit of profit and its pursuit of power. While the benefits of
government-sponsored full employment would benefit capitalists
economically, Kalecki argued, it would also fundamentally threaten their
social position—and the latter mattered more. If wide sections of the
country came to believe that the government could replace the private
sector as a source of investment and even hiring, capitalists would have
to relinquish their role as the ultimate guardians of national economic
health, and along with it their immense power over workers. Kalecki thus
saw how the desire to maintain political dominance could override purely
economic considerations.
This analysis finds a striking illustration in historian Ariel Ron’s
award-winning new book/Grassroots Leviathan/, which advances a major
reinterpretation of the contours of U.S. political economy and the
origins of the U.S. developmental state—the government institutions that
have played an active role in shaping economic and technological growth.
In Ron’s revisionist account, the groundwork for the rapid economic
development in the second half of the nineteenth century was less
industrial and elite than agricultural and popular. “Despite the abiding
myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian
South,” he writes, “the truth is that agriculture continued to dominate
the economic, social, and cultural lives of the majority of Americans
well into the late nineteenth century.” This central fact—at odds with
familiar portraits of a dwindling rural population in the face of
sweeping urban industrialization—carried with it shifting attitudes
toward the state and the economy, dramatically altering the course of
U.S. politics. Far from intrinsically opposed to government, a
consequential strain of agrarianism welcomed state intervention and
helped developed new ideas about the common good.
http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/chris-hong-robert-manduca-nic-johnson-common-interest
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