Description
Book SynopsisIn Transcending Capitalism, Howard Brick explains why many influential midcentury American social theorists came to believe it was no longer meaningful to describe modern Western society as capitalist, but instead preferred alternative terms such as postcapitalist, postindustrial, or technological. Considering the discussion today of capitalism and its global triumph, it is important to understand why a prior generation of social theorists imagined the future of advanced societies not in a fixed capitalist form but in some course of development leading beyond capitalism.
Brick locates this postcapitalist vision within a long history of social theory and ideology. He challenges the common view that American thought and culture utterly succumbed in the 1940s to a conservative cold war consensus that put aside the reform ideology and social theory of the early twentieth century. Rather, expectations of the shift to a new social economy persisted and cannot be disregarded a
Trade Review
Brick asks thinkers from Marx to Radcliffe-Brown to Reisman to Talcott Parsons a single question: What can you tell us about what a postcapitalist society might be like as such a society appears to be emerging? An impressive scholarly effort. Highly recommended.
* Choice *
Howard Brick's Transcending Capitalism is a bold and penetrating analysis of modern social thought in the twentieth-century United States.
* Journal of American History *
Where most historians of the social sciences study the social sciences one at a time, Brick... links intellectual movements within sociology to those in cultural anthropology, political science, social psychology, and particularly economics.... Transcending Capitalism is a rich and imaginative historical argument, one from which sociologists will learn much about a major intellectual current in the development of their field.
* American Journal of Sociology *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. To Name a New Society in the Making1. Capitalism and Its Future on the Eve of World War I2. The American Theory of Organized Capitalism3. The Interwar Critique of Competitive Individualism4. Talcott Parsons and the Evanescence of Capitalism5. The Displacement of Economy in an Age of Plenty6. The Heyday of Dynamic Sociology7. The Great ReversalConclusion. On Transitional Developments beyond CapitalismNotes
Index
