Transcending Capitalism

Understanding why a generation of social theorists imagined the future of advanced societies would not be defined by capitalism but rather as being postcapitalist or postindustrial.

Howard Brick is Professor of History and Louis Evans Chair in U.S. History at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is the author of Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s, also from Cornell, and Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s.

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.

Howard Brick's Transcending Capitalism is a bold and penetrating analysis of modern social thought in the twentieth-century United States.

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.

James Livingston, Rutgers University:

In this brilliant book of astonishing range and depth—Henri Pirenne, R. H. Tawney, and Fernand Braudel here rub shoulders with Talcott Parsons, Karen Horney, Margaret Mead, Peter Drucker, David Riesman, Daniel Bell, and Martin Sklar—Howard Brick demonstrates that the intellectual specification of a postcapitalist society is the secret history of the twentieth century. Marx makes his appearance, to be sure, but Brick shows that a wide variety of writers without any Marxist affiliations or pretensions were able to measure, embrace, and even institutionalize the socialist possibilities residing in and flowing from postindustrial capitalism. In doing so, he both gives us pause and gives us hope-he makes us rethink American social thought, but he also equips us with a usable past. For anyone with an interest in the intellectual history of the twentieth century, or in the future of the planet, this is required reading.

Robert Westbrook, University of Rochester:

In Transcending Capitalism, Howard Brick has given us a fertile rethinking of twentieth-century American social thought, one that reveals the continuities that have bound a host of social liberals in a single tradition of postcapitalist speculation that bridges many conventional lines of division. This is a lucid and imaginative book that should have a profound effect on the way we think about recent American intellectual history. One may hope that it will, as well, alert contemporary liberals to an underappreciated, if often imperfect, theoretical inheritance that they might exploit as they struggle to regain their bearings.

Fred Block, University of California, Davis:

Howard Brick's analysis of the social liberal current in twentieth-century American thought is intellectual history at its very best, and, indeed, Transcending Capitalism is itself an important work of social theory. Brick repeatedly connects the dots among thinkers and movements in ways that force us to rethink our own mappings of the past.

Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara:

Howard Brick has written an extraordinary work of scholarship that will become a standard among historians of twentieth-century America. Transcending Capitalism is sweeping, important, and authoritative. Brick's opus integrates and synthesizes a consequential body of work by a large number of U.S. and European intellectuals in a fashion mastered by just a few scholars in our time.

Dorothy Ross, The Johns Hopkins University:

Transcending Capitalism is an important analysis of a major dimension of twentieth-century social thought: the expectation and hope that modern capitalism was in the process of transformation to a more socialized form of economic system. Howard Brick displays a remarkable ability to deal in clear language with complex, sophisticated topics. This book has analytical rigor and critical bite.