Capitalism and Individualism in America

Capitalism and Individualism in America PDF Author: Gavin Benke
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000811867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
This book provides a concise and accessible history of the relationship between the individual and capitalism in the United States. The text is devoted to tracking the historical development of important themes, whilst addressing key episodes in the progress of American capitalism within these, such as the Great Depression and New Deal. The book will introduce students to the key philosophical principles that have been the most influential in the history of free enterprise in the United States as well as exploring the ways in which these ideas have been popularly understood by Americans from the late eighteenth century to the present. Liberalism and Neoliberalism, entrepreneurialism, slavery and racial capitalism, and business and gender are all assessed. The material in this volume is complimented by a set of primary source documents that bring the subject to life. It will be of interest to students of American history, business and labor history.

Capitalism and Individualism in America

Capitalism and Individualism in America PDF Author: Gavin Benke
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000811867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a concise and accessible history of the relationship between the individual and capitalism in the United States. The text is devoted to tracking the historical development of important themes, whilst addressing key episodes in the progress of American capitalism within these, such as the Great Depression and New Deal. The book will introduce students to the key philosophical principles that have been the most influential in the history of free enterprise in the United States as well as exploring the ways in which these ideas have been popularly understood by Americans from the late eighteenth century to the present. Liberalism and Neoliberalism, entrepreneurialism, slavery and racial capitalism, and business and gender are all assessed. The material in this volume is complimented by a set of primary source documents that bring the subject to life. It will be of interest to students of American history, business and labor history.

Possessive Individualism

Possessive Individualism PDF Author: Daniel W. Bromley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190062843
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Anxiety and alienation threaten modern democracies. Political anger runs rampant in the United States, Britain voted to leave the European Union, authoritarian governments control several European countries, and millions of desperate migrants are streaming north out of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Many people blame stagnant household incomes and economic inequality. However, Possessive Individualism argues that the origins of world disorder are in the failure of the Enlightenment to anticipate the acquisitive individual as a creature of global capitalism. Daniel Bromley provides a fundamental critique of contemporary capitalism to explain why the world now finds itself in widespread disorder. Capitalism's basic flaw, he argues, is "possessive individualism." Glorification of the rational individual motivated by acquisitiveness prevents the adoption of necessary government programs that would ease the economic burden on beleaguered households. Meanwhile, possessive individualism enables managerial capitalism-controlled by the "one percent"-to suppress wages and salaries, embrace automation, and move jobs overseas. Capitalism is no longer an engine of improved livelihoods and social hope. Drawing on evolutionary institutional economics and political theory this book offers two remedies to the crisis of modern capitalism. Escape from the crisis requires that the isolated acquisitive individual rediscovers a sense of loyalty to others-as neighbors, as colleagues, and as participants in the shared social process of living. Escape also requires that the private firm be reimagined as a public trust in which the economic well-being of employees becomes a central part of its purpose. In the absence of these dual transformations, capitalism as we know it cannot endure.

American Individualism

American Individualism PDF Author: Herbert Hoover
Publisher: Garden City, Doubleday
ISBN:
Category : Individualism
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
In this book, Hoover expounds and vigorously defends what has come to be called American exceptionalism: the set of beliefs and values that still makes America unique. He argues that America can make steady, sure progress if we preserve our individualism, preserve and stimulate the initiative of our people, insist on and maintain the safeguards to equality of opportunity, and honor service as a part of our national character.

Making Americans

Making Americans PDF Author: Quentin Anderson
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
What links the hopes of Communist fellow travelers in the 1930s to the work of Emerson a century earlier? Why do we give so much attention to celebrities? And why have we virtually erased the distinction between public and private affairs? Quentin Anderson shows that American individualism goes deeper than we admit. Only in America did writers and thinkers make the claim that a life worth living must subordinate family ties and social obligations to the visionary powers of the self. Drawing on the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, John Dewey, and Henry James - all of whom reacted strongly to the infiltration of money in the national imagination - Anderson finds that in denying the ties and obligations of an existing society each ended up by creating what he calls a "visionary capitalism". Such wholesale appropriations of the American scene, whether in art or systematic thought, discount history and individual action within society. He finds this tendency to grasp the world as an individual imaginative possession in both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and persistent in the claim to an impersonal authority in contemporary literary criticism. Anderson concludes: "We shall not crack the money firmament or attain to the freedom we want until we see that such liberty comes from the quality of our relations with other people and in no other way".

Capitalism in America

Capitalism in America PDF Author: Alan Greenspan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735222452
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
From the legendary former Fed Chairman and the acclaimed Economist writer and historian, the full, epic story of America's evolution from a small patchwork of threadbare colonies to the most powerful engine of wealth and innovation the world has ever seen. Shortlisted for the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award From even the start of his fabled career, Alan Greenspan was duly famous for his deep understanding of even the most arcane corners of the American economy, and his restless curiosity to know even more. To the extent possible, he has made a science of understanding how the US economy works almost as a living organism--how it grows and changes, surges and stalls. He has made a particular study of the question of productivity growth, at the heart of which is the riddle of innovation. Where does innovation come from, and how does it spread through a society? And why do some eras see the fruits of innovation spread more democratically, and others, including our own, see the opposite? In Capitalism in America, Greenspan distills a lifetime of grappling with these questions into a thrilling and profound master reckoning with the decisive drivers of the US economy over the course of its history. In partnership with the celebrated Economist journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge, he unfolds a tale involving vast landscapes, titanic figures, triumphant breakthroughs, enlightenment ideals as well as terrible moral failings. Every crucial debate is here--from the role of slavery in the antebellum Southern economy to the real impact of FDR's New Deal to America's violent mood swings in its openness to global trade and its impact. But to read Capitalism in America is above all to be stirred deeply by the extraordinary productive energies unleashed by millions of ordinary Americans that have driven this country to unprecedented heights of power and prosperity. At heart, the authors argue, America's genius has been its unique tolerance for the effects of creative destruction, the ceaseless churn of the old giving way to the new, driven by new people and new ideas. Often messy and painful, creative destruction has also lifted almost all Americans to standards of living unimaginable to even the wealthiest citizens of the world a few generations past. A sense of justice and human decency demands that those who bear the brunt of the pain of change be protected, but America has always accepted more pain for more gain, and its vaunted rise cannot otherwise be understood, or its challenges faced, without recognizing this legacy. For now, in our time, productivity growth has stalled again, stirring up the populist furies. There's no better moment to apply the lessons of history to the most pressing question we face, that of whether the United States will preserve its preeminence, or see its leadership pass to other, inevitably less democratic powers.

Capitalism Unbound

Capitalism Unbound PDF Author: Andrew Bernstein
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761849696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
This book is a concise explanation of capitalism's moral and economic superiority to socialism, including America's current mixed-economy welfare state. This volume offers a focused, essentialized, and condensed argument ideal for the layman who admires capitalism but lacking a succinct, accessible explanation of its moral and economic virtues.

The Self-Made Man: Myth and Reality of an American Phenomenon

The Self-Made Man: Myth and Reality of an American Phenomenon PDF Author: Kira Kogan
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656476039
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 31

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Book Description
Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Auslandswissenschaft), course: Hauptseminar: “Who are the Americans? Politics, Business and Culture from New York to California”, language: English, abstract: In the first part of this essay I will contemplate the historical development of the concept of American individualism through the centuries, which created a contextual background for the establishment of a self-made man idea in the minds of Americans. In addition there will be given the biographical examples of self-made men that became a pattern for all the successors in American history. Furthermore I would like to make an overview of the various aspects of self-made man philosophy, which includes the discussion of its positive and negative sides and its influences on personality and society in general. Finally I will debate the ways of realisation of the self-made man idea nowadays and weigh the existing perspectives in the individualistic and contradictory world of now.

Americana

Americana PDF Author: Bhu Srinivasan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399563814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
An absorbing and original narrative history of American capitalism NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE ECONOMIST From the days of the Mayflower and the Virginia Company, America has been a place for people to dream, invent, build, tinker, and bet the farm in pursuit of a better life. Americana takes us on a four-hundred-year journey of this spirit of innovation and ambition through a series of Next Big Things -- the inventions, techniques, and industries that drove American history forward: from the telegraph, the railroad, guns, radio, and banking to flight, suburbia, and sneakers, culminating with the Internet and mobile technology at the turn of the twenty-first century. The result is a thrilling alternative history of modern America that reframes events, trends, and people we thought we knew through the prism of the value that, for better or for worse, this nation holds dearest: capitalism. In a winning, accessible style, Bhu Srinivasan boldly takes on four centuries of American enterprise, revealing the unexpected connections that link them. We learn how Andrew Carnegie's early job as a telegraph messenger boy paved the way for his leadership of the steel empire that would make him one of the nation's richest men; how the gunmaker Remington reinvented itself in the postwar years to sell typewriters; how the inner workings of the Mafia mirrored the trend of consolidation and regulation in more traditional business; and how a 1950s infrastructure bill triggered a series of events that produced one of America's most enduring brands: KFC. Reliving the heady early days of Silicon Valley, we are reminded that the start-up is an idea as old as America itself. Entertaining, eye-opening, and sweeping in its reach, Americana is an exhilarating new work of narrative history.

Nineteenth-Century Individualism and the Market Economy

Nineteenth-Century Individualism and the Market Economy PDF Author: Luke Philip Plotica
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319621726
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book studies nineteenth-century American individualism and its relationship to the simultaneous rise of the market economy as articulated in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William Graham Sumner. The argument of the book is that these thinkers offer distinct visions of individualism that reflect their respective understandings of the market, and provide thoughtful and insightful perspectives upon the promise and peril of this economic and social order. Looking back to Emerson, Thoreau, and Sumner furnishes valuable insights about the history of American political and social thought, as well as about the complexity of one of the most basic and prevalent relationships of modern life: that between the individual and the institutional complex of the market.

The Happiness Fantasy

The Happiness Fantasy PDF Author: Carl Cederström
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509523847
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In this devastatingly witty new book, Carl Cederström traces our present-day conception of happiness from its roots in early-twentieth-century European psychiatry, to the Beat generation, to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. He argues that happiness is now defined by a desire to be "authentic", to experience physical pleasure, and to cultivate a quirky individuality. But over the last fifty years, these once-revolutionary ideas have been co-opted by corporations and advertisers, pushing us to live lives that are increasingly unfulfilling, insecure and narcissistic. In an age of increasing austerity and social division, Cederström argues that a radical new dream of happiness is gathering pace. There is a vision of the good life which promotes deeper engagement with the world and our place within it, over the individualism and hedonism of previous generations. Guided by this more egalitarian worldview, we can reinvent ourselves and our societies.