Capitalism and the Moral Order
MANN, ARTHUR
Capitalism and the Moral Order New Frontiers for Freedom. By Erwin D. Canham. Longmans, Green. 116 pp. $2.00. Reviewed by Arthur Mann Assistant Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of...
...One wonders just what this term means in an America whose many governments all touch on economic life...
...The U.S...
...Attack has produced counterattack, and here the thread binds William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie and Herbert Hoover...
...Canham's meliorism is militant...
...Canham's primary purpose is to make a synthesis of what America stands for, so that all Americans may know their identity in their most perilous days...
...Aware of the facts of modern, industrial America, Canham nevertheless talks of "free enterprise" as if it were a constant in American life...
...We must now add Erwin D. Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor...
...This sensitivity and sophistication leave one unprepared for his equating of "free enterprise" with democracy...
...He is not a spokesman for Big Business, and labor does not claim him as one of its own...
...Further, he brings to his task a sprightly journalistic style which makes clear to the layman the meaning of the works of such scholars as Slichter and Bowen, Drucker and Galbraith...
...Because he recognizes that America was built on experience, and not from blueprint, he wisely advises against forcing America's unique institutions on other peoples...
...When these essays first appeared in the Monitor, Professors Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...The record is otherwise, however...
...Mercantilist practices and ideology were so common to state governments that free incorporation did not arrive until the 1840s...
...The qualifications do not qualify: civic theology is offered as history...
...But the author is neither priest nor follower of the natural theology of a Herbert Spencer or an Adam Smith...
...and Seymour Harris asked the author to consider more fully the role of Government in the economy...
...America is the best society, but it must get better...
...Canham also knows that our mixed economy is too complex to be neatly boxed, and he is clear on the relationship of voluntary organizations to the emergence of welfare capitalism...
...The businessman, moreover, is genuinely concerned with looking after his brother, the worker, as evidenced in pension plans, collective bargaining, and profit-sharing...
...industrial plant, he observes, has provided a high standard of living which gives meaning to the Christian belief that man lives above the beast...
...As Carnegie and Hoover felt compelled to argue the American system against collectivism, so Mr...
...Mr...
...In that decade, Mr...
...Lord Bryce understood the peculiar American schizoid when he wrote: "Though Americans conceive themselves to be devoted to laissezfaire in theory, and to be in practice the most self-reliant of peoples, they have grown accustomed to carry the state into ever-widening fields...
...Canham's own Massachusetts went into the business of education in a really big way on the theory that the state could tax A for the education of B's children...
...He is rather a sophisticated observer of the American scene who appreciates the significance of the proliferation of voluntary organizations in our culture...
...The "trustee" has replaced the robber baron...
...The geometer teaches, and the historian observes, that parallel lines do not alway meet...
...now John L. Lewis sits down with the operators in conference...
...Strong government continued through and after the Civil War, and, by the election of 1912, the only question was: "Which party can best regulate business...
...Canham feels it necessary to rebut Marxism...
...But the synthesis partakes of the pious...
...He represents a community, an entire community, and an incredibly heterogeneous community at that...
...Canham from Carnegie-apologetics and Hoover-dogmatism is humaneness combined with flexibility...
...Reviewed by Arthur Mann Assistant Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The ethos and masters of American capitalism have been under such constant attack since the 1880s that it is possible to view the fabric of modern American history by following the thread that connects Henry George to Woodrow Wilson to Thurman Arnold to Harry Truman...
...In the 1790s, the Secretary of the Treasury made a fledgling, near-welshing government solvent precisely because he was an exponent of Big Government...
...One of the purposes of New Frontiers for Freedom is to demonstrate that American capitalism is freedom's answer to the regulated economy...
...What saves Mr...
...Once a bloody strike like Homestead shocked a nation and paralyzed an industry...
...He failed to do so, or at least to do so adequately...
...He is what intellectuals since the 1880s have not always been: on no one's side...
...Every schoolboy knows about the role of Government in the Depression...
...This failure is perhaps explainable: Mr...
...Canham, like others today, believes that America, and indeed all Western civilization, has a monolithic tradition in this instance, an economy relatively untouched by Government...
...Canham is a liberal Christian who believes that capitalism services the moral order...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 24
