3 - Corporate Liberals
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
Summary
Just as moderate Republicans sought to modernize their party, there were those in big business who sought to modernize corporate practices and attitudes. At the time they were known as “enlightened businessmen.” Historians have since called them “corporate liberals.” Developed in the 1960s, the theory of corporate liberalism says, essentially, that corporate leaders supported the expansion of state power in order to rationalize the economy in ways that facilitated corporate growth. Whereas earlier theories attributed reform to progressive efforts to curb big business, this theory said that reform was the result of corporate efforts to manage big business. From this revisionist perspective, enlightened businessmen, or corporate liberals, were actually conservatives, who embraced reforms to stabilize the economic order and co-opt a nascent radicalism.
The problem with the revisionist perspective is that it ignores how not conservative corporate liberals were. Not only did they believe that government regulation could have a stabilizing effect on the economy, but they also shared with liberals the belief that society was made up of interdependent groups and that the key to managing society, and their own corporations, lay in integrating or harmonizing the various groups into an efficient whole. Yes, they were concerned about radicals but, like liberals, they saw progressive reform as the best way to circumvent revolution. They sought to make capitalism work for the masses. They wanted corporations to be good citizens; to treat their employees humanely; to respect the communities in which they put their factories; and to sell safe, affordable, quality products. Such practices were good in themselves but they were also good for the corporate image and hence good for business. Like liberals, they believed in free trade, international cooperation, and economic opportunity for all regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. Like liberals, they disdained ideology and approached economic and social problems pragmatically.
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- Information
- Rethinking the 1950sHow Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal, pp. 56 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013