The Rise of Planning in Industrial America, 1865-1914

This book is about the rise of the great, centrally planned American manufacturing enterprises, Standard Oil, United States Steel and a hundred others like them, in the half-century after the Civil War. These were the economic giants that first demonstrated the collective power of men organized for production instead of combat and then turned that power to war with devastating results. This gave birth to the modern economy of mass production, corporate organization and managed prosperity, and that inspired the intellectuals and reformers who brought the ideal of scientifically informed central planning to government after World War I. This book combines theory and history to describe their rapid ascent after 1865 and the American people "s reluctant coming to terms with them by 1914 as the leading edge of a larger transformation of American economic and political life and thought in the twentieth century. At the heart of this profound reorientation from spontaneous order to central planning, from small to large, and from individual to collective, lay the modern industrial corporation, one of the earliest and still the most durable and influential exemplar of large-scale, centrally planned social order based entirely on consent. Drawing on and integrating recent scholarship in economics, law, philosophy and history, this book offers a novel and illuminating perspective on both firms themselves and a crucial period in American history.