A PROFESSIONAL TURN

 

The last two postings review Daniel Elazar’s continuum of views Americans harbor over the relationship between individual citizens and their government.  To date, this blog has identified and described individualism and collectivism.  The third view – one that is encouraged by collectivism – is corporatism, the topic of this posting.

          Elazar defines corporatism as

 

… the organization of civil society through corporate structures which are able to efficiently focus considerable power and energy on the achievement of specific goals and which have a tendency to combine with one another to control common fields of endeavor, primarily economic but potentially political as well.[1]

 

 While such entities can be broad based, they are usually established to achieve specific sets of aims and goals.  They tend to have specific structural arrangements with leadership under a manager and his/her supportive administrative staff.  They function, in turn, for owners or shareholders, but practically are given a great deal of authority to perform the day-to-day practices that constitute how the entity goes about its business.

          These entities, as corporations, are in law considered as reified persons which in turn limits any legal exposure their owners might face; they, in turn, vote-in an entity’s managers, share the profits the entity is able to earn, and usually have a relatively easy ability to gain or shed their portion of ownership.  Under this structural arrangement a form of collectivism is provided as an option to achieve various social aims and/or goals.  One encounters this option in business endeavors within a national and even international economic landscape.

          Again, as with individualism and collectivism, one can find examples of this view among the early efforts to colonize America.  The fact is that the early voyages of settlers were sponsored by trading companies.  These companies were corporate entities in England and Holland.  While their involvement was limited – due to the inability to earn sufficient profits – to the first generation of settlers they did have a lasting effect on how collective efforts should be pursued. 

One finds similar approach in other settlement projects as Americans stretched their expansion westward across the American frontier.  This mechanism in settlements was associated with the trans-Appalachian West effort and the trans-Mississippi West effort.  Beyond that, one can cite the efforts of the railroad corporations.  Today, business development cannot be considered without expecting corporate entities doing the groundwork to develop new technologies including those of industry, technology, and even urban development.

Despite these broad areas of influence, corporatism did meet its limits.  Never, up to the twentieth century, was it seen as the model to be utilized in establishing and maintaining polities at the local, state, or national levels.  That is to say, a clear distinction existed and was maintained as to what business and public governance are and were distinct areas of collective efforts should exist.

This distinction, though, did not prohibit social reformers from adopting corporate models in their proposed reforms of perceived exploitive realities that various groups experienced – such as with labor and their working and living conditions.  This became common during the Progressive period and the proposed changes they advocated.  They particularly sought changes in municipal governmental structures and introduced such changes as instituting city manager positions.  This proved to be a turning point.

The coming of what Elazar calls the “metropolitan-technological frontier” coincided with the years after World War II when one sees a shared vision between well-run businesses and the ability to modernize governmental practices and structural arrangements.  The result has been a marriage of sorts between these conceptions, collectivism and corporatism, at the expense of individualism, though it is this writer’s opinion that this marriage offered individualism a source of felt independence.

That is, under resulting governmental bureaucracies, the individual is a lost entity basically free to act as he/she feels is rewarding under the relative anonymity vast bureaucracies allow and even encourage.  One often cited example in this blog is the loss of the neighborhood cop who would walk his beat (male dominated at that time) and be known by and know the set of common people he was assigned to protect.  This is not to minimize the problems such an arrangement encouraged – for example, old-fashioned political machines and their bosses.

Elazar identifies, and this writer agrees, the key adopted concern by those who deal with the structures of polities was/is efficiency.  This demonstrated the direct influence business corporations had on governance.  That influence bore down on treating governmental concerns, many of them being very human and evading clear definitional parameters, to business thinking.

That oftentimes reduces concerns to measurable variables resembling scientific analysis.  While this approach usually works in the profit/loss world of business, it has been found lacking in the world of governance.  Elazar concludes:  “Thus political life has also been pushed in the direction of corporatist ideas with little questioning as to whether the basic assumptions of corporatism are applicable or appropriate in a democratic political arena.”[2]

This blog has argued that since World War II, the natural rights construct has become dominant in its influence over Americans’ view of governance and politics.  Just above, what Elazar reports can be viewed as evidence to this claim with the proviso that this writer indicates; i.e., individualism, while limited by corporatism, in reality has provided the landscape that allowed it to become ever more virulent as what individuals do can lie below the surface of being acknowledged.  This, in turn, leads to the environment where problems can incubate and grow.[3]

What remains for this blog to describe is Elazar’s fourth concept; that being federalism.  That will be the topic of the next posting.

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[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “How federal is the Constitution? Thoroughly.”  In a booklet of readings, Readings for classes taught by Professor Elazar (1994, 1-30) prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute. Conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 13.

[2] Ibid., 15.

[3] See Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki, Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2013, accessed 7/8/2020, https://safetydifferently.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SDDriftPaper.pdf , 1-11.  This article reviews the proliferation of incubating problems, why they exist, and why they intensify over time.

WARMING UP TO COLLECTIVISM

 

The last posting introduced Daniel Elazar’s continuum of ideas about how Americans view the relationship between individual citizens and government.[1]  The first of these concepts is individualism, and that posting describes how Elazar sees that relationship.  In order, the concepts beyond individualism are collectivism, corporatism, and federalism; this posting looks at collectivism. 

It can be viewed as a reaction to more extreme individualism in which that self-centered view, history has demonstrated, leads in sufficient cases to social irresponsibility especially on the part of the rich.  That tendency has proved to be an influential factor since it has encouraged the electorate to support policies that have sought solutions to those actual or perceived abuses.  But this development jumps to more recent years and ignores earlier versions of collectivism.

          As pointed out in the last posting, this view can be traced all the way back to the colonial origins of the country.  Upon close inspection, one can detect collectivist models of colonization in such efforts as establishing Jamestown and Plymouth.  That is, those colonies began as the efforts of collectives – joint ownership arrangements – of the colonies’ assets.  In both cases, these collective efforts were abandoned, and they fell back to individual enterprises in which individuals owned the various assets within those colonies.

          But this did not kill off this concept.  It has, during the years, resurfaced from time to time.  First in other colonial efforts, but more memorable were the utopian efforts in the nineteenth century.  In those cases, they seem to be reactive attempts to resolve various private or individual exploitive conditions that groups organized to address.

These examples had limited effects on the economy or the social makeup of Americans since the bulk of these experimental efforts was isolated communities that eventually dissolved or transformed into more common arrangements.  Their ultimate failure was due mostly to their inability to ensure its members – in sufficient numbers – to meet their responsibilities in providing needed services or goods.  So, until the 1930s, collectivism, as a coherent mode of organizing, had little influence on the social/economic conditions of American society.

But then there was the Great Depression.  With historic levels of unemployment and loss profits, the nation was primed to seek public policy to meet the emergency.  In response, the federal government, under the stewardship of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, introduced large doses of collectivist policies which are summarily known as the New Deal. 

Those policies can be characterized as being aimed at relief (providing needed essentials to unemployed workers), recovery (increasing gross demand), and reform (changing systemic arrangements within the economy, e.g., the establishment of Social Security).  A lot of these policies were experimental in nature and some survived their initial enactments, some did not.  Consequently, to this date, the nation has collectivist policies in effect.

But this initiation in collectivism, as an idea, did not begin with the New Deal, there was actually a vibrant social advocacy for such policies stemming back to the years after the Civil War.  Mostly through a strain of Progressivism – and some Progressive experimentation through the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt, Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson – a good deal of theorizing preceded what would later find expression in the New Deal.  Different schools of progressive thought emanated from that time period.

One school that had a particular influence on the Theodore Roosevelt administration under the advisement of such thinkers as Herbert Croly, milder forms of collectivism did make their way to actual policies.  The general aim of the progressives under TR’s leadership was to avoid giving up industrialization while taking into account the interests of the working class. 

A book of that time that had a bit of collectivist input was the novel, Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy which promoted a fairly collectivist view of an ideal society with a military style social/economic arrangement.  While being a best seller of that time – and still read for its historical value – it had little effect on actual policy.

While the Progressive policies and those they suggested did influence the New Deal policy makers, their overall immediate effect was limited in terms of their collectivist attributes or in terms of their duration.  The nation, during the 1920s, entered a highly laissez faire – i.e., individualistic – period under the administrations of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.  But before leaving the TR-to-Wilson period, Elazar judges that Croly’s ideas did have their effect on various developments that the New Deal was to institute some years later.

Summarily, Elazar writes,

 

This is not to say that the New Deal was itself collectivist.  It was far too unsystematic for that, and it is unlikely that Franklin D. Roosevelt wished to foster a collectivist America, but among those around him there were people who saw in collectivism – democratic collectivism to be sure – the only solution to the problems facing the country.  Capitalizing on the moralistic strain in American society which periodically encourages Americans to try to impose single standards of behavior, even in delicate areas, upon the American public, they and their heirs have succeeded in the intervening decades in creating a substantial collectivist thrust within the body politic.  Needless to say, it is not known by that name.  Sinclair Lewis once said that fascism [a right-wing collectivist-political arrangement] could only come to the United States in the name of liberty.  So too, with collectivism.[2]

 

This last note reminds this blogger of what the insurgents yelled as they stormed the Capitol last January 6.  One can upon reflection see as with these insurgents, that extreme individualism can and has led to collectivist movements, sometimes as a remedy to extreme individualism and at other times as an expression of it.

Currently the nexus seems to fall on identity politics; back in the thirties it was economic deprivation.  And as in any continuum, this ideation of the relationship between the individual and the government leads to the next level, corporatism.  This blog will focus on corporatism in its next posting.

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[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “How federal is the Constitution? Thoroughly.”  In a booklet of readings, Readings for classes taught by Professor Elazar (1994, 1-30) prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute. Conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

[2] Ibid., 13.