A New History of Leviathan

The essays in this book reveal how and in what manner the corporate state developed in twentieth-century America. They show how a sophisticated group of large corporate reformers managed to replace a freely competitive economy and make a new governing class, through the use of reform mechanisms to mold the government into a mighty instrument of monopolization and cartelization.

From Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt to their corporate backers, down to the intellectuals who forged theoretical apologia for the new corporatism, these essays show how these sophisticated corporatist reformers sought to stifle the fierce winds of competition and to achieve what James Weinstein has called the “stabilization, rationalization and continued expansion” of the new political economy.