Volume 1, Number 2 · June 1, 1963
Capitalism Contained
By Robert L. Heilbroner
The American Economic Republic
by Adolf A. Berle
Harcourt, Brace & World, $4.50
It is thirty-one years since Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means published The Modern Corporation and Private Property (whence the quotation above), but three intervening decades have not outmoded this extraordinary book. To be sure, some of the names included on their famous list of the 200 largest non-banking corporations have been displaced by other names, and the economic power of the list itself has not grown quite so alarmingly as Berle and Means feared (in a moment of fantasy they suggested that by the year 2300 the 200 giants might be fused into one single immense corporate organism with a business life expectancy of over 1,000 years). But the issues posed by The Modern Corporation and Private Property are no less resonant and no less contemporary on that account. For as the title of the book made clear, this was not just an inquiry into economic performance. It was also, and perhaps more profoundly, an inquiry into economic philosophy. In a fundamental sense it questioned not only the practices of the great concentrate of economic power, but the very right of that concentrate to exist. Having revealed traditional economic theory to be little more than a pious theology, it asked what was left to describe the American economic system except a Realeconomiic of privilege for privilege's sake?
Review, 2786 words
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