The Radical Political Economics of
Douglas F. Dowd

by Michael Keaney

Lecturer in Economics Glasgow Caledonian University

This paper was presented at the Post Keynesian Economics Study Group Microeconomics Seminar, Glasgow Caledonian University, October 2, 1998. The author wishes to thank Douglas Dowd, Anne Mayhew, and Marc Tool for their kind assistance and encouragement.

The 80th anniversary of the birth of Douglas Fitzgerald Dowd was in December 1999. His long and distinguished career has been characterized by a fruitful marriage of scholarship and activism.

Firmly on the political Left, Dowd belongs within an indigenous American tradition of dissenting radicalism whose most famous — perhaps notorious — representatives are Thorstein Veblen and C. Wright Mills. Taking care neither to “mumble” like the former nor “shout” like the latter,¹ Dowd has been an articulate and persistent critic of the American experience for more than 40 years, engaging both students and the wider public. In 1997, he published his semiautobiographical economic history of twentieth-century America [Dowd 1997a]. It exemplifies Dowd's scholarly engagement in public life, meshing together the personal, the professional, and the political.

Dowd is among the now dwindling number of critical public intellectuals willing to engage in current controversy with the aim of enfranchizing those for whom the political process would remain otherwise remote and even irrelevant. This distinguishes his political economics from a typical enlightened liberalism, which would attend primarily to economic needs without due consideration of power relations or other cultural factors. But he has also been careful not to fall into the trap that afflicts many on the Left, often with disastrous consequences-mistaking arrogance for moral superiority and/or scientific exactitude. His socialist humanism mirrors that of Tony Benn and E. P. Thompson in British politics.

Of course, Dowd has been informed by the uniquely American experience, and he has, in turn, attempted to use that experience to contribute to the broadening and deepening of democracy in the United States. His political economic philosophy belongs to an indigenous tradition of constructive, radical dissent within American thought, whose main wellspring is the significant corpus bequeathed by Thorstein Veblen. Thus, one might consider Dowd to be continuing Veblen's radical institutionalist critique in parallel with other important contemporaries including Mills, Paul M. Sweezy, and John Kenneth Galbraith.

But another major American intellectual figure who deserves some credit here is John Dewey, whose pragmatic social philosophy of reconstruction became more pronouncedly radical as he grew older. Clarence E. Ayres is usually acknowledged as the author of the theoretical marriage of Veblen and Dewey, as is evident from reading his Theory of Economic Progress, which was first published in 1944 [Tilman 1996, 109]. But Ayres's identification of this marriage was the articulation of a previously implicit and consistently characteristic feature of institutionalism. For its central focus has always been the problem of institutional adjustment, taking its cue from Veblen's technology/ceremony duality. This, linked with the means-ends continuum articulated by Dewey (and developed from Charles S. Peirce's original work) [Dewey 1954, 217], a commitment “revolutionary in its implications” [Tool 1995, 6], has informed the best work in this tradition of inquiry and is both representative and expressive of a uniquely American contribution to social thought.² Dowd was nurtured within that tradition. Moreover, like Sweezy and Mills, he incorporated Marxian insights, among other non-American sources, in order to produce a more potent brew of critical radicalism that has never lost sight of its single most important test of validity: relevance.³

Dowd's work may be classified primarily as economic history. Yet such categorization does little justice to the breadth of his interests, which are typical of American institutionalists generally. It would subvert a key claim of critical American social thought, including Dowd's, which has been that conventional disciplinary boundaries are inherently artificial and more often than not act to impede the development of relevant scholarship that can, among other important goals, engage an audience wider than that of the typical peer-reviewed journal.⁴

A discussion of Dowd's scholarly activism necessitates not only the examination of his intellectual formation and the development of his analytical framework, but the concrete historical events with which he was and is concerned. Both inform each other. It is the purpose of this essay to so demonstrate.

Background and Overview

Perhaps the most disappointing aspects of contemporary social studies are those which show the reverse of the two characteristics of Veblen cited above: first, a strong tendency is apparent to accept uncritically the basic institutions of society, and, second, what appears to be an undue zeal for system, or precision, leads investigations into ever-narrowing paths of compartmentalization. These paths often lead to relatively precise “answers.”

But the validity of such answers rests upon a myriad of assumptions that wall off important areas of relevant reality, which is to say that social analysis frequently gives way to exercises in logic [Dowd 1958, viii].

Among the social sciences, economics has not been alone in its drift toward scholasticism and practical irrelevance. Mills famously lambasted the grand theory and abstracted empiricism characteristic of sociology: “Both are withdrawals from the tasks of the social sciences;” both are consequences of what he dubbed the “methodological inhibition” [Mills 1959, 50]. The more conservative Leo Strauss similarly decried the state of political “science” as “losing itself in the study of irrelevances. It is confronted by a chaotic mass of data into which it must bring an order alien to those data, an order originating in the demands of political science as a science anxious to comply with the demands of logical positivism” [Strauss 1962, 318]. While neither could be described as ideological bedfellows, both Mills and Strauss took aim at an excessive concern with technique and abstraction, as opposed to the historically grounded study of human action.

Where they would part company, so to speak, is in the purpose of that study: for Strauss, it is the identification, veneration, and, where possible, preservation of tradition; for Mills, it is the identification, exposition, and reconstruction of otherwise repressive social, political and economic institutions. Dowd, in common with others in the Veblenian-Deweyan tradition, belongs firmly within the latter camp.

Among those who have influenced Dowd, the most apparently significant is Veblen. Dowd has been at the center of efforts to revive interest in Veblen, coordinating scholarly activity on campus as well as publishing what is still one of the best introductions to the founder of institutionalism [Dowd 1966]. He also contributed a new introduction to the reissued Theory of Business Enterprise [Dowd 1978].

In November, 1957, the Department of Economics at Cornell sponsored a series of eight lectures on various aspects of Veblen's thought…As that program was being arranged, Morris Copeland, a member of the Department of Economics at Cornell and then President of the American Economic Association, organized a round-table discussion on Veblen for the 1957 annual meeting of the association [Dowd 1958, viii–ix].

Three papers presented to the AEA, together with six others, were included with the original eight Cornell lectures in a collection published to commemorate the centennial of Veblen's birth. This was preceded by the publication a year earlier of a special double issue of the Monthly Review, “for many years the most influential Marxist periodical in the United States” [Tilman 1992, 206]. Sweezy contributed to both projects, and while it is acknowledged that the

unwillingness of institutional and other heterodox economists, most of whom were political liberals, to interact even on a scholarly basis with Marxists and the equally rigid attitude of Marxists toward liberals was indicative of the fragmentation of the American left during the early years of the Cold War [Tilman 1992, 207],

Dowd's own political formation in San Francisco allowed him to straddle each “camp” constructively.⁵ It should also be noted that Sweezy is the acknowledged personal friend of both Dowd and Galbraith.⁶

Nevertheless, today, much more than before, there is a fruitful dialogue of inquiry between institutionalists and Marxists, as characterized by the growing importance of “radical” institutionalism. William M. Dugger and James Ronald Stanfield, in particular, have made great strides in engaging the Marxist Left in collaborative criticism.⁷ However, prefiguring much of the present intellectual détente has been Dowd, whose own work has incorporated many key insights of the Marxian canon and who has combined these with those of Veblen, Mills, and Dewey, as well as Sweezy, James O'Connor, and James Cypher [Dowd 1993, xxiv].

If Dowd were classified according to conventional academic categories or disciplines, then his contributions would fall mainly under economic history. However, Dowd's historiography is similar to that of English socialist historian E. P. Thompson, whose efforts to counter both conservative and Stalinist orthodoxies with “history from below” proved highly influential in both historiography and the invigoration of the New Left. Dowd's own involvement with the American New Left organization, Students for a Democratic Society, will be discussed in detail later. But to understand that involvement it is as important to appreciate the theoretical basis that supported it.

With respect to both Dowd's scholarship and his activism, the parallels between Dowd and Thompson are both illuminatory and striking. Thompson's own background was steeped in the English nonconformist, dissenting radical wing of Methodist Christianity. His propensity toward social activism was encouraged by his brother, who recruited him to the Communist party in 1942 “at a time of international solidarity on the part of the radical Left in the form of an organic movement which claimed in a real sense to represent working class interests” [McCann 1997, 19]. The socialist politics of the Popular Front initially attracted Thompson to the Communist party; in equal measure it led him to depart it in 1956 in protest over the crushing of the Hungarian uprising and the supine abeyance of the British Party leadership in accordance with the Stalinist theoretical orthodoxy emitting from Moscow. Dialectical materialism, democratic centralism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat were concepts antithetical to Thompson's socialist humanism,⁸ informed by his historiography of “history from below” that “served primarily to affirm the processes of human agency” [1997, 72].

Thompson's approach simultaneously reinvigorated historical study and dissenting radical politics by letting each inform and be mutually supportive of the other. For example, in a climate of increasing state power and secrecy that impinged upon the civil rights of British citizens during the 1970s (continuing throughout the 1980s), in 1975 Thompson published Whigs and Hunters, a study of the Black Acts of the 1720s “and their results in terms of the rule of law and repression” [1997, 81; Thompson 1975]. This understanding and employment of history in order to shed light upon contemporary politics greatly influenced Tony Benn, who was then a Labour cabinet minister and the leading representative of New Left politics within the U.K. Parliamentary system.⁹

Dowd's academic career mirrors this commitment to contemporary relevance, employing historical knowledge to illuminate institutionalized injustices, especially racism, poverty, and the cult of business values, or the pecuniary interest. In tackling these and other problems, Dowd has employed an analytical framework founded upon a synthesis of Veblenian and Marxian analyses.

Dowd was influenced greatly by Robert A. Brady and Leo Rogin. Both are almost forgotten today. For Dowd, Brady was a model of what he himself later became

an intensely political person. When it was appropriate, his politics were up-front; but most of his work came as close to what is normally meant by 'scientific' as one is likely to find in social analysis: he was almost religiously objective, determinedly, extraordinarily, and voraciously well informed, and, except as a critic, he consciously distanced himself from ideological positions; but he was never neutral [Dowd 1994, 1033–1034].

Brady was steeped in the work of Veblen throughout his undergraduate and graduate education, especially at Columbia University, where he worked closely with John Maurice Clark, another person Dowd bemoans as having been almost forgotten by the economics profession. Brady's Veblenian emphasis “on the socioeconomic power of business, with its source the control over property (the means of production)” [1994, 1033; emphasis in original], is as evident throughout Dowd's work [1994, 1055, n5].

Any social analysis that takes due account of the location and exercise of power will most likely lead to some kind of action. The study of power demands it, for the student can no longer treat it as merely an academic exercise. This is not a guarantee of potent insight and radical conclusion, however [Tilman 1974]. It is, nevertheless, a hallmark of those working within the Veblenian tradition and is usually the basis for disagreement among institutionalists. It is certainly fundamental to understanding the different approaches of Dowd and Galbraith, for example, both of whom are avowed Veblenians, but who have approached the same problems in very different ways. Dowd distinguishes “Bradyites” as a distinct subset of “Veblenites,” who “would all be found on the left of the political spectrum.” [Dowd 1994, 1052]. This is not true of “Veblenites” as a rule, adding further support to the notion of a distinctly radical strand of institutionalism.

Rogin was a Marxist who prefigured the sort of approach typified by Sweezy and Baran, in stipulating that the test of a theory's validity is its relevance. It is not enough merely to demand internal consistency and logical rigor; “the point of social interpretation is, after all, to change the world” [Dowd 1975, 231]. Rogin's course in the history of economic thought became his unjustly neglected book, The Meaning and Validity of Economic Theory, published posthumously in 1956.¹⁰ Dowd describes it as “the most incisive analysis of how and why economic theory developed, up through Keynes” [Dowd 1993, 40].

Rogin begins his study of the history of economics by stating first and foremost, that, as a “science of fact,” the validity of economics depends upon “the adequacy of its correspondence with fact” [Rogin 1971, 1]. However, this should neither be a guarantee of unanimity among those seeking to define the principles of economics, nor should such unanimity be expected. Instead, Rogin argues, it would be far more beneficial if the validity of both theory and criticism were explored “by an appeal to fact through the requirements of practice — of economic policy” [1971, 2]. The objective meaning of a theory would therefore vary over time.

It is certainly useful to understand the historical circumstances in which a theory is formulated, not least because “such understanding should immunize us against the force of prestige and authority, and against comfortable familiarity with a set of conceptual furniture which has been acquired as a matter of accident.” Furthermore, it will inform the choice of an appropriate frame of reference for the addressing of contemporary problems in accordance with the “practical affirmation of our values — 'practical' affirmation, because no one may participate in the making of a perfect society, but rather in helping reduce the amount of needless waste and frustration of personality” [1971, 4].

Rogin warns against the sort of decadence that is sadly typical of the social science professions, and which Dowd has fought against throughout his career:

Ultimately a social scientist must do the same thing a natural scientist does. Both check theory for its truth. But in the social sciences, where reference is not to a constant external nature but to the everchanging historical configuration of human affairs, theory which does not orient itself to the requirements of contemporary practice feeds on the bare bones of bygone practical issues and is destined to be both socially reactionary and scientifically sterile. Differences in values and in perceptions of the historical drift of events preclude unanimity in the appraisal of systems of theory. But criticism which has proceeded without explicit reference to historically conditioned practical ends has involved a waste of moral energy [1971, 13].

Very much in the spirit of Rogin's methodological exhortation was the seminal reworking of Marx by the Monopoly Capital school [Baran and Sweezy 1966], described by Stanfield and Carroll [1997, 488 n1] as “the major scholarly influence on the radical political economists who emerged in American academic life in the decade after its publication.” And for some of those a little older, it was a shot in the arm for the development of a radical, critical theory of contemporary U.S. capitalism.

Dowd has been a regular contributor to the Monthly Review, while his own writings make generous use of the school's theoretical and analytical insights [e.g., Braverman 1974; O'Connor 1973]. Baran and Sweezy provided a significant part of the inspiration behind the establishment of the Union for Radical Political Economics in 1968, at which Dowd delivered one of three inaugural addresses. His was on Veblen.

Thus, Dowd has incorporated the Veblenian business/industry dichotomy, with its emphasis upon “the socioeconomic power of business, with its source the control over property (the means of production)” [Dowd 1994, 1033; emphasis in original] with the Monopoly Capital model, eschewing Marx's teleology like Veblen but nevertheless retaining a greater optimism and faith in political action. Brady's characterization of the United States, and humanity as a whole, as constantly facing a choice between the admirable and the despicable is a continuous theme underlying both Dowd's scholarship and activism.¹¹ These value judgments are premised on the Veblenian-Deweyan goals of the authentication of self and community via the fullest possible participation in society: political, cultural, and economic. And, following Rogin, the validity of the framework informing action toward these ends is assessed according to the paramount criterion of relevance.

Activism

A belief in democracy has always carried with it the implicit and accompanying requirement of an informed public [Dowd 1997b, ix].

Less parallel to than intertwined with Dowd's academic career has been his political activism. This is because his politics has been focused upon the empowerment of those inside and outside the academy to simply think. In this he consciously follows the example of Brady [Dowd 1994, 1034]. For example, for more than 20 years he has conducted informal classes at bookstores in the San Francisco Bay Area, involving no payment or formal accreditation and comprising participants between the ages of 20 and 80. One such class is titled “Getting Our Heads Screwed on Straight on Current Economic Controversies” [Dowd 1997b, x]. Analogous to Thompson's “history from below,” Dowd's “argument was and is that the politics we need is one that must seem possible for ordinary people to construct and join” [Dowd 1997a, 139]. This section examines the position Dowd adopted during the 1960s, when an originally democratic but increasingly militant student radicalism clashed with an equally trenchant and violent establishment determined to suppress opposition at all costs.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was formed in 1960 and was reconstructed from the student affiliate to the League for Industrial Democracy (the unfortunately named SLID). According to James Miller [1987, 29], neither SLID nor its parent organization, despite their Veblenian-sounding titles, were particularly active in the pursuit of a Veblenian society; the League in those days is described as “a tax-exempt sinecure — a kind of dignified retirement home for aging social democrats.”

David Burner [1996, 151] ascribes more energy to the League, emphasizing, however, its support of the cold war against Soviet communism. The reconstitution of SLID as SDS in 1960, when a new leadership reinvigorated the organization with new ideas and energy, also heralded SDS's more critical view of the United States' role as “defender of the free world,” and, by implication, the leadership of the League and other traditional Left organizations.

While Alan Haber “was the organizational brains behind the early SDS,” it was Tom Hayden who “provided the rhetorical passion and proved to be the more lasting and important influence” [Ellis 1998, 117]. Hayden was, in the early days, most influenced by Mills, who was the subject of his master's dissertation. The democratic radicalism of Mills is evident throughout the Port Huron Statement, published in 1962 and the defining statement of SDS's principles. Rejected were both the hierarchies of Soviet communism and cold war liberalism; instead, a coalition of radical and Left liberal ideas were adopted, because they appeared to offer the greatest promise for the formulation and enactment of true democracy in the optimistic tradition of Thomas Jefferson [Ellis 1998, 118]. However, between 1962 and 1968 a transition occurred within SDS, as the hope embodied in the Port Huron Statement gave way to pessimism and intolerance, which resulted ultimately in the brutalities of the the 1968 Democratic Convention and the “Days of Rage” the following year.

In the middle of all this was the SDS group at Cornell University, where Dowd was professor of economics and actively involved in radical campus politics. Students at Cornell had been involved in campaigning for civil rights and as the 1960s progressed — as the Vietnam War progressed — the number of participants in the Cornell SDS chapter grew until it became “the largest single SDS group” [Dowd 1997a, 139]. In common with the national organization, the Cornell SDS actively participated in the resistance movement, fighting against the draft and running the risk of imprisonment, as well as exposure to the authorities' interpretations and brands of law enforcement.

Throughout this time, Dowd struggled to maintain an active, peaceful campaign in the face of increasing intimidation from the authorities as well as the inevitable backlash among protestors tired of the very real injustices being inflicted upon not only the Vietnamese, the U.S. black population, but as much themselves, as American citizens supposedly covered by the Bill of Rights.

Richard Ellis [1998] paints a tragic picture of how the original high ideals informing the Port Huron Statement were not only supplanted by the very ones supposedly rejected earlier, but were themselves at least partly responsible for the descent into intolerance and violence. In other words, the New Left contained the seeds of its own destruction. This interpretation, however, ignores the immensity of the opposing forces and the means that they employed to subvert organizations like SDS, as well as the difficulties of holding a broad coalition together in the face of such intimidation.

Certainly, there is a marked transition from hope to despair in the rhetoric of Hayden and the national SDS leadership, as well as an increasing reliance on the more nihilistic radicalism of Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other European intellectuals who glorified violence and justified the pursuit of ideological purity at the expense of political effectiveness.

This latter aspect particularly fed valuable ammunition to those like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who used the notion of the “silent majority” to such great effect, so much so that it remains a potent rhetorical weapon for those on the Right like J. Danforth Quayle:

Perhaps the greatest costs…are those arising from the shrill political style that has 'succeeded' in typifying the conferences and most of the literature of [radical] groups. Like the emphasis on high theory and its priestly language, the bristling political terminology of radical intellectuals has as its major effect the repelling of possible allies among those potentially interested [Dowd 1982, 27].

Dowd's long experience in organizing Left coalitions on campus was stretched to the limit during the late 1960s, especially when events led to serious disagreements inside his own family. But his refusal to sanction both the Hayden-sponsored demonstrations at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968 and the subsequent “Days of Rage” was informed by his keen appreciation for the need to keep democratic politics accessible — an obvious requirement, perhaps, but one that has been all too frequently overlooked by the self-styled “vanguard,” more often than not with disastrous consequences.

Civil Rights

The 1960s are imprinted deep upon the American psyche, as succeeding generations still find it necessary to come to terms with the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War, the apparent failures of the Great Society, the remarkable impact of student protest, the securing of civil rights legislation, and the eclipse of both New Deal liberalism and more radical politics by a conservative reaction that is still firmly entrenched in the American polity.

Dowd was at the center of these events, as both a scholar engaged in trying to understand them, and as an activist in attempting to act on that understanding. His theoretical grounding and analytical framework have already been discussed. This section examines in detail one particular and abiding concern of Dowd's: institutionalized racism in the United States.

Veblen's deep distrust of centralized power is manifest in Dowd's similar instinctive suspicion of institutionalized authority, a quality characteristic of the New Left in general. Thus, his critical stance toward conventional views of the United States' economic development as solid proof of the fulfillment of the American Dream. To coincide with the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Dowd published The Twisted Dream in 1974 (to be updated three years later), a scathing indictment of the maldistribution of economic wealth characteristic of U.S. history and the triumph of business values at the expense of the humanitarian.¹² This latter aspect in particular is focused upon as an explanation of the deeply embedded racism that was at first institutionalized in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, thereafter tenaciously persisting despite the Bill of Rights, the abolition of slavery, and the civil rights and Great Society legislation of Lyndon Johnson's presidency.¹³

A primarily economic explanation for the institution of slavery, and the longevity of the racism that originally justified it, is not, in itself, altogether satisfactory. Some attention must be afforded to the religious and cultural norms of Western European Christians who sanctioned this belief and consequent action. The work of Francis Jennings is instructive in this regard. He traces the origins of what we know today as racism as emerging “by easy stages out of feudal religiosity”:

The overwhelming importance of this fact can be seen in a single glance at the behavior and rationalization of the Crusaders. Their enemies were also the enemies of the Crusaders' god and therefore outside the protection of the moral law applicable to that god's devotees. No slaughter was impermissible, no lie dishonorable, no breach of trust shameful, if it advantaged the champions of true religion. In the gradual transition from religious conceptions to racial conceptions, the gulf between persons calling themselves Christians and the other persons, whom they called heathen, translated smoothly into a chasm between whites and coloreds. The law of moral obligation sanctioned behavior on only one side of that chasm [Jennings 1976, 6].

Thus, we might better explain Jim Crow and the poisoned chalice of a legacy of the so-called Reconstruction during Andrew Johnson's presidency, which, aside from Vietnam, did much to destroy the consensus underpinning Lyndon Johnson's presidency 100 years later. Jennings's explanation partly supports Dowd's view that the Civil War was not primarily about slavery; rather, it was a conflict between two opposing economic systems with disproportionate access to the levers of state power [Dowd 1993, 96, 437–438].

Orlando Patterson [1979, 259] sees the conflict arising precisely because these systems “had become so tightly interwoven,” but asymmetrically so, with the South occupying a colonial status within the United States. He cites Dowd [1956] to the effect that “the very profitability of the slave system on the micro-level of the plantation firm depended on a configuration of social, political, and economic institutions that ensured its overall economic backwardness and dependency.” Corporate rationalism would therefore dictate the dismantling of such inhibitory institutions one way or another.

Controversy will forever rage as to the primary cause of the Civil War — currently, it seems to mainly involve those who argue that it was an disagreement over states' rights versus those who are sometimes referred to as “neo-abolitionists.” However, the ambiguity of Civil War participants with regard to slavery, together with the continuity of legislated discrimination against blacks south and north of the Mason-Dixon Line, suggests that the reasons are more complex.

Certainly, if one examines the career of Andrew Johnson closely, one will discover a man wedded to a Jacksonian vision of American democracy (Andrew Jackson was Johnson's political hero), who was not averse to courting blacks' opinion — even going so far as to posture as their “Moses,” but all the while retaining an undimmed belief in white supremacy [see Trefousse 1991].¹⁴

Another, quite forgotten feature of the Reconstruction was the institution of white slavery. It was an eerie enactment of Jeremy Bentham's notion that “infant man, a drug at present so much worse than worthless, may be endowed with an indubitable and universal value.”¹⁵ Dowd [ 1994, 1054, n4] continues:

The purchase and sale of children — white children — was common in the years after the Civil War, black slavery having been outlawed. The children could be said to have been in the category of 'indentured servants,' except that the latter were normally obligated for a period of four to seven years (rather than until age 21, as was common for 'boughten' children), and were usually obligated by themselves, rather than sold by another in the manner of slaves. There is no accounting of how many such white slaves there were, how many of them survived until age 21, nor of the horrors they endured whether or not they survived.

Robert Brady's father was a “boughten” child who managed to escape at the age of 16, having been sold for $15 at the age of four. His story forms the basis of Joan Brady's 1993 novel, Theory of War. The mere existence and acceptability of such an institution after the Civil War casts doubt upon the idea that somehow the war's resolution marked a turning point in public morality in the United States. It casts further doubt upon the notion that the abolition of Negro slavery was central to the conflict, instead underlining the awful continuities that, even today, continue to govern the lives of the powerless.

Dowd was an active participant in the campaign for civil rights during the 1960s, including not least his leadership of a three-month effort involving 50 students from Cornell University who assisted voter registration efforts in Fayette County, Tennessee [see Dowd and Nichols 1965]. As well as radicalizing the political atmosphere on campus, the campaign brought participants face to face with the formidable social forces acting against the enfranchisement of the local black population. John F. Kennedy's prevarication over civil rights contrasted noticeably with Lyndon Johnson's determination to push through legislation, and thereafter enforce where necessary through federal agencies.¹⁶

Political opponents like John Tower and Barry Goldwater understood only too well that this legislation impinged upon states' rights and, whether through genuine principle or racially motivated sophistry, used such arguments to resist its passage. Whether intended or not, this strategy resulted in a replay of events that had occurred during Reconstruction a century earlier, with an inconsistent deployment of federal forces symptomatic of ambiguities within the administration regarding the means of achieving the goal of enfranchisement.

This hesitant approach was interpreted as weakness by opponents such as Alabama Governor George Wallace, who then went on to exploit it fully. Thus, resistance by the Southern Establishment to civil rights was afforded a legitimacy that it might not otherwise have enjoyed had Johnson, in his deep insecurity, not been so wedded to consensus politics and had instead enforced his reforms in a consistent manner, while devoting some attention to internal Democratic party organization, not least regarding the treatment of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats [Burner 1996, 42–44]. The Cornell group in Fayette County was thus exposed to the same violence and intimidation that was a fact of daily life for the black population, especially those with the temerity to register to vote [Dowd 1997a, 144–146].

When we speak of racism, it is perhaps easy to forget that the concept itself emerged during the 1960s as a result of the struggle for civil rights. It signifies the changing manner in which the problem of institutionalized discrimination on the grounds of color has been viewed. The concept of “racism,” while undoubtedly important in yielding insights into the character and behavior of institutions (and people), crystallized during a simultaneous shift in white liberals' and black activists' views. It came to be as value-laden and derogatory for conservatives as for reformers, with conservatives describing as “racist” most features of Johnson's Great Society program, which many (wrongly) perceived to be designed and implemented for the sole benefit of blacks.

Meanwhile, the highly visible rise of the Black Power movement further polarized debate, as black nationalism began to exclude white participation in certain civil rights campaigning organizations, most prominently the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and spokesmen like Stokely Carmichael openly espoused a black supremacism. “Militancy replaced the ideals of integration and accommodation” [Andrew 1998, 42–43, 49]. This was as true for SDS, as the campaign for civil rights and the anti-war movement coalesced in a swiftly developing transition from peaceful protest to the rhetoric of resistance and, ultimately, violence.

But in the transition from “civil rights” to “race,” we may also see features of the perennial North-South divide within the United States. It is true that, with the passage of civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965, many Northern whites felt that “equality of opportunity” had been achieved and that Johnson's desire for “equality of result” was a step too far, so that by 1966 the civil rights consensus had irrevocably fragmented.

Even Johnson's overwhelming desire to prove that southerners were not all racist and culturally backward was compromised by his need for consensus and approval. Meanwhile, black expectations had outstripped the pace of political change — as with the abolition of slavery, improvement in political status was no guarantee of parallel economic improvement.

But 1966 also marked a turning point in the civil rights campaign, as Martin Luther King and his strategists targeted Chicago. Suddenly, northerners were confronted with evidence of de facto discrimination on their own doorstep, something quite contrary to the socially progressive image in which they were, for the most part, content to bathe. Access to adequate housing, education, and jobs was seen “more as racial preference than as civil rights” [1998, 48].

The results, predictably, were a hemorrhaging of white northern support for further civil rights legislation and a growing association of the entire Great Society program with “positive discrimination.” This fed the growing white conservative backlash which translated into the “politics of resentment” articulated by Goldwater and personified by Nixon [Wills 1969].

One of the clear advantages of a historically based philosophy of social science is that it can take account of historical continuity. Abstract models depicting fantasy worlds of atomistic “homogeneous globules of desire” [Veblen 1990, 73–74] can hardly be expected to yield understanding of how and why certain events unfolded beyond an elementary rationalization, itself constructed within a static representation. More often than not, such rationalizations merely serve to justify what actually happened, rather than providing a deeper insight into why.¹⁷ This helps to explain the political utility of neoclassical economics, and its consequent popularity as the “conventional wisdom.”

Dowd's theoretical grounding in Veblen and Marx spares him from too great an exposure to the risk of tautology. However, if Veblen could criticize Marx for paying too little attention to the irrational, while he himself apparently believed that the “dense weight of the past, of tradition, of habituation, and the ongoing propensities of man” [Dowd 1966, 77], most especially the “instinct of sportsmanship” and its manifestation in emulation and invidious distinction, rendered political action most likely ineffectual, he nevertheless fashioned a materialist vision of salvation in industrial democracy. Ayres's [1978] cruder delineation of “technology and ceremony,” while not doing justice to either Veblen's more sophisticated appreciation of the “ceremonial” or Dewey's pragmatic value theory, is symptomatic of a tendency within Veblen and his followers to concentrate upon the material at the expense of the human. Dowd himself, although of necessity using the analytical lens of the economic historian, alludes to “the need for those 'on the Left' to attend to their own humanity” [Dowd 1997a, 249]. A Veblenian treatment of the origins of the American Civil War, for example, would assuredly incorporate an economic rationalist explanation as much as that of Jennings, perhaps even emphasizing the importance of the “irrational” as highlighted by Jennings. Both Veblen and Dewey would also stress continuity and, in Dewey's case, examine the practical consequences of the conflict. This Dowd has done.

But, if only to avoid falling into the trap of Enlightenment liberalism, institutionalists, radical or otherwise, might speak less in terms of a dualism of “rationality” and “irrationality,” looking more at the consequences of actions and beliefs in the light of democratically agreed ends. For there can be little doubt that what is commonly referred to as “irrational” is nevertheless an integral part of humanity.¹⁸ This was clearly understood by Veblen, whose theory of instincts was a conceptual response. However, it cannot, realistically, be merely wished away in some utopian exercise of either Left or Right. Veblen recognized this also, but his pessimism was in large part founded upon his disparaging view of humanity's propensity to “irrationality,” so conceived.

Thus, Veblen's sheer radicalism, informed by a normative rationalism, when confronted with his conception of human nature, rendered him, in effect, a conservative. The impossible demands placed upon human rationality by rationalists form the basis of the conservative critique of liberalism. Dewey did much to answer both.¹⁹ In so doing, he provided a rationale for actively challenging the status quo without lapsing into fatalistic irony.

Radical Institutionalist and Critic

Civil rights was only one of Dowd's political concerns. He is, perhaps, better remembered for his prominent role as a campaigner against the Vietnam War. Taken together with the transformation of the civil rights agenda into one governed by conceptions of race, this issue was decisive in destroying both Johnson's presidency and Hubert Humphrey's succession.²⁰

Dowd, of course, was not alone in opposing the war. An increasing number of those across the Left-Liberal spectrum in the 1960s called for an end to American involvement in Indo-China. Among these was another public intellectual with a Veblenian background, John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith occupies a unique position in American academic and public life, successfully contributing to both while in many ways remaining somehow aloof personally. Dowd neither shares this aloofness nor has been as wedded to the political mainstream. An explanation for this can be found in Dowd's critique of Galbraith's economic thought, which exemplifies the differences in temperament and politics between the two, as much as does their respective analyses of the contemporary United States.

With regard to intellectual background, Dowd and Galbraith share some notable pedigree. Both are graduates of the University of California at Berkeley, although they were not contemporaries, and both were instructed by, among others, Brady and Rogin. Galbraith [1981, 29–31 ] describes Rogin as “a teacher who established himself firmly in the affections of all my generation,” and he refers to Brady as “a leading Berkeley Veblenian. ” He does not go as far as to credit Brady as being at least partly responsible for introducing him to Veblen, whom he acknowledges as “the major influence on me from those years.”

Dowd, meanwhile, has been as conscientious in stimulating awareness of Brady's work as he has of Veblen's, and he acknowledges the deep influence Brady has had upon him. He dedicated the published proceedings of the 1958 Veblen symposium to Brady, describing him as having “helped to perpetuate the approach and the spirit of Veblen” [Dowd 1958, v].

Despite their common Veblenian heritage, Dowd and Galbraith differ markedly in their analyses of the political economy as well as in their political actions. While Galbraith was an active supporter and adviser of the Democratic party, Dowd's energies were consumed further on the Left of the political spectrum in organizations such as SDS. Thus, Galbraith has been understood by many on the Left as supporting the “vital center” of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. [Diggins 1978, 219], while Dowd was suspected by the FBI, CIA, and many others of being a member of the Communist party. Meanwhile, Galbraith's apparent advocacy of an enlightened technocracy [Galbraith 1984], reminiscent of Veblen's The Engineers and the Price System, contrasts with Dowd's New Left “politics from below.”

Anyone familiar with the Veblenian canon will readily appreciate the importance of rhetoric in critical analysis. Both Dowd and Galbraith have often criticized the over-specialization and consequent emphasis upon mathematical sophistication that characterize economics and more generally the social sciences. But each has adopted a different rhetorical strategy in exposing the inadequacies and injustices of modern capitalism.

While hardly lacking humor, Dowd has been the more consistently tenacious in attacking conventional wisdom, whereas Galbraith has.employed a more refined approach, usually involving the lampooning of a sacred tenet as being patently stupid and thereafter suggesting an apparently plausible alternative.

This has not always met with the approval of Galbraith's friends, however. Stanfield [1996, 39] has remarked upon Galbraith's occasional failure to follow the logic of his criticism conclusively, and he cites Robert Heilbroner's view that “Galbraith would rather make a joke than push a point to its ethical implication” [1996, 6]. Dowd is even less tolerant of this aspect of Galbraith's work:

John Kenneth Galbraith is a witting and witty troublemaker, and though by no means a radical, his troublesomeness, and perhaps even more his graceful writing style, have placed him beyond the pale for most of the economics profession — despite that…he, like [Adolf] Berle, uses a fine mind to underscore problematic areas in the socioeconomy, but moves from those troubles, somehow, always to a comforting set of conclusions (and then in his next book, undermines those conclusions and repeats the process) [Dowd 1993, 123].

However, he did, in an earlier discussion of Veblen, suggest the possible rationale for such a rhetorical strategy:

Perhaps, in America, the pill of serious social criticism will be swallowed only when it is coated with the sugar of humor. But if that is so, it is also true that the inner criticism must have coherence and system sufficient to make the pill effective [Dowd 1966, xii].

It is certainly true, and hardly unique to the United States, that much of the Left's criticism of the status quo has been either inaccessible to those for whom it is intended to benefit or sanctimonious in its insouciant assumption that its arguments are clothed in moral superiority. Neither Dowd nor Galbraith can reasonably be accused of either trait. However, the pronounced difference between each other's approach is symptomatic of a problem which all on the Left must face, particularly those like Dowd, whose affinities are very much with the New Left participatory politics of socialist humanism.

Veblen himself grappled with the dilemmas of participation, at least vicariously. In so doing, he rehearsed arguments that rage to this day, and that certainly informed those which flared among Left radicals in the 1950s and 1960s. Because Marx had postulated that the development of capitalism would involve an enrichment of an ever-concentrating ruling class at the expense of a simultaneously swelling working class, rational class interest would dictate that the working class would one day unite to overthrow the ruling class and to institute communism. So it was incumbent upon Marxists to await that time and to look for its omens in the continuing immiserization of the working class. In practical terms, this meant that it was in the interest for revolutionaries to let laissez-faire capitalism develop unfettered, regardless of the untold misery this would entail for the working class. The greater the misery, the better, for this would herald the hastening arrival of the revolutionary moment.

What this position ignores is the continuously worsening situation that must be borne by those for whom the revolution is supposed to be beneficial. The enlightened vanguard, or whatever, would, in practice, either wait for a spontaneous mass uprising (difficult to accomplish in a state of utter penury) or adopt the Leninist position and itself divine the correct timing for the overthrow of the ruling class.

The naiveté of such a position is matched only by its cruelty. Veblen's analysis of German socialism examined the dilemma faced by the most radical workers' movement in late-nineteenth century Europe: whether to allow capitalism 1o develop unfettered or to demand improvements in the conditions of the working class from those in power in a more incremental manner, without losing sight of the radical goal of socialist democracy. Veblen's Judgment of the German socialists bears repeating:

It is now not an unusual thing for orthodox Marxists to hold that the improvement of the conditions of the working classes is a necessary condition to the advance of the socialistic cause, and that the unionist efforts at amelioration must be furthered as a means toward the socialistic consummation. It is recognized that the socialistic revolution must be carried through not by an anaemic working class under the pressure of abject privation, but by a body of full-blooded workingmen gradually gaining strength from improved conditions of life. Instead of the revolution being worked out by the leverage of desperate misery, every improvement in working-class conditions is to be counted as a gain for the revolutionary forces. This is a good Darwinism, but it does not belong in the neo-Hegelian Marxism [Veblen 1990, 450].

Veblen's analysis, originally published in 1907, prefigures much of the debate that led to the rise of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s. Rejecting the institutionalized stagnation of Western orthodox liberalism and Soviet dialectical materialism were New Left intellectuals like Thompson, for whom developments like “the institution of jury service, old age pensions, free health care, labour rights, and the accountability of state authorities” were gains “in large part the results of popular dissent” [McCann 1997, 2].

Thus, a radical position was crafted whereby liberal reform could be supported — even embraced — without losing sight of the powerful anti-democratic forces that begrudgingly conceded them. Of course, the German social democrats succumbed to the appeal of nationalism and soon forgot their internationalism and pacifism. Unfortunately for both the American Left and the “vital center,” similar energies were wasted in internecine squabbles and red-baiting at the cost of many of the New Deal/Great Society achievements:

We live in the most capitalist of all societies. Naturally, then, only an embattled minority has resisted…the commodification of everything. Nonetheless, this minority has won many a battle since the 1930s, limited in scope and durability though they may have been: battles to hold down and cushion unemployment and poverty; to diminish repression and discrimination of all sorts; to render work conditions safer; to provide health care, pensions, paid vacations, and better housing and education for many — though by no means all; to protect our health and our environment from ecological recklessness; to enhance economic stability…

Since the 1960s, in part prompted by our successes, the economically powerful and politically reactionary have steadily built an imposing political force. They are supported by groups with diverse social, political, and economic agendas; many of the members of those groups are beneficiaries of the very achievements now under siege. The movement to the right has already chipped away at many of our gains; now relentlessly it tries to return our socioeconomy to the free market ideology and practices of a century ago, with all their brutality and social foolhardiness [Dowd 1997b, 8].

Of central importance to any study of the socioeconomy that derives from Veblen is the location and exercise of power. This lies at the heart of the differences between Dowd and Galbraith.

Dowd's criticism of Galbraith's work crystallized with Galbraith's publication of the New Industrial State in 1967. Prior to that work, his two previous weighty studies, American Capitalism (1952) and The Affluent Society (1958), had dealt with countervailing power and social balance respectively. Galbraith's solutions to the problems identified in these books did not meet with Dowd's approval:

As always with Galbraith, when faced with a problem of power, he skirts it by proposing schemes that assume it away (or that implicitly assume that because power is used irrationally it is also used thoughtlessly) [Dowd 1973, 98].

In The New Industrial State,²¹ Galbraith identifies the existence of the technostructure supporting the planning system of the modern capitalist economy. While the system of monopoly capitalism can hardly be said to hold paramount wider society's interests, its pecuniary interest can be potentially undermined by the system's dependence upon higher education for the formal training of the technostructure. As long as sufficient academic freedom is retained, and married to a commitment to progressive politics, thereby hangs the subversion of the pecuniary interest:

The proper course of action is clear. The college and university community must seek or retain paramount authority for the education it provides and for the research it undertakes. Support for research and scholarship must be in accordance with some natural distribution of human curiosity and competence. It will be urged that this is a counsel of perfection. That eve see it as such shows how readily we assume that education and research must be subordinate to the needs of the planning system. But they need not be subordinate if it is realized that the educator is a figure of power in this context. He is the source of the factor of production on which industrial success depends; he must realize this and exert his power, not on behalf of the planning system but on behalf of the entire human personality [Galbraith 1984, 385].

These are admirable, seemingly practical goals, until one remembers the distinct lack of such action on the part of academics in their pursuit. Those who do engage in activism tend to be isolated figures within departments that, at best," tolerate them. Paul Baran's shoddy treatment at Stanford University is only one such instance [Dowd 1975, 232–233].

Others who claim to be radical or heterodox are yet tempted to stray down paths of scholasticism and obscurantism in the academic equivalent of 60s radicals' prioritization of truth over effectiveness:

They write for each other in the arcane language of the professions; and, although they consciously and vigorously reject the methodology of bourgeois social science, they too often continue to work within those very confines. They indulge in theorizing out of thin air; they have a tendency to nest in Marxological disputation, to continue the interminable variations on how much surplus value will fit on the head of a pin, or the depths to which opposites interpenetrate [Dowd 1982, 26].

What astounds Dowd concerning Galbraith's approach is that he, as “part of the scientific and technical estate,” should know precisely what sort of obstacles are the in way of progressive change, even — perhaps especially — that “guided from near the top.” If it is any consolation, this is a realization that Galbraith himself has rather forlornly admitted:

I am somewhat less confident as to the influence of the educational and scientific estate than in the days before President Reagan took office. It was his purpose, intended or otherwise, to challenge its authority — to assert the virtues of a narrower pecuniary preoccuption in public life and policy. In consequence, the educational and scientific estate as here described has become an opposition force. There is more power in being in power [Galbraith 1984, xxxiv–xxxv].

Douglas Dowd: A Critical Reappraisal

Tilman [1984, 1] cites William Appleman Williams's four criteria for radicals to meet:

First, they must get to the root of things by finding the actual rather than the apparent nature of the political economy and social structure. Second, they must offer an explanation of the constantly changing relationships among basic social institutions. Third, they must provide an alternative hierarchy to the socially dominant values. Finally, they must understand what the specific options are for structural change, including strategical as well as tactical alternatives.

Dowd's marriage of scholarship and activism has striven to meet these four demanding criteria and has, for the most part, done just that. The fusion of insights from Veblen, Marx, Brady, and others into a consistent analytical framework offers a powerful means of explanation of both the nature of and the changing institutional relationships within the political economy. The tradition of radical dissent within the United States has a clearly articulated set of values, consonant with the “fullness of life” Veblen advocated. The fourth criterion, however, is the most difficult, for not only is it dependent strategically upon the previous three, and on all of their overemphases and omissions, but tactically it also remains dependent upon political judgment [Berlin 1996, 40–53].

Hindsight is a gift that only the subsequent can bestow upon the present, and with respect to the fourth criterion, Dowd's radical politics, in common with that of all others, is open to critical scrutiny as regards the balance between the strategic and the tactical. Outright opposition to the candidacy of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 seems unwise, given subsequent events. Even then, despite Humphrey's obvious compromises with reactionary forces, it could surely be ascertained that a Nixon presidency would not promise much in the way of peace, whether at home or in Indo-China.

While Dowd was a reluctant vice-presidential running mate to Eldridge Cleaver that year [Dowd 1997a, 156–158], the utter resignation regarding mainstream politics that informed his and many others' views of Humphrey effectively let in Nixon and the conservative ascendancy. Now he admits that progressives were too complacent and divided to sustain their momentum against the increasingly formidable reactionary forces that have wreaked such havoc since triumphing in the shape of President Ronald Reagan [Dowd 1982; 1997b, 8–9]. But Humphrey's failure constitutes a larger one for the United States and the wider world.

Nevertheless, the passage of time lends support to his rejection of both the violent nihilism of the “Days of Rage” and the sanguine views of those, like Galbraith, who held out the hope of an enlightened technocracy of the scientific and educational establishment. That we have yet to witness the concrete development of a participatory polity — we have moved further from it in the last 30 years — does not in itself render the original New Left position untenable or, worse still, irrelevant. Far from it; we need such a politics now more than ever.

C. Wright Mills was correct when he emphasized the importance of using the insights of others for the benefit of the present. He called this the “sociological imagination.” It may be more generally regarded as good scholarship. The Left, particularly, has been forever hamstrung over the changing character of Marx's thought throughout his writing career and has wasted much time and effort as a consequence, attempting to establish and to maintain doctrinal rectitude. Dowd [1975, 242] has defended Baran and those associated with the Monthly Review against charges of revisionism, accusing the accusers of "defying the spirit of Marxism." As Thompson himself said, “The point is, that Marx is on our side; we are not on the side of Marx” [Thompson 1978, 258; emphasis in original].²²

Following Veblen, Dowd has reached beyond the confines of professional disciplines, which are far more rigid today than in Veblen's time. It is part and parcel of the study of institutions, which

requires not only that economics shed much of its synthetic purity; it requires that economics more consciously relate itself to the other social sciences. Institutions are social phenomena, caught up in and affecting history. An increased emphasis upon institutions in economics implies an increased emphasis on politics, sociology, psychology, and history. Sociologists and historians are not interested in Veblen by accident; nor is it surprising that social scientists find Veblen too general. He could not succeed in the task he set himself. What Veblen could not do alone, cooperating social scientists may be able to do [Dowd 1966, 144–145].

Irving Louis Horowitz's assertion that “the old canard about a man being 'ahead of his times' did not obtain…Mills was of his times and in his times” [Horowitz 1964, ix] applies just as strongly to Dowd. The examples earlier offered to him by Brady and Rogin provided him with a model of scholarly engagement that characterizes his own work throughout.

At the age of 80, Douglas Dowd can hardly be said to be wasting moral (or any other) energy. At the time of writing, he is preparing two more books. He continues to conduct informal classes and discussion groups in the San Francisco Bay area. And with these means, he still campaigns for what Dewey termed the “Great Community,” to be achieved through what historian Harvey J. Kaye has described as the task “to secure, bear witness to, and critically advance the prophetic memory of the struggle for democracy” [Kaye 1997, 27; emphasis in original].

That Dowd is one of a dwindling minority of economists, and critical social scientists generally, committed to engaging the wider public is a sad testimony to the powerful incentives, inside and outside the academy, rewarding compliance, whether implicit or explicit, with the ethically questionable.

It is also a cautionary example to organizations like AFEE and Union for Radical Political Economics, whose founding principles, enshrining the sort of scholarly activism exemplified by Dowd, require a constant reiteration in both theory and practice, lest we submit to convention and so nourish society with the genetically modified fruits of elegant abstraction.

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Notes

1. “By comparison with their colleagues, both Mills and Veblen were defensive in their attitudes toward teaching. Veblen's defensiveness was hidden behind a mask of diffidence amounting to virtual hostility. Mills, in his last years, had despaired of graduate instruction; or, when he felt there were promising lines to follow on that level, he found himself blocked by unsympathetic colleagues. Both finally did battle with the academic establishment — Veblen doing battle against the 'immature and reluctant' students and the 'captains of erudition', and Mills against the 'slavish' enmeshed in the coils of an 'adaptive organism'. So, literally or figuratively, Veblen mumbled and Mills shouted” [Dowd 1964, 62]. return to text

2. “As a matter of principle, institutional economics is less interested in being a universal science of economic behavior than in being a useful component of present society. The instrumental philosophy developed from the seminal contributions of Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey regards economics and all social science as the process of bringing systematic knowledge to bear upon the social problems of the day. Institutional economics offers not only a radically different conception of the role of the economist as social scientist but a fundamentally different vision of the nature of the economic process in and of itself” [Stanfield 1996, 4]. return to text

3. Similar points are made very forcefully by Tilman [1984, 1–2], whose study of Mills “is premised on the assumption that Marxists who attempt to junk the radical elements in the American intellectual tradition succeed only in cutting themselves off from our cultural existence and consequently from political reality. This is not a plea to Marxianize the American tradition or to Americanize Marx; it is simply my view that Karl Marx's ideas by themselves are not potent enough for building an adequate radical theory. Instead, his insights must be grafted onto the indigenous radical tradition as but one branch on a massive trunk from which several other limbs protrude.”

This is reiterated by Dowd, who lists Veblen and Brady with Mills “as the most analytical and radical of those extending the traditions of U.S. populism” [Dowd 1994, 1033]. return to text

4. Dowd has been as willing to apply this sort of criticism to heterodoxy as much as to the mainstream of the economics discipline [see Dowd 1982]. return to text

5. The 1930s were not only notable for the economic hardships induced by the Great Depression, but were also a time of rising labor militancy across the United States. San Francisco's dockworkers were led by Harry Bridges, whom Dowd cites as having done “more for San Francisco and the largest part of its population than any other one person” [Dowd 1997a, 47]. Bridges had reorganized dockworkers into a new, genuinely representative union that spearheaded a local general strike in 1934, and whose impact went far beyond improving the conditions of the Bay Area workers, not least in speeding the passage of the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act in 1935. Like Bridges, Dowd often found himself acting in concert with the Communist party, although neither was actually a member. While a student at Berkeley, Dowd conducted the meetings of the Independent Students' Political Action Committee, a broad leftist grouping that successfully remained independent of control by any one faction [Dowd 1997a, 86]. return to text

6. Dowd dedicated his book, Against the Conventional Wisdom, to Sweezy. Galbraith [1981, 50], in recalling Sweezy as both assistant and friend of Joseph Schumpeter while at Harvard, describes him as “my own friend of a lifetime.” return to text

7. Dugger [1988, 1989] and Stanfield [19951 are good examples. Dowd [1975, 231n] credits Sweezy with incorporating Veblen into the analytical framework detailed in Baran and Sweezy's 1966 Monopoly Capital. The strong relationship between institutionalism and the Monopoly Capital school is discussed by Stanfield and Carroll [1997]. return to text

I have previously doubted the distinction between radical and, presumably, nonradical institutionalism [Keaney 1997]. Compared to sterile neoclassicism, institutionalism was, per se, radical. To a certain extent this remains the case, as institutionalism, by comparison with neoclassicism, is critical of both the status quo and dominant economic theory [see Dogger 1997, 843]. However, I may attribute my more recent appreciation of a distinctly radical institutionalism to an increased awareness of the damaging effects wrought upon American social and academic life by the bunker mentality fostered by cold war ideology. Institutionalists have certainly suffered persecution as perceived dangers to the status quo, including even the less radically inclined like Clarence Ayres. Despite this, however, others were prepared in practice to subscribe to the cold war liberalism typical of Daniel Bell and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. A methodology that recognizes — even emphasizes — the importance of history in social study is no guarantee of radical policy conclusions, as the similarity in the methodological positions of Rogin and Leo Strauss testifies. return to text

8. Dowd says of Veblen that he “abhorred concentrated power of any sort” [Dowd. 1966, 22]. Much the same can be said of Thompson. return to text

9. Benn's increasing radicalism throughout his career led him to construct a historical lineage of English democratic socialist ideas and action from the Levellers of the seventeenth century to the Left politics he represented within the Labour party [Benn 1979, chap. 1]. The classic exposition of such a continuity is E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963). An excellent account of the rise and fall of the New Left in British parliamentary politics, and Benn's pivotal role in that, is that of Panitch and Leys [1997]. return to text

10. Winifred Ellsworth Rogin, the author's wife, in the introduction tells of how “Dr. Robert Brady, the author's friend and colleague, gave the manuscript its initial push toward publication. With warm generosity he gave countless arduous hours to it…He himself read the entire manuscript and contributed encouragement and advice in practical matters for nearly half a year, help which has our enduring affectionate gratitude.” [Rogin 1971, xvi] return to text

11.This is a dichotomy that historian Clive Ponting [1998] employs to analyze the course of the twentieth century. return to text

12. At around the same time, a similar dissenting history of the United States, dealing primarily with the treatment of its native Indian population, was published by Francis Jennings [1976]. Just as damning, its radical critique of the historiography exemplified by Frederick Jackson Turner is echoed by Dowd [1982, 17]:

As the Europeans earned and received the epithet of imperialists from, among others, the people of the United States, those very people, from Plymouth Rock onward, were garnering the most bountiful empire of all, violently and at bargain basement prices, in the pleasing names of “Manifest Destiny,” or “Westward Expansion.” These were neither the first nor the last of the euphemisms that have allowed us to stifle our consciences, bolster our pride, and feed our arrogance as a people; to see ourselves as a special breed whose energy and ingenuity have made this nation the standard-bearer for all of humanity. return to text

13. Dowd's later revision of the book resulted in his 1993 magnum opus, U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776: Of, By, and For Which People? return to text

14. It is possible that some are motivated to research the origins of the Civil War out of desire to salvage some kind of morally acceptable element that is institutionally embedded in the governance and white culture of the ante-bellum United States. One could hardly discount the existence of just such an element, but its relative paucity in comparison with the overwhelming support for the “peculiar institution” may be witnessed in the Reconstruction and after:

If we may judge the intentions of warriors by what they do after victory, the organization and functioning of the U.S. government during and after the Civil War tells us that northern intentions were to adapt federal power to the needs of industrial, not planter, capitalism; and the former slaves were abandoned to the not-so-tender mercies of their former masters — as ruthlessly exploited and oppressed sharecroppers. Freed from chattel slavery, most frequently they became debt slaves, free (as they were no longer valuable assets) to starve [Dowd 1993, 96]. return to text

15. Quoted in Dowd [1997b, 7] and taken from Bentham's Annals of Agriculture, vol. 31. return to text

16.Edsall and Edsall [1992, 35–36] quote contemporaneous poll data that illustrate the marked difference in public perceptions of Republicans and Democrats' positions on civil rights between 1962 and 1964. return to text

17.Oliver E. Williamson's brand of “institutionalism” comes to mind here [see Dugger 1996]. return to text

18.In a very Deweyan call for the reconstruction of our notion of reason, as distinct from rationality, Eugene Halton [1995, 280] reaffirms its far larger constitution:

Reason renewed will involve opening the gates to the entire historical and prehistorical heritage of humankind, to renew the archaic values of family, household, neighborhood and local community, and the sympathetic relations they engender, to renew those organic and communicative essences of play, dreaming, and mother-infant nurturance which are our human-mammalian legacy and crucial for the development of the spontaneous self, and also making a life-sustaining world culture with vital and selfcritical institutions capable of supporting and protecting the reasonableness of local ways. return to text

19. “The ulterior problem of thought is to make thought prevail in experience, not just the results of thought by imposing them upon others, but the active process of thinking. The ultimate contradiction in the classic and genteel tradition is that while it made thought universal and necessary and the culminating good of nature, it was content to leave its distribution among men a thing of accident, dependent upon birth, economic, and civil status. Consistent as well as humane thought will be aware of the hateful irony of a philosophy which is indifferent to the conditions that determine the occurrence of reason while it asserts the ultimacy and universality of reason. In as far as qualities of objects are found worthy of finality, the finding must eventuate in arts. Only thereby will thinking and knowing take their full place as events falling within natural processes, not only in their origin but also in their outcome” [Dewey 1958, 120]. return to text

20. History suggests that the election of Hubert Humphrey to the presidency in 1968 would have been preferable to that of Richard Nixon [Burner 1996, 2181. Burner suggests that, with New Left support, Humphrey would have won [1996, 2141. In our correspondence, Dowd has firmly rejected the possibility of New Left support for Humphrey, citing Humphrey's terrible compromises with forces inimical to his own principles in the pursuit of power. For example, his dealings with the Mississippi Freedom Democrats at the 1964 Democratic Convention were less than edifying for one so publicly associated with the cause of civil rights [Burner 1996, 43–44; Andrew 1998, 33].

Humphrey's track record in the Senate was typical of post-FDR Democrats, marrying progressive economic policy with reactionary cold war machismo [Burner 1996, 2131, a trait described by Galbraith [1998, 641 to President Kennedy in 1961 as “adventurism” and that, sadly, appears to be informing the policies of the Clinton administration. Nixon's legacy continues to be felt today, most keenly in the controversial role of the special prosecutor. It may reasonably be averred that Humphrey would have spared the United States the indignity of Watergate, as well as further cement the undoubted gains of Johnson's Great Society program. return to text

21. The very title of the book Dowd finds indicative of weakness, and a weakness of which a Veblenian of particularly radical bent would be acutely aware:

Galbraith calls it the “industrial” not the “corporate” state, and that is a telling difference of terminology, not least when we recognize that Galbraith is among the most literate of economists, and, as a writer, one who chooses his words with exacting care [Dowd 1973, 98]. return to text

22. It is worth noting how Thompson continues:

His is a voice whose power will never be silenced, but it has never been the only voice, and its discourse does not have limitless range. He did not invent the socialist movement, nor did socialist thought in some way fall into his sole possession or that of his legitimate heirs. He had little to say (by choice) as to socialist objectives, as to which [William] Morris and others said more — and more that is pertinent today. In saying this little he forgot (and at times appeared to deny) that not only Socialism but any future made by men and women rests not only upon “science,” or upon the determinations of necessity, but also upon choices of values, and the struggles to give these choices effect [Thompson 1978, 258–259]. return to text

June 23, 2003