Liberalism Changed from the Individualism of Laissez-Faire to the Social Control of Twentieth-Century Corporate Liberalism

The assumptions behind Schlesinger's evaluation of Social Security are those he revealed years earlier. Writing in his classic The Age of Jackson, Schlesinger noted that "Liberalism in America has been ordinarily the movement of the part of the other sections of society to restrain the power of the business community." This statement assumes that a popular movement, opposed by business, continually arises in America to challenge the one-sided power of large corporate business. But new historical research by a generation of revisionists has all but wiped out this assumption. William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein, and Murray N. Rothbard have argued that liberalism has actually been the ideology of dominant business groups, and that they have in reality favored state intervention to supervise corporate activity. Liberalism changed from the individualism of laissez-faire to the social control of twentieth-century corporate liberalism. Unrestrained ruthless competition from the age of primitive capital accumulation became an anachronism, and the new social and political regulatory measures emanating from the Progressive Era were not so much victories for the people over the interests, as examples of movement for state intervention to supervise corporate activity on behalf of the large corporate interests themselves.

--Ronald Radosh, "The Myth of the New Deal," in A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State, ed. Ronald Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), 150-151.

Herbert Hoover and the Myth of Laissez-Faire: Hoover Was a Preeminent "Corporate Liberal"

The conventional wisdom, of historian and layman alike, pictures Herbert Hoover as the last stubborn guardian of laissez-faire in America. The laissez-faire economy, so this wisdom runs, produced the Great Depression in 1929, and Hoover's traditional, do-nothing policies could not stem the tide. Hence, Hoover and his hidebound policies were swept away, and Franklin Roosevelt entered to bring to America a New Deal, a new progressive economy of state regulation and intervention fit for the modern age.

The major theme of this paper is that this conventional historical view is pure mythology and that the facts are virtually the reverse: that Herbert Hoover, far from being an advocate of laissez-faire, was in every way the precursor of Roosevelt and the New Deal, that, in short, he was one of the major leaders of the twentieth-century shift from relatively laissez-faire capitalism to the modern corporate state. In the terminology of William A. Williams and the New Left, Hoover was a preeminent "corporate liberal."

--Murray N. Rothbard, "Herbert Hoover and the Myth of Laissez-Faire," in A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State, ed. Ronald Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), 111.