Author | Michael Lind |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | nonfiction |
Publisher | HarperCollins, New York |
Publication date | April 17, 2012 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Hardback and eBook |
Pages | 586 |
ISBN | 978-0-06-183480-6 |
Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States is a book on the economic history of the United States of America by Michael Lind, first published in 2012 by HarperCollins. Omitting the economic circumstances of colonial America, it comprises a time frame that ranges from the Revolutionary War to the Great Recession. The book goes beyond re-narrating events by continually interpreting causes and effects as suggested by a view of history as linear, and its approach towards economics is of a decisively anti-libertarian nature which is exemplified by statements like "what is good about the American economy is largely the result of the Hamiltonian [...] tradition, and what is bad about it is largely the result of the Jeffersonian [...] school." [1] While naturally preoccupied with the past, Land of Promise also looks ahead, makes conjectures about the future of America's economy and "ends on as optimistic a note as the title suggests, though it also acknowledges that failure is an option." [2]
The title "Land of Promise" is alluding to an expression for the United States that was coined by George Washington in 1785 and partly pertained to the promise of economic growth. In Lind's view, that promise is still valid, even in the face of economic slowdowns and other difficulties, because a look at history reveals how Americans have always been capable of reversing a crisis into its opposite. [3]
The book is divided into four major chapters that are preceded by an introduction named "A Land of Promise". In that introduction, Lind uses the example of Paterson, New Jersey, to show the decisive changes, the American economy has undergone since the late eighteenth century. According to Lind, there are three American Republics so far, accompanied as they were by three industrial revolutions.
"The First Republic of the United States was founded on water and undermined by steam" [4] which is why Paterson could become an early industrial center due to its advantageous location at the Great Falls of the Passaic River. During the Second American Republic, "Paterson reinvented itself by taking advantage of technological innovation" [5] such as electricity and aviation and thus soon came to be nicknamed Aviation City. However, as the Third American Republic unfolded after World War II, Paterson failed to repeat that process of reinvention and had to cede its status to such newly influential places like Silicon Valley which symbolized the onset of the Digital Revolution. [6]
Throughout the following chapters, Lind tries to show how not only Paterson, but the United States as a whole underwent three industrial revolutions and three republics: The First Republic started after the Revolutionary War and experienced the first industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century. The Second Republic started after the Civil War and experienced the second industrial revolution around the turn of the century, whereas the Third Republic began after the Great Depression and was already more than thirty years old when the third industrial revolution set in during the 1980s.
In compliance with the belief that there are lessons to be learnt from history, in Land of Promise Lind explicitly contradicts Henry Ford who once claimed that there was nothing useful about historiography. [7] Accordingly, Lind tends to agree with Cicero, whose De oratore contains the famous statement historia magistra vitae est (history is the teacher of life). If combined with the theory of the business cycle, that view suggests to take a look at historically successful economic policy for the purpose of preventing economic crises or attaining economic recovery. Quite consequently, Lind uses the perception of history as a teacher in order to justify his hostility towards libertarianism, arguing that it "has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world" [8] and that it is thus unlikely to succeed.
Also the common thread of Land of Promise, namely the superiority of Hamiltonianism compared to Jeffersonianism, is explained by lessons drawn from history according to Lind. In an interview with Boston Review , he said:
While generally praised for its readability due to numerous anecdotes and asserted historical accuracy, the book received criticism for its relentless promotion of Hamiltonianism.
David Leonhardt of The New York Times , for instance, lauded several aspects of the book, such as the provision of "small, little-known stories [and] Lind's attempt to rehabilitate figures to whom history has not been kind." [2] However, Leonhardt also expressed some scepticism about the book's undeviating fondness of Hamiltonianism: "Lind never quite explains how the United States has ended up as the richest large country in the world, with per capita income about 20 percent higher than Sweden’s or Canada’s, almost 30 percent higher than Germany’s and almost 500 percent higher than China’s. If anything, other countries have pursued more Hamiltonian policies in many ways than the United States, without quite the same success." [2]
Quite similarly, Stanford University professor Jack N. Rakove wrote an undecided review of Land of Promise for The New Republic , acknowledging that "Lind offers countless apt observations about American economic development, and with or without his interpretive scheme, any reader will learn much about that history" [7] but also criticizing "the idea that Americans should be either natural-born Hamiltonians or Jeffersonians [a]s a primitive way of explaining how the energy of economic activity pulses through [the] political and legal system." [7]
The blog website Daily Kos ran an outspokenly positive review that concentrated on the topicality of the book's final pages: "Between Lind's specific insights on size, regulation, and private-public hybrids, and his ability to provide the Big Overview, one can begin to see the contours of how a workable Fourth Republic could come into being as we find ourselves in the midst of convulsive global change. Land of Promise is an invaluable tool in exploring where we've been, how we arrived at the perilous economic place in which we stand now, and how we can find our way back to more income equality and stability in the years ahead." [10]
Publishers Weekly gave a short and largely neutral account of the book, stating that Lind "offers a prescription for how the next Hamiltonian cycle should fix matters, but asserts that Jeffersonianism rules today [and] paints a vivid if dismal picture." [11]
Equally short but considerably more judging was the article in Kirkus Reviews which praised Lind's versatile approach and summarized the book as "timely, big-picture analysis that supplies vital context to our current economic and political moment." [12]
In the June 2012 issue of The American Conservative , James Pinkerton published a very positive assessment of Land of Promise that mainly focused on the book's tendency to question the bipolarity of American politics by arguing that Alexander Hamilton could hardly be located anywhere in today's political spectrum, thereby suggesting that the United States are in need of a third alternative. The praise eventually resulted in the plain conclusion: "Thus Lind's book emerges as a fresh and bold challenge to the status quo." [13]
Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy that promotes subsistence agriculture, family farming, widespread property ownership, and political decentralization. Adherents of agrarianism tend to value traditional bonds of local community over urban modernity. Agrarian political parties sometimes aim to support the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants against the wealthy in society.
Charles Austin Beard was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the fields of history and political science. His works included a radical re-evaluation of the Founding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed to be more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), has been the subject of great controversy ever since its publication. While it has been frequently criticized for its methodology and conclusions, it was responsible for a wide-ranging reinterpretation of early American history.
The American School, also known as the National System, represents three different yet related constructs in politics, policy and philosophy. The policy existed from the 1790s to the 1970s, waxing and waning in actual degrees and details of implementation. Historian Michael Lind describes it as a coherent applied economic philosophy with logical and conceptual relationships with other economic ideas.
Jeffersonian democracy, named after its advocate Thomas Jefferson, was one of two dominant political outlooks and movements in the United States from the 1790s to the 1820s. The Jeffersonians were deeply committed to American republicanism, which meant opposition to what they considered to be artificial aristocracy, opposition to corruption, and insistence on virtue, with a priority for the "yeoman farmer", "planters", and the "plain folk". They were antagonistic to the aristocratic elitism of merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, distrusted factory workers, and strongly opposed and were on the watch for supporters of the Westminster system.
Bernard Bailyn was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1953. Bailyn won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice. In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture. He was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal.
The history of the United States from 1789 to 1815 was marked by the nascent years of the American Republic under the new U.S. Constitution.
Thomas James DiLorenzo is an American author and former university economics professor who is the President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He has written books denouncing President Abraham Lincoln.
In United States history, the Report on the Subject of Manufactures, generally referred to by its shortened title Report on Manufactures, is the third of four major reports, and magnum opus, of American Founding Father and first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. It was presented to the Congress on December 5, 1791.
Isabel Paterson was a Canadian-American libertarian writer and literary critic. Historian Jim Powell has called Paterson one of the three founding mothers of American libertarianism, along with Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand, who both acknowledged an intellectual debt to Paterson. Paterson's best-known work, The God of the Machine (1943), a treatise on political philosophy, economics, and history, reached conclusions and espoused beliefs that many libertarians credit as a foundation of their philosophy. Her biographer Stephen D. Cox (2004) believes Paterson was the "earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today." In a letter of 1943, Rand wrote that "The God of the Machine is a document that could literally save the world ... The God of the Machine does for capitalism what Das Kapital does for the Reds and what the Bible did for Christianity."
The values and ideals of republicanism are foundational in the constitution and history of the United States. As the United States constitution prohibits granting titles of nobility, republicanism in this context does not refer to a political movement to abolish such a social class, as it does in countries such as the UK, Australia, and the Netherlands. Instead, it refers to the core values that citizenry in a republic have, or ought to have.
Michael Lind is an American writer and academic. He has explained and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism in a number of books, beginning with The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (1995). He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is a 1913 book by American historian Charles A. Beard. It interpreted the early history of the United States from the lens of class conflict, arguing that the Constitution of the United States was structured to financially benefit the Founding Fathers.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy that upholds liberty as a core value. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing equality before the law and civil rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice. Libertarians often oppose authority, state power, warfare, militarism and nationalism, but some libertarians diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power. Different categorizations have been used to distinguish various forms of Libertarianism. Scholars distinguish libertarian views on the nature of property and capital, usually along left–right or socialist–capitalist lines. Libertarians of various schools were influenced by liberal ideas.
In the United States, libertarianism is a political philosophy promoting individual liberty. According to common meanings of conservatism and liberalism in the United States, libertarianism has been described as conservative on economic issues and liberal on personal freedom, often associated with a foreign policy of non-interventionism. Broadly, there are four principal traditions within libertarianism, namely the libertarianism that developed in the mid-20th century out of the revival tradition of classical liberalism in the United States after liberalism associated with the New Deal; the libertarianism developed in the 1950s by anarcho-capitalist author Murray Rothbard, who based it on the anti-New Deal Old Right and 19th-century libertarianism and American individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner while rejecting the labor theory of value in favor of Austrian School economics and the subjective theory of value; the libertarianism developed in the 1970s by Robert Nozick and founded in American and European classical liberal traditions; and the libertarianism associated with the Libertarian Party, which was founded in 1971, including politicians such as David Nolan and Ron Paul.
The Promise of American Life is a book published by Herbert Croly, founder of The New Republic, in 1909. This book opposed aggressive unionization and supported economic planning to raise general quality of life. By Croly's death in 1930, only 7,500 copies of The Promise of American Life had been sold. Despite this, the book was immensely influential, influencing Theodore Roosevelt to adopt the platform of the New Nationalism after reading it, and being popular with intellectuals and political leaders of the later New Deal.
The First Party System was the political party system in the United States between roughly 1792 and 1824. It featured two national parties competing for control of the presidency, Congress, and the states: the Federalist Party, created largely by Alexander Hamilton, and the rival Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, usually called at the time the Republican Party.
Forrest McDonald, Jr. was an American historian who wrote extensively on the early national period of the United States, republicanism, and the presidency, but he is possibly best known for his polemic on the American South. He was a professor at the University of Alabama, where, together with Grady McWhiney, he developed the hypothesis that the South had been colonized by "Anglo-Celts," rather than the British Protestant farmers who populated the North.
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement is a 2007 book about the history of 20th-century American libertarianism by journalist and Reason senior editor Brian Doherty. He traces the evolution of the movement, as well as the life stories of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard, and details how they intertwined.
David Leonhardt is an American journalist and columnist. Since April 30, 2020, he has written the daily "The Morning" newsletter for The New York Times. He also contributes to the paper's Sunday Review section. His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. He previously wrote the paper's daily e-mail newsletter, which bore his own name. As of October 2018, he also co-hosted "The Argument", a weekly opinion podcast with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream is a non-fiction book which chronicles the role of corporations in relation to the American economy and shifts in public policy by Nicholas Lemann, who is a veteran journalist and a The New Yorker staff writer.
Lind, Michael (2012). Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States . New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-183480-6.