Search

Federal protection of the environment, food safety, and occupational health now routinely relies on the oxymoron of "voluntary compliance." The current Administration has undertaken a broad effort to restructure federal advisory committees to both the Center for Disease Control and Health and Human Services, displacing "renowned scientists" with, as the National Resources Defense Council notes acidly, "pro-industry representatives with questionable expertise." In recent months alone, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has delayed smog abatement requirements, reversed or weakened restrictions (in violation of international agreements) on the use of the pesticides atrazine, methyl bromide, and carbofuran, and only reluctantly withdrawn a proposal to loosen the regulations that govern screening of lowincome children for lead poisoning. And a proposed expansion of the Patriot Act features provisions that would both limit citizen access to information about possible risks from local chemical plants and grant companies broad immunity form civil liability.' These facts, mere illustrations of a deregulatory impulse that is now three decades old, underscore (even as they ignore) the remarkable history uncovered by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz in Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. From two paradigmatic case studies-lead in the first half of the twentieth century, and plastics in the latter half-the authors draw three important ethical and political conclusions. First, the economic principle that "there is no reason to hold up production of useful products if danger has not been proven" has proven disastrous in terms of occupational health, public health, and environmental health (p. 6). Second, leading firms and trade associations have proven unable and unwilling to consider the "externalities" of modern industry (death, sickness, environmental degradation) as much more than a marketing or public relations challenge. And third, the very institutions that might be expected to broach these questions less

In Kindred Strangers, David Vogel dances with the central dilemmas of the modern American political economy: Why, in a notoriously business-dominated political system, are business interests so persistently frustrated by and distrustful of the state? How, in a political system which both invites the direct influence of private wealth and provides uncommon popular access to politics and the courts, do business interests exercise their political power? In what ways, in the pantheon of democratic capitalism, is American democratic capitalism both exceptional and ordinary? First, some caveats. This is not a monograph, although the twelve essays (originally published between 1978 and 1992) are organized around three broad themes: the distinctiveness of American business-government relations, the nature of business power, and the recent history of "public interest" consumer and environmental movements. The argument (as in any collection of this kind) is occasionally contradictory and often repetitive. And while Vogel lays claim to a historical, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspective, most of the heavy lifting in the argument is done by patterns of American economic regulation in the 1960s and 1970s. For the purposes of this review, I will focus on Vogel's arguments about American exceptionalism and the nature of business powerin part because these are of greater historical and theoretical interest, and in part because (in the light of our recent political history) the ability of consumer or environmental movements to constrain corporate power seems less like the culmination of American political development than (like bellbottoms and macrame) a curiosity of the 1970s. Vogel begins with business "distrust" of the American state: "compared to other capitalist nations, there has been relatively less cooperation and more mistrust between economic and political elites" (p. 10). This, of course, is one of the enduring riddles of American political culture; nowhere is the political threat to private capital weaker, yet nowhere is the antistatist rhetoric more ferocious. In some respects, Vogel is not consistently sure what to make of this

The search for progressivism is the American historical profession's version of the snipe hunt: we watch those engaged in the pursuit, even participate ourselves on occasion, but never fail to shake our heads ruefully at those who claim to have "seen it" or "found it." My own skepticism was both confirmed and challenged by Eldon Eisenach's tightly argued The Lost Promise Of Progressivism. This is a complex and engaging pursuit of progressivism; an attempt not only to identify a notoriously elusive historical subject but to stuff and mount it as a lesson in contemporary civics. Yet, to exhaust the metaphor, I was never fully convinced that Eisenach's quarry really existed. This confused and undermined both the object of the hunt (an intellectually coherent set of "Progressive" ideas) and the contemporary relevance of displaying the trophy (the "lost promise"). Its nuances aside for the moment, Eisenach's argument is relatively straightforward. This is both a historical analysis of Progressive thought and a fan letter for a certain strain of it. Eisenach focuses on a small cohort of Progressives who shared the conviction that "[t]o link personal freedom to national democracy-a substantive and inclusive public good-not only placed issues of rights within a framework of national institutions, it redefined the idea of citizenship as well" (p. 221). This is presented as both the intellectual center of progressivism and the lost mooring of the modern liberal tradition, which instead adopted the "rights consciousness" of the Progressives' critics. Progressives, in Eisenach's view, laid the intellectual foundations for a more meaningful political culture-a sort of public-spirited, interest group liberalism resting on both state institutions and an array of secondary associations. The promise of this public spirit, however, was lost after 1920 in the ethical anarchy of democratic individualism. In the end, Eisenach's Progressives were unable to displace the pursuit of negative liberty (freedom from the state) with a sense of positive liberty (obligation to the state). This is at once a fresh reading of Progressivism, a distinct historical echo of the communitarian critique of modern liberalism, and a ringing indictment of a