Putting 'Capitalism' in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature

URING the 1950s, a group of revisionist, left-leaning historians (including Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) rejected the Progressive emphasis on the important role a transition to capitalism played in American history. They championed instead a view of the United States as a liberal, postfeudal society without a precapitalist past (except that associated with the precontact, indigenous peoples, whom the revisionists largely ignored). According to them, the European settler societies of North America were almost wholly capitalist from their earliest days. ' Eugene D. Genovese opened the first serious breach in this soothing perspective in the i96os, arguing in The Political Economy of Slavery that the slave system of the South, "in its spirit and fundamental direction, represented the antithesis of capitalism, however many compromises it had to make." Genovese's subsequent work, both separately and together with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, explores the implications of this insight, not only for the slave South but also for the entire country and, indeed, the Atlantic world.2 Challenges to the revisionists' wholly capitalist narrative have also lately come from the new social history of the American countryside, which demonstrates the existence and continuing importance of noncapitalist (and even noncommercial) relationships over the course of the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth, and from the new labor history of primarily nineteenth-century working-class movements and communities, which highlights the continuing resistance to capitalism by artisans and other small producers and by factory operatives and outworkers.3