Between February 28 and March 1, 2003, an interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered at the University of California, Santa Barbara to consider the evolution of Americans' thinking about capitalism in the last half of the twentieth century. The conference, organized by Nelson Lichtenstein (University of California, Santa Barbara) and entitled “Capitalism and Its Culture: Rethinking Twentieth-Century American Social Thought,” focused on the years between 1938 and 1973, when capitalism as an idea and a system moved from a term of some contestation to an almost naturalized phenomenon that equated the market with progress, democracy, and civil society. In these mid-century decades, intellectuals increasingly substituted a discourse involving bureaucracy, modernization, and mass culture for earlier concerns over class conflict, social inequality, and the place of the large corporation in the democratic polity. The conference provided an opportunity for scholars of the family, academia, radicalism, feminism, and conservatism to explore the development of and challenges to capitalism and its culture.
Materials Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara