Harmony in Business: Christian Communal Capitalism in the Early Republic

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 716-767
Author(s):  
JOSEPH P. SLAUGHTER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Leadership Style ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Authoritarian Leadership ◽  
Successful Model ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Harmony Society

Scholars increasingly acknowledge the contingent, varied, complex nature of capitalism, yet overlook a viable vision of the early nineteenth-century United States: communal capitalism. Communal societies proliferated in the early United States as a way to regulate the market. The most industrious, materially successful model of this approach was George Rapp’s Harmony Society, established in 1805. Rapp was a radical Pietist, immigrating with his followers from Württemberg in order to establish a purified community that would persevere into the millennium he predicted was imminent. Despite a ban on private property, the Harmonists embraced the market, building textile factories and conducting market activity under the moniker “Rapp & Associates.” Technologically innovative, shrewd in business, and dogged in pursuit of a “divine economy,” the example of the Harmony Society helps us better understand how religious businesses helped shape the early American capitalist system and, specifically, the contributions of German Pietism to economic thought in the Atlantic world. Ultimately, we discover how the Harmonists’ communal capitalism forsook wages and private property, while embracing stocks, bonds, leases, mortgages, patents, trademarks, licenses, litigation, and contracts as they built an incredibly successful and wealthy manufacturing community in the then-western United States, even as George Rapp’s authoritarian leadership style created tensions within his workforce of immigrant women, men, and children.

“Health is Wealth”: Valuing Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie A Kiechle
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Early American ◽  
Public Health Functions ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

Abstract This essay traces the evolution of the motto “health is wealth” from its origins as an anticapitalist argument made by antebellum sanitary reformers to its acceptance as a fundamental principle of organized public health in the United States. Sanitarians originally coined the phrase “health is wealth” to counter the capitalist maxim “labor is wealth.” Because city leaders were businessmen who understood economic arguments, public health reformers increasingly gave health a monetary value in order to win over this audience and change urban governance. Although “health is wealth” momentarily co-opted the logic of capitalism in order to successfully make the case for institutionalizing public health within municipal and state governments, the phrase ultimately wrote economic values into the purpose and functions of public health boards and departments. In the course of advancing a proactive public health that prevented both endemic and epidemic diseases, sanitarians reduced the perception of health from a common good to a commodity. The economic logic employed by early reformers is critical, not only for understanding how the long reach of early American capitalism touches us today but also for recognizing that modern public health functions in the way it was created, as a capitalist system.

Keynes and the Ethics of Socialism

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-180
Author(s):  
Edward Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Social System ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Logical Theory ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Ethical Justification ◽  
General Rules

This paper examines John Maynard Keynes’s ethical theory and how it relates to his politico-economic thought. Keynes’s ethical theory represents an attack on all general rules. Since capitalism is a rule-based social system, Keynes’s ethical theory is incompatible with capitalism. And since socialism rejects the general rules of private property, the Keynesian ethical theory is consistent with socialism. The unexplored evidence presented here confirms Keynes advocated a consistent form of non-Marxist socialism from no later than 1907 until his death in 1946. However, Keynes’s ethical theory is flawed because it is based on his defective logical theory of probability. Consequently, Keynes’s ethical theory is not a viable ethical justification for socialism.

Normal Rights, Just New: Understanding the Judicial Enforcement of Socioeconomic Rights

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fowkes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Inherent Property ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Existing Structure

Abstract A common skeptical view holds that socioeconomic rights are a different kind of right than civil-political rights. Even those who support justiciable socioeconomic rights often see them as a different kind of right with special challenges. I argue that this view is wrong. What all these observers are reacting to is not an inherent property of socioeconomic rights: it is a contingent property of a situation in which judges are asked to enforce a rights claim without a pre-existing set of familiar public understandings of the right’s content and/or an existing structure of officials and procedures to give effect to that content. It is because the rights claim is new, and this is something that can be, and often is, true of rights across the spectrum. Any rights claim is problematic to enforce to the degree that it is new, but these obstacles can and do disappear if society changes and the claim becomes less new. In the first part of the Article, I seek to establish the accuracy of this argument, drawing on examples of rights distinctions from the nineteenth-century United States and rights across the spectrum displaying newness in contemporary South Africa and India. I then show how controlling for newness can help us to understand standard features of the socioeconomic rights debate: the ubiquitous, but misleading, negative–positive distinction; arguments about resources; Fuller’s endlessly cited polycentricity argument; and current controversial cases, such as the budget-shifting judicial enforcement of Latin American healthcare entitlements. These topics are central to our widespread intuition that socioeconomic rights are different; newness can help us to see that this intuition is misleading us, and by recalibrating the debate can filter out some distractions that have long dogged it.

Models of Effective Teaching

1983 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Jack O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Style ◽  
Political Socialization ◽  
Classroom Interaction ◽  
The Political ◽  
Socialization Process ◽  
Authoritarian Leadership ◽  
Democratic Leadership ◽  
Role Behavior ◽  
The One ◽  
Conventional Classroom

Probably the fundamental criticism within the discipline concerning conventional classroom interaction dynamics comes from our sister subsidiary, political socialization. This criticism takes two forms. One version focuses on the teacher's classroom role behavior. Dawson and Prewitt, for example argue that the democratic or authoritarian leadership style of an instructor is the one aspect of the teacher's role considered most important to the political socialization process. The instructor may or may not stress “disciplined learning of the material presented, rigid adherence to rules, and a deferential attitude toward himself as the authority figure.” The authors continue: The crucial notion for political socialization is that these conditions affect the political outlook of the students. Democratic leadership by the teacher fosters attitudes and skills consonant with democratic values. The authoritarian teacher induces his charges to think according to hierarchy and deference to power.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document