Transformations of Capitalism: Economy, Society and the State in Modern Times

The Transformations of Capitalism is a masterful collection of twenty one essays that highlight five transformations of capitalism during the twentieth century. Harry Dahms, the editor of this series, probes the evolution of modern capitalism relying on the insights from some of the most eminent economists and sociologists of the 20th century. Included in this collection are masterful essays by Alfred Chandler (the Role of Business in the United States), Thorstein Veblen (The Industrial System of the New Order), John Maynard Keynes (The End of Laissez faire), Karl Polanyi (Our Obsolete Market Mentality), Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism In the Postwar World), John Kenneth Galbraith (The Technostructure, the Industrial System and the State), Bill Jordan (Planning, Corporatism and the Capitalist State), Joyce Kolko,(Restructuring and the Working Class), Neil Fligstein (The Social Construction of Efficiency), Joseph Bensman and Arthur J. Vidich (American Society since the Golden Age of Capitalism) and Robert Gilpin (The Multinational Corporation and International Production).

The series editors - Robert Jackall and Arthur J. Vidich - suggest ongoing social transformations of capitalism in a post-Keynesian era have had significant impacts on the middle classes and influenced the class and status structure in modern America.  They contend that these transformations are just as dramatic as the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism.  Harry Dahms, as the editor of this collection reviews the five phases of American capitalism with entrepreneurial capitalism succeeded by corporate capitalism and then by government interventions (i.e. Keynesianism) in the 1930s that led to a "golden age" of capitalism lasting from the 1940s to the 1970s. This period was followed by a return to supply side economics with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. During this fourth phase, the multi-national corporation became the pre-eminent vehicle for economic organization.

Since the 1990s, Dahms contends that a fifth transformation, "the structural and ideological foundations for the move toward globalization" was established. The recent populist uprisings in Europe and America reveal the working classes dissatisfaction with the financial consequences of globalization. This book is a "must read" for those seeking to find the motivations for recent populist counter-measures to the globalization capitalism.