Culture and Crime

Politics & Social Sciences

Carlson, Allan

Check, Christopher

Politics & Government

Independent Inst

The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

The self-sufficiency and regional outlook of farm life characterized the United States until the Civil War period. With the triumph of the industrial North over the rural South, the expansion of urbanism, and the closing of the frontier, the agrarian sector became an economic and cultural minority. The social benefits of rural life--a sense of independence, commitment to democracy, an abundance of children, stable community life--were threatened. This volume examines the rise of a distinctive agrarian intellectual movement to combat these trends. The New Agrarian Mind, now in paperback, synthesizes the thought of twentieth-century agrarian writers. It weaves together discussions of major representative figures, such as Liberty Hyde Bailey, Carle Zimmerman, and Wendell Berry, with myth-shattering analyses of the movement's cultural diversity, intellectual influence, and ideological complexity. Collectively labeled the New Agrarians to distinguish them from the simpler Jeffersonianism of the nineteenth century, they shared a coherent set of goals that were at once socially conservative and economically radical.

History

Americas

Transaction Pub

The "American Way": Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity

ISI Books

The United States of America is arguably more family-centered than any other Western nation. If polling data can be trusted, the vast majority of Americans--a higher percentage than in any other nation--would rather build society around the family and the church than around the individual. In fact, family and religiously grounded community--not individualism, not capitalism, and not a commitment to polyglot cultural pluralism--have historically provided the basis of America's dominant self-understanding. The American Way, Allan Carlson's episodic history of the last century, shows how the nation's identity has been shaped by carefully constructed images of the American family and the American home. From the surprisingly radical measures put forth by Theodore Roosevelt to encourage stable, large families, to the unifying role of the image of the home in assimilating immigrants, to the maternalist activists who attempted to transform the New Deal and other social welfare programs into vehicles for shoring up traditional family life, Carlson convincingly demonstrates the widespread appeal exerted by the images of family and community. Carlson also shows how a family- and faith-centered discourse anchored Henry Luce's publishing enterprise and even American foreign policy during the Cold War. But many of the reforms and ideas championed by pro-family forces in the twentieth century--family activists' embrace of the federal bureaucracy, Luce's propaganda for suburban living and modern architecture--inadvertently worked to undermine family and community life, writes Carlson. And he shows that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which effectively made it illegal for employers to offer malebreadwinners a living wage, has made it harder for traditional families to make ends meet, further helping to fracture family life. Carlson concludes by arguing that, despite the half-hearted and partially successful attempt of the Reagan administration to again forge a link between the American identity and healthy family life, much bolder measures are necessary if American culture is again to be put on a family- and community-centered footing. Written with grace and precision. The American Way is revisionist history of the highest order.

The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping Of American Identity

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Freewheeling capitalism or collectivist communism: when it came to political-economic systems, did the twentieth century present any other choice? Does our century? In Third Ways, social historian Allan Carlson tells the story of how different thinkers from Bulgaria to Great Britain created economic systems during the twentieth century that were by intent neither capitalist nor communist. Unlike fascists, these seekers were committed to democracy and pluralism. Unlike liberal capitalists, they refused to treat human labor and relationships as commodities like any other. And unlike communists, they strongly defended private property and the dignity of persons and families. Instead, the builders of these alternative economic systems wanted to protect and renew the “natural” communities of family, village, neighborhood, and parish. They treasured rural culture and family farming and defended traditional sex roles and vital home economies. Carlson’s book takes a fresh look at distributism, the controversial economic project of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton which focused on broad property ownership and small-scale production; recovers the forgotten thought of Alexander Chayanov, a Russian economist who put forth a theory of “the natural family economy”; discusses the remarkable “third way” policies of peasant-led governments in post–World War I Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania; recounts the dramatic and largely unknown effort by Swedish housewives to defend their homes against radical feminism; relates the iconoclastic ideas of economic historian Karl Polanyi, including his concepts of “the economy without markets” and “the great transformation”; and praises the efforts by European Christian Democrats to build a moral economy on the concept of homo religious—“religious man.” Finally, Carlson’s work explains why these efforts—at times rich in hope and prospects—ultimately failed, often with tragic results. The tale inspires wistful regret over lost opportunities that, if seized, might have spared tens of millions of lives and forestalled or avoided the blights of fascism, Stalinism, socialism, and the advent of the servile state. And yet the book closes with hope, enunciating a set of principles that could be used today for invigorating a “family way” economy compatible with an authentic, healthy, and humane culture of enterprise.

Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies - And Why They Disappeared (Culture of Enterprise)

Business & Money

Economics

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Books by Carlson, Allan