When Berle and Galbraith Revived Political Economy: A Study of Cross-Fertilization (1933–67)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the intellectual cross-fertilization between Adolf Berle Jr. (1895–1971) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) to account for their institutionalist challenge to “conventional economics” that revived political economy. It goes back to the origins of The Modern Corporation and Private Property before analyzing Berle and Galbraith's answers to a set of fundamental questions. What is the nature of modern competition? What is the nature of the modern corporation? What is the role of the state? And how should American liberalism be reinvented to cope with the social issues raised by the transformation of American capitalism in the postwar era? Their answers to these questions reveal the deep affinities between the theoretical and political dimensions of their work. This research contributes, then, to the history of the institutionalist movement in the postwar period and its affinities with qualitative liberalism.