Mimi Marstaller, University of Utah
Economics
During the Progressive Era that stretched roughly from 18771928, the United States faced the rising costs of industrialism. As corporate capitalism expanded and a national market replaced local economies, the role of the federal government changed to include mitigating collective costs by providing public goods. The Progressive Era represents the U.S.’ first national discussion on the role of the state in an industrialized nation. The nation, newly linked by economic ties, faced a collective action problem. I use this historical backdrop to examine economic theories on how societies manage the costs of capitalism. I look at scholarship on collective action, spontaneous order, self-regulation and enforcement within economic systems, and explore how the Progressive Era exemplify or refute the theories on social and economic behavior. I trace the emergence of a national market from pre-industrial, local economies, and examine how in the national context citizenship, the newly powerful nation state and standardized treatment of collective costs played an essential role in establishing the market as the central motivating factor of 20th century American culture. The institutions supporting citizenship and facilitating market participation bolstered capitalism but also required significant oversight by the regulatory bureaucracy established during the Progressive Era. While mainstream economic theory minimizes the role of class interests and power dynamics by assuming freedom of contract and costless enforcement of property rights, recent work in economics invokes sociology and history to understand the barriers to collective action. Today’s most illuminating theories revive the thought processes of the early, classical political economists, and I use the Progressive Era to explore the extent to which their theories on collective cost management describe the case of U.S. industrialization.