This article is the first to reconstruct the intellectual history of Milton Friedman's criticism of business and its social responsibilities. Using original archival research and printed evidence, this article makes three major arguments. First, Friedman's criticisms of business and its social responsibilities evolved over time and emerged from persistent anxieties among economic liberals about monopoly, business interests, and political authority that were explicitly read from Adam Smith. Second, the article contributes to the emerging intellectual history of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by reconstructing the development of Friedman's criticisms, their transformations, and their reception within the context of American managerial thought from the 1950s to the 1980s. Finally, contextualizing Friedman's criticisms demonstrates his concern about decision-making logics within organizations, which in turn explains his belief that CSR would contribute to collectivization and enhances the understanding of neoliberal political thought.
At the California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, where I teach, the subjects traditionally defined as “science”—physics, chemistry, biology—make their institutional home in the College of Science and Mathematics. The history department, on the other hand, is housed in the College of Liberal Arts, alongside philosophy, English, psychology, and the umbrella “social sciences” of sociology, anthropology, and religious studies, to name a few. Why, one might ask, have these fields been organized this way? What exactly distinguishes science from the liberal arts? Meanwhile, within the College of Science and Mathematics, highly credentialed professors offer courses in astronomy and chemistry, but not astrology and alchemy. Why not? My students might respond that the answers are obvious: alchemy is not real science, of course, and whereas science is objective and empirical, the liberal arts are subjective and interpretive. But where did these distinctions originate? Who determines and maintains them? What, if anything, can the history of these categories tell us about the waxing and waning of scientific authority in the twentieth century?
Recent scholarship has examined Alexis de Tocqueville's underexplored assertion that American racial stratification functioned as an extension of European feudalism. However, Tocqueville was not alone in his insights. At least a half-dozen nineteenth-century African American writers and thinkers, including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and especially Hosea Easton, have also described America's racial hierarchy as a continuation of antecedent European feudal social structures. Not only do their perspectives on what I call racial feudalism in America lend credence to Tocqueville's hypothesis that the afterlife of medieval social frameworks continued to persist in the post-Enlightenment United States, but also black Americans establish a distinctive body of knowledge that must be read alongside Tocqueville to render a more complete understanding of antebellum US social hierarchy.
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