Gabriel Kolko

This was a thesis that disputed the "widely held view that government regulates business, arguing that, instead, business steers government", and Kolko used it to analyze how America's social, economic, and political life was shaped beginning with the Progressive Era (1900-1920).

"'As I have argued elsewhere, American 'progressivism' was a part of a big business effort to attain protection from the unpredictability of too much competition, [See my book The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, New York, 1962]."

Kolko argued that big business turned to the government for support because of its inefficiency and inability to prevent the economy veering between boom and bust, which aroused fears that the concomitant discontent amongst the general public would lead to the imposition of popular constraints upon business.

Its embrace of government led to their intertwinement, with business becoming the dominant strand.

"Kolko's thesis 'that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government–business coalition' is one that is echoed by many observers today."

Kolko, in particular, broke new ground with his critical history of the Progressive Era.

He suggested that free enterprise and competition were vibrant and expanding during the first two decades of the 20th century; thereafter, however, "the corporate elite—the House of Morgan, for example—turned to government intervention when it realized in the waning 19th century that competition was too unruly to guarantee market share."

This behavior is known as corporatism, but Kolko preferred political capitalism, "the merger of the economic and political structures on behalf of the greater interests of capitalism".

Kolko's thesis "that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government–business coalition" is one that is echoed by many observers today.

Former Harvard professor Paul H. Weaver uncovered the same inefficient and bureaucratic behavior from corporations during his stint at Ford Motor Corporation.

Free market economist Murray Rothbard thought highly of Kolko's work on the history of relations between big business and government.

As one profile, published in The American Conservative, put it:

"For Gabriel Kolko, the enemy has always been what sociologist Max Weber called 'political capitalism'—that is, 'the accumulation of private capital and fortunes via booty connected with politics.' In Kolko's eyes, 'America's capacity and readiness to intervene virtually anywhere' pose a grave danger both to the U.S. and the world. Kolko has made it his mission to study the historical roots of how this propensity for intervention came to be. He was also one of the first historians to take on the regulatory state in a serious way. Kolko's landmark work, The Triumph of Conservatism, is an attempt to link the Progressive Era policies of Theodore Roosevelt to the national-security state left behind in the wake of his cousin Franklin's presidency.

Kolko's indictment of what he calls 'conservatism' is not aimed at the Southern Agrarianism of Richard Weaver or the Old Right individualism of Albert Jay Nock.

In fact, Kolko's thesis—that big government and big business consistently colluded to regulate small American artisans and farmers out of existence—has much in common with libertarian and traditionalist critiques of the corporatist state.

The 'national progressivism' that Kolko attacks was, in his own words, 'the defense of business against the democratic ferment that was nascent in the states.' Coming of age in the '50s and '60s, Kolko saw firsthand the destruction of the 'permanent things' as the result of the merging of Washington, D.C., and Wall Street.

A sense of place and rootedness lingers just beneath the surface of his work."

But for Kolko, a social policy of "corporate liberalism" (or what Kolko preferred to call "political capitalism") shaped the mainstream agenda of all that was to follow afterwards in American society, from The New Deal (1930s) through to the post-World War II era of the Cold War (1947-1962), and onwards.

Kolko's argument that public policy was shaped by "corporate control of the liberal agenda" (rather than the liberal control of the corporate agenda), revised the old Progressive Era historiography of the "interests" versus the "people", which was now to be reinterpreted as a collaboration of "interests" and "people."

So too, with this revised version of recent American history, came the tacit recognition that this fulfilled the business community's unspoken, but deliberate, aim of stabilizing competition in the "free market."

This was an idea summarized by journalist and internet columnist Charles Burris when he argued that:"Rather than 'the people' being behind these 'progressive reforms', it was the very elite business interests themselves responsible, in an attempt to cartelize, centralize and control what was impossible due to the dynamics of a competitive and decentralized economy."

In retrospect, Kolko summarized this phase of his career when he wrote that:

Gabriel Morris Kolko (August 17, 1932 – May 19, 2014) was an American historian.

His research interests included American capitalism and political history, the Progressive Era, and U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century.

One of the best-known revisionist historians to write about the Cold War, he was also credited as "an incisive critic of the Progressive Era and its relationship to the American empire."

U.S. historian Paul Buhle summarized Kolko's career when he described him as "a major theorist of what came to be called Corporate Liberalism...[and] a very major historian of the Vietnam War and its assorted war crimes."

Kolko was of Jewish heritage.

He was born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of two teachers: Philip and Lillian (née Zadikow) Kolko.

Kolko attended Kent State University, studying American economic history (BA 1954).

Next he attended the University of Wisconsin, where he studied American social history (MS 1955) and was taught by William Appleman Williams.

By the time SLID published his first pamphlet, Distribution of Income in the United States, in 1955, Kolko had already completed a stint as the league's national vice chairman.

Following his graduation from Harvard, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at SUNY-Buffalo.

He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1962.

During these years, Kolko was active in the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID).

Having published on the US domestic scene, Kolko next turned to matters international, beginning in 1968 with The Politics of War, "the most thorough and extensive of the 'revisionist' views of American foreign policy during World War II."

Next came The Roots of American Foreign Policy (1969), a book that, according to Richard H. Immerman, "became must reading for a generation of diplomatic historians."

In 1970, he joined the history department of York University in Toronto, remaining an emeritus professor of history there until his death in 2014.

According to antiwar activist Eric Garris, Kolko first established his reputation as a historian writing about the "close connection between the government and big business throughout the Progressive Era and the Cold War [...] but broke new ground with his analysis of the corporate elite's successful defeat of the free market by corporatism."

Early in his career, beginning with his books The Triumph of Conservatism and Railroads and Regulation, Kolko used a revisionist approach as a way of analyzing history.

Soon he was considered a leading historian of the New Left, joining William Appleman Williams and James Weinstein in advancing the so-called "corporate liberalism" thesis in American historiography.