ABSTRACT
During the last quarter of the nineteen century, laissez-faire liberalism in the United States both justified and promoted the tremendous proliferation of corporate enterprise. This new force, however, ordained the demise of nineteenth-century individualism. Dedicated to economic concentration, corporate enterprise rapidly restructured the economic foundations of American capitalism, transforming social relationships and the conditions of political action. Corporate capitalism evolved as a social and political force from an economic foundation restructured to meet its needs. In The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly expounded the thesis that changes in the American economy from the close of the Civil War to the turn of the century had not only given rise to an extreme concentration of industrial and financial wealth, but had also dramatically transformed social and political relationships. Croly's analysis of corporate power, his theory of democracy, and his program for reform constitute a watershed in twentieth-century American political thought.
