ABSTRACT

It has never been easy to interpret the work of Charles A. Beard using traditional ideological categories from either American or Euro­ pean political thought. Political theorists and intellectual historians have identified Beard as both a Jeffersonian and a Hamiltonian. Oth­ ers have described him as a Progressive, a liberal, a corporate-liberal, a Tory-radical, and a Marxian socialist.1 Notably, with the exception of those few scholars misguided enough to view Beard as a Jeffersonian, most students of Beard’s political thought have defended their claims by pointing to Beard’s growing enthusiasm for a planned economy during the 1930s. However, as George Soule noted early in the contro­ versies over Beard’s work, the concept of planning was an omnibus word during the 1930s that was given “a different content by any number of its advocates, practitioners, and opponents.” In a political sense, the concept was attractive during the decade because it vaguely denoted one’s opposition to laissez-faire capitalism without “involv­ ing the proponent in endless arguments about specific panaceas” for the Great Depression.2 In substance, therefore, discussions of eco­ nomic planning during this period included everything from Wilsonian liberalism to communism and fascism. Thus, it is no surprise that previous efforts to locate and evaluate Beard’s work on the basis of this concept have never proven wholly satisfactory. Furthermore, Beard made little effort to clarify this ambiguity in most instances, since he frequently referred to his conception of a planned economy as indus­ trial democracy or collectivist democracy.