Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865-1917

At the heart of Alternative Tracks is the historical relationship between democracy and the modern corporation. The long-held view is that industrial centralization and corporate hierarchy were driven by the efficiency imperatives of modern technology. Collective choice and the state, it followed, had little lasting influence on the development of corporate capitalism. In Alternative Tracks Gerald Berk uses the critical case of the railroad industry to show that economic development in the United States did not follow this deterministic course. Instead, it was open to any number of forms and was significantly affected by its interactions with the state. Moreover, the role of government depended less on the exercise of interest-group or class power than it did on the protracted struggle over constitutional norms of fairness and justice relating to corporations and the market. Mediated through the courts, Congress, and the bureaucracy, this struggle had profound effects on the organization of railroads, the pattern of urbanization, and the practice of business regulation. Berk concludes that our understanding of historical political economy must take markets, technologies, and organizational forms as the contingent outcomes of such constitutional politics, rather than as premeditated contexts for state and economic development.