Abstract

"The Challenge to Managerialism and the Corporate Politics of the Late Twentieth Century"

Kyle Williams, University of Virginia (williams.kyle.edward@gmail.com)

“There is no such thing as a corporate responsibility,” Henry Manne told a Senate committee in 1976. Business executives and directors, he argued, had no right to control large corporations for any political or social interest. A legal scholar and conservative activist, Manne disseminated a radical brand of law and economics ideas to law professors and federal jurists through educational programs at luxury resorts between the 1970s and 1990s.
Manne was not alone—but not in ways that he expected. His greatest enemies of the late 1960s and 1970s were leftist and liberals like Saul Alinsky and Ralph Nader who wanted to make large corporations accountable to the interests of social movements. Black power, environmental, consumer protection, and feminist activists believed that business leaders needed more accountability. A transformation of corporate governance, they said, was necessary to replace the unaccountable, if liberal, manager.
Manne represented a long-brewing right-wing perspective on political economy. Left-liberal activists had suddenly burst onto the scene. Both had something in common with a third group. An emergent cohort of managers and financial consultants had come to believe in the 1960s and 1970s that the older model of the long-term growth and conglomerated-industrialism had become obsolete. All three groups helped to delegitimize the decades-long regime of liberal managerialism that had emerged in the years immediately following World War II.
Building onarchival research and on other histories of capitalism, my paper presents an interpretive problem. The late 1960s and 1970s represented the greatest challenge to the power of corporate capitalism since the New Deal. But this era of protest was followed by the rising power of Wall Street. My paper seeks to give attention to how an unlikely combination of financial managers and consultants and right-wing and left-wing activists contributed to the new age of shareholder value.