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

Alternative Tracks provides a novel interpretation of industrialization and political development in the United States. Focusing on the critical case of railroads, Gerald Berk shows that alternative forms of economic organization and governmental regulation existed in the late nineteenth century. Constitutional choices, not technological imperatives or economic interests, determined the outcome in the twentieth century: a centralized industry regulated according to liberal principles of redistribution. Alternative Tracks reveals a nineteenth-century rival to this political economy — an equally efficient and more democratic system of regional railroads regulated according to republican principles.

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Conventional wisdom has it that the industrial centralization of the US between the Civil War and World War I was driven by the efficiency imperatives of modern technology, with the state hanging onto the rear. Using the railroads as an example, however, Berk (government and international studies, U. of Notre Dame) argues that economic development could have gone in a number of directions, but was highly shaped by interactions with the several branches of government. A main concern of the government, he says, were the constitutional forms of justice relating to the corporations and the market. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Gerald Berk is associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon.