Everything about Gabriel Kolko totally explained
Gabriel Kolko (born 1932) is a
historian and author.
Kolko received his Ph.D. from
Harvard in 1962. Following graduation he taught at the
University of Pennsylvania and at
SUNY-Buffalo. He joined the
York University History Department in 1970 and is now an emeritus professor of history there.
Kolko's research interests include American political history, the
Progressive Era, and foreign policy in the twentieth century.
Kolko was considered a leading historian of the early
New Left, joining
William Appleman Williams and
James Weinstein in advancing the
corporate liberalism idea whereby the old Progressive historiography of the "interests" versus the "people" was reinterpreted as a collaboration of interests aiming towards stabilizing competition [Novick,439]. According to Grob and Billias, "Kolko believed that large-scale units turned to government regulation precisely because of their inefficiency" and that the "Progressive movement - far from being antibusiness - was actually a movement that defined the general welfare in terms of the well-being of business" [Groband Billias, 38]. Kolko, in particular, broke new ground with his critical history of the
Progressive Era. He discovered that free enterprise and competition were vibrant and expanding during the first two decades of the twentieth century; meanwhile, corporations reacted to the free market by turning to government to protect their inherent inefficiency from the discipline of market conditions. This behavior is known as
corporatism, but Kolko dubbed it "political capitalism." Kolko's thesis "that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government-business coalition" is one that's echoed by conservative economists today [Groband Billias, 39]. Former Harvard professor
Paul H. Weaver uncovered the same inefficient and bureaucratic behavior from corporations during his stint at
Ford Motor Corporation (see Weaver's
The Suicidal Corporation [1988]).
Gabriel Kolko is also an important contributor to the historiography of the
Vietnam War. In
The Roots of American Foreign Policy (1969), Kolko contended that the American failure to 'win' the war demonstrated the inapplicability of the US policy of containment. Later, in
The Anatomy of a War (1985), Kolko became, along with writers such as
George Kahin, a leading writer of the postrevisionist, or synthesis, school, which suggested, among other things, that the revisionist school was wrong in speculating that the United States could have won the war.
He was also a proponent of the, since discredited, Soviet version of the massacre of Polish officers known as the
Katyn Massacre.
Kolko is a regular contributor to the political newsletter
Counterpunch.
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