Kindred Strangers: The Uneasy Relationship Between Politics and Business In America.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

A popular subject of debate within academic circles is "American exceptionalism," or why the United States declines to conform to academic theory. Exceptionalism is said to characterize America's relatively low level of class tension, versus the high level theoreticians expect. Exceptionalism is said to run through the U.S. labor movement, which differs from its European counterparts by rarely being violent, by praising market economics and by supporting military policy. (European strikers still routinely skirmish with riot police, destroy equipment, and shut down essential public services - tactics safely tenured academic theoreticians seem to look on with nostalgic longing, but that American labor leaders consider irresponsible. As for hard-hat support of the Vietnam War - or the labor states of Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio twice voting for Reagan - labor scholars find such defection too painful for words.) Whatever it is, exceptionalism is invoked to explain why Americans are more religious than Europeans, why they trust individual initiative more than government, why they rarely resent wealth, and various other departures from what contemporary social psychoanalysis predicts capitalist culture should be like.

Exceptionalism is state-business relations is the subject of Kindred Strangers, an admirable and amenable, if slow-moving, book by David Vogel, a professor of business ethics at Berkeley. In Europe, government and corporations have cozy shared-bed relationships built on the statist model of capitalism. European corporate leaders employ the state to plow the road for them in more ways the one, while legislatures pass few restrictions that business leaders have not privately assented to: The typical European CEO views government as a patron. In the United States, by contrast, business leaders almost uniformly despise government, and relations with regulators are adversarial. The sorts of business-politics interactions that in Europe are done in the back room over Armagnac are, in America, done in lawsuits and at press conferences.

Why do American business leaders have such hostile intercourse with the political sphere? Vogel roots his answer in the 19th century. "The 1840s and 1850s are the critical period in the history of the American business system," he writes. Then, business worked without government alliance, unlike in Britain or the Netherlands, where crown-chartered corporations were the great money-makers, and government...