Carnegie
11/29/2010 18:45
Harold C. Livesay
Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business
1975
(part of the Library of American Biography, edited by Oscar Handlin)
LIvesay says Carnegie’s lifetime “spanned two worlds, before and after mechanization,” and as a result “his actions continuously manifested an ambivalence rooted in his double exposure to the old world” of peasant Scotland and the new world of industrial America. Carnegie’s business innovations and understanding of increasing returns to scale and demand elasticity were modern, but “his attitudes towards politics, society, culture, and...even the ownership structure of his business exhibited the old world ideas he had absorbed as a boy in Scotland.” (13) Carnegie brought “cost control, low prices, low profits, and high volume” to American business, Livesay says, which turned “America into the world’s richest society.” (189) Livesay makes the contradictions in Carnegie’s character into metaphors for American history.
Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business
1975
(part of the Library of American Biography, edited by Oscar Handlin)
LIvesay says Carnegie’s lifetime “spanned two worlds, before and after mechanization,” and as a result “his actions continuously manifested an ambivalence rooted in his double exposure to the old world” of peasant Scotland and the new world of industrial America. Carnegie’s business innovations and understanding of increasing returns to scale and demand elasticity were modern, but “his attitudes towards politics, society, culture, and...even the ownership structure of his business exhibited the old world ideas he had absorbed as a boy in Scotland.” (13) Carnegie brought “cost control, low prices, low profits, and high volume” to American business, Livesay says, which turned “America into the world’s richest society.” (189) Livesay makes the contradictions in Carnegie’s character into metaphors for American history.
