“What we have done is … to put business in its broader political and cultural setting…. We are not out to defend business, but to try to do an impartial, scholarly investigation of an important American institution.”

 – Henrietta Larson (1894–1983), Harvard business historian

For many decades, corporate histories were dominated by simplistic notions of big-is-bad and capitalist exploitation. Yes, Ida Tarbell documented many innovations and economies from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, but she jumped to examples to paint the Standard Trust as ultimately evil in its exploitation of competitors.

Much “Robber Baron” history followed in the decades after Tarbell, failing to comprehend the advantages of industrialization and to differentiate free-market entrepreneurship on the one hand from corporate/government cronyism on the other. As Harvard business historian Thomas McCraw would later explain:

Without the benefit of a vocabulary that distinguished conceptually between center and peripheral firms, productive and allocative efficiency, vertical and horizontal integration, economies of scale and transaction cost, these observers had only their personal sensibilities and political ideologies to guide them.

“Gore the Policy Apostle can utter statements that most colleagues would regard as wildly impolitic: calling for elimination of the internal combustion engine by 2020 or denouncing excessive consumerism in Western nations as evidence of a ‘dysfunctional civilization.’ Gore the Politician, say some of these people, is prone to brooding over the electoral risks of his beliefs.”

“… environmentalists note that the [Clinton/Gore] administration since [the Kyoto Protocol of 1997] has done little to build support for the treaty’s passage or to reduce U.S. emissions.”

 – John F. Harris and Ellen Nakashima, “Gore’s Greenness Fades,” Washington Post, February 28, 2000.

A niche of MasterResource is remembering the past to inform the present in energy/environmental policy debates. With a strong worldview and historical perspective, this emphasis is a rich vein to mine.…

“Under [Ken] Lay’s direction, Enron would restart the solar industry [in 1995], rescue the US wind industry [in 1997], and help legitimize the climate issue.”

“Enron saw green in green energy. Wind and solar as primary energies had new public policy rationales and powerful political constituencies. Specifically, global warming from fossil-fuel usage (via the enhanced greenhouse effect) was the new neo-Malthusian scare, and post–Gulf War concerns over energy security put petroleum on the defensive. Even more than this, renewables had public cachet for an energy company, particularly one that prized publicity and promoted a momentum stock.”

– Bradley, Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years, pp. 530, 528, respectively.

Rent-seeking … strategic uses of government intervention…. corporativism. Many terms have described business lobbying within political capitalism where the political means replaces the economic means to financial success The result is bad profit, defined by classical-liberal entrepreneur Charles Koch as corporate income not created but politically obtained and thereby lost to the creators in the economic system.…

“We still have much to learn about and learn from Enron’s remarkable history to understand its meaning for twenty-first-century American capitalism.”

 —Malcolm S. Salter, emeritus professor, Harvard Business School; author of Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron’s Collapse (2008)

This week, Scrivener Publishing and John Wiley & Sons begin shipments of a book that I have been working on for many years, along with my research assistant/editor Roger Donway. We searched and searched for this or that. We debated paragraphs, sentences, even words. And we never cut a corner for what is easily, between the two of us and copy-editor Evelyn Pyle, a 10,000-hour book. [1]

Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years, 1984–1996 is Book 3 in my tetralogy on Political Capitalism inspired by the rise and fall of Enron.…