Gabriel Morris Kolko (August 17, 1932 – May 19, 2014) was an American historian. His research interests included American capitalism and political history, the

Progressive Era The Progressive Era (1890s–1920s) was a period in the United States characterized by multiple social and political reform efforts. Reformers during this era, known as progressivism in the United States, Progressives, sought to address iss ...

, and U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century. One of the best-known revisionist historians to write about the Cold War, he was also credited as "an incisive critic of the Progressive Era and its relationship to the American empire." U.S. historian

Paul Buhle Paul Merlyn Buhle (born September 27, 1944) is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of pop ...

summarized Kolko's career when he described him as "a major theorist of what came to be called Corporate Liberalism... nda very major historian of the

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam w ...

and its assorted war crimes."

Background and education

Kolko was of Jewish heritage. He was born in

Paterson, New Jersey Paterson ( ) is the largest City (New Jersey), city in and the county seat of Passaic County, New Jersey, Passaic County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. Kolko attended

Kent State University Kent State University (KSU) is a Public university, public research university in Kent, Ohio, United States. The university includes seven regional campuses in Northeast Ohio located in Kent State University at Ashtabula, Ashtabula, Kent State ...

, studying American economic history (BA 1954). Next he attended the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Uni ...

, where he studied American social history (MS 1955) and was taught by

William Appleman Williams William Appleman Williams (June 12, 1921 – March 5, 1990) was one of the 20th century's most prominent revisionist historians of American diplomacy. He achieved the height of his influence while on the faculty of the department of history at t ...

. He received his PhD from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 1962.''Contemporary Authors: First Revision, Volumes 5–8'', p. 655. During these years, Kolko was active in the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). By the time SLID published his first pamphlet, ''Distribution of Income in the United States'', in 1955, Kolko had already completed a stint as the league's national vice chairman. Following his graduation from Harvard, he taught at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

and at SUNY-Buffalo. In 1970, he joined the history department of

York University York University (), also known as YorkU or simply YU), is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's third-largest university, and it has approximately 53,500 students, 7,000 faculty and staff, ...

in Toronto, remaining an emeritus professor of history there until his death in 2014.

Career

According to antiwar activist Eric Garris, Kolko first established his reputation as a historian writing about the "close connection between the government and big business throughout the Progressive Era and the Cold War ..but broke new ground with his analysis of the corporate elite's successful defeat of the free market by corporatism." Early in his career, beginning with his books ''The Triumph of Conservatism'' and ''Railroads and Regulation'', Kolko used a revisionist approach as a way of analyzing history. Soon he was considered a leading historian of the

New Left The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer ...

, joining William Appleman Williams and James Weinstein in advancing the so-called "corporate liberalism" thesis in American historiography. This was a thesis that disputed the "widely held view that government regulates business, arguing that, instead, business steers government", and Kolko used it to analyze how America's social, economic, and political life was shaped beginning with the Progressive Era (1900–1920). But for Kolko, a social policy of "corporate liberalism" (or what Kolko preferred to call "political capitalism") shaped the mainstream agenda of all that was to follow afterwards in American society, from The New Deal (1930s) through to the post-World War II era of the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

(1947–1962), and onwards. Kolko's argument that public policy was shaped by "corporate control of the liberal agenda" (rather than the liberal control of the corporate agenda), revised the old Progressive Era historiography of the "interests" ''versus'' the "people", which was now to be reinterpreted as a ''collaboration'' of "interests" and "people." So too, with this revised version of recent American history, came the tacit recognition that this fulfilled the business community's unspoken, but deliberate, aim of stabilizing competition in the "free market." This was an idea summarized by journalist and internet columnist Charles Burris when he argued that: In retrospect, Kolko summarized this phase of his career when he wrote that: Kolko argued that

big business Big business involves large-scale corporate-controlled financial or business activities. As a term, it describes activities that run from "huge transactions" to the more general "doing big things". In corporate jargon, the concept is commonly ...

turned to the government for support because of its inefficiency and inability to prevent the economy veering between boom and bust, which aroused fears that the concomitant discontent amongst the general public would lead to the imposition of popular constraints upon business. Its embrace of government led to their intertwinement, with business becoming the dominant strand..

Historian of the Progressive Era

Kolko, in particular, broke new ground with his critical history of the

. He suggested that free enterprise and competition were vibrant and expanding during the first two decades of the 20th century; thereafter, however, "the corporate elite—the

House of Morgan J.P. Morgan & Co. is an American financial institution specialized in investment banking, asset management and private banking founded by financier J. P. Morgan in 1871. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, the company is now a subsidi ...

, for example—turned to government intervention when it realized in the waning 19th century that competition was too unruly to guarantee

market share Market share is the percentage of the total revenue or sales in a Market (economics), market that a company's business makes up. For example, if there are 50,000 units sold per year in a given industry, a company whose sales were 5,000 of those ...

." This behavior is known as

corporatism Corporatism is an ideology and political system of interest representation and policymaking whereby Corporate group (sociology), corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, come toget ...

, but Kolko preferred ''political capitalism'', "the merger of the economic and political structures on behalf of the greater interests of capitalism". Kolko's thesis "that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government–business coalition" is one that is echoed by many observers today. Former Harvard professor Paul H. Weaver uncovered the same inefficient and bureaucratic behavior from corporations during his stint at Ford Motor Corporation. Free market economist

Murray Rothbard Murray Newton Rothbard (; March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist of the Austrian School,Ronald Hamowy, ed., 2008, The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism', Cato Institute, Sage, , p. 62: "a leading economist of the Austri ...

thought highly of Kolko's work on the history of relations between big business and government. As one profile, published in ''

The American Conservative ''The American Conservative'' (''TAC'') is a bimonthly magazine published by the American Ideas Institute. The magazine was founded in 2002 by Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell and Taki Theodoracopulos to advance an anti- neoconservative perspect ...

'', put it:

Historian of U.S. foreign relations and the Vietnam War

Having published on the US domestic scene, Kolko next turned to matters international, beginning in 1968 with ''The Politics of War'', "the most thorough and extensive of the 'revisionist' views of American foreign policy during World War II.". Next came ''The Roots of American Foreign Policy'' (1969), a book that, according to Richard H. Immerman, "became must reading for a generation of diplomatic historians.". In this work, Kolko contended that the American failure to win the

demonstrated the inapplicability of the US policy of containment. ''The Limits of Power'' (1972), co-authored with his wife, Joyce, looked at US foreign policy in the crucial postwar years, when American power was at its peak, one without historical precedent. ''Limits'' is described by ''The Cambridge History of the Cold War'' (2010), as a]mong the most important analyses of US policy and the origins of the Cold War".. "Even among more traditionally-minded scholars," noted one unsympathetic historian, "the Kolkos have been credited with considerable insight and praised for the breadth of their research." Arch-traditionalist John Lewis Gaddis, for example, conceded that ''The Limits of Power'' was "an important book.". Kolko next moved on to his country's war in Vietnam, a conflagration with which he and Joyce were deeply preoccupied at home and abroad; the couple were in

Huế Huế (formerly Thừa Thiên Huế province) is the southernmost coastal Municipalities of Vietnam, city in the North Central Coast region, the Central Vietnam, Central of Vietnam, approximately in the center of the country. It borders Quảng ...

when North Vietnamese forces entered

Saigon Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) ('','' TP.HCM; ), commonly known as Saigon (; ), is the most populous city in Vietnam with a population of around 14 million in 2025. The city's geography is defined by rivers and canals, of which the largest is Saigo ...

, and were granted the privilege of announcing the event over local radio. Kolko would publish two books on the Vietnam War and its aftermath. ''Anatomy of a War'' (1985) looked at the war itself, its prologue and its effects. ''Anatomy'' would place its author alongside the likes of George Kahin as a leading writer of the postrevisionist, or synthesis, school. This group of historians suggested, among other things, that the revisionist school was wrong in speculating that the United States could have won the war. In ''Anatomy'', Kolko became "the first American historian to establish a distinction between Diệm and Thiệu, on the one hand, and the population of the Saigon milieu on the other. It might even be said that he was the first to insist that there was such a milieu and to attempt a systematic study of its inhabitants." One sympathetic reviewer notes that Kolko's work on Vietnam has been relegated to the margins of the Vietnam War literature. ''Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace'' (1997) cast a look back at developments in Vietnam in the wake of the war, and how the Vietnamese communists ran the country. Kolko's assessment of their efforts was rather less than positive. Kolko became a founding editor of the ''

Journal of Contemporary Asia The ''Journal of Contemporary Asia'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering Asian studies. It was established in 1970 and is published 5 times a year by Routledge. The editor-in-chief is Kevin Hewison (University of North Carolina at Chapel H ...

'' in 1970, remaining on the board until 1998. Kolko was not without his critics. Gaddis Smith once described him, along with Williams, as at "the forefront of revisionist scholars" and yet "essentially pamphleteers".. Others said his leftist political sympathies had a "distorting" effect on his work.

Political views

Kolko was a self-declared leftist and an anticapitalist. Nonetheless, Kolko's revisionist historical accounts gained favor with several libertarian capitalists from the United States, often to the chagrin of Kolko, who, at least as late as 1973, actively tried to distance himself from connections to that particular strain of libertarian thinking as it developed in the US. Regarding socialism, Kolko wrote in ''After Socialism'' (2006) that, both as theory and as movement, it is "essentially dead," its analysis and practice have both been failures, and it "simply inherited most of the nineteenth century's myopia, adding to the illusions of social thought". He maintained, however, that capitalism is neither a rational nor a stable basis for a peaceful society: "Given its practice and consequences, opposition to what is loosely termed capitalism—the status quo in all its dimensions—is far more justified today than ever. Precisely because of this, a more durable and effective alternative to capitalism is even more essential." As sociologist

Frank Furedi Frank Furedi (; born 3 May 1947) is a Hungarian Canadians, Hungarian-Canadian academic and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent. He is well known for his work on culture of fear, sociology of fear, education, therapy culture ...

has argued: " olko'sscathing condemnation of American foreign policy, like his condemnation of the crudity of Maoist rhetoric, stand as a testimony to his intellectual and political integrity." Georgetown historian David S. Painter similarly wrote that "while very critical of Marxist and Communist movements and regimes, Kolko also counts among the human, social, and economic costs of capitalism the 'repeated propensity' of capitalist states to go to war." Kolko was a strong supporter of

North Vietnam North Vietnam, officially the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV; ; VNDCCH), was a country in Southeast Asia from 1945 to 1976, with sovereignty fully recognized in 1954 Geneva Conference, 1954. A member of the communist Eastern Bloc, it o ...

, but he was opposed to

Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ( 187021 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until Death and state funeral of ...

and

Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Dzhugashvili; 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, his death in 1953. He held power as General Secret ...

and was scathingly dismissive of

Mao Zedong Mao Zedong pronounced ; traditionally Romanization of Chinese, romanised as Mao Tse-tung. (26December 18939September 1976) was a Chinese politician, revolutionary, and political theorist who founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) in ...

and his thinking. Kolko regarded the result of the creation of Israel as "abysmal". In his view,

Zionism Zionism is an Ethnic nationalism, ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in History of Europe#From revolution to imperialism (1789–1914), Europe in the late 19th century that aimed to establish and maintain a national home for the ...

produced "a Sparta that traumatized an already artificially divided region," "a small state with a military ethos that pervades all aspects of t culture, its politics and, above all, its response to the existence of Arabs in its midst and at its borders." Overall, his conclusion was that there is "simply no rational reason" that justifies Israel's creation. "The US has never been able to translate its superior arms into political success, and that decisive failure is inherent in everything it attempts," remarked Kolko in the context of the

Iraq War The Iraq War (), also referred to as the Second Gulf War, was a prolonged conflict in Iraq lasting from 2003 to 2011. It began with 2003 invasion of Iraq, the invasion by a Multi-National Force – Iraq, United States-led coalition, which ...

, just after

George W. Bush George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who was the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Bush family and the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he i ...

's Mission Accomplished speech. He predicted that Iraq's "regionalism and internecine ethnic strife will produce years of instability." Similarly for Afghanistan: "As in Vietnam, the US will win battles, but it has no strategy for winning this war."

Personal life

Amsterdam_-_Wittenburgergracht_79_RM_6440

Kolko married Joyce Manning in 1955, and the couple remained together until her death in 2012. She had been a collaborator in his writings, such as ''The Limits of Power''. Upon retirement, Kolko emigrated to

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...

, where he had a home and continued to work on his historical assessments of modern warfare, particularly the Vietnam War. He was a regular contributor to the political newsletter ''

CounterPunch ''CounterPunch'' is a left-wing online magazine. Content includes a free section published five days a week as well as a subscriber-only area called CounterPunch+, where original articles are published weekly. ''CounterPunch'' is based in the Un ...

'' during the final 15 years of his life. He was interested in

mycology Mycology is the branch of biology concerned with the study of fungus, fungi, including their Taxonomy (biology), taxonomy, genetics, biochemistry, biochemical properties, and ethnomycology, use by humans. Fungi can be a source of tinder, Edible ...

and a fan of Giovanni Kapsperger. Kolko died aged 81 at his home in Amsterdam at Oostelijke Eilanden on May 19, 2014. He was suffering from a degenerative neurological disorder and chose

euthanasia Euthanasia (from : + ) is the practice of intentionally ending life to eliminate pain and suffering. Different countries have different Legality of euthanasia, euthanasia laws. The British House of Lords Select committee (United Kingdom), se ...

, permitted under Dutch law. He left a considerable amount of money to the Nederlandse Bachvereniging.

Selected publications

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * Based on his PhD dissertation. * * *

References

Notes

Bibliography

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

External links

Gabriel Kolko articles at Counterpunch

with electricpolitics.com

with ''

Der Spiegel (, , stylized in all caps) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of about 724,000 copies in 2022, it is one of the largest such publications in Europe. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...

''
The future of the post World War II American Empire
with Scott Horton
2012 interview
with Antiwar.com {{DEFAULTSORT:Kolko, Gabriel 1932 births 2014 deaths American foreign policy writers American historians American political writers American socialists Cold War historians Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada Harvard University alumni Historians of American foreign relations Historians of the United States Jewish American historians American male non-fiction writers New Jersey socialists Ohio socialists Massachusetts socialists Jewish socialists Kent State University alumni University of Pennsylvania faculty University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni Historians of the Vietnam War Academic staff of York University Max Weber scholars