Discover the Best Books Written by Gabriel Kolko

Gabriel Morris Kolko was an American historian. His research interests included American capitalism and political history, the Progressive Era, and U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century. One of the best-known revisionist historians to write about the Cold War, he had also been credited as "an incisive critic of the Progressive Era and its relationship to the American empire." U.S. historian Paul Buhle summarized Kolko's career when he described him as "a major theorist of what came to be called Corporate Liberalism...and a very major historian of the Vietnam War and its assorted war crimes."

Kolko was of Jewish heritage. He was born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of two teachers: Philip and Lillian (née Zadikow) Kolko. Kolko attended Kent State University, where he studied American economic history (BA 1954). Next, he attended the University of Wisconsin, where he studied American social history (MS 1955). He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1962.

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 serving as the league's national vice chairman. Following his graduation from Harvard, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at SUNY-Buffalo. In 1970, he joined the history department of York University in Toronto, remaining an emeritus professor of history there until his death in 2014.

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 book 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, 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." 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 afterward in American society, from The New Deal (the 1930s) through to the post-World War II era of the Cold War (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: Rather than "the people" being behind these "progressive reforms," it was the very elite business interests themselves responsible in an attempt to cartelize, centralize and control what was impossible due to the dynamics of a competitive and decentralized economy.

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, 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 during the final 15 years of his life. He was interested in mycology and a fan of Kapsberger.

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