Although the idea of "postcapitalist society" was promoted by Western European social-democratic and liberal intellectuals in the decades after World War II, many postwar American social theorists also worked under the conviction that a gradual but dramatic transformation was leading, in their own time, to a society that eluded conventional definitions of capitalism. Talcott Parsons's sociology, Robert Dahl's early postwar pluralism, David Riesman's social psychology, the idea of postindustrial society, and even New Left ideas of a "postscarcity" radicalism all manifested, in various ways, such expectations of change. The vision they clung to--of a transitional order that remained hard to name but pointed, at least potentially, to a new kind of social economy, beyond the unalloyed rule of market exchange--descended in turn from interwar traditions of social reform and cultural criticism first fueled by radical anticipations of a "new order" in the late teens. From the years of its interwar formation to its exhaustion in the 1970s, the postcapitalist vision--now utterly eclipsed by the rehabilitation and celebration of capitalism--figured prominently in a current of American social liberalism spanning much of the past century. Yet, over its long career, the postcapitalist vision proved profoundly ambiguous, helping to sustain a robust reformist imagination right through the middle of the twentieth century, while also serving to subdue radical criticism by vesting too much confidence in the progressive potential of the socioeconomic status quo.

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