Robert A. Brady (economist)

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Robert A. Brady (1901-1964), an American economist who analyzed the dynamics of technological change and the structure of business enterprise. Brady developed a potent analysis of fascism and other emerging authoritarian economic and cultural practices.^[1] His essential work is “about power and the organization of power around the logic of technology as operated under capitalism”^[2], yielding insights and understanding of modern society’s careening path between enhancing or destroying “life and culture”.

In The Sprit and Structure of German Fascism (1937) and Business as a System of Power (1943), important works in historical and comparative economics, Brady traced the rise of bureaucratic centralism in Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the United States; and the emergence of an authoritarian model of growth and development for the study of Third World economies.

Brady worked his way into and through college, doing undergraduate studies at Reed College. He began his graduate work at Cornell and went on to Columbia, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1929. He had been exposed to Veblen's thought all along the way, most systematically at Columbia, where he worked closely with John Maurice Clark. Brady took Veblen’s work as the point of departure for his own professional work. He taught at New York University for two years while completing his dissertation and then, in 1929, joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.^[3]

[edit] Works

Brady, Robert A. “Industrial Standardization.” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1929
The Rationalization Movement in German Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933
The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism. New York: Viking, 1937
Business as a System of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943
“The Economic Impact of Imperial Germany: Industrial Policy.” In The Tasks of Economic History (Supplement No. 3 to the Journal of Economic History) (December 1943).
Planning and Technology. Mimeo, University of California at Berkeley Library, 1950
Crisis in Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950
The Citizen's Stake in Price Control. Paterson, N.J., Littlefield Adams, 1952.
Organization, Automation, and Society: The Scientific Revolution in Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961.