Historians of American business have consistently elected to follow one of two extreme paths. They have either been disciples of Ida Tarbell and the muckrakers, or they have trod mincingly behind the apologetic steps of Arundel Cotter's infamous "U.S. Steel: A Coporation with a Soul." Messers. Cochran and Miller, instructors at New York University, have instead attempted to write a chronicle of businesses as an ever-expanding institution. Their task is history, not propaganda.

An absence of judgment-passing does not, however, imply a pretense of artificial objectivity. Some of the practices of the Rockefellers and the Hewitts were felonics by any civilized standards. But, not content with mere condemnation, the authors of "The Age of Enterprise" make a stab at explanation. In their eyes, business for almost a century was a lusty young giant trying to conquer a continent. Like most lusty young giants, it managed to stage a few orgiastic riots.

Once the continent was subjugated, the giant went abroad, thrusting his fingers into pies scattered from one side of the carth to the other. In order to win protection for their investments, business men expanded their political activities from minor forays into the National Congress to a forth-right effort at capturing the whole government. The story of that seizure of power is told in all its squalid splendor.

Behind all the bustle lay a set of attitudes which most historians are prone to ignore. In this volume, however, the influence of such forces as Herbert, Spencer's evolutionary liberalism and Frederick Taylor's "time-and-motion-studies" are more accurately weighed than ever before. "The Age of Enterprise" is a tale both of what men did and of how they thought.

According to a jacket blurb, this is a "new kind of history." It isn't that so much as an attempt to extend an old and honorable type of history into a throughly discredited field. As a first approximation to an honest history of business, "The Age of Enterprise" far surpasses its predecessors.