Cox, Oliver

COX, OLIVER (1901-1974). In an academic career that spanned some thirty-five years at Tuskegee Institute, Wiley College, Lincoln University in Missouri, and Wayne State University, Oliver Cox made two significant contributions to the social sciences: an early materialist explanation of racial stratification; and a history of capitalism from late-medieval Europe to the mid-twentieth century. He was a major contributor to the worlds-systems scholarship.

Oliver Cromwell Cox was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. After completing high school in the British colony, he joined two of his older brothers in Chicago where they had settled some years earlier. He intended to earn a law degree in the United States and then return to Trinidad to practice. That plan changed when he was diagnosed with polio in his senior year at Northwestern University. Fearing that the impending constraints on his mobility would hinder his legal career, Cox decided to pursue an academic one. With the onset of the Great Depression, he enrolled in the economics program at the University of Chicago. However, when his professors could not explain the causes of the unprecedented economic downturn to his satisfaction, he left the program in 1932 with a MA and transferred to the department of sociology. Cox was awarded his doctorate in sociology in 1937.

It was during the ten years that he spent at Tuskegee Institute and Wiley College in eastern Texas that Cox developed his theory of racial stratification. He presented it in his classic, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948). In contrast to those theorists who explained racial hierarchies as a consequence of conquest or the cultural predilections of the socially-dominant population, Cox looked to economic factors and to the relative sizes of the two populations. If racial identification and interaction operate differently in historical and contemporary Jamaica and the United States, these differences had little to do with their respective English legacies and more with their contrasting demographic legacies in capitalist contexts. On similar comparative grounds, Cox contested the characterization of racial stratification, particularly the US South, as a caste system, arguing that whereas the Indian caste system was elaborated by priest aristocrats millennia ago to maintain an aristocratic social order, southern racial practices were developed by agrarian capitalists to super-exploit black labor and to undermine potential working-class solidarity between black and white workers. Moreover, unlike a caste system that is based on the social instructions of sacred texts, the North American racial hierarchy contravened the principles of its foundational secular text, the constitution, and was consistently challenged by Black Americans, even at the risk of death.

In the decade after the publication of Caste, Class, and Race, Cox turned his attention to the origins and structure of the capitalist system, the roots of racial strife as he saw it. The results of his findings were two volumes – The Foundations of Capitalism (1959) and Capitalism and American Leadership (1962) – and a retrospective work, Capitalism as a System (1964). What is distinctive about Cox’s theory of capitalism is its emphasis on the means by which certain powers come to monopolize the trade of other societies. To those powers that succeeded in establishing these lucrative commercial arrangements, Cox gave the names leaders and subsidiaries. To those societies with trade relations owned and managed by leaders and subsidiaries, Cox gave the names progressives, dependents, and passives. In his volumes, Cox traced capitalist leadership from Venice to the United States, with extensive discussions of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, and of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In light of the privileged position of capitalist leader and subsidiary powers, Cox argued that the working classes of those societies would not be the ones to advance socialism, either domestically or internationally. That impetus would come rather from the ranks of peasants and wage earners in the progressive, dependent, and passive societies. This conclusion led Cox to question the effectiveness of even social justice movements in capitalist leader and subsidiary societies, a position that put him at odds with Black Power advocates, among others, in the late-1960s and early-1970s. Cox assessed those movements in his posthumously published, Race Relations: Elements and Social Dynamics (1976).

Oliver Cox died in 1974 in Detroit.

McAuley, Christopher. The Mind of Oliver C. Cox. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004.

Oliver Cromwell Cox Papers at the Walter P. Reuther Library. Wayne States University. http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/14325.