Education
Brady worked his way into and through college, doing undergraduate studies in history, philosophy, and mathematics at Reed College, where he graduated in 1923.
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Robert Alexander
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Career
He became an Instructor in European History upon his graduation. He began his graduate work at Cornell and went on to Columbia, where he completed his Doctor of Philosophy 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.
During his years of graduate study, he taught at Cornell, Hunter College, Cooper Union, and New York University. In 1929, Brady joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.
Brady served as Chief of the Standards Division, Consumers Advisory Board, National Recovery Administration and on the staff of the National Resources Planning Board during the New Deal. He was one of the founders of Consumers Union, its vice president during its formative period, and head of Western Consumers Union.
Brady suffered a stroke in 1952 and was an invalid until his death in 1963.
Politics
Brady developed a potent analysis of fascism and other emerging authoritarian economic and cultural practices. In The Spirit 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 economic growth and development.
Views
His essential work is “about power and the organization of power around the logic of technology as operated under capitalism”, yielding insights and understanding of modern society’s careening path between enhancing or destroying “life and culture”.
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Born
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Died
April 27, 1963 (aged 62)