Against the Profit Motive

The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940

Parrillo Nicholas R.

In America today, a public official's lawful income consists of a salary. But until a century ago, the law frequently authorized officials to make money on a profit-seeking basis. Prosecutors won a fee for each defendant convicted. Tax collectors received a cut of each evasion uncovered. Naval officers took a reward for each ship sunk. The list goes on. This book is the first to document American government's "for-profit" past, to discover how profit-seeking defined officials' relationship to the citizenry, and to explain how lawmakers – by banishing the profit motive in favour of the salary – transformed that relationship forever.

About the author

Nicholas R. Parrillo is associate professor of law at Yale University.

Reviews

"Nicholas Parrillo's 'Against the Profit Motive' represents the best in a new generation of source-based, reality-based legal history. Forgoing yet another discussion of the usual cases and well-worn theory and historiography, Parrillo takes us somewhere new. Through exemplary and tireless research in previously untapped primary sources, Parrillo takes us deep into the inner workings of early American governance and meticulously reconstructs a previously unknown historical world of public-private bounties, fees, rewards, prizes, gifts, profits, and moieties that made that all-important machinery seem to 'go of itself'. Together with his Yale colleague Jerry Mashaw, Parrillo is doing nothing less than rewriting the history of the early American state" – William Novak, University of Michigan Law School