Owen, Thomas C. 1943–

PERSONAL: Born April 23, 1943, in Milwaukee, WI; son of Cyril Maurice (a musician) and Eunice (a musician) Owen; married Sue Ann Matthews (a poet), August 29, 1964. Ethnicity: "American." Education: University of Wisconsin—Madison, B.A. (with honors), 1964; Harvard University, A.M., 1969, Ph.D., 1973.

ADDRESSES: Home—Cambridge, MA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, assistant professor, 1974–80, associate professor, 1980–90, professor, 1990–2000, Lewis, Katheryn, and Benjamin Price Professor of History, 2000–05; retired, 2005. Harvard University, associate of Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Military service: U.S. Naval Reserve, active duty, 1964–67; became lieutenant junior grade.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

WRITINGS:

Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855–1905, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1981.

The Corporation under Russian Law, 1800–1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

(Editor) Ruth A. Roosa, Russian Industrialists in an Era of Revolution: The Association of Industry and Trade, 1906–1917, M.E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 1997.

Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism: Fedor Chizhov and Corporate Enterprise in the Railroad Age, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2005.

(Editor, with Larissa G. Zakharova) Alexander Polunov, Russia in the Nineteenth Century: Autocracy, Reform, and Social Change, 1814–1914, translated from Russian by Marshall S. Shatz, M.E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Thomas C. Owen once told CA: "In my first book I attempted to explain the weakness of the middle class in Russia under tsarist rule, as this phenomenon helped prepare the way for the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917. My second and third books examined the hostility of the tsarist government toward the corporate form of economic activity and the weakness of Russian capitalism. My biography of the banker and railroad manager Fedor V. Chizhov, based on his 4,000-page diary, seeks to explain further the weakness of capitalist institutions in the Russian Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in contrast with those of Japan, which became far more dynamic and productive in spite of the greater cultural distance separating Japan from Europe, the original home of corporate capitalism. The cultural and political obstacles to what Max Weber called the 'rational-legal' mode of behavior, including many aspects of modern capitalism, remain prominent in Russian life, even after the fall of the Soviet Union.

"I believe that an understanding of the historically conditioned impediments to rational-legal norms in Russia is essential to any strategy aimed at overcoming them."