bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Justus Möser and the Conservative Critique of Early Modern Capitalism
Authors: Muller Jerry Z.
Published: December 2008

As Albert Hirschman has recently observed, critics and advocates of a capitalist, market economy are forever reinventing the wheel, repeating arguments made by their forebears decades and sometimes centuries ago. Take the following observations of a social critic—let his name, for the moment, remain a mystery—as he casts his gaze upon the cultural influence of the market. New forms of capitalist economic organization, he observes, have led to the disappearance of the link between ownership of property and civic responsibility. Men are so involved in acquisition, he laments, that they no longer have time for political concerns and public life. He sees an eclipse of civic virtue, a diminishing willingness to sacrifice private concerns for the public good. Changes in social structure brought about by capitalist development are no less worrisome. The process of the market is leading to the replacement of once-independent producers by men who are mere specialized cogs in a productive machine. The cultural consequences of capitalism are cause for despair. The ever-shifting, international fashions on which the market thrives are destroying authentic, indigenous culture. New forms of capitalist merchandising prosper by arousing novel desires, creating tastes for consumer goods which people do not really need, and leading to excessive expenditure which is bankrupting the economy. Most pernicious are unprecedented marketing techniques which undermine the steadying influence of the family by invading the household itself.
Alltagsgeschichte, Social Science History, and the Study of Migration in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Authors: Jackson James H.
Published: December 2008

Inthe past several decades, the scope of European social history has been widened considerably attention given to the historical experience of inarticulate, common folk. By imaginatievly exploring neglected sources and through the use of quantitative techniques, social science historians on both sides of the Atlantic have attempted to systematically weigh hypothesis and evidence in order to recover the texture of past lives. In recent years, however, social science historians who specialize in German history have been confronted by the challenges ofAlltagsgeschichte—the history of ordinary events. Using a methodology influenced by anthropology, practitioners of “every-day history” have utilized memoirs, letters, old photos, and interviews with participant observers in order to evoke the past social life of select groups. These scholars have often reported their findings in vivid, detailed narratives in order to avoid forcing the multifaceted experience of ordinary folk into what they consider arid statistical tables and reified constructs, dangers that particularly beset the consumers of computer-generated cross-tabulations and regression equations. In addition, advocates of “peoples' history” have attempted to make historical scholarship unambiguously relevant to contemporary issues by setting their research against a backdrop of current social and political controversy and by espousing “populist” social views.
National Socialism and the Technological Culture of the Weimar Republic
Authors: Gispen Kees
Published: December 2008

At the height of the Cold War in 1962, U.S. Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights, raised the possibility of introducing legislation to “restore the patent system, in at least some measure, to its traditional role of rewarding the inventor, in order the better to carry out the constitutional objective of ‘promoting the progress of science and useful arts.’” The rise of the corporate research establishment, McClellan stated, had caused the employer to interpose “himself between the individual inventor and the patent system, with the former appropriating the patent rights and the latter often being rewarded by nominal monetary grants or other recognition.”
Unresolved Questions of German Medicine and Medical History in the Past and Present
Authors: Kater Michael H.
Published: December 2008

While in recent years a great deal has been written to clarify Germany's medical past, the picture is not yet complete in several important respects. In the realm of the sociology of medicine, for example, we still do not know enough about physicianpatient relationships from, say, the founding of the Second Empire to the present. On the assumption, based on the meager evidence available, that this relationship had an authoritarian structure from the physician on downward, did it have anything to do with the shape of German medicine in the Weimar Republic and, later, the Third Reich? Another relative unknown is the role of Jews in the development of medicine as a profession in Germany. Surely volumes could be written on the significant influence Jews have exerted on medicine in its post-Wilhelmian stages, as well as the irreversible victim status Jewish doctors were forced to assume after Hitler's ascension to power
Anti-Semitism as Skill: Rudolf Virchow'sSchulstatistikand the Racial Composition of Germany
Authors: Zimmerman Andrew
Published: December 2008

Oneof the major events in the history of German anti-Semitism has been, if not entirely overlooked, then misunderstood and misrepresented. In the 1870s, the professor of medicine, liberal politician, and anthropologist, Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), directed a study of the skin, hair, and eye color of 6,758,827 German school children, a study that marked “Jews” and “Germans” as racially different and trained a generation of Germans to perceive these differences both as real and as of political significance. Historians have been virtually unanimous in viewing this study as a blow against anti-Semitism, as a demonstration that there was neither a Jewish nor a German “race.” This interpretation has survived, I believe, because it supports and rests on a commonly held conception of racism as primarily an intellectual phenomenon, as a set of more-or-less explicit propositions held in the minds of individuals. Virchow, a well-known opponent of political anti-Semitism, was never motivated by hostility to Jews in conducting this research. Indeed, he understood his focus on Jews as simply a race (rather than as a religion or a culture) to indicate that the study was not anti-Semitic. Paradoxically, the study that Virchow designed and oversaw may have unintentionally provided an important practical basis for German racial anti-Semitism. By considering anti-Semitism as a set of skills rather than a philosophy, as hands-on practical knowledge more akin to riding a bicycle than to philosophical exposition, I hope to offer a new explanation of both Virchow's study of race and the place of that study in German history.
A Sociography of German Academics, 1863–1938
Authors: Ringer Fritz
Published: December 2008

During the 1950s, a team of Göttingen sociologists led by Helmut Plessner undertook a systematic survey of all faculty who taught at German university-level institutions during one or more of eleven selected sample years between 1864 and 1953. Drawing upon university catalogues (Vorlesungsverzeichnisse), scholarly handbooks (Minerva, Kürschners, Poggendorfs), and a variety of encyclopedias, members of the Göttingen group collected biographical and career data for almost twenty-four thousand individuals, which they entered by hand (though much of it in code) on manuscript sheets that were preserved at the Max Planck Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin.
The Selling of Adolf Hitler: David Irving's Hitler's War
Authors: Sydnor Charles W.
Published: December 2008

In the last decade the field of studies focusing on Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist period of German history has been invaded and nearly overrun by an international throng of journalists, essayists, memoirists, apologists, cultists, and hucksters busily engaged in advancing various interpretations, analyses, and portraits of Hitler. Among this group who are not scholars or professional historians, there seems a wide disparity of ability and expertise and an obvious dissimilarity of motives and objectives. It is, therefore, difficult to specify common points of similarity or agreement that might characterize this particular genre of Hitler studies (or enterprises). On one point only do the efforts seem to tally, in the unspoken but apparent agreement on an injunction by now axiomatic: Adolf Hitler sells.
Kurt Ludecke and I Knew Hitler: An Evaluation
Authors: Layton Roland V.
Published: December 2008

Kurt Ludecke's I Knew Hitler: The Story of a Nazi Who Escaped the Blood Purge, published in 1937, was one of the first accounts of Hitler by a person claiming to have been closely associated with the highest figures of the Nazi Party, and as such it was widely reviewed. The New York Times gave the memoir both a column in its daily “Books of the Times” and a full page in the Sunday book review section. Other leading publications treated the book with similar interest. The reviews ranged from enthusiastic (the New York Times reviewer, Email Lengyel, characterized the book as “a historic document” and “indispensable”) to dubious (the Saturday Review of Literature complained that “one can't believe him”).
GK–DIMENSION OF ALGEBRAS WITH MANY GENERIC RELATIONS
Authors: SMOKTUNOWICZ AGATA
Published: December 2008

We prove some results on algebras, satisfying many generic relations. As an application we show that there are Golod–Shafarevich algebras which cannot be homomorphically mapped onto infinite dimensional algebras with finite Gelfand–Kirillov dimension. This answers a question of Zelmanov (Some open problems in the theory of infinite dimensional algebras, J. Korean Math. Soc. 44(5) 2007, 1185–1195).
“Emergent Noir”: Film Noir and the Great Depression in High Sierra (1941) and This Gun for Hire (1942)
Authors: DINERSTEIN JOEL
Published: December 2008

This article theorizes a new periodization for film noir through a prewar category of “emergent noir”: seven films released between 1940 and 1942 – including The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane – that defined the genre's thematics, aesthetics, visual style, and moral ambiguity. Using archival research and trauma theory, the article analyzes High Sierra and This Gun for Hire as case studies of “failure narratives”: each film resonated with American audiences by validating the recent suffering of the Great Depression, allowing for a vicarious sense of revenge, and creating new ideals of individuality and masculinity. Both films were surprise box-office hits and created new film icons for the 1940s: Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Veronica Lake. All three were embodiments of “cool,” a concept herein theorized as a public mask of stoicism.
Global Trauma at Home: Technology, Modernity, Deliverance
Authors: NARINE ANIL
Published: December 2008

This paper hermeneutically examines the relationship between technology, masculinity, and modernity in John Boorman's film Deliverance (1972). It finds that the suburbanites who are victimized in Appalachia do not regress to a primal, premodern state but rely on their modern values to justify killing their assailants. The men's violence allegorizes the institutionalized violence of the power company that is damming the Cahulawassee River to power their suburban technological comforts. Hermeneutic analysis and critical theories of technology are combined to examine how each man reassesses his life, as one of modernity's beneficiaries, after encountering the displaced mountain people – modernity's others.
Obscenity, Free Speech, and “Sporting News” in 1870s America
Authors: FRISKEN AMANDA
Published: December 2008

The interventions of anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock into 1870s popular illustrations created some surprising – and largely unintended – consequences. Not only did the man who defined modern American censorship goad into existence the radical free speech movement, but his manipulations of 1870s visual culture also heightened racial stereotyping in public print. His behind-the-scenes negotiations led illustrated newspaper editors to erase white sexuality, which they replaced with stories of interracial rape of white women by black men. In fostering both the rise of the free press movement and the selective racialization of visual culture, Comstock left an indelible mark on modern representation.
The Tony Sender Papers
Authors: Wheeler Robert F.
Published: December 2008

For many years students of German Labor history have speculated about the possible existence of a Tony Sender Nachlass somewhere in the United States. Ms. Sender, a Social Democratic journalist, was active in the Socialist Women's anti-war movement during World War I, played an important local role in the German Revolution of 1918 (in Frankfurt/Main), was a leading member of the Independent Social Democratic and later the Social Democratic party, held an important position in the German Metal Workers Union, and sat in the Reichstag throughout the Weimar Republic. She'fled Germany in 1933 and eventually migrated to the United States where she died in 1964 at the age of 76. Following her death what remained of her papers were entrusted to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison where they are now located and available for use.
Archival Sources for the Study of Anarchism in Germany
Authors: Carlson Andrew R.
Published: December 2008

It should be noted at the outset that it is not my intention to cover in detail all files available for the study of anarchism in Germany. Even a partial listing would fill many pages. What I have attempted to do is to point out the principal repositories of materials available, while describing some of the most valuable or unique parts of their collections. Surprisingly the body of material for the study of anarchism in Germany is much larger than one might at first assume. What is more most of it has been little used by researchers.
Recent Japanese Studies in European Labor History
Authors: Nishikawa Masao
Published: December 2008

This essay is designed as a short introduction to Japanese studies in European labor history. As a bibliography it does not claim to be exhaustive. A few significant titles had to be excluded when there were too many on a topic to cite them all. Some others have been included because of their uniqueness, even when they were of lower quality. Older writings are only mentioned occasionally.
The Impact of Haymarket on German-American Radicalism
Authors: Keil Hartmut
Published: December 2008

Over the course of one hundred years Haymarket has provoked a considerable body of personal and historical writing offering a variety of interpretations and evaluations of its meaning. Thus historians have attributed to Haymarket local as well as national significance; they have viewed it as a conspiracy by the ruling elite against the labor movement, as a death-blow to anarchism in the United States, as an attempt at weakening the eight-hour movement, and as a critical watershed for the organization of American labor at large. Before adding yet another view, it may be appropriate to address not only one basic issue underlying any such endeavor but also the assumptions for attributing to this unique historical event important and far-reaching consequences. Claims about Haymarket's wide ramifications certainly cannot be sustained by dealing with it solely on the factual level; such an attempt could justifiably be criticized as a simplistic and reductionistic “cause-and-effect” explanation.
Shop Floors and Rugby Fields: The Social Basis of Auto Worker Solidarity in South Africa
Authors: Adler Glenn
Published: December 2008

When 4,000 black workers at Volkswagen South Africa went on strike on the morning of June 16, 1980, their walkout and march through Uitenhage—twenty-five kilometers inland from the Indian Ocean city of Port Elizabeth—did far more than disturb the streets of a conservative industrial town. The Workers struct after an impasse in negotiations between the automobile companies and their union, the National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers of South Africa (NUMARWOSA) over the union's demand for a “living wage.” Within days the entire town was engulfed in a general strike. The South African Police declared Uitenhage a “security area,” effectively cutting it off from the outside world. The other strikes soon ended or were repressed, most fiercely at the American multinational Goodyear, where the work force was dismissed and then selectively reemployed under police guard. However, Volkswagen workers continued their action for more than three weeks before winning awage increase and returning to work with their jobs intact and their union strengthened (Plates 1, 2, 3).
A Modern Cinderella: Race, Sexuality, and Social Class in the Rhinelander Case
Authors: Lewis Earl , Ardizzone Heidi
Published: December 2008

On November 13, 1924, the first public announcements of white scion Leonard Kip Rhinelander's secret marriage to a working-class “colored” woman, Alice Jones, exploded across the front pages of New York newspapers. Although Rhinelander, a wealthy white socialite, ignored family orders and stayed with his wife through the first week or so of the scandal, few were surprised when he ultimately left her and filed an annulment suit. While New York did not outlaw interracial marriages, Leonard's suit reflected the extent of public sentiment against such marriages. Claiming he had not known Alice was black and would not have married her if he had, Leonard, acutely aware of his class station, nonetheless based his request to dissolve the marriage on prohibitions against interracial unions. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that the jury of twelve white married men refused the Rhinelander heir his annulment and upheld the marriage, there-by accepting Alice's version of events and actions.
“Citizens of the Kingdom”: Toward a Social History of Radical Christianity in Latin America
Authors: Jiménez Michael F.
Published: December 2008

In 1981 liberation theologian José Porfirio Miranda argued that the parable of the weeds in Matthew was a clear guide for a radical politics in the modern world. According to the Mexican mathematician and union adviser, Jesus' explanation that “the farmer sowing seeds is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed the citizens of the Kingdom” was an injunction to achieve justice and freedom in the present. This earthly incarnation of the Kingdom of God was a central pillar of resistance to capitalism among middle-and lower-class groups in Latin America in the last third of the twentieth century, from human rights activism in the Southern Cone to Central America's revolutionary insurrections.
The Reader and the Worker:Los Lectoresand the Culture of Cigarmaking in Cuba and Florida
Authors: Mormino Gary R.
Published: December 2008

“You know what Victor Hugo say?” asked José Vega Díaz. Thus began a lengthy recitation, the product of decades of labor agitation, listening toLes Miserables, and rolling cigars. He had been asked to explain the influence ofel lector(the reader) on the lives of cigar workers. The answer filtered through ninety-five years of experience in Cuba and Florida.“You know what Victor Hugo say? In all the towns, in every place, they have a schoolteacher. And in every town, the schoolteacher is the light. He lights the candle. But in every town they try to blow away the light. The preachers, the priests. That's why they [the church, the owner] don't want the reader. The reader lights the candle. It was a good thing.”
Working-Class Families Respond to Industrial Decline: Migration from the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region since 1920
Authors: Dublin Thomas
Published: December 2008

The decline of coalmining has been a worldwide phenomenon in recent years. In Great Britain, both Labour and Conservative governments have steadily closed down state-owned mines, provoking economic devolution in parts of the north of England and South Wales. European Community nations have collaborated to recovert declining European coal basins in the decades since the 1970s. In the Soviet Union coalminers played a crucial role in galvanzing support behind Mikhail Gorbachev.Nevertheless, despite miners' political importance and union strength, they have been unable to arrest the industrial decline of the Donbass region of the Ukraine.1 A long-term process of substitution among fossil fuels has had a major impact on developed economies over the course of the twentiethcentury. Economic and population shifts have been central features of this broader process. By focusing on the internal migration that accompanied the decline of anthracite coalmining in northeastern Pennsylvania, this article examines an American manifestation of this phenomenon of economicand social transformation. It argues for the importance of viewing working people as conscious actors in this larger process. While working people are certainly affected by economic forces beyond their control, they actively make choices that shape both their own lives and the broader process of economic transformation.2 Examination of the experiences of members of mining families in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania in the years since World War Two demonstrates the ways in which strong kinship, family, and ethnic networks have led residents in mining communities to resist an entirely economic calculus in responding to the region's economic decline.
White Working-Class Women and the Race Question
Authors: Frank Dana
Published: December 2008

InTowards the Abolition of WhitenessDavid Roediger tells the story of Covington Hall, the editor of a newsletter published by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1913 and 1914. Roediger deftly analyzes efforts by Hall and other white writers in the brotherhood to construct cross-racial unity within an otherwise racially torn working class. He shows how Hall redrew the lines of solidarity: On one side were the degraded, of any race.On the other were enlightened workers who eschewed racial divisions, racist language, and stereotypes. “There are whitemen, Negromen, and Mexicanmenin this union, but no niggers, greasers or white trash,” proclaimed Ed Lehman, a soapbox speaker for the Brotherhood. A headline in the newsletter similarly asked readers to choose, “SLAVES OR MEN, WHICH?” Still more graphically, a cartoon commanded, “Let all white MEN and Negro MEN get on the same side of this rotten log.”
The “Bourgeois” Dimension: A Provocation About Institutions, Politics, and the Future of Labor History
Authors: Katznelson Ira
Published: December 2008

At a moment when labor history risks becoming an elegy for dashed hopes, I wish to tell a cautionary tale of missed opportunities and to counsel an alteration in intellectual focus. Not just a profound shift in the political climate, East and West, but a sustained assault on the operational premises of our craft from within has raised issues more challenging than those encompassed by the usual range of inquiries devoted to improving methods, incorporating neglected topics, and critiquing extant literatures.Not surprisingly, there has been a burst of historiographical stock-takings of late. When fields are in trouble, their practitioners are tempted to become planners. I fully agree with William Sewell's orienting judgment (in one of the most thoughtful of these recent considerations) that labor history cannot be judged to be in a state of scholarly crisis, even if the field has lost its unitary theoretical grounding. After all, assessed by the standards of the craft of history, more excellent work is being done now than ever before. Read as an empirical genre, irrespective of trends in the world or normative commitments, labor history has never been better, more diverse, or asrichly textured. Impressively, it is the site of important epistemological debates. Further, labor history has extended its domain to include subjects such as drink, crime, leisure, sexuality, and the family it once either ignored or relegated to the periphery of its concerns. Like Sewell, however, I am struck by labor history's loss of élan, directionality, and intellectual purpose. Engaged history, in possession at least of the conceit of making a difference, has moved elsewhere, to other subject areas.
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Neither Crisis Nor Stasis
Authors: Gruber Helmut
Published: December 2008

Linking the fate of labor and working-class history to the temporal fortunes of socialist parties or the collapse of the communist system seems to reduce history to a very meager function. It suggests that labor has somehow lost importance or interest as a historical subject because the political parties and movements which claimed to speak in its name have experienced drastic reversals or other profound changes.Apparently historians have periodically and repeatedly had to confront such narrow present-mindedness.Katznelson dwells on this sense of loss which he sees reflected in how “far more rapidly” the “agenda defended by Hobsbawm and Hill… has taken on something of the quaint feel of antiquarianism.”
A Return to Liberalism in Labor History?
Authors: Hanagan Michael
Published: December 2008

Ira Katznelson's paper should be welcomed because it contributes to an urgently needed debate. One of the less-noted consequences of the breakup of the social movements of the sixties and seventies and of the disintegration of “Old Left” organizations has been the disappearance of relevant forums for discussing the overall direction of left-wing politics.The collapse and shattering of the left-wing movement of the sixties and early seventies and its dispersion into pockets of isolated separate issues and ad hoc social movements has reached such a state that it threatens the Left's ability to discuss larger issues of strategy and tactics.
The History of Politics and the Politics of History
Authors: Levine Bruce
Published: December 2008

I believe Ira Katznelson is quite right to link the condition of labor history as a scholarly field with bigger changes taking place in the world. The malaise he points to is a response to the striking, protracted, and continuing shift to the Right in political life; the prolonged and barely challenged erosion of working-class living standards, rights, and organizations; and the evident programmatic and strategic bankruptcy alike of Stalinist, social democratic, and even more explicitly business-minded labor leaders and labor parties. Those waiting for organized labor to stand up on its hind legs and fight back grow disappointed and disoriented.
Labor History: Out of Vogue?
Authors: Wilentz Sean
Published: December 2008

There is something predictable in hearing a political scientist preach the virtue of political science. But in Ira's case there is also something personal, even poignant—for just below the surface of his remarks there runs a stream of self-consciousness about how he made it through the academic battles of the 1980s. Many of us have been harboring our own reflections about what happened, letting go only with occasional irritated book reviews or with diatribes in the faculty lounge. Ira opens up the conversation and sets a welcome, candid tone.
Social Patriotism and the British Working Class: Appearance and Disappearance of a Tradition
Authors: Field Geoffrey
Published: December 2008

The study of patriotism and national identity, once left to the likes of Sir Arthur Bryant, has been rediscovered by the mainstream of British historians. One source of this change is the growing influence of anthropology and literary theory on the discipline, encouraging closer attention to ritual, myth, and language. Another is a renewed focus on the modern state and the mechanisms by which it “intervenes” in civil society.
From Brotherly Handshake to Militant Clenched Fist: On Political Metaphors for the Worker's Hand
Authors: Korff Gottfried
Published: December 2008

The hand has long been a symbol of what makes human beings human. It is still used to convey this meaning, despite the decline of manual labor and the replacement of manual dexterity by machines, robots, and computers. A number of twentieth-century images remind us of the hand's labor power: for example, Fernand Leger's 1951 homage to Vladimir Mayakowsky, his earlier 1918 painting, “The Mechanic,” which is a veritable icon of the worker whose hand forms the dynamic compositional element (Fig. 1), and Diego Rivera's “Detroit Industry Frescoes,” where gigantic hands symbolize humanity's struggle with the material world. In European visual traditions, the iconography of the hand as labor power is imprinted by three types of images: Renaissance imagery, industrial allegory, and artisan and worker iconography. In Renaissance art, Michelangelo, in “The Creation” in the Sistine Chapel, reinterpreted the Biblical reference to God's breathing life into the world by adding the barely touching hands of God and Adam, thereby suggesting the virtue of active work. Industrial allegory, developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emphasized the “bourgeois” view of work as a sign of goaloriented, planned achievement and success in the world, with the hand depicted as a tool that creates new tools and hence the organ that makes humanity the crowning work of creation.
Tradition and the Working Class, 1850–1950
Authors: Cohen Lizabeth
Published: December 2008

For two days, October 25–26, 1991, about forty scholars—mostly, but not exclusively, historians—sat around a conference table in the Alumni Room of the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and discussed “Tradition and the Working Class, 1850–1950.” We came from nine countries (the largest delegations were from France and the United States) to participate in the third of what has become a tradition in itself among historians of the working class, an international colloquium sponsored by ILWCH and the French social history journal. Le Mouvemem social, and supported as well by the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. CNRS. and DAGIC.
Trading Work and Pay
Authors: Rustin Michael
Published: December 2008

Gary Cross's article is a valuable and welcome attempt to extend the scope of labor history. to give attention to issues of popular culture and consumption that have been brought to current prominence especially by work in the field of cultural studies. Clearly this move reflects wider changes in society, in which the hegemony of commodity production appears to be exercised as much through the attractions of advertising and the shopping mall as through the disciplines of the factory and office. But as Cross is able to show, these are not new issues. Working-class movements have long sought to resist the power of capitalism and class domination through the social linkages of alternative class cultures as well as through bargaining and political strategies, though in the consumerist age these forms of cultural resistance are easily forgotten. Cross is right to suggest that these issues and struggles - whatever their outcomes have been – are important to labor history. His central idea of exploring the antinomies of money (conferring power within a market system) and time (allowing partial withdrawal from it) as alternative kinds of class demands, is an interesting and potentially fruitful one.
Science, Work, and Worktime
Authors: Rabinbach Anson
Published: December 2008

In the beginning was the Theory. Even before the collapse of Soviet communism, the glow of Marxism in American (and European) universities was beginning to dim. Now we look back on our own investment in Marxism, not always with satisfaction. At best, the theory did not so much fail historians, as historians, in their efforts to redress the lacunae in the theory, wrote around it to the extent that theory ultimately became marginal to their enterprise. This is hardly surprising since Marxism, having given up pretense to science by the mid-1960s, became largely a critical theory in the sense that its main sources were European thinkers – Gramsci, Adorno, Foucault, Althusser – who sought to repair the crumbling walls and beams remaining from the wreckage of Stalinism.
“Keeping the Natives Under Control”: Race Segregation and the Domestic Dimensions of Empire, 1920–1939
Authors: Tabili Laura
Published: December 2008

Scholars examining ethnic and racial barriers in twentieth-century societies have argued that they function to reinforce workplace inequalities, perpetuating a substratum of superexploited and disenfranchised workers for the benefit of capital. Debate continues as to whether the state, deliberately or inadvertently, willingly or unwillingly, has helped to reinforce these barriers. Locating the history of British state support for race segregation within this debate is an effort to move discussion away from the prevalent and unfocused emphasis on popular racism or “intolerance” to examine the material underpinnings of racial conflict.
Americanism and Paternalism: Managers and Workers in Twentieth-Century Italy
Authors: Benenati Elisabetta
Published: December 2008

During the twentieth century, company welfare programs have been developed in Italy, as in other countries. Once they had been introduced in some large firms after the “Red years,” social programs spread to the rest of industry at the end of the 1920s, with more noticeable growth during the Depression years when, in other countries, such programs were on the wane. Companies investing in assistance and recreation did so not because this was perceived as being in the firms' interest in managing workers, but in obedience to directives from the Fascist government and in keeping with the corporate ideology of a regime that seemed to assure protection of the country's industry.
Paternalism, Productivism, Collaborationism: Employers and Society in Interwar and Vichy France
Authors: Amdur Kathryn E.
Published: December 2008

Long before Michel Foucault compared the factory to a prison, employer paternalism had acquired a pejorative sense for many observers. Those who favored the idea in France preferred the term “patronage,” following the usage of engineer and social philosopher Frédéric Le Play. The Centre des Jeunes Patrons (CJP), a progressive employers' group founded in 1938 in the wake of the Popular Front social crisis, vowed to “rehabilitate the patronal function.” Corporatist theorists imagined new forms of “association” or “community” in the workplace, a conscious break with paternalist habits of rule by “divine right.”
Creating Cultures of Reform
Authors: Bridges Amy
Published: December 2008

Beginning in the late 1840s advocates of municipal reform in the United States campaigned to throw rascals out of public office, reconstruct the legal foundations of municipal government, and install regimes of at least modest virtue in place of local government's shameless vice. More profoundly, reformers hoped to replace municipal political cultures of partisanship and patronage with different values and expectations. In these efforts reformers met with the militant opposition of party leaders and their constituents; party leaders too had a vision of what local political life ought to be, and of their own central role in making it so.
The Work of Government: Recovering the Discourse of Office inMarbury v. Madison
Authors: Orren Karen
Published: December 2008

The following essay elaborates the proposition that changing work relations has been a major problematic of American constitutional development. By work relations I refer to the hiring and firing, compensation, and discipline, of persons assigned to perform designated tasks in public and private settings. By “problematic” I have in mind cause and project, dynamic and rationale, of constitutional duration and change. By “constitutional development” I mean the authoritative reordering of government institutions or of the transactions between government and society.
Gender and the Origins of Modern Social Policies in Britain and the United States
Authors: Skocpol Theda , Ritter Gretchen
Published: December 2008

Comparative research on the origins of modern welfare states typically asks why certain European nations, including Great Britain, enacted pensions and social insurance between the 1880s and the 1920s, while the United States “lagged behind,” that is did not establish such policies for the entire nation until the Social Security Act of 1935. To put the question this way overlooks the social policies that were distinctive to the early twentieth-century United States. During the period when major European nations, including Britain, were launching paternalist versions of the modern welfare state, the United States was tentatively experimenting with what might be called a maternalist welfare state. In Britain, male bureaucrats and party leaders designed policies “for the good” of male wage-workers and their dependents. Meanwhile, in the United States, early social policies were championed by elite and middle-class women “for the good” of less privileged women. Adult American women were helped as mothers, or as working women who deserved special protection because they were potential mothers.
Response to Tulis
Authors: Riker William H.
Published: December 2008

It is a bit difficult for me to figure out the main theme of Tulis' often inconsistent commentary. For example, he ends his essay with the claim that my insights are “epistemologically equivalent” to those of whom I “seek to supersede.” Apart from gratuitously attributing to me an intention to “supersede” Main and Storing, two scholars for whom I have the deepest respect and whom I wish to correct only in one particular, my insights cannot, on Tulis' own grounds, possibly be “epistemologically equivalent” to theirs. Much of his essay is devoted to criticizing my method as an unnecessary and undesirable departure from the traditional method of rhetorical analysis by literary criticism. So, by his account, my method cannot be “epistemologically equivalent” to theirs. I suppose he meant to write “substantively equivalent.” Whatever his intent, this illustrates my difficulty with interpretation.
Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s
Authors: Katznelson Ira , Pietrykowski Bruce
Published: December 2008

From the vantage point of a critical moment in the history of statebuilding in the United States, we wish to take a fresh look at questions about the resources and wherewithal of the national state. Within modern American political science, a focus on state capacity is at least as old as the landmark essay by Woodrow Wilson on “The Study of Administration” and as current as the important scholarly impulse that has revived interest in the state at a time of struggle about the size and span of the federal government. The dominant motif of these various accounts of American statebuilding has been a concern with organizational assets, which usually are assayed by their placement on a linear scale of strength and weakness.
Industrial Concentration, Sectional Competition, and Antitrust Politics in America, 1880–1980
Authors: Sanders Elizabeth
Published: December 2008

Antitrust law in the United States—framed in the Sherman, Clayton, and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) acts and their subsequent amendments—establishes a policy toward industrial concentration and business practices that sets the United States apart from other industrial democracies. In Europe and Japan, large-scale industry has been perceived as a national and international asset and, while particular abuses may be condemned at the government's discretion, emotional antibigness rhetoric and statutory prohibition of monopolistic practices are largely absent.
Notes on the Presidency in the Political Order
Authors: Skowronek Stephen
Published: December 2008

The American presidency reflects nothing so clearly as the idiosyncrasies of personality and circumstance. The discrete dynamics of the men and their times are naturally pronounced; the general dynamics that define the institution in time, correspondingly obscured. This makes thematic analysis of the presidency peculiarly dependent on uncovering broad-ranging patterns in institutional history. By isolating different historical regularities we can locate different dimensions of the problem and significance of presidential action.
The Nonmajoritarian Difficulty: Legislative Deference to the Judiciary
Authors: Graber Mark A.
Published: December 2008

Theoretical and descriptive studies of the Supreme Court exhibit a curious parallel. Both usually begin from the premise that judicial review is “a deviant institution in a democratic society.” Much normative work claims that independent judicial policymaking is rarely legitimate in a democracy because, with few exceptions, elected officials rather than appointed judges should resolve social controversies. In a frequently cited passage, Alexander Bickel asserts that the Supreme Court is “a counter-majoritarian force” in our system of government. Much empirical work, by comparison, insists that independent judicial policymaking seldom takes place in a democracy because, with few exceptions, judges appointed and confirmed by elected officials sustain whatever social policies are enacted by the dominant national coalition. Robert Dahl observes that it is “unrealistic to suppose that a Court whose members are recruited in the fashion of Supreme Court justices would long hold to norms of Right or Justice substantially at odds with the rest of the political elite.”
On the Origins of the Regime of Pragmatic Liberalism: John Dewey, Adolf A. Berle, and FDR's Commonwealth Club Address of 1932
Authors: Eden Robert
Published: December 2008

This essay stems from a prolonged study of Adolf A. Berle's drafts for the address “On Progressive Government” which Franklin Roosevelt gave in San Francisco during the 1932 presidential campaign. The essay compares Dewey'sIndividualism Old and New(Part I below) with the Commonwealth Club Address (Part II). The need for such a sustained comparison and commentary became clear only when I began to wonder whether Roosevelt's pragmatism—or rather the pragmatist teaching Berle formulated in responding to Roosevelt—was really idiosyncratic and philosophically derivative, as students of my generation had been taught to suppose. Like most journeymen, I had heard Justice Holmes's characterization of Roosevelt: “a first class temperament but a second class mind.” Coming from the oracle of pragmatist jurisprudence, that remark deflected my attention from Roosevelt's executive character and delayed my study of its effect on younger, more impressionable pragmatists like Berle. I also shared the common opinion of New Deal pragmatism as an encore for reform or a revanche for interventionism. I did not foresee that it might present an occasion for theoretical advance.
The Politics of Rapid Legal Change: Immigration Policy in the 1980s
Authors: Schuck Peter H.
Published: December 2008

Conventional wisdom maintains that the enduring structures of American politics make rapid policy change unlikely. This proposition is confirmed by much political science. Our institutions are designed to bridle and domesticate reform impulses, dissipating the constant pressures for new political and social arrangements. The separation of powers establishes numerous veto points, making initiatives of any kind difficult. The political culture's firm commitment to broad participation and due process places a much higher value on consultation than on decisiveness or direction. Special interests tolerate only incremental changes. The major parties clothe themselves in the familiar as they move toward the political center and its embrace of the status quo. New ideas are of only marginal importance; their transformative power is routinely blunted by one of America's oldest ideas, pragmatism. Stability, not innovation, is the master theme of our politics.
Law, Police, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the New American Republic
Authors: Tomlins Christopher L
Published: December 2008

On 1 June 1779, Thomas Jefferson became the second governor of the state of Virginia. Shortly thereafter, he was elected to the Board of Visitors of the College of William and Mary where he pursued a series of educational innovations that he had unsuccessfully promoted earlier while engaged in his mammoth revision of the laws of Viriginia. The goal of Jefferson's proposed educational reforms was the creation of an educational system which would be a training ground for republican citizenship. It is therefore of interest that among the innovations he pressed on the College of William and Mary was the establishment of the first chair of law in North America—indeed the first chair anywhere after the Vinerian chair at Oxford. What is of greater interest, however, is that the chair that Jefferson pioneered was not a chair of law, as such, but a chair of “Law and Police.”
Reply to Professor Appleby
Authors: Tomlins Christopher
Published: December 2008

Joyce Appleby's very constructive commentary rightly locates my article philosophically and historiographically amid the intellectual eddies of the postindustrialist sensibility. At the same time she is sensitive, I think, to my ambition to tell more than a relativist's tale. If that ambition has led me to splash my colors too indiscriminately across Jefferson's broad canvas, however, Appleby is right to chide me for it. Thus, for example, while I would not accept that energetic government and police are conceptually synonymous, they are certainly related. As Appleby implies, many of Jefferson's political opponents from Hamilton on down were far more enthusiastic in their advocacy of energetic government—once granted control of the agenda—than was Jefferson.
Constitutionalism and Social Spending: Pennsylvania's Old Age Pensions in the 1920s
Authors: Sterett Susan
Published: December 2008

Rather than studying only what appellate courts do, scholars of law and society have been pointing out that the interpretation of law is an enterprise many engage in—e.g., lawyers, administrative officials, and the lay public, as well as courts. Recent scholarship has broadened the analysis of constitutional law in a way that is not Supreme Court centered. Scholars have focused on constitutionalism as the idea that words written down limit and shape political practice. For example, Michael Kammen's work shows the continuing and repetitive celebrations of the Constitution in American life, celebrations that have taken the federal constitution as “a machine that would go of itself” and as a sacred text, often forgetting how much it has been remade through reinterpretation. This focus on constitutionalism rather than on appellate court decisions leads to a broader understanding of constitutions in a polity, so that scholars analyze rights claims in addition to examining the rights that courts have said people have. This effort emphasizes the meaningful elements of law, since the definition of constitutionalism focuses on what people think they should do, or on what they have a right to do. It leads to scholarship that points out the penetration of legal language, particularly claims of rights, into American culture. With this approach, one reason to analyze elite statements of law is that they state rights in ways that become part of general political consciousness.
The Political Economy of Business Politics in U.S. Cities: A Developmental Perspective
Authors: Kantor Paul
Published: December 2008

Although the political presence of business in the economic development of American cities has been richly documented, there has been much less attention to how and why urban business politics has changed in the course of our history. Indeed, the political circumstances and problems of the early Republic's merchant entrepreneurs in the towns seem remote from those of urban business leaders of postindustrial America, with its giant cities and megacorporations. The challenge remains of identifying forces of continuity and change that have shaped relations between business and city governments in urban economic development.