Workingmen's Democracy

Workingmen's Democracy PDF

Author: Leon Fink

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2022-10-17

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0252054466

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Focusing on the operation and influence of the Knights of Labor—the leading labor organization of the nineteenth century—Workingmen's Democracy explores the dreams, achievements, and failures of a movement that sought to renew the democratic potential of American institutions. Runner-up in both the John H. Dunning Prize and Albert J. Beveridge Award competitions

Community of Suffering and Struggle

Community of Suffering and Struggle PDF

Author: Elizabeth Faue

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2016-08-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1469617196

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Elizabeth Faue traces the transformation of the American labor movement from community forms of solidarity to bureaucratic unionism. Arguing that gender is central to understanding this shift, Faue explores women's involvement in labor and political organizations and the role of gender and family ideology in shaping unionism in the twentieth century. Her study of Minneapolis, the site of the important 1934 trucking strike, has broad implications for labor history as a whole. Initially the labor movement rooted itself in community organizations and networks in which women were active, both as members and as leaders. This community orientation reclaimed family, relief, and education as political ground for a labor movement seeking to re-establish itself after the losses of the 1920s. But as the depression deepened, women -- perceived as threats to men seeking work -- lost their places in union leadership, in working-class culture, and on labor's political agenda. When unions exchanged a community orientation for a focus on the workplace and on national politics, they lost the power to recruit and involve women members, even after World War II prompted large numbers of women to enter the work force. In a pathbreaking analysis, Faue explores how the iconography and language of labor reflected ideas about gender. The depiction of work and the worker as male; the reliance on sport, military, and familial metaphors for solidarity; and the ideas of women's place -- these all reinforced the representation of labor solidarity as masculine during a time of increasing female participation in the labor force. Although the language of labor as male was not new in the depression, the crisis of wage-earning -- as a crisis of masculinity -- helped to give psychological power to male dominance in the labor culture. By the end of the war, women no longer occupied a central position in organized labor but a peripheral one.

Political Parties and the State

Political Parties and the State PDF

Author: Martin Shefter

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1993-12-27

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1400821223

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book collects a number of Martin Shefter's most important articles on political parties. They address three questions: Under what conditions will strong party organizations emerge? What influences the character of parties--in particular, their reliance on patronage? In what circumstances will the parties that formerly dominated politics in a nation or city come under attack? Shefter's work exemplifies the "new institutionalism" in political science, arguing that the reliance of parties on patronage is a function not so much of mass political culture as of their relationship with public bureaucracies. The book's opening chapters analyze the circumstances conducive to the emergence of strong political parties and the changing balance between parties and bureaucracies in Europe and America. The middle chapters discuss the organization and exclusion of the American working classes by machine and reform regimes. The book concludes by examining party organizations as instruments of political control in the largest American city, New York.

Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940

Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 PDF

Author: James Livingston

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0807863033

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The rise of corporate capitalism was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event, according to James Livingston. That revolution resides, he argues, in the fundamental reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, that attends the advent of an 'age of surplus' under corporate auspices. From this standpoint, consumer culture represents a transition to a society in which identities as well as incomes are not necessarily derived from the possession of productive labor or property. From the same standpoint, pragmatism and literary naturalism become ways of accommodating the new forms of solidarity and subjectivity enabled by the emergence of corporate capitalism. So conceived, they become ways of articulating alternatives to modern, possessive individualism. Livingston argues accordingly that the flight from pragmatism led by Lewis Mumford was an attempt to refurbish a romantic version of modern, possessive individualism. This attempt still shapes our reading of pragmatism, Livingston claims, and will continue to do so until we understand that William James was not merely a well-meaning middleman between Charles Peirce and John Dewey and that James's pragmatism was both a working model of postmodern subjectivity and a novel critique of capitalism.

Working-class Formation

Working-class Formation PDF

Author: Ira Katznelson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1986-12-21

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780691102078

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Applying an original theoretical framework, an international group of historians and social scientists here explores how class, rather than other social bonds, became central to the ideologies, dispositions, and actions of working people, and how this process was translated into diverse institutional legacies and political outcomes. Focusing principally on France. Germany, and the United States, the contributors examine the historically contingent connections between class, as objectively structured and experienced, and collective perceptions and responses as they develop in work, community, and politics. Following Ira Katznelson's introduction of the analytical concepts, William H. Sewell, Jr., Michelle Perrot, and Alain Cottereau discuss France; Amy Bridges and Martin Shefter, the United States; and Jargen Kocka and Mary Nolan, Germany. The conclusion by Aristide R. Zolberg comments on working-class formation up to World War I, including developments in Great Britain, and challenges conventional wisdom about class and politics in the industrializing West.

Working for Democracy

Working for Democracy PDF

Author: Paul Buhle

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780252012211

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Written by some of our nation's top historians, Working for Democracy is the first book to examine the politics of American workers from the revolution to the present in terms of broad struggles for power in society at large. In more than a dozen chapters, the topics range from the committees of artisan "republicans" at the time of the American Revolution to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Whether the subject is the anti-slavery movement, the New Deal coalition, the Wobblies, or women workers, Working For Democracy is a testament to the struggles of workers everywhere in America.

Schools of Democracy

Schools of Democracy PDF

Author: Clayton Sinyai

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1501729918

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this new political history of the labor movement, Clayton Sinyai examines the relationship between labor activism and the American democratic tradition. Sinyai shows how America's working people and union leaders debated the first questions of democratic theory—and in the process educated themselves about the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship. In tracing the course of the American labor movement from the founding of the Knights of Labor in the 1870s to the 1968 presidential election and its aftermath, Sinyai explores the political dimensions of collective bargaining, the structures of unions and businesses, and labor's relationships with political parties and other social movements. Schools of Democracy analyzes how labor activists wrestled with fundamental aspects of political philosophy and the development of American democracy, including majority rule versus individual liberty, the rule of law, and the qualifications required of citizens of a democracy. Offering a balanced assessment of mainstream leaders of American labor, from Samuel Gompers to George Meany, and their radical critics, including the Socialists and the Industrial Workers of the World, Sinyai provides an unusual and refreshing perspective on American labor history.

Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes

Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes PDF

Author: Christa Buschendorf

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-01-18

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1443828254

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This volume collects new articles that explore the theoretical framework of figurational or relational sociology as represented by Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu with regard to its relevance to American history, culture, and literature. The emphasis is put on Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process” and the question in how far his study of the European process of state formation and the correlative psycho-social changes is relevant to the analysis of the development of the American nation-state and the habitus of Americans. Leading scholars from the field of figurational sociology team up with an international cast of renowned Americanists to shed new light on a variety of issues from the domains of social theory, cultural history, and literary criticism. With Elias as a guide, drinking and democracy in the early republic, nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools, the fear of slave insurrections, and the modern-day black ghetto appear as steps in an open-ended and non-teleological civilizing process that weaves together changes in habitus and social structure. Without stumbling into the pitfalls of an ideology of “American exceptionalism,” the figurational approach to American studies allows the contributors of this pioneering collection to give new answers to the tenacious question of the United States’ peculiar characteristics. Adapting Elias’s analyses to US-American conditions, the authors provide fresh impulses for theorizing civilizing and decivilizing processes, thus transforming the field of both American studies and figurational sociology. The contributors are Jesse F. Battan, Christa Buschendorf, Rachel Hope Cleves, Winfried Fluck, Astrid Franke, Mary O. Furner, Günter Leypoldt, Stephen Mennell, Ruxandra Rădulescu, Kirsten Twelbeck, Johannes Voelz, Loïc Wacquant, and Cas Wouters.

Lanterna Rally - Theme by Grace Themes