In the early stages of thinking about this paper, I profited from conversations with David Feldman, Eric Hobsbawm, Gareth Stedman Jones, Naomi Tadmor, Pat Thane, and Jay Winter. Nick Stargart shared his unpublished piece, “Where Have all the Workers Gone?” which argues persuasively that working-class formation is “endogenous to politics.” During the course of writing the essay, Victoria Hattam provided challenging critical reflections and generously shared materials in her file drawer. Once a first draft was completed, the members of this journal's editorial board gathered for a tough-minded four-hour seminar. This version, I trust, is clearer about my intentions, arguments, and prescriptions.

1. Sewell, William H. Jr., “A Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History,” in Rethinking Labor History, ed. Berlanstein, Lenard (Urbana, 1993). I also share his judgment, not without self-interest, that International Labor and Working-Class History continues to be a thriving site for labor history. Nonetheless, in order to avoid the temptation of focusing this article on the contributions of this journal or on major work written by its editors, I decided to abjure direct engagement with this rich body of scholarship.Google Scholar

2. This announcement by the Study Group's Executive Committee appeared in the first issue of the Newsletter: European Labor and Working Class History (May 1972). The newsletter principally consisted of reports on meetings (one in Madison on ideology and the labor movement, another—the seventh in a continuing series—in Linz, Austria, that brought together some 150 historians of labor from East and West Europe) and on events to come, including the announcement that the Study Group would sponsor an August 1972 session at the Pacific Coast branch of the American Historical Association on “Women and the Working Class.”

3. For a pithy contrast between these movements and patterns of working-class formation oriented to the labor movement, see Olofsson, Gunar, “After Working-Class Movement? An Essay on What's ‘New’ and What's ‘Social’ in the New Social Movements,” Acta Sociologica 31 (1988):15–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Jacob, Margaret C. and Katznelson, Ira, “Agendas for Radical History,” Radical History Review 36 (1986):27–28.Google Scholar

5. Eley, Geoff and Nield, Keith, “Why Does Social History Ignore Politics,” Social History 5 (05 1980):249–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide, eds., Working Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986).Google Scholar

7. Jacob and Katznelson, “Agendas for Radical History,” 27.

8. Ibid., 33, 39, 41.

9. The flagship statement was provided by Scott, Joan in “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (Spring 1987):1–13.Google Scholar

10. Among others, spirited critiques of the exceptionalist problematic have been mounted by Aristide R.Zolberg, “How Many Exceptionalisms?” in Katznelson and Zolberg, Working Class Formation;Wilentz, Sean, “Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement,” International Labor and Working-Class History 26 (Fall 1984);Google ScholarFoner, Eric, “Why is There No Socialism in America?” History Workshop Journal 17 (Spring 1984);Google Scholar and Kimeldorf, Howard and Stepan-Norris, Judith, “Historical Studies of the Labor Movement in the United States,” Annual Review of Sociology 18 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Hattam, Victoria, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, 1993), 207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. A point nicely made by Sewell, “Post-Materialist Rhetoric.”

13. The best recent version of such efforts, full of supple suggestions and readings even as it seeks far too much for my taste to transcend the dualism of structure and agency, is Sewell, William H. Jr, “A Theory of Structure, Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (07 1992):1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. I would distinguish between efforts, like Scott's, that, by seeing through this prism seek to challenge traditional labor history's core ways of seeing and working, and those that seek to reclaim women's history and voice in order to incorporate these into those ways of seeing and working. For examples of the latter, see John, Angela, By the Sweat of their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (London, 1980)Google Scholar, and the fine collection of essays edited by Baron, Ava, Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, 1991).Google Scholar

15. Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985).Google Scholar

16. Hattam, Labor Visions, 209. In a paper written just a few months after the publication of this book, Hattam appears to have shifted positions. Rather than counsel the kind of interplay between state-focused research and questions of dispositions and identity, she advocates a virtual abandonment of institutionally focused work, which she sees as too determinist and Whiggish, in favor of an identity approach, which she finds “a more promising research strategy.” Though the paper in fact is more nuanced than its expositional structure, which poses a choice between institutions and identity, I think it important to affirm that Hattam had it right in Labor Visions and wrong—because it poses a contrived choice—in her more recent exploratory paper. Victoria Hattam, “Political Identity and the Limits of the New Institutionalism” (unpublished manuscript, 1993).

17. Sewell, “Post-Materialist Rhetoric,” 36.

18. Eley and Nield, “Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?” 261, 262.

19. Ibid., 262.

20. Ibid., 264.

21. The essay utilized Charles Tilly's “thin” definition of the working class: “people who work for wages, using means of production over which they have little or no control.” Tilly, Charles, “Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat,” in Proletarianization and Family Life, ed. Levine, David (New York, 1984), 1.Google Scholar

22. Katznelson, Ira, “Working Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” in Katznelson and Zolberg, Working Class Formation, 14, 21.Google Scholar

23. Another line of criticism (that my essay and the book more generally fail to take variations in social and economic developments seriously enough and thus insufficiently integrate these with the more political variations we stressed, and in this way reproduce a more general problem in comparative studies—a focus on a single factor of variation) is developed by Cronin, James, “Neither Exceptional Nor Peculiar: Toward the Comparative Study of Labor in Advanced Society,” International Review of Social History 38 (04 1993):59–75. Even if I think my colleagues and I were careful to avoid falling headlong into this trap, Cronin's advocacy in this regard is well taken.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Kimeldorf, Howard, “Bringing Unions Back In (or Why We Need a New Old Labor History),” Labor History 32 (Winter 1991).Google Scholar

25. Montgomery was one of five contributors to “The Limits of Union-Centered History: Responses to Howard Kimeldorf,” Labor History 32 (Winter1991), citation, 111.

26. “Limits of Union-Centered History,” 104. For examples of these various tendencies, see Nelson, Daniel, American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900–1941 (Princeton, 1988);CrossRefGoogle ScholarLewis, Ronald L., Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980 (Lexington, Ky., 1987);Google ScholarBlewett, Mary H., Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (Urbana, 1988);Google ScholarNorwood, Stephen H., Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878–1923 (Urbana, 1990);Google ScholarBarrett, James R., Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packing-house Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana, 1987);Google ScholarGerstle, Gary, Working Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge, 1989);Google Scholar and Tolliday, Steven and Zeitlin, Jonathan, eds., Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge, 1985).Google Scholar

27. Pelling's most recent work has focused on Churchill in the postwar years. The books I have most in mind include Origins of the Labour Party (London, 1954);Google ScholarAmerica and the British Left: From Bright to Bevan (London, 1956);Google ScholarThe British Communist Party (London, 1958);Google ScholarA Short History of the Labour Party (London, 1961);Google ScholarA History of British Trade Unionism (London, 1963);Google ScholarSocial Geography of British Elections, 1885–1910 (London, 1967);Google ScholarPopular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (London, 1968);Google Scholar and The Labour Governments, 1945–51 (London, 1984).Google Scholar

28. Biagini, Eugenio F., Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Radicalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992);Google ScholarBiagini, Eugenio F. and Reid, Alastair, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Biagini and Reid, Currents of Radicalism, 5.

30. For examples, see Hindess, Barry, “Marxism and Parliamentary Democracy,” in Marxism and Democracy, ed. Hunt, Alan (London, 1980);Google ScholarMehta, Uday, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” Politics and Society 18 (12 1990):427–54;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and McClure, Kirstie M., “Difference, Diversity, and the Limits of Toleration,” Political Theory 18 (08 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Dworkin, Ronald, “Liberalism,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. Hampshire, Stuart (Cambridge, 1978).Google Scholar

32. Ibid., 125, 128.

33. For an influential discussion, see Dahl, Robert A., A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago, 1956).Google Scholar

34. Dworkin, “Liberalism,” 136.

35. Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).Google Scholar

36. Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), xv.Google Scholar

37. The relevant literature is too extensive to cite at any length here. Recent key texts grappling with these themes include Raz, John, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, 1986);Google ScholarKymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford, 1989);Google Scholar and Lukes, Steven, Moral Conflict and Politics (Oxford, 1991).Google Scholar

38. Rawls, Political Liberalism.

39. StevenLukes, “Making Sense of Moral Conflict,” in idem, Moral Conflict and Politics, 18.

40. For relevant suggestive discussions, see Samuel P.Huntington, “One Soul at a Time: Political Science and Political Reform” and Gunnell, John G., “American Political Science, Liberalism, and the Invention of Political Theory,” both in American Political Science Review 82 (03 1988);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lowi, Theodore J., “The State in Political Science: How We Became What We Study,” American Political Science Review 86 (03 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. This observation should not be taken to imply a unitary political science. The discipline is characterized by diverse epistemologies that nestle uneasily in the space between the humanities and the sciences and are nourished by a wide array of imports from other fields. Nonetheless, the subject matter, goals, and value orientations of political science have been remarkably coherent in spite of this variety.

42. This counsel is written in the same spirit as Cronin's observation that a “possible locus of innovation in comparative labor history is among the several clusters of historically minded economists, sociologists, and political scientists who are working within their disciplines to reassess labor's role in economy, society, and politics; and it is quite possible, likely even, that they will bring to the task different questions and research tools than we, as historians, would imagine or propose.” Cronin, “Neither Exceptional Nor Peculiar,” 74.

43. Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 47–48, 55, 58.Google Scholar

44. Esping-Andersen, Gosta, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990).Google Scholar

45. Kitschelt, Herbert, “Class Structure and Social Democratic Party Strategy,” British Journal of Political Science 23 (07 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The best work of this genre linking class formation and the political strategies of the leaders of working-class parties is Przeworski, Adam, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. A stunning study along just these lines is Baldwin, Peter, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (Cambridge, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47. There are a number of pitfalls in offering up these examples of which I am well aware, including the implication that I am in agreement with their arguments and formulations and the implicit imputation that historians are not doing what they should, but that social scientists are. I intend no endorsement of specific formulations or claims developed by these authors; rather it is their broad agendas, linkage between subjects and disciplines, and suggestive importance for the kind of labor history proposed by Eley and Nield that draw me to them. There are, of course, a great many historians who broadly work in this manner as well. Think of Eric Foner's work on Reconstruction or Gordon Wood's on the American Revolution. Of course what is striking about these considerable examples for me is how seriously they take recent debates about the character and limits of liberalism in the American regime and how much they focus on transactions between state and society in systematic fashion. I have underscored the works of political theorists and social scientists because all too many historians, especially labor historians, either do not read the bodies of work I have accentuated, do not take them seriously, or argue we do this stuff anyway, so what's new? The result is too many opportunities lost, and the Eley–Nield agenda left underdeveloped.