ILWCH ROUNDTABLE: WHAT NEXT FOR LABOR

AND WORKING-CLASS HISTORY?

The "Bourgeois" Dimension: A ProvocationAbout Institutions, Politics, and the Future

of Labor History

Ira KatznelsonColumbia University

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 analteration in intellectual focus. Not just a profound shift in the politicalclimate, East and West, but a sustained assault on the operational premisesof our craft from within has raised issues more challenging than thoseencompassed by the usual range of inquiries devoted to improving meth-ods, incorporating neglected topics, and critiquing extant literatures. Notsurprisingly, there has been a burst of historiographical stock-takings oflate. When fields are in trouble, their practitioners are tempted to becomeplanners. I fully agree with William Sewell's orienting judgment (in one ofthe most thoughtful of these recent considerations) that labor history can-not be judged to be in a state of scholarly crisis, even if the field has lost itsunitary theoretical grounding. After all, assessed by the standards of thecraft of history, more excellent work is being done now than ever before.Read as an empirical genre, irrespective of trends in the world or norma-tive commitments, labor history has never been better, more diverse, or asrichly textured. Impressively, it is the site of important epistemologicaldebates. Further, labor history has extended its domain to include subjectssuch as drink, crime, leisure, sexuality, and the family it once either ig-nored or relegated to the periphery of its concerns. Like Sewell, however, Iam struck by labor history's loss of elan, directionality, and intellectualpurpose.' Engaged history, in possession at least of the conceit of making adifference, has moved elsewhere, to other subject areas.

A short time ago, I attended an ambitious talk by a political theoristwho sought to reread Marx's "On the Jewish Question" from a feministperspective. The event's most striking feature was its quality of being partof a social and political movement. The room was very full, the moodcharged. When a hostile, tough-minded question was asked, impolitely,about whether turning Marx's critique to feminist purposes did not skimrather lightly over the price exacted by a world without liberal rights or

International Labor and Working-Class HistoryNo. 46, Fall 1994, pp. 7-32© 1994 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

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without a division, even if more heuristic than real, between public andprivate, the atmosphere turned electric. Even if something of a conceit,much more seemed at stake than the logical integrity of the talk as such. Asthe speaker sought in her riposte to define an intellectual space locatedbetween the poles of postmodernism and liberalism, she did more thandefend her views as a scholar. She also was fending off an attack on some ofthe most important normative and epistemological themes of the move-ment seeking to transform gender roles and social knowledge about genderwith which she identified. In straddling the border that usually divides theuniversity from the public sphere, not just the talk but the whole exercisetook on the aura of an event that matters.

Not so long ago—say, in December 1971, when, in what proved to bethe precursor to ILWCH, a "Study Group was formally constituted inorder to facilitate contact between scholars interested in European Laborand Working Class History"2—labor history possessed just this status. Fol-lowing on the movement politics of the 1960s and the founding of a numberof insurgent caucuses within professional associations, the new StudyGroup, by no means the only effort of this kind, consisted primarily ofscholars who saw their work, much as feminist scholars do today, as embat-tled and engaged. The founding of the Study Group was an act of assertionon behalf of what in today's investment jargon would be called an emergingmarket. For most of the membership, virtually all of whom were profes-sional historians, their subject mattered because it was enlisted on behalfof a cause within a broadly shared set of assumptions about the way theworld works and how it might be made a more tolerable place. It is this self-conscious purpose, the kind currently found at the junction of feministtheory focused on identity and strategic politics concerned with issues thatmatter, that many of us who work on labor and working-class history misstoday.

It is tempting to dwell extensively on the multiple sources of thedecentering of our subject, but I will try to resist, for the challenges tolabor history as a coherent, integrated subject are well known. They comein two categories: changes to the world, and thus to the assumptions whichhave guided our work; and changes within the craft, including those ofepistemology. They are not unrelated, of course. What a short time agowere labeled the "new social movements"—ecology, gender, civil rights3—called into question the priority of class and class analysis and spurred anew focus on language and on groups outside the predominantly male,white, cloth-cap working classes. Later, the decline in electoral fortunes ofdemocratic socialism and the utter collapse of the ruling communist ver-sions did far more than challenge the credibility of a forward march forlabor, a notion that had been integral to the writings and motivations of amajority of labor historians, for these turnabouts on the ground fundamen-tally contradicted the very premises of the enterprise.

Rather than concentrate on these developments, I should like to ad-

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 9

dress what we might study next, how we might do so, and with what tools.To anticipate, my argument possesses the following elements. Much cur-rent controversy revolves around debate between traditional materialismand constructivist alternatives. The considerable mutual aggression thathas come to characterize at least some of the contention between thesecamps has produced, from the perspective of epistemology, choices wewould do well to reject: on the one hand, hard-to-soft Marxisant versionsof linear causality flowing from a material base to secondary superstruc-tural constructs, and, on the other hand, the full elimination of the dualismof structure and agency. These alternatives also are politically debilitatingbecause they make labor history either hostage to the fate of problematicalmovements and political tendencies or eradicate the specificities of classstructure and agency altogether. I do not counsel the abandonment ofhistory done on materialist premises nor do I suggest we reject out of handthe postmodern turn. Rather, I urge they be kept in useful tension and thatthey both should be joined in a relationship with once-hegemonic but now-less-fashionable political, institutional, and state-focused themes withinlabor history. I should like these elements to join issues of class and identityto provide the third main pillar for labor history. In so doing, I argue thattwo sites of recent scholarship—the extensive elaboration of liberal politi-cal theory as well as the "new institutionalism" in political science, sociolo-gy, and history—can provide labor history with means to alter its architec-ture without jettisoning existing forms.

Labor history, of course, never has been distant from political prac-tice, or, at least, from a bundle of political norms and expectations. Notsurprisingly, the attention of its early practitioners, criticized in our time ashide-bound, highlighted political rules and institutions, and there is a gooddeal of work today that continues along these lines. If this scholarshipneglected the domains of experience and consciousness which so much ofthe field since the publication of Edward Thompson's masterwork hassought effectively to redress, the powerful turn to social history and agency,as well as more recent concerns for the plasticity of identity and languageand the pitfalls of essentialist ontologies, have tended not so much toignore politics and institutions as to undervalue their importance for thevery issues the new work has sought to feature. More precisely, I believe anemerging rich body of political studies oriented to probing the links be-tween the state and civil society holds out the promise of allowing us toreturn to the tracks forged by "old-fashioned" labor history, but with adifference: The gains we have made can be kept, the temptations to dis-solve our subject can be avoided, and the questions we ponder can renewour zest for political engagement.

There are two main textual pivots to my reflections. The first is fur-nished by the record of an extraordinary symposium held in October 1985at the New School for Social Research at which Eric Hobsbawm, Christo-pher Hill, Perry Anderson, Edward Thompson, and Joan Scott addressed

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"The Agenda for Radical History."4 At the risk of oversimplifying a richoccasion, collectively the participants defended the traditions of labor his-tory from assaults by the Right, expressed reservations about the theoreti-cal limits of current work, and called for a number of new initiatives,including more systematic counterfactual history and attention to issues ofgender and identity. The second axis for my meditations is provided by thejeremiad Geoff Eley and Keith Nield produced five years earlier imploringus to consider why social history, by which they principally meant the socialhistory of working classes, ignores politics.5 I recall the intellectual jolt Iexperienced sitting in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicagothat summer when I came across the Eley-Nield piece. Because it sodirectly spoke to my own scholarly location at the junction of politicalscience and history and because its dense argumentation raised so manypointed questions about the moves recently made by social and labor histo-rians as well as about their tacit assumptions, I found the paper rivetingeven where I thought it did not have things quite right. It certainly helpedme rethink a number of projects I then had in hand, including the volumeon Working Class Formation that Aristide Zolberg and I were in the earlystages of organizing.6

In writing this provocation about the future of labor history, I have twogoals. First, by way of a return to Eley and Nield in light of themes raisedin the New School symposium, I should like to remind us of the costs ofhaving left their program largely unheeded. Second, I want to suggest thatmore attention to political theory and to emergent themes at the intersec-tion of political science and labor history concerned with ties between thestate and civil society might help jump-start a field facing problems of self-definition. I will suggest, in short, that there exists a considerable oppor-tunity to revivify the subject to which this journal is devoted by (re)turningto institutions and the analysis of politics, but with a richer set of theoreti-cal and analytical tools in hand.

Whereas an older labor history (by older, I mean before the publica-tion of The Making of the English Working Class, a book that changedevery aspect of our field) had been something of a mix of economic historyand empiricist accounts of the growth and development of working-classtrade unions and political parties written in a largely uncritical, atheoreti-cal, and celebratory mode, the counsel I offer is geared self-consciously toovercome the limitations of this kind of work. Notwithstanding these im-pairments, there is much to be learned by a fresh look at this institutionalistscholarship, especially when it was crafted by the hands of considerablescholars such as Henry Pelling whose work recurrently strains to transcendthe limits of the genre, at a time when the most novel initiatives in laborhistory have taken us in directions that make a decision to attend seriouslyto the concerns raised by Eley and Nield more difficult.

I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do not argue below in favorof a labor history synthesis that is hegemonically state-centered, nor that

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 11

institutional-political analysis and liberal theory, imported from the out-side, provide ready-made panaceas for what ails labor history. The atten-tion I wish to pay to liberal theory, in particular, is likely to make laborhistorians nervous. After all, so much in this historiographical tradition hasbeen resolutely either non- or antiliberal, rightly suspicious of liberalism'stendency to mask questions of inequality and social power. Liberalism, itshould be recalled, is a protean domain of doctrines and institutions inpossession of a systemic body of political thought that has sought to theor-ize linkages between the state and the capitalist economy and between thestate and civil society central to labor history. That theorizing has largelybeen excised from the purview of the field for reasons that have more to dowith the history of the politics of labor history than with the craft of laborhistory. To the extent that the state is important as an object of analysis forlabor historians, it makes no sense to foreclose the critical use of the richestbody of relevant theorizing currently being produced, even if it is flawedtheorizing. Certainly, labor historians have not abjured the utilization ofMarxist theory or various postmodern theoretical strains in spite of theirflaws and limitations.

To a significant, but insufficiently recognized, extent, labor historians,following on the revival of important scholarship in political history outsidethe framework of labor studies, already have begun to seize the oppor-tunities I wish to underscore, just as they are rediscovering a historiograph-ical lineage that has been rather underplayed. What makes this trend sopromising, as exemplified in burgeoning studies of labor law on suchthemes as the criminalization of vagrancy, master-servant codes, and theimpact of constitutional arrangements on labor strategies, is that its practi-tioners do not so much replace class- or identity-focused concerns withstate-focused or political ones; rather, they tend to treat the relationshipsbetween these themes in novel ways. How might this welcome tendencybest be advanced? What themes, literatures, and strategies might work tobest promote it?

I

Of course, the great works of labor history long have shared in a politicaland normative tradition. This lineage is characterized by commitments andgoals whose character has been largely egalitarian and socialist. "Otherscan speak for themselves," Eric Hobsbawm observed at the New Schoolsymposium,

but I for one have seen my work on the era of the first industrial revolution andits impact on the workers as defending and continuing the work of Edwardianliberal-radicals like the Hammonds, Christian socialists like Tawney and Fabianslike the Webbs. The defects of our ancestors are patent. We have criticized them

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and got beyond them. Still, we see ourselves as being on their side againstreaction, and I think they would have seen themselves on our side.7

Hobsbawm proceeded to defend the new social history against assaultsfrom troglodytes who assert the primacy of narrative political history anddo battle with systematic explanation, theory, generalization, and compari-son as a way of promoting intellectual reaction.

The other panel participants, as I noted, were Christopher Hill, PerryAnderson, and Edward Thompson, with commentary offered by Joan Scott.It is worth revisiting their conversation as a revealing marker of transition.In effect, Hill, who asserted the importance of revolution as a tradition ofpatriotism from below, and Hobsbawm, who saluted the achievements ofstudies of ordinary people and popular classes while calling for analyticaltranscendence of the temptations of "inspirational history and conscious-ness raising," defended the achievements of what Hobsbawm called the"old agenda" of historical materialism as prologue to the suggestion that"we extend it a little bit," principally by looking further back into antiquityand further forward to confront the novel challenges of our current globalcivilization.

By contrast, the three other interventions, though hardly of one piece,presented more radical diagnoses. Thompson announced himself "an im-postor here," telling us what we already knew. For the previous six years hehad taken leave from his scholarly work to labor full time for the anti-nuclear movement. Acknowledging the centrality of Marxism for his ownwork and that of the other panelists, Thompson proclaimed his own grow-ing disinterest. "I'm neither pro nor anti so much as bored with some of theargument that goes on." His subtext was clear enough: Neither labor norradical history currently was engaged in issues that mattered, at leastenough. Naming nationalism, Nazism, Stalinism, and the Cold War, heobserved that in its focus on the economy, its causal treatment of base andsuperstructure, even in its creative focus on the relationship between powerrelations and culture, "'Marxism' has had so little helpful to say."

Anderson, by contrast, looked to a stronger and deeper Marxism todo better than intuitive and largely ad hoc historical scholarship. Seeking ahistory characterized by "a defensible causal hierarchy," he argued thatMarxism enjoys great advantages in this respect because it possesses "acomprehensive and articulated set of concepts and hypotheses about theprincipal lines of historical development as a whole." If we utilize thispromise, which, "far from exhausted . . . is only starting to be realized,"we can achieve "a much more consciously and lucidly philosophical histo-ry," open to systematic counterfactual reasoning.8

Scott, though full of praise for the "exciting and inspiring politicalengagement . . . we see in these four men," and couching her comment inthe language of appreciation for the capacities of Marxist history for renew-al, challenged both the premises and program of the other participants.

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 13

She pronounced herself uneasy wtih the impulse to protect the ground wehad won against assaults from the narrativists. Instead, taking the tack ofurging that gender must be incorporated more fully, a claim on the surfaceas unobjectionable as could be, she called for a fundamental refocusing ofour analyses of power and social relations in the direction of "the languageof class formation," including its incorporation of the language of mas-culinity; a broadening of the analysis of individual and collective identity totake account of plasticity, contingency, and multidimensionality; the studyof signification, symbols, metaphoric representations, and texts, borrowingheavily, but not credulously, from literary criticism and cultural anthropol-ogy; and a reconsideration of the boundaries of the political, to include,within the domain of power, areas of "private" life, including leisure, fami-ly, and sexuality. The times, she concluded, "demand that we be willing toforge new concepts, new theories in the heat of battle."

This effort, which she has done so much to promote, has scored somedecisive victories, measured by what students find exciting, how scholarlyenergies are directed, and the manner in which what goes on in the acade-my gets linked to what happens outside.9 By contrast, much of the agendadefended by Hill and Hobsbawm (far more rapidly than any of us antici-pated and more emphatically than makes me comfortable) has becomeendowed with the faintest quaint sense of antiquarianism. In a world whereunion density is diminishing to the vanishing point in more than a fewadvanced capitalist countries, where social-democratic ideas seem ex-hausted, not to speak of the (welcome) collapse of neo-Stalinist regimes,the once-passionate impulse to recapture working-class struggles and com-mitments to anticapitalist imperatives now risks creating sentimental re-minders of times lost and aspirations disappointed. The subject of working-class exceptionalism that once so thrived in the American context—basedon the assumption that this experience could usefully be compared coun-terfactually to robust working-class formations elsewhere which approxi-mated our theoretical, political, and ethical anticipations—now threatensto become the pivot of all our inquiries still focused on the working class:10

Why does class no longer seem to provide the best categories with which todescribe the world? Why is the working class, in particular, so diminishedas a historical actor? We chance devoting ourselves, if we stick to theagendas with which we have grown comfortable, to comforting reminis-cences as we lament the growing hegemony of our intellectual and politicaladversaries.

I think it is possible to do better by harnessing the tensions exhibitedin the Hobsbawm et al. symposium without resolving them. More specifi-cally, the pleas made by Hobsbawm and Anderson to elongate the timeframes and extend the geographical scope of our studies, and to create amore theoretical and philosophical history, more finely crafted counterfac-tuals, and more agile treatments of causality, do not fundamentally contra-dict Scott's call for (1) innovative ways of thinking about power and the

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relations of power, (2) an extension of attention to civil society that tran-scends as it incorporates traditional class categories and understandings,and (3) attention to conventions, norms, and values. To the contrary,Hobsbawm's and Anderson's projects gain force in direct proportion to awillingness to let go of traditional Marxist developmentalist visions or nar-rowly materialist understandings of working-class formation—in the spirit,say, of Victoria Hattam's plea that "the mutually constitutive role of ideasand interests" should be studied by a strategy of analytical configurativestudies open to the recognition that "particular linguistic categories andcultural traditions . . . cannot be deduced from a priori principles." Rath-er, those categories and traditions are "the product of an ongoing politicalstruggle that needs to be researched and explained."11 Disappointingly,rather than engage each other productively, the protagonists in the varioushistoriographical and epistemological battles currently underway eitherhave sought to force a choice between the poles of such various (butnot identical) dyads as structure/agency, material/cultural, and reality/signification, or they have sought to overcome these and other dualisms byway of various gambits of elision. These stratagems are lamentable. Thefirst smacks of one or another kind of reductionist imperialism (anti-materialism can be as reductionist as the most hide-bound materialism);12

the second because antidualist conflations make it impossible to exploresome of the most challenging and vexatious questions about relationshipsbetween elements of the social world which require they be kept in rela-tional friction as analytically distinct.13

Taking the 1985 New School symposium as a kind of baseline, it isclear that the turn to language, signification, and identity has successfullyundermined Marxism's essentialist tendencies but at the not-inconsiderablecost of eroding meaningful conceptions of materiality and structure of anykind, including political ones. When Anderson and Scott advocated a morepotent theoretical-political history, their counsel diverged dramatically.Anderson, as noted, advocated a refreshed Marxism. Scott, by contrast,while respectful of Marxism's "capacity for theoretical renewal," mounteda radical critique of that tradition viewed through the prism of gender.14

Because both projects have been advanced in the interim, not withoutmutual suspicion and disdain, labor history today carries two main kit bagsof theoretical tools: those grounded in Marxism and ancillary socialisttraditions and those nourished by various postmodern turns, including themultilayered emphasis on discourse, power, and identity. When confrontedwith each other as alternatives, these impulses cannot easily be renderedcompatible; after all, the appeal of the second lies not inconsiderably in itsthoroughgoing critique of the first. Marxism, on this accounting, repre-sented, say, in the influential volume on Hegemony and Socialist Strategyby Laclau and Mouffe,15 is seen to suffer from the irremediable sins ofreductionism and essentialism. Thompson had argued in his late 1970soutburst against Althusserianism that Marxism had entered the world of

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 15

political economy only to be captured by it; but he sought to rescue Marx-ism by incorporating processual, cultural contingencies. By contrast, thestrong postmodern critique rejects Marxist theory tout court as incapable ofovercoming a misplaced naturalness for the working class (hence a fixity ofidentities and the exclusion of categories of experience that do not fit thismold) or its immanent teleological grand narrative. In turn, in a mannernot without its own inherent tensions, the postmodern impulse insists thatthe complex discursive universe we inhabit allows for a relatively uncon-strained construction of interests and identities, that power relations arediffused across spheres, and that the language and language games weinhabit shape our consciousness and possibilities.

Pushed hard, either a Marxism of enveloping base-superstructurecausality or the dissipation of any notion of "reality" in the face of claimson behalf of plasticity and signification can only lead to theoretical andhistoriographical dead ends. Even more, the sense that we might bepressed to choose between these options is entirely unattractive (irrespec-tive of whether we try to find ways to hold them in tension or eliminate theduality altogether). Surely, the tension between reality and significationneed not be dissolved by way of a rupture dividing between one possibilitythat privileges matters of structure and objectivism at the price of nottaking agency, learning, and choice seriously; and another that cannotmake up its mind whether language is a determining prison or whetherdiscursive contestation is the key to our liberation.

If one of the least-fortunate developments of the past few years ap-pears to be an unwillingness to embrace diversity in social analysis by wayof a playful multidimensionality, an appreciation of complexity, and a will-ingness to rotate axes of inquiry without insisting on the decisive superi-ority of one's preferred approach, this has been accompanied by anotherbaneful trend: the continuing flight within labor history from institutional-political analysis. Quite obviously, neither traditional Marxism, which al-ways has felt most comfortable in the company of economic history, norstudies of social history and popular culture have placed such matters in theforeground. Further, the recent welcome extension of our understandingof what constitutes "the political" to such spheres as the family and theproduction of social knowledge has had the paradoxical effect of obscuringthe specificity of state power. States are not just one source of social poweror one kind of organization among many. As institutional and normativeensembles, states make unique and enforcible claims to sovereignty overpeople and territory. "Although much has been gained from this expansionof politics," Hattam acutely observed, "something has also been lost.While most of these studies have self-consciously chosen to ignore tradi-tional forms of political power and state action, this turn away from formalpolitics, not surprisingly, has led many scholars to underestimate the influ-ence of the state."16

My own advocacy, then, is for a labor history that refuses to choose

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between currently fashionable alternatives and finds a way, as in somehands it has begun to do, to reincorporate at the center of the discipline thesubjects of state-focused politics, institutions, and law. Importantly, Wil-liam Sewell's recent brief on behalf of a "post-materialist rhetoric" hasforcefully addressed the first of these concerns. Even though I could notdisagree more, for reasons stated, with his plea for a postmaterialist laborhistory that wishes "to obliterate, to deny as nonsensical, the oppositionbetween the ideal and material on which materialist common sense hasbeen built," I could not agree more with his vigorous plea to reject theimperialistic claims of such alternatives as economistic rational choice,Gramscian culturalism, and Foucauldian conflations of culture and politicsin favor of an intellectual variety that refuses decisive choices in the humansciences—"a labor history more multiple in its theoretical strategies, moreironic in its rhetorical stance, and more open in its search for understand-ing."17 Yet Sewell, implicitly resonating to the various antitraditionalistmoves with which he identifies, nowhere finds room for the institutional-political subjects that take the state seriously. Without allowing these top-ics, however, it is hard to see how worries articulated by Edward Thomp-son at the New School about the silences in labor history's Marx-centereddiscourse or by Joan Scott about the blinders we have worn with respect tosubject matter and method can meaningfully be addressed. Long afterscholars in political science and political sociology have brought the state"back in," too many labor historians still are writing in recoil from theirown state-centered patrimony. I think it possible to reincorporate thesethemes, but neither by a simplistic recursive return to the older pathwaysof institutions and politics nor by uncritically absorbing the state-centeredimpulse from other disciplines. To begin to specify what I have in mind, Ipropose to turn to the Eley-Nield paper because its sharply etched critiqueof labor history's practices and its warning about the costs of setting the"bourgeois" political realm to the side have become even more pertinent.

II"Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?," you will recall, directed itsconcerns to the manner in which students of working-class history hadsought to transcend the limitations of a focus on the institutional biogra-phies of unions and parties. This attempt to reorient labor history to theconditions, consciousness, culture, and agency of working-class people, theauthors argued, had focused both on questions of hegemony and socialcontrol—the manner in which working-class subordination had beenperpetuated—and on a fine-grained look at working-class life, including,as in the case of a focus on the "labor aristocracy," a searching examinationof work itself and a deeper emphasis on working-class culture understood"thickly," as social anthropologists use the term. The essay expressed theworry that despite important divergences in historiographical traditions in

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 17

both Germany and Britain, labor history's approach to politics was con-verging on a common problematique oriented narrowly toward understand-ing why the working class did not think or behave in the manner projectedby Marxist propositions. In Britain, there was no Marxist party; in Ger-many, a Marxist party was integrated into the larger regime; in both,revolutionary militancy was absent or insufficient. Why these outcomes?Politics, from the angle of vision afforded by such questions, tends to betreated reductively as an account of social control or as a source of alibis forworking classes essentially thought to be ready to revolt, if only (in thehands of some writers) they had been left alone to express their naturalstructural tendencies toward appropriate consciousness, or if (in the handsof others) they had been mobilized appropriately by their institutions andleaders.

To be sure, Eley and Nield took note of key differences between theGerman and British historiographical traditions. In the former, politicalanalysis had tried to account for why the social-democratic complex hadintegrated the working class instead of producing revolutionary change."On the whole the political, economic and cultural organizations of Ger-man labour are shown reacting to, and seeking accommodations within, aglobal political structure which strictly determined the limits of their effec-tiveness." By contrast, in Britain, "this bourgeois political dimension hasall but disappeared." Instead, British labor historians (mimicked, I mightadd, by most American colleagues) concentrated on specific events, sites,places, or local practices without much attention to the overarching institu-tional context of political life. Yet both the political approach of the Ger-mans and the civil-society approach of the British, Eley and Nield argued,converged on a number of assumptions—about the givenness of the work-ing class with a relatively fixed structure of interests and identities, aboutideology as imposition or reinforcement from the outside, and about "thehistorical priority of "experience" and "consciousness" over politics andpolitical processes—that left concern for political institutions and pro-cesses segregated within archaic labor histories.18 "Formal political pro-cesses," their overview concluded,

remain more or less suppressed in recent social history, retreating in the face ofconcentrations on collapsed notations of "culture" and "experience," or, seem-ingly more hard-headed, on questions of social structure, social mobility andstudies of the status relations of single components of the social formation:labour aristocracy, petty bourgeoisie.19

The danger of these emphases, they rightly observed, is that in themove away from traditional institutional labor history, scholars weretempted to utilize the domain of politics as providing the instruments ofbourgeois domination without taking seriously either the achievements ofworking-class political institutions, including the ways they altered bour-

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geois society, or the processes of class negotiation undertaken by theseinstitutions in the zone linking the state to civil society. This, they ob-served, is a terrain of engagement, bargaining, and mutual constitution.

Eley and Nield's diagnosis and critique were stronger than their proac-tive research program, however. They expressed themselves as disap-pointed by the lack of comparative and theoretical ambition in the field butoffered no new theoretical or comparative departures. They sought tomake politics and institutions constitutive aspects of an enlarged laborhistory but they did not specify how. They observed that the state maintainsa complex organizational presence in everyday life but they did not indi-cate how either the institutions or terms of these transactions might bestudied. The central hortatory aim of of my essay is to remind us of thesegoals. My main ambition is to address some of the silences in Eley andNield's advocacy (without implying they would agree with my proposals).This I wish to do by suggesting how these might be accomplished in a waythat does not insist that an agenda oriented to politics and the state becompetitive in a zero-sum way with other scholarly currents.

Put in shorthand, I want to build on the regret Eley and Nield ex-presed when they took note of "the new English 'culturalist' tendencies inGerman historiography" that threatened to reduce this history of thesocial-democratic complex of institutions and practices to "an importantvehicle of reproduced bourgeois culture and not much else."20 This solu-tion to the difficulties historians were having with constructing robust two-way links between German working-class identities and culture, on the onehand, and working-class political institutions, on the other, severed tiesprecisely where the main challenge was to understand contingent relation-ships. The fracture dividing social from political history not only madeanalyses of the domain between the state and civil society impossible butimpaired our understanding of the mutual constitution of institutions andculture, organization and ideology. Eley and Nield's solution, though notmapped in any detail, was to return to both the panoply of working-classparty and union organizations and to the larger regime contexts withinwhich they were embedded without being burdened by labor history'straditional baggage of a priori essentialist or ideological assumptions.

When Ary Zolberg and I set out, with colleagues, to reconsider thehistory of working-class formation in France, Germany, and the UnitedStates, it was just this kind of program we had in mind. My own contribu-tion, the book's introductory chapter, sought to thicken our sense of whatit means to speak of the formation of a working class in four ways. First, itrejected the story of the class "in itself" moving to become a class "foritself," and, more broadly, attempted to infer class ideas, language, organi-zations, and activity from class structure. Second, it sought to cut the tiebetween the "outcome" of class formation and these tendencies by definingworking-class formation in terms of the historical-empirical complex ofdispositions and patterns of collective action actually pursued by people

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 19

who have been inserted, directly or indirectly through ties of family andkin, into the world of capitalism via the mechanism of the labor market.21

Third, noting that class has been a lumpy term encompassing issues bestdistinguished from each other, it proposed "that class in capitalist societiesbe thought of as a concept with four connected layers of theory and history:those of structure, ways of life (not limited to the workplace), dispositions,and collective action." Class formation, from this angle of vision, "may bethought of more fully and more variably as concerned with the conditional(but not random) process of connection between the four levels of class."22

Fourth, with its insistence that the content of each of these levels will bedistinctive from society to society, that none of the levels should be an-alyzed exclusively in class terms, and that the connections between thelevels are mutually conditioning, the chapter argued in favor of inquiringabout how variations in state structures and policies affected both thecontent of these levels of class and the qualities of their relationship witheach other.

These linked formulations can be (indeed, have been) criticized in anumber of ways: by traditionalists for their slackness and high level ofindeterminacy and by more thoroughgoing critics of Marxism's legacies forthe remaining tightness of linkage between capitalism's structures (treatedas rather too hermetically sealed off) and the limited repertoire of identi-ties and actions the essay and book considered. With regard to worries ofthese kinds, I now think my chapter was right in trying to identify a rangeof open possibilities within determinate limits and in seeking to understandthe selection process among these by asking how various bundles of incen-tives and disincentives to class-based identities altered with changes to thecharacter of political institutions and regimes. Nonetheless, in retrospect,my argument was marred by two key shortcomings. Because the argumentenumerated the four levels of class in a sequence beginning with economicstructure and ending with conduct, in spite of its announced position itremained opaque about just how fully it wished to break with the direc-tionality of classes in motion from "in" to "for" themselves. I intended amore open and reflexive process than my prose signified, and I warmlywelcome the reminders that have come largely from studies of gender thateven the more fluid qualities I meant but did not succeed enough in under-scoring were insufficient in their range and in the directionality of cause.Notwithstanding, I continue to insist that we not break the links betweenthe four levels of analysis I proposed which would result in a segregation ofthe motifs of language, thought, and action from issues of structure.

The second main inadequacy in my paper was its much too mechani-cal, nonrelational distinction between the domain of social class and themacrostructures of states. The state was treated almost as a deus ex ma-china that descended on capitalist class relations to shape outcomes of classformation without anything like sufficient appreciation of the ways inwhich states, in interaction with the substantially, but not entirely, distinc-

20 ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

tive zones of the economy and civil society both constitute those domainsand are constituted by them. It is the paper's insufficient account of theterms and institutions governing these ties that constitutes its most signifi-cant evasion.23

The reason this autocritique amounts to more than self-indulgence isthat it mirrors the limits of Eley and Nield's historiographical evaluationand their program for bringing politics back in. Some recent trends in laborhistory, moreover, have moved the field even further away from just thosetransactional issues they stressed under the rubric of negotiation, andwhich I considered far too incompletely.

As it happens, materials with which to remedy these defects do nothave to be invented from scratch. They exist, in generous measure, withinthree disciplinary domains: labor history itself, contemporary political the-ory, and "new institutional" political studies. In the remainder of this pa-per, I should like to take note of at least some of these intellectual develop-ments, suggest their relevance for the future of labor history, and indicatehow the forging of new relationships among them promises not so much analternative to as a synergy with some versions of the turn to language andthe plasticity of identity.

Ill

When Howard Kimeldorf recently advocated that a rejoinder to just suchpostmodern currents be grounded in a revival of the "old" institutional,union-centered, labor history,24 his claim that such work has been shuntedto the periphery was resisted by David Montgomery. Though sympatheticto Kimeldorf's brief on behalf of institutional history, Montgomery quiterightly argued—citing the considerable work of more than two dozenscholars—that "careful analysis of labor organizations has hardly beenmarginalized by the historical writing of the last generation."25 There havebeen three main trends within this scholarship. One current, the mosttraditional, has broadened the number of unions for which we now possessexcellent institutional biographies and has deepened our understanding ofsuch key issues as the relationship between leaders and followers, the roleof gender and race within union affairs, and the character of shop-floorclass struggles. A second tendency has oriented itself to work and indus-trial relations more broadly, looking both to more fine-grained analyses ofthe work process and to the complicated interplay between employers andemployees. The third, perhaps the most vibrant because of its close tieswith social history from below, has sought, as Michael Kazin puts it, to"embed unions in the rich soil of ethnic (and, often, radical) politics andculture."26 Kazin, interestingly, suggests that histories of the labor move-ment move in the direction of more attention to language as a complementto this engagement with social history. Virtually none of this impressivebody of work, however, has been concerned with politics in the sense

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 21

proposed by Eley and Nield. The stratagems of more sophisticated institu-tional biographies, of focusing on work and industrial relations within theworkplace, and of setting union histories within their working-class com-munal, social, and cultural contexts, have elided just these themes.

Yet there has been an important, if neglected, current of labor history,including scholarship that focuses on unions and parties, that in fact doesaddress these topics. Henry Pelling, working at the junction of political andlabor history (with a tinge of influence from political science) has producedan underappreciated corpus over the past four decades that provides apotentially rich source of nourishment for any return to the study of politicsand institutions in a manner open to sustenance from political theory andanalytically grounded political studies. Pelling's books and articles includenarrative histories of the British Labour party and British trade unions, arelational study of America and the British Left, a fine-grained analysis ofthe social geography of British elections spanning the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, treatments of the interplay between the liberaland labourist traditions, analysis of the ties between British imperial-ism and the working class, analysis of the limited appeal of British commu-nism, and studies of the labor movement and the welfare state, including acritical appreciation of the Attlee governments of 1945-51. Some of thesewritings are organized along the lines of linear narrative, while others areorganized analytically by theme. Pelling's work stands out, in my view, as akey resource because it is integrated in its various facets by a central,unwavering theme: the quest to understand how the labor movement inBritain, in all its aspects, has forged institutional ties of representation,influence, and negotiation with the state within a broadly liberal frame-work of rights and citizenship.27 But the reasons Pelling's work seems sofresh to me, in spite of its studied diffidence of tone and unwillingness toannounce a theoretical perspective, are not limited to its subject matter.Pelling has been something of an outsider. Because he is a liberal, not asocialist; a political, not a social, historian; and a researcher without strongideological views about the role and strategies of the labor movement,Pelling has paid the price of being at a distance from some of the mostexciting epistemic and political communities working in the field (like theones represented at the New School symposium). At the same time, how-ever, he has escaped both the embrace of teleology and fashion. Even ifdoggedly atheoretical (virtually as a matter of principle and in recoil fromwhat he believes to be an unwonted taste for abstraction), today withinlabor history there is no single body of work as accomplished as Pelling'sthat takes seriously a relational approach to the ties between the state andthe working class via an analysis of their institutions considered in a largerregime framework.

In his electoral work, and studies of the party system and particularinstances of labor unrest, moreover, Pelling never has been content toprivilege particular modes of working-class political mobilization. Taking

22 ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

seriously the idea of popular politics and society, he has been concernedwith how and why workers at some moments have found liberal initiativesappealing, but at other times have been attracted to socialist or conserva-tive appeals. There are, of course, quite massive literatures on the BritishLeft and, reciprocally, on the theme of Conservative working-class voting(a theme that has focused ever since Bagehot on the dubious notion ofworking-class deference), but, until recently, Pelling aside, studies ofworking-class liberalism have been downplayed. The most important rea-son to regret this imbalance is not that of wanting to redress it as such, butbecause in Britain, as in much of the West, the socialist and liberal tradi-tions have become tightly, if problematically, intertwined. Under such vari-ous headings as New Liberalism and Progressivism, liberalism becamemore social in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In turn,socialism, as it engaged in electoral politics and focused demands on thestate, accommodated with varying degrees of enthusiasm to liberal regimerules. Though not its only source, a central offspring of this marriage, ofcourse, has been the modern welfare state. Neither the socialist nor liberalstories can meaningfully be told in isolation, yet the tendency within laborhistory to neglect what Eley and Nield call the bourgeois political dimen-sion, with the rare exception of work like Pelling's, has been to vastlyunderplay the significance of their interaction.

Happily, some pathbreaking recent work on the working class andliberalism is redressing the balance and extending the zone of meaningfulhistorical questions. I have in mind, as leading instances, Eugenio Biagini'sexcellent study of "popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone," and thecollection of 1989 conference papers on popular radicalism, organized la-bor, and party politics Biagini edited with Alastair Reid.28 Covering suchthemes as the role of Gladstonian liberals in the labor law reforms of 1875and in debates over the scope and character of taxation, the ties betweenLiberals and Labour in Parliament, the qualities of ideological radical andsocialist debate in Edwardian labor politics, and the complex relationshipbetween liberalism, socialism, and democracy in social reform at the locallevel, the latter book sets the story of British working-class history in amuch wider political compass than conventionally has been the case. Ex-plicitly echoing the emphases and foci of Pelling's work, Currents of Radi-calism takes note of the continuities between Chartism, liberalism, andpolitical socialist-laborism, observes that there were multiple mass move-ments and working-class institutions, stresses the extension of democracy,citizenship, and political participation, creates a dialogue between Labourand Liberal party histories and strategies of representation, refuses a prioriassumptions about class as the necessary basis of political expression, andinsists above all (in the spirit of Eley and Nield) that working-class Liberaland Labor activists be placed "back into their own political context."29 Inso doing, the volume not only gives some specificity to the program Eleyand Nield advocated in rather general terms, it also opens potential path-

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 23

ways in two other promising directions: toward a serious reckoning withformulations and themes that have developed in recent years within theframework of a revivified liberal political theory, and with relevant analyti-cal work in political sociology and political science on state-civil societyinteractions.

One of the main features of the 1985 New School symposium was adefense of theoretically oriented history against the view that historicaldevelopments are best understood as "one damn thing after another." Inevery instance, what the participants meant by theory—principally Marxistor feminist—constituted either a rejection of liberal political theory or anavoidance of the themes it has made central. From the origins of liberalismas a doctrine of toleration at a time of fractricidal religious wars, thesethemes have been concerned with the awesome capacities of states to dogood and evil and with establishing rules and institutions capable of gov-erning the exchanges states establish with the economy and with civil soci-ety. Both Marxist and feminist theory, certainly not without warrant, havebeen suspicious of liberal theoretical impulses and categories, includingrights and the distinction between public and private, as masks for privi-leges grounded in the class structure and patriarchy. Labor history hasshared this dubiety. The result, I think, is the unhappy paradox that skepti-cism about liberalism's tendencies to conceal class power has reduced ouraccess to the most elaborated instruments scholars and citizens possess toprobe state power. Additionally, just those issues raised at the symposiumso forcefully by Edward Thompson concerning what states do and howtheir actions can be controlled in the interests of a more peaceful anddemocratic world cannot be addressed except by means of political theorycapable of analyzing how states actually transact with the economy andsociety, and concerned, normatively and practically, to harness and delimitthe capacities of states.

As a result of its willful lack of engagement with the rich harvest ofliberal political thought, labor history has sallied on without taking some ofthe most potent tools for political analysis along for the ride. Marxism andfeminism have provided indispensable vantage points from which to revealliberalism's limits, hypocrisies, and silences.30 Yet this demystification isinsufficient to the tasks of political analysis. The resulting lack of nuancehas proved a serious shortcoming. After all, working-class struggles, pros-pects, and identities have been bound up with the state and with the rulesand institutions that have linked them to the state. These have been forgedin the crucible of the civic, political, and social issues which have been ofcentral concern to theorists working within (or with) a liberal framework.

Both in practice and in doctrine, liberalism has proved remarkablygelatinous. At times, it has bonded with socialism; at others, with reaction.It has sustained the elaboration of welfare states as well as their contrac-tion. It has flattened and supported difference. Liberalism, in short, doesnot demarcate outcomes (though it limits the feasible set by acting as a

24 ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

filter) but specifies the arenas and terms of conflict and negotiation. Withinthe West in the past two centuries, politics has pivoted mainly around twocentral questions: first, whether liberalism would prevail over illiberal alter-natives to define the basic qualities of political regimes; second, whereliberalism has prevailed, which kind of liberalism we should have. Thisdouble set of issues—the antinomy of liberalism and illiberalism, and con-testation about liberalism's character—in fact has been at least as central tothe histories of modern working classes as their struggles with capitalism asa system of economic exploitation.

Labor history's neglect of liberal political theory has been expensive.It has biased empirical research away from the kinds of themes Pelling andBiagini and Reid have been exploring, and it has contributed to the relativepaucity of fine-grained political analysis. My aim is not to propose a lurchaway from labor history's other preoccupations, nor is it to endorse aparticular kind of liberal politics; my aim is to note that an engagementwith liberal theory that is both open-minded and skeptical might produce atwo-way process of interrogation in which questions drawn from liberaltheory could inform the research of labor historians and the resourcespossessed by labor history could be utilized to critically interrogate liberal-ism's claims. The historical importance of this engagement is that it hasmarked one of the most significant contested zones of working-class forma-tion. Its current political significance lies in its identification of profoundlyimportant questions about the kind of liberalism we should, and will, cometo possess.

Consider, by way of a suggestive but problematical example, the ap-proach to liberalism propounded in a now-famous essay by political philos-opher Ronald Dworkin.31 Dworkin argues that liberalism's central princi-ples are not located, as commonly thought, on one side of a tradeoffbetween liberty and equality understood as discrete and free-standing val-ues. Rather, what is distinctive to liberalism, as compared to other politicaltheories, is the type of equality it values: "the requirement that the govern-ment treat all those in its charge as equals," that is, with equal concern andrespect. The issue of who gets included "in its charge" may be contested,but not the standing of liberal citizens. The second of liberalism's coreprinciples, Dworkin argues, is official neutrality on what constitutes goodand valued ways of life. Taken together, these two constitutive principles ofequality and neutrality do not represent "some compromise of half-wayhouse between more forceful positions"; rather, they stand "on one side ofan important line that distinguishes [liberalism] from all competitors takenas a group." A liberal is a person who holds these views about equality andtoleration.32

The primary institutions of liberal political orders—economic marketsand representative democracy—are valued as the best available mecha-nisms with which to satisfy the requirements of equal treatment and neu-

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 25

trality. Yet the routine functioning of each of these institutions, Dworkinobserves in an echo of Karl Polanyi, generates profound difficulties forliberal principles. Markets produce and reinforce not only such inequalitiesas the differential costs of goods but also those that cannot be defended byliberal principles of equality. As a result, liberalism in practice generates itsown impulse toward schemes of redistribution that preserve the price sys-tem but curtail its production of impermissible inequality.

Likewise, representative democracy's routine operation can generateilliberal results, particularly when either a majority or an intense minoritysucceeds in imposing its preferences so strongly as to violate the right ofcitizens to choose valued ways of life.33 For this reason, liberalism requiresprocedural and civil rights. "These rights will function as trump cards heldby individuals. . . . For the liberal, rights are justified, not by some princi-ple in competition with an independent justification of the political andeconomic institutions they qualify, but in order to make more perfect theonly justification on which these other institutions may themselves rely."34

Seen from this perspective, the various "welfare state" packages ofpublic policies adopted by governments in liberal regimes to organize mar-kets and provide for the representation of interests within a system ofrights compose provisional attempts—the outcome of situated conflictamong competing ideas and coalitions within determinate institutional andmaterial contexts—to manage the tensions inherent in a liberal order withrespect to its constitutive principles of equality and neutrality.

This framework opens up a rich harvest of questions both for liberalsand their critics, and for labor historians. When Dworkin wrote "Liberal-ism" in 1978, liberal theory was dominated by commentary and criticismdirected at John Rawls's monumental A Theory of Justice.35 This treatise,as Rawls put it some two decades later, sought "to generalize and to carryto a higher order of abstraction the traditional doctrine of the social con-tract." In developing his conception of "justice as fairness" as an alterna-tive to the predominant utilitarianism of moral and political philosophy inthe Anglo-American world, Rawls thought his conception of liberalism tobe "the best approximation to our considered convictions of justice and[that it] constituted the most appropriate basis for the institutions of ademocratic society."36 Dworkin's article was published when Rawls com-mentary was at its peak. In the years since, Rawls himself has turned rathermore in a political direction to complement his work's ethical features, andthe field of liberal political thought has vastly extended the scope andcharacter of its controversies. Its key themes—all of which are potentiallyenriching for labor history—have included the relationship between indi-vidual well-being and social and political forms; the status and comprehen-siveness of rights; conflict over incommensurable values; the formation ofwhat John Stuart Mill called "affections and desires"; and the capacity ofliberalism to deal with individuals not just as disembodied citizens but as

26 ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

gendered members of communities and cultures.37 Rawls himself has dedi-cated most of his recent scholarship to just these political subjects.38

If these issues directly address current political controversies in a man-ner that connects them directly to the perspective advocated by Eley andNield, labor history, in turn possesses an enormous richness of resourceswith which to interrogate liberalism and its claims. Thus, when StevenLukes argues, in a tension-ridden formulation, that liberalism "is aboutfairness between conflicting moral and religious positions, but it is alsoabout filtering out those that are incompatible with a liberal order andtaming those that remain,"39 he provides not only a set of questions withwhich to investigate labor history but a fertile set of objects of analysiswithin the liberal tradition that labor history can be utilized to probe. Withthe products of such a two-way engagement, labor history can becomemore precise in its political inquiries and political theory can be invited tosee if its often-evidence-free reasoning in fact can meet the test of makingsense of actually existing worlds.

IV

Issues central to liberal political thought (including its relationship to thesocialist tradition, its braiding with illiberalisms of different kinds, and itscapacities to accommodate to moral and human difference) and to thefocus on politics, institutions, and negotiation advocated by Eley and Nieldalso have been characteristic of political science from the start, yet laborhistorians have written virtually without any reference to that discipline'sanalytical or ethical qualities. This, too, is a lost opportunity. In spite of itsoften profoundly ahistorical qualities, political science possesses importantliteratures that grapple with precisely the issues Eley and Nield advancedas suggestions and which many labor historians work on in ad hoc wayswithout drawing on materials that would be of direct assistance in posingand researching their questions. The fact that historians and social scien-tists often inhabit distinctive epistemic communities is no reason to valorizetheir mutual isolation.

From its founding as a constitutive part of Progressive thought at theturn of the century, political science has been a moral, not just an empiri-cal, discipline. Its various constitutional, institutional, behavioral, and the-oretical aspects, even its internal organization and estrangements, havebeen geared to secure normative commitments. These, broadly, may beidentified as liberal, in the doctrinal and institutional senses of the term.More particularly, political scientists have worked principally at the pointof intersection of the modern state and civil society at a time of growingstate capacity to make war, organize economies, and promote social wel-fare. The development of political science in the past century also hasparalleled the long moment when liberalism thickened and became bothmore legitimate (swallowing some of its former conservative and socialist

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 27

competitors) and more vulnerable to a wide array of tyrannies and massmovements, almost all of which have been defended as constituting betterversions of democracy than liberalism can accommodate.40

Transactions linking citizens and the state have provided the mainobjects of analysis for political scientists. Their concern with law, represen-tation, voting, public opinion, interest groups, and congnate subjects instudies of the United States, with classifications of other regimes by refer-ence to their degree of distance from models of liberal democracy, withliberal theory, and with understanding how international orders led first byliberal Britain and then by liberal America could secure desired ends addup to a remarkably coherent program of research and writing. Even criticsof the discipline's mainstream have accepted these foci and premises. Theyhave directed their ire at the complacencies, insufficiency of inclusiveness,implicit concessions to hierarchies of class, race, gender, and power, andinstitutional limits to political participation both in American society and intheir scholarly discipline without breaking with the central axis of politicalscience: to understand and promote a liberal political order against allcomers.41

I do not counsel that labor history be inserted into this discipline andits premises; rather, that labor historians take critical advantage of thistradition of political studies to secure its own aims.42 If our resistance totaking liberal theory seriously has exacted costs, the marginalization ofpolitical science and political sociology, in spite of their lacunae and limita-tions, has been even more expensive. Surely the massive literatures inthese disciplines concerned with political parties, corporatism, interest rep-resentation, and public opinion, among other key subjects, can help ad-vance the development of a labor history attuned to politics and the state.

At least some of the work accomplished in the past decade under therubric of the new institutionalism is especially promising in this regard.Consider, by way of brief suggestive illustration, just three such examplesin work by Theda Skocpol, Gosta Esping-Andersen, and Herbert Kitschelt.None provides a template or model, but each is an attempt to develop ahistorically grounded institutionalism aimed at probing the links betweenpublic policy, political strategies, and politicized identities—issues, ofcourse, which have been central to the histories of working-class forma-tion.

In Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Theda Skocpol's approach to iden-tity and political action rejects the choice between objectivist models ofsocial structure and constructivist notions of identity. Instead, in a contri-bution located in a zone between model building and narrative history, sheinsists on "the dual lines of determination that should enter into any analy-sis of the social identities and relations involved in political processes. . . .I propose to explore how social and political factors combine to affect thesocial identities and group capacities involved in the politics of social poli-cymaking." Her concern is with politicized identities, and with the ways in

28 ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

which state and party structures, economic relations, and cultural patternscompound to shape such identities and the political orientations and abili-ties of groups. She utilizes this perspective to account for her controversial,only partially persuasive finding that gender consciousness and the deter-mination of women to realize maternal values in the sphere of nationalpolicy-making proved more important in shaping American social politicsin the early twentieth century than the consciousness and activities of theworking class. Her argument pivots on the fit between politicized identitiesand group assets, on the one side, and government institutions, the partysystem and more general rules of the liberal political game, on the other. Infinding that American "political structures allow unusual leverage to socialgroups that can, with a degree of discipline and consistency of purpose,associate across many local political districts," she notes an affinity be-tween the formation of networks of middle-class women with federatedinterests across thousands of localities and opportunities for influence inthe American regime. Further, she argues that through a process of policyfeedback, successful policy initiatives transform state capacities and inducechanges in social groups and in their political goals and capacities; these, inturn, shape the next generation of policy changes.43

When durable patterns of such relationships are fashioned, connectingnorms, actors, and policies, it is possible to speak of a policy regime. This,at least, is the approach of Gosta Esping-Andersen, who distinguishesbetween different kinds of welfare states in just this manner. Conservative-Catholic, social democratic, and market liberal welfare states represent, inhis work, distinctive configurations of identities and interests. At the cen-ter of these types are different kinds of states (distinguished from eachother by normative visions, institutional arrangements, and policy instru-ments) that distinctively position groups, including the working class, incontexts that not only help shape who they are discursively and strategi-cally, but actually organize politically disparate stratification systems andpathways of transaction between states and markets and between statesand civil societies. Like Skocpol's, his is not a form of analysis consisting oflawlike model building of the kind that rightly makes historians very ner-vous, nor does it treat historical complexity as shapeless.44

Writing in the configurational mode characteristic of Skocpol's andEsping-Andersen's recent work, Herbert Kitschelt rejects the popular no-tion that the decline of European labor and socialist parties in the recentpast follows directly from transformations to the class structure. Forswear-ing this approach as too blunt and unidirectional, Kitschelt persuasivelycounsels that we need, first, a more fine-grained account of working-classexperiences at work, in markets, and in the sphere of social reproduction;second, a more eleborated approach to the formation of working-classpreferences that takes seriously the strategic decisions of political parties inlight of the circumstances of party competition in which they find them-

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 29

selves; and, third, a sense of how these two dimensions of working-classexperience and elite strategy interact to produce electoral outcomes.45

What Skocpol's, Esping-Andersen's, and Kitschelt's recent configura-tive political scholarship shares in common is the manner in which theyplace state-centered concerns at the heart of their work without treatingthe state simply as a bulky macrostructure. Just as Eley and Nield urged,their focus is on relationships and negotiations between actors in civilsociety, including members of the working class, and the state via politicalinstitutions of different kinds under the influence both of constitutionaland policy regimes. By linking studies of public policy and class inclinationswithout making essentialist assumptions,46 and by demonstrating how wemight better study the relationship between political content and the con-tingencies of class solidarity, this body of work bears directly on some ofthe newest, but also the oldest, puzzles of labor history.47 Was it not Marxwho insisted that the road to working-class emancipation must travel to theheart of the bourgeois dimension?

NOTES

In the early stages of thinking about this paper, I profited from conversations with DavidFeldman, Eric Hobsbawm, Gareth Stedman Jones, Naomi Tadmor, Pat Thane, and JayWinter. Nick Stargart shared his unpublished piece, "Where Have all the Workers Gone?"which argues persuasively that working-class formation is "endogenous to politics." Duringthe course of writing the essay, Victoria Hattam provided challenging critical reflections andgenerously shared materials in her file drawer. Once a first draft was completed, the membersof 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. William H. Sewell, Jr., "A Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History," in Rethink-ing Labor History, ed. Lenard Berlanstein (Urbana, 1993). I also share his judgment, notwithout self-interest, that International Labor and Working-Class History continues to be athriving site for labor history. Nonetheless, in order to avoid the temptation of focusing thisarticle on the contributions of this journal or on major work written by its editors, I decided toabjure direct engagement with this rich body of scholarship.

2. This announcement by the Study Group's Executive Committee appeared in the firstissue of the Newsletter: European Labor and Working Class History (May 1972). The newsletterprincipally consisted of reports on meetings (one in Madison on ideology and the labormovement, another—the seventh in a continuing series—in Linz, Austria, that brought togeth-er some 150 historians of labor from East and West Europe) and on events to come, includingthe announcement that the Study Group would sponsor an August 1972 session at the PacificCoast 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 forma-tion oriented to the labor movement, see Gunar Olofsson, "After Working-Class Movement?An Essay on What's 'New' and What's 'Social' in the New Social Movements," Ada Sociologi-cal (1988):15-34.

4. Margaret C. Jacob and Ira Katznelson, "Agendas for Radical History," Radical Histo-ry Review 36 (1986):27-28.

5. Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, "Why Does Social History Ignore Politics," Social Histo-ry 5 (May l980):249-n.

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

7. Jacob and Katznelson, "Agendas for Radical History," 27.8. Ibid., 33, 39,41.

30 ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

9. The flagship statement was provided by Joan Scott in "On Language, Gender, andWorking-Class History," International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (Spring 1987):1—13.

10. Among others, spirited critiques of the exceptionalist problematic have beenmounted by Aristide R. Zolberg, "How Many Exceptionalisms?" in Katznelson and Zolberg,Working Class Formation; Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness andthe American Labor Movement," International Labor and Working-Class History 26 (Fall1984); Eric Foner, "Why Is There No Socialism in America?" History Workshop Journal 17(Spring 1984); and Howard Kimeldorf and Judith Stepan-Norris, "Historical Studies of theLabor Movement in the United States," Annual Review of Sociology 18 (1992).

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

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, isWilliam H. Sewell, Jr., "A Theory of Structure, Duality, Agency, and Transformation,"American Journal of Sociology 98 (July 1992):l-29.

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

15. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards aRadical Democratic Politics (London, 1985).

16. Hattam, Labor Visions, 209. In a paper written just a few months after the publica-tion of this book, Hattam appears to have shifted positions. Rather than counsel the kind ofinterplay between state-focused research and questions of dispositions and identity, she advo-cates a virtual abandonment of institutionally focused work, which she sees as too deterministand Whiggish, in favor of an identity approach, which she finds "a more promising researchstrategy." Though the paper in fact is more nuanced than its expositional structure, whichposes a choice between institutions and identity, I think it important to affirm that Hattam hadit right in Labor Visions and wrong—because it poses a contrived choice—in her more recentexploratory paper. Victoria Hattam, "Political Identity and the Limits of the New Institu-tionalism" (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." CharlesTilly, "Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat," in Proletarianization and FamilyLife, ed. David Levine (New York, 1984), 1.

22. Ira Katznelson, "Working Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,"in Katznelson and Zolberg, Working Class Formation, 14, 21.

23. Another line of criticism (that my essay and the book more generally fail to takevariations in social and economic developments seriously enough and thus insufficiently inte-grate these with the more political variations we stressed, and in this way reproduce a moregeneral problem in comparative studies—a focus on a single factor of variation) is developedby James Cronin, "Neither Exceptional Nor Peculiar: Toward the Comparative Study ofLabor in Advanced Society," International Review of Social History 38 (April 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.

24. Howard Kimeldorf, "Bringing Unions Back In (or Why We Need a New Old LaborHistory)," Labor History 32 (Winter 1991).

25. Montgomery was one of five contributors to "The Limits of Union-Centered Histo-ry: Responses to Howard Kimeldorf," Labor History 32 (Winter 1991), citation, 111.

26. "Limits of Union-Centered History," 104. For examples of these various tendencies,see Daniel Nelson, American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900-1941 (Princeton,

The "Bourgeois" Dimension 31

1988); Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Con-flict, 1780-1980 (Lexington, Ky., 1987); Mary H. Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class,Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 (Urbana, 1988); StephenH. Norwood, Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878—1923(Urbana, 1990); James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packing-house Workers, 1894-1922 (Urbana, 1987); Gary Gerstle, Working Class Americanism: ThePolitics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (Cambridge, 1989); and Steven Tolliday andJonathan Zeitlin, eds., Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and ComparativePerspectives (Cambridge, 1985).

27. Pelling's most recent work has focused on Churchill in the postwar years. The books Ihave most in mind include Origins of the Labour Party (London, 1954); America and theBritish Left: From Bright to Bevan (London, 1956); The British Communist Party (London,1958); A Short History of the Labour Party (London, 1961); A History of British TradeUnionism (London, 1963); Social Geography of British Elections, 1885-1910 (London, 1967);Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (London, 1968); and The Labour Gov-ernments, 1945-51 (London, 1984).

28. Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Radicalism in theAge of Gladstone, 1860-1880 (Cambridge, 1992); Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair Reid, eds.,Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain,1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1991).

29. Biagini and Reid, Currents of Radicalism, 5.30. For examples, see Barry Hindess, "Marxism and Parliamentary Democracy," in

Marxism and Democracy, ed. Alan Hunt (London, 1980); Uday Mehta, "Liberal Strategies ofExclusion," Politics and Society 18 (December 1990):427-54 ; and Kirstie M. McClure,"Difference, Diversity, and the Limits of Toleration," Political Theory 18 (August 1990).

31. Ronald Dworkin, "Liberalism," in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hamp-shire (Cambridge, 1978).

32. Ibid., 125, 128.33. For an influential discussion, see Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory

(Chicago, 1956).34. Dworkin, "Liberalism," 136.35. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).36. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), xv.37. The relevant literature is too extensive to cite at any length here. Recent key texts

grappling with these themes include John Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, 1986); WillKymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford, 1989); and Steven Lukes, MoralConflict and Politics (Oxford, 1991).

38. Rawls, Political Liberalism.39. Steven Lukes, "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 John G. Gunnell, "American Political Science,Liberalism, and the Invention of Political Theory," both in American Political Science Review82 (March 1988); and Theodore J. Lowi, "The State in Political Science: How We BecameWhat We Study," American Political Science Review 86 (March 1992).

41. This observation should not be taken to imply a unitary political science. The disci-pline is characterized by diverse epistemologies that nestle uneasily in the space between thehumanities 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 beenremarkably coherent in spite of this variety.

42. This counsel is written in the same spirit as Cronin's observation that a "possiblelocus of innovation in comparative labor history is among the several clusters of historicallyminded economists, sociologists, and political scientists who are working within their disci-plines to reassess labor's role in economy, society, and politics; and it is quite possible, likelyeven, that they will bring to the task different questions and research tools than we, ashistorians, would imagine or propose." Cronin, "Neither Exceptional Nor Peculiar," 74.

43. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of SocialPolicy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 47-48, 55, 58.

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

32 ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

45. Herbert Kitschelt, "Class Structure and Social Democratic Party Strategy," BritishJournal of Political Science 23 (July 1993). The best work of this genre linking class formationand the political strategies of the leaders of working-class parties is Adam Przeworski, Cap-italism and Social Democracy (Cambridge, 1985).

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

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