ILWCH ROUNDTABLE: WHAT NEXT FOR LABOR

AND WORKING-CLASS HISTORY?

The "Bourgeois" Dimension: A Provocation
About Institutions, Politics, and the Future
of Labor History
Ira Katznelson
Columbia 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 an
alteration in intellectual focus. Not just a profound shift in the political
climate, East and West, but a sustained assault on the operational premises
of our craft from within has raised issues more challenging than those
encompassed by the usual range of inquiries devoted to improving methods, incorporating neglected topics, and critiquing extant literatures. Not
surprisingly, there has been a burst of historiographical stock-takings of
late. When fields are in trouble, their practitioners are tempted to become
planners. I fully agree with William Sewell's orienting judgment (in one of
the most thoughtful of these recent considerations) that labor history cannot be judged to be in a state of scholarly crisis, even if the field has lost its
unitary theoretical grounding. After all, assessed by the standards of the
craft of history, more excellent work is being done now than ever before.
Read as an empirical genre, irrespective of trends in the world or normative commitments, labor history has never been better, more diverse, or as
richly textured. Impressively, it is the site of important epistemological
debates. Further, labor history has extended its domain to include subjects
such as drink, crime, leisure, sexuality, and the family it once either ignored or relegated to the periphery of its concerns. Like Sewell, however, I
am struck by labor history's loss of elan, directionality, and intellectual
purpose.' Engaged history, in possession at least of the conceit of making a
difference, has moved elsewhere, to other subject areas.
A short time ago, I attended an ambitious talk by a political theorist
who sought to reread Marx's "On the Jewish Question" from a feminist
perspective. The event's most striking feature was its quality of being part
of a social and political movement. The room was very full, the mood
charged. When a hostile, tough-minded question was asked, impolitely,
about whether turning Marx's critique to feminist purposes did not skim
rather lightly over the price exacted by a world without liberal rights or
International Labor and Working-Class History
No. 46, Fall 1994, pp. 7-32
1994 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

without a division, even if more heuristic than real, between public and
private, the atmosphere turned electric. Even if something of a conceit,
much more seemed at stake than the logical integrity of the talk as such. As
the speaker sought in her riposte to define an intellectual space located
between the poles of postmodernism and liberalism, she did more than
defend her views as a scholar. She also was fending off an attack on some of
the most important normative and epistemological themes of the movement seeking to transform gender roles and social knowledge about gender
with which she identified. In straddling the border that usually divides the
university from the public sphere, not just the talk but the whole exercise
took on the aura of an event that matters.
Not so long agosay, in December 1971, when, in what proved to be
the precursor to ILWCH, a "Study Group was formally constituted in
order to facilitate contact between scholars interested in European Labor
and Working Class History"2labor history possessed just this status. Following on the movement politics of the 1960s and the founding of a number
of insurgent caucuses within professional associations, the new Study
Group, by no means the only effort of this kind, consisted primarily of
scholars who saw their work, much as feminist scholars do today, as embattled and engaged. The founding of the Study Group was an act of assertion
on behalf of what in today's investment jargon would be called an emerging
market. For most of the membership, virtually all of whom were professional historians, their subject mattered because it was enlisted on behalf
of a cause within a broadly shared set of assumptions about the way the
world works and how it might be made a more tolerable place. It is this selfconscious purpose, the kind currently found at the junction of feminist
theory focused on identity and strategic politics concerned with issues that
matter, that many of us who work on labor and working-class history miss
today.
It is tempting to dwell extensively on the multiple sources of the
decentering of our subject, but I will try to resist, for the challenges to
labor history as a coherent, integrated subject are well known. They come
in two categories: changes to the world, and thus to the assumptions which
have guided our work; and changes within the craft, including those of
epistemology. They are not unrelated, of course. What a short time ago
were labeled the "new social movements"ecology, gender, civil rights3
called into question the priority of class and class analysis and spurred a
new focus on language and on groups outside the predominantly male,
white, cloth-cap working classes. Later, the decline in electoral fortunes of
democratic socialism and the utter collapse of the ruling communist versions did far more than challenge the credibility of a forward march for
labor, a notion that had been integral to the writings and motivations of a
majority of labor historians, for these turnabouts on the ground fundamentally contradicted the very premises of the enterprise.
Rather than concentrate on these developments, I should like to ad-

The "Bourgeois" Dimension

dress what we might study next, how we might do so, and with what tools.
To anticipate, my argument possesses the following elements. Much current controversy revolves around debate between traditional materialism
and constructivist alternatives. The considerable mutual aggression that
has come to characterize at least some of the contention between these
camps has produced, from the perspective of epistemology, choices we
would do well to reject: on the one hand, hard-to-soft Marxisant versions
of linear causality flowing from a material base to secondary superstructural constructs, and, on the other hand, the full elimination of the dualism
of structure and agency. These alternatives also are politically debilitating
because they make labor history either hostage to the fate of problematical
movements and political tendencies or eradicate the specificities of class
structure and agency altogether. I do not counsel the abandonment of
history done on materialist premises nor do I suggest we reject out of hand
the postmodern turn. Rather, I urge they be kept in useful tension and that
they both should be joined in a relationship with once-hegemonic but nowless-fashionable political, institutional, and state-focused themes within
labor history. I should like these elements to join issues of class and identity
to provide the third main pillar for labor history. In so doing, I argue that
two sites of recent scholarshipthe extensive elaboration of liberal political theory as well as the "new institutionalism" in political science, sociology, and historycan provide labor history with means to alter its architecture without jettisoning existing forms.
Labor history, of course, never has been distant from political practice, or, at least, from a bundle of political norms and expectations. Not
surprisingly, the attention of its early practitioners, criticized in our time as
hide-bound, highlighted political rules and institutions, and there is a good
deal of work today that continues along these lines. If this scholarship
neglected the domains of experience and consciousness which so much of
the field since the publication of Edward Thompson's masterwork has
sought effectively to redress, the powerful turn to social history and agency,
as well as more recent concerns for the plasticity of identity and language
and the pitfalls of essentialist ontologies, have tended not so much to
ignore politics and institutions as to undervalue their importance for the
very issues the new work has sought to feature. More precisely, I believe an
emerging rich body of political studies oriented to probing the links between the state and civil society holds out the promise of allowing us to
return to the tracks forged by "old-fashioned" labor history, but with a
difference: The gains we have made can be kept, the temptations to dissolve our subject can be avoided, and the questions we ponder can renew
our zest for political engagement.
There are two main textual pivots to my reflections. The first is furnished by the record of an extraordinary symposium held in October 1985
at the New School for Social Research at which Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Perry Anderson, Edward Thompson, and Joan Scott addressed

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ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

"The Agenda for Radical History."4 At the risk of oversimplifying a rich

occasion, collectively the participants defended the traditions of labor history from assaults by the Right, expressed reservations about the theoretical limits of current work, and called for a number of new initiatives,
including more systematic counterfactual history and attention to issues of
gender and identity. The second axis for my meditations is provided by the
jeremiad Geoff Eley and Keith Nield produced five years earlier imploring
us to consider why social history, by which they principally meant the social
history of working classes, ignores politics.5 I recall the intellectual jolt I
experienced sitting in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago
that summer when I came across the Eley-Nield piece. Because it so
directly spoke to my own scholarly location at the junction of political
science and history and because its dense argumentation raised so many
pointed questions about the moves recently made by social and labor historians as well as about their tacit assumptions, I found the paper riveting
even where I thought it did not have things quite right. It certainly helped
me rethink a number of projects I then had in hand, including the volume
on Working Class Formation that Aristide Zolberg and I were in the early
stages of organizing.6
In writing this provocation about the future of labor history, I have two
goals. First, by way of a return to Eley and Nield in light of themes raised
in the New School symposium, I should like to remind us of the costs of
having left their program largely unheeded. Second, I want to suggest that
more attention to political theory and to emergent themes at the intersection of political science and labor history concerned with ties between the
state and civil society might help jump-start a field facing problems of selfdefinition. I will suggest, in short, that there exists a considerable opportunity to revivify the subject to which this journal is devoted by (re)turning
to institutions and the analysis of politics, but with a richer set of theoretical and analytical tools in hand.
Whereas an older labor history (by older, I mean before the publication of The Making of the English Working Class, a book that changed
every aspect of our field) had been something of a mix of economic history
and empiricist accounts of the growth and development of working-class
trade unions and political parties written in a largely uncritical, atheoretical, and celebratory mode, the counsel I offer is geared self-consciously to
overcome the limitations of this kind of work. Notwithstanding these impairments, there is much to be learned by a fresh look at this institutionalist
scholarship, especially when it was crafted by the hands of considerable
scholars such as Henry Pelling whose work recurrently strains to transcend
the limits of the genre, at a time when the most novel initiatives in labor
history have taken us in directions that make a decision to attend seriously
to the concerns raised by Eley and Nield more difficult.
I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do not argue below in favor
of a labor history synthesis that is hegemonically state-centered, nor that

The "Bourgeois" Dimension

11

institutional-political analysis and liberal theory, imported from the outside, provide ready-made panaceas for what ails labor history. The attention I wish to pay to liberal theory, in particular, is likely to make labor
historians nervous. After all, so much in this historiographical tradition has
been resolutely either non- or antiliberal, rightly suspicious of liberalism's
tendency to mask questions of inequality and social power. Liberalism, it
should be recalled, is a protean domain of doctrines and institutions in
possession of a systemic body of political thought that has sought to theorize linkages between the state and the capitalist economy and between the
state and civil society central to labor history. That theorizing has largely
been excised from the purview of the field for reasons that have more to do
with the history of the politics of labor history than with the craft of labor
history. To the extent that the state is important as an object of analysis for
labor historians, it makes no sense to foreclose the critical use of the richest
body of relevant theorizing currently being produced, even if it is flawed
theorizing. Certainly, labor historians have not abjured the utilization of
Marxist theory or various postmodern theoretical strains in spite of their
flaws and limitations.
To a significant, but insufficiently recognized, extent, labor historians,
following on the revival of important scholarship in political history outside
the framework of labor studies, already have begun to seize the opportunities I wish to underscore, just as they are rediscovering a historiographical lineage that has been rather underplayed. What makes this trend so
promising, as exemplified in burgeoning studies of labor law on such
themes as the criminalization of vagrancy, master-servant codes, and the
impact of constitutional arrangements on labor strategies, is that its practitioners do not so much replace class- or identity-focused concerns with
state-focused or political ones; rather, they tend to treat the relationships
between these themes in novel ways. How might this welcome tendency
best be advanced? What themes, literatures, and strategies might work to
best promote it?

I
Of course, the great works of labor history long have shared in a political
and normative tradition. This lineage is characterized by commitments and
goals whose character has been largely egalitarian and socialist. "Others
can speak for themselves," Eric Hobsbawm observed at the New School
symposium,
but I for one have seen my work on the era of the first industrial revolution and
its impact on the workers as defending and continuing the work of Edwardian
liberal-radicals like the Hammonds, Christian socialists like Tawney and Fabians
like the Webbs. The defects of our ancestors are patent. We have criticized them

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ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

and got beyond them. Still, we see ourselves as being on their side against
reaction, and I think they would have seen themselves on our side.7
Hobsbawm proceeded to defend the new social history against assaults
from troglodytes who assert the primacy of narrative political history and
do battle with systematic explanation, theory, generalization, and comparison as a way of promoting intellectual reaction.
The other panel participants, as I noted, were Christopher Hill, Perry
Anderson, 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 of
patriotism from below, and Hobsbawm, who saluted the achievements of
studies of ordinary people and popular classes while calling for analytical
transcendence of the temptations of "inspirational history and consciousness 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 antiquity
and further forward to confront the novel challenges of our current global
civilization.
By contrast, the three other interventions, though hardly of one piece,
presented more radical diagnoses. Thompson announced himself "an impostor here," telling us what we already knew. For the previous six years he
had taken leave from his scholarly work to labor full time for the antinuclear movement. Acknowledging the centrality of Marxism for his own
work and that of the other panelists, Thompson proclaimed his own growing disinterest. "I'm neither pro nor anti so much as bored with some of the
argument that goes on." His subtext was clear enough: Neither labor nor
radical history currently was engaged in issues that mattered, at least
enough. Naming nationalism, Nazism, Stalinism, and the Cold War, he
observed that in its focus on the economy, its causal treatment of base and
superstructure, even in its creative focus on the relationship between power
relations and culture, "'Marxism' has had so little helpful to say."
Anderson, by contrast, looked to a stronger and deeper Marxism to
do better than intuitive and largely ad hoc historical scholarship. Seeking a
history characterized by "a defensible causal hierarchy," he argued that
Marxism enjoys great advantages in this respect because it possesses "a
comprehensive and articulated set of concepts and hypotheses about the
principal lines of historical development as a whole." If we utilize this
promise, which, "far from exhausted . . . is only starting to be realized,"
we can achieve "a much more consciously and lucidly philosophical history," open to systematic counterfactual reasoning.8
Scott, though full of praise for the "exciting and inspiring political
engagement . . . we see in these four men," and couching her comment in
the language of appreciation for the capacities of Marxist history for renewal, 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 we
had won against assaults from the narrativists. Instead, taking the tack of
urging that gender must be incorporated more fully, a claim on the surface
as unobjectionable as could be, she called for a fundamental refocusing of
our analyses of power and social relations in the direction of "the language
of class formation," including its incorporation of the language of masculinity; a broadening of the analysis of individual and collective identity to
take account of plasticity, contingency, and multidimensionality; the study
of signification, symbols, metaphoric representations, and texts, borrowing
heavily, but not credulously, from literary criticism and cultural anthropology; and a reconsideration of the boundaries of the political, to include,
within the domain of power, areas of "private" life, including leisure, family, and sexuality. The times, she concluded, "demand that we be willing to
forge new concepts, new theories in the heat of battle."
This effort, which she has done so much to promote, has scored some
decisive victories, measured by what students find exciting, how scholarly
energies are directed, and the manner in which what goes on in the academy gets linked to what happens outside.9 By contrast, much of the agenda
defended by Hill and Hobsbawm (far more rapidly than any of us anticipated and more emphatically than makes me comfortable) has become
endowed with the faintest quaint sense of antiquarianism. In a world where
union density is diminishing to the vanishing point in more than a few
advanced capitalist countries, where social-democratic ideas seem exhausted, not to speak of the (welcome) collapse of neo-Stalinist regimes,
the once-passionate impulse to recapture working-class struggles and commitments to anticapitalist imperatives now risks creating sentimental reminders of times lost and aspirations disappointed. The subject of workingclass exceptionalism that once so thrived in the American contextbased
on the assumption that this experience could usefully be compared counterfactually to robust working-class formations elsewhere which approximated our theoretical, political, and ethical anticipationsnow threatens
to 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 to
describe the world? Why is the working class, in particular, so diminished
as a historical actor? We chance devoting ourselves, if we stick to the
agendas with which we have grown comfortable, to comforting reminiscences as we lament the growing hegemony of our intellectual and political
adversaries.
I think it is possible to do better by harnessing the tensions exhibited
in the Hobsbawm et al. symposium without resolving them. More specifically, the pleas made by Hobsbawm and Anderson to elongate the time
frames and extend the geographical scope of our studies, and to create a
more theoretical and philosophical history, more finely crafted counterfactuals, and more agile treatments of causality, do not fundamentally contradict Scott's call for (1) innovative ways of thinking about power and the

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ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

relations of power, (2) an extension of attention to civil society that transcends 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 a
willingness to let go of traditional Marxist developmentalist visions or narrowly materialist understandings of working-class formationin the spirit,
say, of Victoria Hattam's plea that "the mutually constitutive role of ideas
and interests" should be studied by a strategy of analytical configurative
studies open to the recognition that "particular linguistic categories and
cultural traditions . . . cannot be deduced from a priori principles." Rather, those categories and traditions are "the product of an ongoing political
struggle that needs to be researched and explained."11 Disappointingly,
rather than engage each other productively, the protagonists in the various
historiographical and epistemological battles currently underway either
have sought to force a choice between the poles of such various (but
not identical) dyads as structure/agency, material/cultural, and reality/
signification, or they have sought to overcome these and other dualisms by
way of various gambits of elision. These stratagems are lamentable. The
first smacks of one or another kind of reductionist imperialism (antimaterialism can be as reductionist as the most hide-bound materialism);12
the second because antidualist conflations make it impossible to explore
some of the most challenging and vexatious questions about relationships
between elements of the social world which require they be kept in relational friction as analytically distinct.13
Taking the 1985 New School symposium as a kind of baseline, it is
clear that the turn to language, signification, and identity has successfully
undermined Marxism's essentialist tendencies but at the not-inconsiderable
cost of eroding meaningful conceptions of materiality and structure of any
kind, including political ones. When Anderson and Scott advocated a more
potent 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," mounted
a radical critique of that tradition viewed through the prism of gender.14
Because both projects have been advanced in the interim, not without
mutual suspicion and disdain, labor history today carries two main kit bags
of theoretical tools: those grounded in Marxism and ancillary socialist
traditions and those nourished by various postmodern turns, including the
multilayered emphasis on discourse, power, and identity. When confronted
with each other as alternatives, these impulses cannot easily be rendered
compatible; after all, the appeal of the second lies not inconsiderably in its
thoroughgoing critique of the first. Marxism, on this accounting, represented, say, in the influential volume on Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
by Laclau and Mouffe,15 is seen to suffer from the irremediable sins of
reductionism and essentialism. Thompson had argued in his late 1970s
outburst 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 Marxism by incorporating processual, cultural contingencies. By contrast, the
strong postmodern critique rejects Marxist theory tout court as incapable of
overcoming a misplaced naturalness for the working class (hence a fixity of
identities and the exclusion of categories of experience that do not fit this
mold) or its immanent teleological grand narrative. In turn, in a manner
not without its own inherent tensions, the postmodern impulse insists that
the complex discursive universe we inhabit allows for a relatively unconstrained construction of interests and identities, that power relations are
diffused across spheres, and that the language and language games we
inhabit shape our consciousness and possibilities.
Pushed hard, either a Marxism of enveloping base-superstructure
causality or the dissipation of any notion of "reality" in the face of claims
on behalf of plasticity and signification can only lead to theoretical and
historiographical dead ends. Even more, the sense that we might be
pressed to choose between these options is entirely unattractive (irrespective of whether we try to find ways to hold them in tension or eliminate the
duality altogether). Surely, the tension between reality and signification
need not be dissolved by way of a rupture dividing between one possibility
that privileges matters of structure and objectivism at the price of not
taking agency, learning, and choice seriously; and another that cannot
make up its mind whether language is a determining prison or whether
discursive contestation is the key to our liberation.
If one of the least-fortunate developments of the past few years appears to be an unwillingness to embrace diversity in social analysis by way
of a playful multidimensionality, an appreciation of complexity, and a willingness to rotate axes of inquiry without insisting on the decisive superiority of one's preferred approach, this has been accompanied by another
baneful trend: the continuing flight within labor history from institutionalpolitical analysis. Quite obviously, neither traditional Marxism, which always has felt most comfortable in the company of economic history, nor
studies of social history and popular culture have placed such matters in the
foreground. Further, the recent welcome extension of our understanding
of what constitutes "the political" to such spheres as the family and the
production of social knowledge has had the paradoxical effect of obscuring
the specificity of state power. States are not just one source of social power
or one kind of organization among many. As institutional and normative
ensembles, states make unique and enforcible claims to sovereignty over
people and territory. "Although much has been gained from this expansion
of politics," Hattam acutely observed, "something has also been lost.
While most of these studies have self-consciously chosen to ignore traditional forms of political power and state action, this turn away from formal
politics, not surprisingly, has led many scholars to underestimate the influence 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 some

hands it has begun to do, to reincorporate at the center of the discipline the
subjects of state-focused politics, institutions, and law. Importantly, William Sewell's recent brief on behalf of a "post-materialist rhetoric" has
forcefully addressed the first of these concerns. Even though I could not
disagree more, for reasons stated, with his plea for a postmaterialist labor
history that wishes "to obliterate, to deny as nonsensical, the opposition
between the ideal and material on which materialist common sense has
been built," I could not agree more with his vigorous plea to reject the
imperialistic claims of such alternatives as economistic rational choice,
Gramscian culturalism, and Foucauldian conflations of culture and politics
in favor of an intellectual variety that refuses decisive choices in the human
sciences"a labor history more multiple in its theoretical strategies, more
ironic in its rhetorical stance, and more open in its search for understanding."17 Yet Sewell, implicitly resonating to the various antitraditionalist
moves with which he identifies, nowhere finds room for the institutionalpolitical subjects that take the state seriously. Without allowing these topics, however, it is hard to see how worries articulated by Edward Thompson at the New School about the silences in labor history's Marx-centered
discourse or by Joan Scott about the blinders we have worn with respect to
subject matter and method can meaningfully be addressed. Long after
scholars in political science and political sociology have brought the state
"back in," too many labor historians still are writing in recoil from their
own state-centered patrimony. I think it possible to reincorporate these
themes, but neither by a simplistic recursive return to the older pathways
of institutions and politics nor by uncritically absorbing the state-centered
impulse from other disciplines. To begin to specify what I have in mind, I
propose to turn to the Eley-Nield paper because its sharply etched critique
of 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 its
concerns to the manner in which students of working-class history had
sought to transcend the limitations of a focus on the institutional biographies of unions and parties. This attempt to reorient labor history to the
conditions, consciousness, culture, and agency of working-class people, the
authors argued, had focused both on questions of hegemony and social
controlthe manner in which working-class subordination had been
perpetuatedand on a fine-grained look at working-class life, including,
as in the case of a focus on the "labor aristocracy," a searching examination
of work itself and a deeper emphasis on working-class culture understood
"thickly," as social anthropologists use the term. The essay expressed the
worry that despite important divergences in historiographical traditions in

The "Bourgeois" Dimension

17

both Germany and Britain, labor history's approach to politics was converging on a common problematique oriented narrowly toward understanding why the working class did not think or behave in the manner projected
by Marxist propositions. In Britain, there was no Marxist party; in Germany, 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 be
treated reductively as an account of social control or as a source of alibis for
working classes essentially thought to be ready to revolt, if only (in the
hands of some writers) they had been left alone to express their natural
structural tendencies toward appropriate consciousness, or if (in the hands
of others) they had been mobilized appropriately by their institutions and
leaders.
To be sure, Eley and Nield took note of key differences between the
German and British historiographical traditions. In the former, political
analysis had tried to account for why the social-democratic complex had
integrated the working class instead of producing revolutionary change.
"On the whole the political, economic and cultural organizations of German labour are shown reacting to, and seeking accommodations within, a
global political structure which strictly determined the limits of their effectiveness." By contrast, in Britain, "this bourgeois political dimension has
all but disappeared." Instead, British labor historians (mimicked, I might
add, by most American colleagues) concentrated on specific events, sites,
places, or local practices without much attention to the overarching institutional context of political life. Yet both the political approach of the Germans and the civil-society approach of the British, Eley and Nield argued,
converged on a number of assumptionsabout the givenness of the working class with a relatively fixed structure of interests and identities, about
ideology as imposition or reinforcement from the outside, and about "the
historical priority of "experience" and "consciousness" over politics and
political processesthat left concern for political institutions and processes segregated within archaic labor histories.18 "Formal political processes," their overview concluded,
remain more or less suppressed in recent social history, retreating in the face of
concentrations on collapsed notations of "culture" and "experience," or, seemingly more hard-headed, on questions of social structure, social mobility and
studies 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 the
move away from traditional institutional labor history, scholars were
tempted to utilize the domain of politics as providing the instruments of
bourgeois domination without taking seriously either the achievements of
working-class political institutions, including the ways they altered bour-

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geois society, or the processes of class negotiation undertaken by these

institutions in the zone linking the state to civil society. This, they observed, is a terrain of engagement, bargaining, and mutual constitution.
Eley and Nield's diagnosis and critique were stronger than their proactive research program, however. They expressed themselves as disappointed by the lack of comparative and theoretical ambition in the field but
offered no new theoretical or comparative departures. They sought to
make politics and institutions constitutive aspects of an enlarged labor
history but they did not specify how. They observed that the state maintains
a complex organizational presence in everyday life but they did not indicate how either the institutions or terms of these transactions might be
studied. The central hortatory aim of of my essay is to remind us of these
goals. My main ambition is to address some of the silences in Eley and
Nield's advocacy (without implying they would agree with my proposals).
This I wish to do by suggesting how these might be accomplished in a way
that does not insist that an agenda oriented to politics and the state be
competitive in a zero-sum way with other scholarly currents.
Put in shorthand, I want to build on the regret Eley and Nield expresed when they took note of "the new English 'culturalist' tendencies in
German historiography" that threatened to reduce this history of the
social-democratic complex of institutions and practices to "an important
vehicle of reproduced bourgeois culture and not much else."20 This solution to the difficulties historians were having with constructing robust twoway links between German working-class identities and culture, on the one
hand, and working-class political institutions, on the other, severed ties
precisely where the main challenge was to understand contingent relationships. The fracture dividing social from political history not only made
analyses of the domain between the state and civil society impossible but
impaired our understanding of the mutual constitution of institutions and
culture, organization and ideology. Eley and Nield's solution, though not
mapped in any detail, was to return to both the panoply of working-class
party and union organizations and to the larger regime contexts within
which they were embedded without being burdened by labor history's
traditional baggage of a priori essentialist or ideological assumptions.
When Ary Zolberg and I set out, with colleagues, to reconsider the
history of working-class formation in France, Germany, and the United
States, it was just this kind of program we had in mind. My own contribution, the book's introductory chapter, sought to thicken our sense of what
it means to speak of the formation of a working class in four ways. First, it
rejected the story of the class "in itself" moving to become a class "for
itself," and, more broadly, attempted to infer class ideas, language, organizations, and activity from class structure. Second, it sought to cut the tie
between the "outcome" of class formation and these tendencies by defining
working-class formation in terms of the historical-empirical complex of
dispositions and patterns of collective action actually pursued by people

The "Bourgeois" Dimension

19

who have been inserted, directly or indirectly through ties of family and
kin, into the world of capitalism via the mechanism of the labor market.21
Third, noting that class has been a lumpy term encompassing issues best
distinguished from each other, it proposed "that class in capitalist societies
be 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 be
thought 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 be
distinctive from society to society, that none of the levels should be analyzed exclusively in class terms, and that the connections between the
levels are mutually conditioning, the chapter argued in favor of inquiring
about how variations in state structures and policies affected both the
content of these levels of class and the qualities of their relationship with
each other.
These linked formulations can be (indeed, have been) criticized in a
number of ways: by traditionalists for their slackness and high level of
indeterminacy and by more thoroughgoing critics of Marxism's legacies for
the remaining tightness of linkage between capitalism's structures (treated
as rather too hermetically sealed off) and the limited repertoire of identities and actions the essay and book considered. With regard to worries of
these kinds, I now think my chapter was right in trying to identify a range
of open possibilities within determinate limits and in seeking to understand
the selection process among these by asking how various bundles of incentives and disincentives to class-based identities altered with changes to the
character of political institutions and regimes. Nonetheless, in retrospect,
my argument was marred by two key shortcomings. Because the argument
enumerated the four levels of class in a sequence beginning with economic
structure and ending with conduct, in spite of its announced position it
remained opaque about just how fully it wished to break with the directionality of classes in motion from "in" to "for" themselves. I intended a
more open and reflexive process than my prose signified, and I warmly
welcome the reminders that have come largely from studies of gender that
even the more fluid qualities I meant but did not succeed enough in underscoring were insufficient in their range and in the directionality of cause.
Notwithstanding, I continue to insist that we not break the links between
the four levels of analysis I proposed which would result in a segregation of
the motifs of language, thought, and action from issues of structure.
The second main inadequacy in my paper was its much too mechanical, nonrelational distinction between the domain of social class and the
macrostructures of states. The state was treated almost as a deus ex machina that descended on capitalist class relations to shape outcomes of class
formation without anything like sufficient appreciation of the ways in
which states, in interaction with the substantially, but not entirely, distinc-

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ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

tive zones of the economy and civil society both constitute those domains
and are constituted by them. It is the paper's insufficient account of the
terms and institutions governing these ties that constitutes its most significant evasion. 23
The reason this autocritique amounts to more than self-indulgence is
that it mirrors the limits of Eley and Nield's historiographical evaluation
and their program for bringing politics back in. Some recent trends in labor
history, moreover, have moved the field even further away from just those
transactional issues they stressed under the rubric of negotiation, and
which I considered far too incompletely.
As it happens, materials with which to remedy these defects do not
have to be invented from scratch. They exist, in generous measure, within
three disciplinary domains: labor history itself, contemporary political theory, and "new institutional" political studies. In the remainder of this paper, I should like to take note of at least some of these intellectual developments, suggest their relevance for the future of labor history, and indicate
how the forging of new relationships among them promises not so much an
alternative to as a synergy with some versions of the turn to language and
the plasticity of identity.
Ill
When Howard Kimeldorf recently advocated that a rejoinder to just such
postmodern currents be grounded in a revival of the "old" institutional,
union-centered, labor history, 24 his claim that such work has been shunted
to the periphery was resisted by David Montgomery. Though sympathetic
to Kimeldorf's brief on behalf of institutional history, Montgomery quite
rightly arguedciting the considerable work of more than two dozen
scholarsthat "careful analysis of labor organizations has hardly been
marginalized by the historical writing of the last generation." 25 There have
been three main trends within this scholarship. One current, the most
traditional, has broadened the number of unions for which we now possess
excellent institutional biographies and has deepened our understanding of
such key issues as the relationship between leaders and followers, the role
of gender and race within union affairs, and the character of shop-floor
class struggles. A second tendency has oriented itself to work and industrial relations more broadly, looking both to more fine-grained analyses of
the work process and to the complicated interplay between employers and
employees. The third, perhaps the most vibrant because of its close ties
with social history from below, has sought, as Michael Kazin puts it, to
"embed unions in the rich soil of ethnic (and, often, radical) politics and
culture." 26 Kazin, interestingly, suggests that histories of the labor movement move in the direction of more attention to language as a complement
to this engagement with social history. Virtually none of this impressive
body 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 institutional biographies, of focusing on work and industrial relations within the
workplace, and of setting union histories within their working-class communal, 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 does
address these topics. Henry Pelling, working at the junction of political and
labor history (with a tinge of influence from political science) has produced
an underappreciated corpus over the past four decades that provides a
potentially rich source of nourishment for any return to the study of politics
and institutions in a manner open to sustenance from political theory and
analytically grounded political studies. Pelling's books and articles include
narrative histories of the British Labour party and British trade unions, a
relational study of America and the British Left, a fine-grained analysis of
the social geography of British elections spanning the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, treatments of the interplay between the liberal
and labourist traditions, analysis of the ties between British imperialism and the working class, analysis of the limited appeal of British communism, and studies of the labor movement and the welfare state, including a
critical appreciation of the Attlee governments of 1945-51. Some of these
writings are organized along the lines of linear narrative, while others are
organized analytically by theme. Pelling's work stands out, in my view, as a
key resource because it is integrated in its various facets by a central,
unwavering theme: the quest to understand how the labor movement in
Britain, in all its aspects, has forged institutional ties of representation,
influence, and negotiation with the state within a broadly liberal framework of rights and citizenship.27 But the reasons Pelling's work seems so
fresh to me, in spite of its studied diffidence of tone and unwillingness to
announce a theoretical perspective, are not limited to its subject matter.
Pelling has been something of an outsider. Because he is a liberal, not a
socialist; a political, not a social, historian; and a researcher without strong
ideological views about the role and strategies of the labor movement,
Pelling has paid the price of being at a distance from some of the most
exciting epistemic and political communities working in the field (like the
ones represented at the New School symposium). At the same time, however, he has escaped both the embrace of teleology and fashion. Even if
doggedly atheoretical (virtually as a matter of principle and in recoil from
what he believes to be an unwonted taste for abstraction), today within
labor history there is no single body of work as accomplished as Pelling's
that takes seriously a relational approach to the ties between the state and
the working class via an analysis of their institutions considered in a larger
regime framework.
In his electoral work, and studies of the party system and particular
instances of labor unrest, moreover, Pelling never has been content to
privilege particular modes of working-class political mobilization. Taking

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ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

seriously the idea of popular politics and society, he has been concerned
with how and why workers at some moments have found liberal initiatives
appealing, but at other times have been attracted to socialist or conservative appeals. There are, of course, quite massive literatures on the British
Left and, reciprocally, on the theme of Conservative working-class voting
(a theme that has focused ever since Bagehot on the dubious notion of
working-class deference), but, until recently, Pelling aside, studies of
working-class liberalism have been downplayed. The most important reason to regret this imbalance is not that of wanting to redress it as such, but
because in Britain, as in much of the West, the socialist and liberal traditions have become tightly, if problematically, intertwined. Under such various headings as New Liberalism and Progressivism, liberalism became
more social in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In turn,
socialism, as it engaged in electoral politics and focused demands on the
state, accommodated with varying degrees of enthusiasm to liberal regime
rules. Though not its only source, a central offspring of this marriage, of
course, has been the modern welfare state. Neither the socialist nor liberal
stories can meaningfully be told in isolation, yet the tendency within labor
history to neglect what Eley and Nield call the bourgeois political dimension, with the rare exception of work like Pelling's, has been to vastly
underplay the significance of their interaction.
Happily, some pathbreaking recent work on the working class and
liberalism is redressing the balance and extending the zone of meaningful
historical questions. I have in mind, as leading instances, Eugenio Biagini's
excellent study of "popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone," and the
collection of 1989 conference papers on popular radicalism, organized labor, and party politics Biagini edited with Alastair Reid. 28 Covering such
themes as the role of Gladstonian liberals in the labor law reforms of 1875
and in debates over the scope and character of taxation, the ties between
Liberals and Labour in Parliament, the qualities of ideological radical and
socialist debate in Edwardian labor politics, and the complex relationship
between liberalism, socialism, and democracy in social reform at the local
level, the latter book sets the story of British working-class history in a
much wider political compass than conventionally has been the case. Explicitly echoing the emphases and foci of Pelling's work, Currents of Radicalism takes note of the continuities between Chartism, liberalism, and
political socialist-laborism, observes that there were multiple mass movements and working-class institutions, stresses the extension of democracy,
citizenship, and political participation, creates a dialogue between Labour
and Liberal party histories and strategies of representation, refuses a priori
assumptions about class as the necessary basis of political expression, and
insists above all (in the spirit of Eley and Nield) that working-class Liberal
and Labor activists be placed "back into their own political context." 29 In
so doing, the volume not only gives some specificity to the program Eley
and 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 with

formulations and themes that have developed in recent years within the
framework of a revivified liberal political theory, and with relevant analytical work in political sociology and political science on state-civil society
interactions.
One of the main features of the 1985 New School symposium was a
defense of theoretically oriented history against the view that historical
developments are best understood as "one damn thing after another." In
every instance, what the participants meant by theoryprincipally Marxist
or feministconstituted either a rejection of liberal political theory or an
avoidance of the themes it has made central. From the origins of liberalism
as a doctrine of toleration at a time of fractricidal religious wars, these
themes have been concerned with the awesome capacities of states to do
good and evil and with establishing rules and institutions capable of governing the exchanges states establish with the economy and with civil society. Both Marxist and feminist theory, certainly not without warrant, have
been suspicious of liberal theoretical impulses and categories, including
rights and the distinction between public and private, as masks for privileges grounded in the class structure and patriarchy. Labor history has
shared this dubiety. The result, I think, is the unhappy paradox that skepticism about liberalism's tendencies to conceal class power has reduced our
access to the most elaborated instruments scholars and citizens possess to
probe state power. Additionally, just those issues raised at the symposium
so forcefully by Edward Thompson concerning what states do and how
their actions can be controlled in the interests of a more peaceful and
democratic world cannot be addressed except by means of political theory
capable of analyzing how states actually transact with the economy and
society, and concerned, normatively and practically, to harness and delimit
the capacities of states.
As a result of its willful lack of engagement with the rich harvest of
liberal political thought, labor history has sallied on without taking some of
the most potent tools for political analysis along for the ride. Marxism and
feminism have provided indispensable vantage points from which to reveal
liberalism's limits, hypocrisies, and silences.30 Yet this demystification is
insufficient to the tasks of political analysis. The resulting lack of nuance
has proved a serious shortcoming. After all, working-class struggles, prospects, and identities have been bound up with the state and with the rules
and institutions that have linked them to the state. These have been forged
in the crucible of the civic, political, and social issues which have been of
central concern to theorists working within (or with) a liberal framework.
Both in practice and in doctrine, liberalism has proved remarkably
gelatinous. At times, it has bonded with socialism; at others, with reaction.
It has sustained the elaboration of welfare states as well as their contraction. It has flattened and supported difference. Liberalism, in short, does
not demarcate outcomes (though it limits the feasible set by acting as a

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ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

filter) but specifies the arenas and terms of conflict and negotiation. Within
the West in the past two centuries, politics has pivoted mainly around two
central questions: first, whether liberalism would prevail over illiberal alternatives to define the basic qualities of political regimes; second, where
liberalism has prevailed, which kind of liberalism we should have. This
double set of issuesthe antinomy of liberalism and illiberalism, and contestation about liberalism's characterin fact has been at least as central to
the histories of modern working classes as their struggles with capitalism as
a 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 and
Biagini and Reid have been exploring, and it has contributed to the relative
paucity of fine-grained political analysis. My aim is not to propose a lurch
away from labor history's other preoccupations, nor is it to endorse a
particular kind of liberal politics; my aim is to note that an engagement
with liberal theory that is both open-minded and skeptical might produce a
two-way process of interrogation in which questions drawn from liberal
theory could inform the research of labor historians and the resources
possessed by labor history could be utilized to critically interrogate liberalism's claims. The historical importance of this engagement is that it has
marked one of the most significant contested zones of working-class formation. Its current political significance lies in its identification of profoundly
important questions about the kind of liberalism we should, and will, come
to possess.
Consider, by way of a suggestive but problematical example, the approach to liberalism propounded in a now-famous essay by political philosopher Ronald Dworkin. 31 Dworkin argues that liberalism's central principles are not located, as commonly thought, on one side of a tradeoff
between liberty and equality understood as discrete and free-standing values. Rather, what is distinctive to liberalism, as compared to other political
theories, is the type of equality it values: "the requirement that the government treat all those in its charge as equals," that is, with equal concern and
respect. The issue of who gets included "in its charge" may be contested,
but not the standing of liberal citizens. The second of liberalism's core
principles, Dworkin argues, is official neutrality on what constitutes good
and valued ways of life. Taken together, these two constitutive principles of
equality and neutrality do not represent "some compromise of half-way
house between more forceful positions"; rather, they stand "on one side of
an important line that distinguishes [liberalism] from all competitors taken
as a group." A liberal is a person who holds these views about equality and
toleration. 32
The primary institutions of liberal political orderseconomic markets
and representative democracyare valued as the best available mechanisms 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, Dworkin

observes in an echo of Karl Polanyi, generates profound difficulties for
liberal principles. Markets produce and reinforce not only such inequalities
as the differential costs of goods but also those that cannot be defended by
liberal principles of equality. As a result, liberalism in practice generates its
own impulse toward schemes of redistribution that preserve the price system but curtail its production of impermissible inequality.
Likewise, representative democracy's routine operation can generate
illiberal results, particularly when either a majority or an intense minority
succeeds in imposing its preferences so strongly as to violate the right of
citizens to choose valued ways of life.33 For this reason, liberalism requires
procedural and civil rights. "These rights will function as trump cards held
by individuals. . . . For the liberal, rights are justified, not by some principle in competition with an independent justification of the political and
economic institutions they qualify, but in order to make more perfect the
only justification on which these other institutions may themselves rely."34
Seen from this perspective, the various "welfare state" packages of
public policies adopted by governments in liberal regimes to organize markets and provide for the representation of interests within a system of
rights compose provisional attemptsthe outcome of situated conflict
among competing ideas and coalitions within determinate institutional and
material contextsto manage the tensions inherent in a liberal order with
respect to its constitutive principles of equality and neutrality.
This framework opens up a rich harvest of questions both for liberals
and their critics, and for labor historians. When Dworkin wrote "Liberalism" in 1978, liberal theory was dominated by commentary and criticism
directed 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 carry
to a higher order of abstraction the traditional doctrine of the social contract." In developing his conception of "justice as fairness" as an alternative to the predominant utilitarianism of moral and political philosophy in
the Anglo-American world, Rawls thought his conception of liberalism to
be "the best approximation to our considered convictions of justice and
[that it] constituted the most appropriate basis for the institutions of a
democratic society."36 Dworkin's article was published when Rawls commentary was at its peak. In the years since, Rawls himself has turned rather
more in a political direction to complement his work's ethical features, and
the field of liberal political thought has vastly extended the scope and
character of its controversies. Its key themesall of which are potentially
enriching for labor historyhave included the relationship between individual well-being and social and political forms; the status and comprehensiveness of rights; conflict over incommensurable values; the formation of
what John Stuart Mill called "affections and desires"; and the capacity of
liberalism to deal with individuals not just as disembodied citizens but as

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ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

gendered members of communities and cultures. 37 Rawls himself has dedicated most of his recent scholarship to just these political subjects. 38
If these issues directly address current political controversies in a manner that connects them directly to the perspective advocated by Eley and
Nield, labor history, in turn possesses an enormous richness of resources
with which to interrogate liberalism and its claims. Thus, when Steven
Lukes argues, in a tension-ridden formulation, that liberalism "is about
fairness between conflicting moral and religious positions, but it is also
about filtering out those that are incompatible with a liberal order and
taming those that remain," 39 he provides not only a set of questions with
which to investigate labor history but a fertile set of objects of analysis
within the liberal tradition that labor history can be utilized to probe. With
the products of such a two-way engagement, labor history can become
more precise in its political inquiries and political theory can be invited to
see if its often-evidence-free reasoning in fact can meet the test of making
sense of actually existing worlds.
IV
Issues central to liberal political thought (including its relationship to the
socialist tradition, its braiding with illiberalisms of different kinds, and its
capacities to accommodate to moral and human difference) and to the
focus on politics, institutions, and negotiation advocated by Eley and Nield
also have been characteristic of political science from the start, yet labor
historians have written virtually without any reference to that discipline's
analytical or ethical qualities. This, too, is a lost opportunity. In spite of its
often profoundly ahistorical qualities, political science possesses important
literatures that grapple with precisely the issues Eley and Nield advanced
as suggestions and which many labor historians work on in ad hoc ways
without drawing on materials that would be of direct assistance in posing
and researching their questions. The fact that historians and social scientists often inhabit distinctive epistemic communities is no reason to valorize
their mutual isolation.
From its founding as a constitutive part of Progressive thought at the
turn of the century, political science has been a moral, not just an empirical, discipline. Its various constitutional, institutional, behavioral, and theoretical aspects, even its internal organization and estrangements, have
been geared to secure normative commitments. These, broadly, may be
identified as liberal, in the doctrinal and institutional senses of the term.
More particularly, political scientists have worked principally at the point
of intersection of the modern state and civil society at a time of growing
state capacity to make war, organize economies, and promote social welfare. The development of political science in the past century also has
paralleled the long moment when liberalism thickened and became both
more legitimate (swallowing some of its former conservative and socialist

The "Bourgeois" Dimension

27

competitors) and more vulnerable to a wide array of tyrannies and mass

movements, almost all of which have been defended as constituting better
versions of democracy than liberalism can accommodate.40
Transactions linking citizens and the state have provided the main
objects of analysis for political scientists. Their concern with law, representation, voting, public opinion, interest groups, and congnate subjects in
studies of the United States, with classifications of other regimes by reference to their degree of distance from models of liberal democracy, with
liberal theory, and with understanding how international orders led first by
liberal Britain and then by liberal America could secure desired ends add
up to a remarkably coherent program of research and writing. Even critics
of the discipline's mainstream have accepted these foci and premises. They
have directed their ire at the complacencies, insufficiency of inclusiveness,
implicit concessions to hierarchies of class, race, gender, and power, and
institutional limits to political participation both in American society and in
their scholarly discipline without breaking with the central axis of political
science: to understand and promote a liberal political order against all
comers.41
I do not counsel that labor history be inserted into this discipline and
its premises; rather, that labor historians take critical advantage of this
tradition of political studies to secure its own aims.42 If our resistance to
taking liberal theory seriously has exacted costs, the marginalization of
political science and political sociology, in spite of their lacunae and limitations, has been even more expensive. Surely the massive literatures in
these disciplines concerned with political parties, corporatism, interest representation, and public opinion, among other key subjects, can help advance the development of a labor history attuned to politics and the state.
At least some of the work accomplished in the past decade under the
rubric of the new institutionalism is especially promising in this regard.
Consider, by way of brief suggestive illustration, just three such examples
in work by Theda Skocpol, Gosta Esping-Andersen, and Herbert Kitschelt.
None provides a template or model, but each is an attempt to develop a
historically grounded institutionalism aimed at probing the links between
public policy, political strategies, and politicized identitiesissues, of
course, which have been central to the histories of working-class formation.
In Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Theda Skocpol's approach to identity and political action rejects the choice between objectivist models of
social structure and constructivist notions of identity. Instead, in a contribution located in a zone between model building and narrative history, she
insists on "the dual lines of determination that should enter into any analysis of the social identities and relations involved in political processes. . . .
I propose to explore how social and political factors combine to affect the
social identities and group capacities involved in the politics of social policymaking." Her concern is with politicized identities, and with the ways in

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which state and party structures, economic relations, and cultural patterns
compound to shape such identities and the political orientations and abilities of groups. She utilizes this perspective to account for her controversial,
only partially persuasive finding that gender consciousness and the determination of women to realize maternal values in the sphere of national
policy-making proved more important in shaping American social politics
in the early twentieth century than the consciousness and activities of the
working class. Her argument pivots on the fit between politicized identities
and group assets, on the one side, and government institutions, the party
system and more general rules of the liberal political game, on the other. In
finding that American "political structures allow unusual leverage to social
groups that can, with a degree of discipline and consistency of purpose,
associate across many local political districts," she notes an affinity between the formation of networks of middle-class women with federated
interests across thousands of localities and opportunities for influence in
the American regime. Further, she argues that through a process of policy
feedback, successful policy initiatives transform state capacities and induce
changes in social groups and in their political goals and capacities; these, in
turn, shape the next generation of policy changes. 43
When durable patterns of such relationships are fashioned, connecting
norms, actors, and policies, it is possible to speak of a policy regime. This,
at least, is the approach of Gosta Esping-Andersen, who distinguishes
between different kinds of welfare states in just this manner. ConservativeCatholic, social democratic, and market liberal welfare states represent, in
his work, distinctive configurations of identities and interests. At the center of these types are different kinds of states (distinguished from each
other by normative visions, institutional arrangements, and policy instruments) that distinctively position groups, including the working class, in
contexts that not only help shape who they are discursively and strategically, but actually organize politically disparate stratification systems and
pathways of transaction between states and markets and between states
and civil societies. Like Skocpol's, his is not a form of analysis consisting of
lawlike model building of the kind that rightly makes historians very nervous, nor does it treat historical complexity as shapeless. 44
Writing in the configurational mode characteristic of Skocpol's and
Esping-Andersen's recent work, Herbert Kitschelt rejects the popular notion that the decline of European labor and socialist parties in the recent
past follows directly from transformations to the class structure. Forswearing this approach as too blunt and unidirectional, Kitschelt persuasively
counsels that we need, first, a more fine-grained account of working-class
experiences at work, in markets, and in the sphere of social reproduction;
second, a more eleborated approach to the formation of working-class
preferences that takes seriously the strategic decisions of political parties in
light 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-class

experience and elite strategy interact to produce electoral outcomes.45
What Skocpol's, Esping-Andersen's, and Kitschelt's recent configurative political scholarship shares in common is the manner in which they
place state-centered concerns at the heart of their work without treating
the state simply as a bulky macrostructure. Just as Eley and Nield urged,
their focus is on relationships and negotiations between actors in civil
society, including members of the working class, and the state via political
institutions of different kinds under the influence both of constitutional
and policy regimes. By linking studies of public policy and class inclinations
without making essentialist assumptions,46 and by demonstrating how we
might better study the relationship between political content and the contingencies of class solidarity, this body of work bears directly on some of
the newest, but also the oldest, puzzles of labor history.47 Was it not Marx
who insisted that the road to working-class emancipation must travel to the
heart of the bourgeois dimension?
NOTES
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. William H. Sewell, Jr., "A Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History," in Rethinking Labor History, ed. Lenard Berlanstein (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.
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, anotherthe seventh in a continuing seriesin 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 Gunar Olofsson, "After Working-Class Movement?
An Essay on What's 'New' and What's 'Social' in the New Social Movements," Ada Sociological (1988):15-34.
4. Margaret C. Jacob and Ira Katznelson, "Agendas for Radical History," Radical History Review 36 (1986):27-28.
5. Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, "Why Does Social History Ignore Politics," Social History 5 (May l980):249-n.
6. Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg, eds., Working Class Formation: Nineteenth
Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986).
7. Jacob and Katznelson, "Agendas for Radical History," 27.
8. Ibid., 33, 39,41.

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9. The flagship statement was provided by Joan Scott in "On Language, Gender, and
Working-Class History," International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (Spring 1987):113.
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; Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and
the American Labor Movement," International Labor and Working-Class History 26 (Fall
1984); 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 the
Labor Movement in the United States," Annual Review of Sociology 18 (1992).
11. Victoria Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism
in 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, is
William 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 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 Angela John, By the Sweat of their Brow:
Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (London, 1980), and the fine collection of essays
edited 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 a
Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985).
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 wrongbecause it poses a contrived choicein 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." Charles
Tilly, "Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat," in Proletarianization and Family
Life, 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 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 studiesa focus on a single factor of variation) is developed
by James Cronin, "Neither Exceptional Nor Peculiar: Toward the Comparative Study of
Labor 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 Labor
History)," Labor History 32 (Winter 1991).
25. Montgomery was one of five contributors to "The Limits of Union-Centered History: 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 Conflict, 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); Stephen
H. Norwood, Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 18781923
(Urbana, 1990); James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 (Urbana, 1987); Gary Gerstle, Working Class Americanism: The
Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (Cambridge, 1989); and Steven Tolliday and
Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and Comparative
Perspectives (Cambridge, 1985).
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); America and the
British 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 Trade
Unionism (London, 1963); Social Geography of British Elections, 1885-1910 (London, 1967);
Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (London, 1968); and The Labour Governments, 1945-51 (London, 1984).
28. Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Radicalism in the
Age 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 of
Exclusion," 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 Hampshire (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); Will
Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford, 1989); and Steven Lukes, Moral
Conflict 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 Review
82 (March 1988); and Theodore J. Lowi, "The State in Political Science: How We Became
What We Study," American Political Science Review 86 (March 1992).
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. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social
Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 47-48, 55, 58.
44. Gosta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990).

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ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

45. Herbert Kitschelt, "Class Structure and Social Democratic Party Strategy," British
Journal of Political Science 23 (July 1993). The best work of this genre linking class formation
and the political strategies of the leaders of working-class parties is Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge, 1985).
46. A stunning study along just these lines is Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social
Solidarity: 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 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.