A contest of ideas : capital, politics, and labor / Nelson Lichtenstein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lichtenstein, Nelson, author.

Series:

Working class in American history

The working class in American history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Labor--United States--History.

Labor.

United States.

History.

Labor unions--United States--History.

Labor unions.

Working class--United States--History.

Working class.

Capitalism--United States--History.

Capitalism.

Physical Description:

ix, 314 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2013]

Summary:

For more than thirty years Nelson Lichtenstein has deployed his scholarship-on labor, politics, and social thought-to chart the history and prospects of a progressive America. A Contest of Ideas collects and updates many of Lichtenstein's most provocative and controversial essays and reviews. Tracing broad patterns of political thought, Lichtenstein offers important perspectives on the relationship of labor and the state, the tensions that sometimes exist between a culture of rights and the idea of solidarity, and the rise of conservatism in politics, law, and intellectual life. The volume closes with portraits of five activist intellectuals whose work has been vital to the conflicts that engage the labor movement, public policy, and political culture. Book jacket.

Contents:

I Shaping Myself, Shaping History 13

1 Writing and Rewriting Labor's Narrative 15

2 Supply-Chain Tourist; or, How Globalization Has Transformed the Labor Question 29

3 Historians as Public Intellectuals 38

II Capital, Labor, and the State 45

4 Tribunes of the Shareholder Class 47

5 "The Man in the Middle": A Social History of Automobile Industry Foremen 56

6 From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era 79

7 Communism On the Shop Floor and Off 100

III The Rights Revolution 107

8 Opportunities Found/and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement 109

9 The Lost Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement 129

10 A New Era of Global Human Rights: Good for the Trade Unions? 144

IV The Specter on the Right 155

11 The United States in the Great Depression: Was the Fascist Door Open? 157

12 Market Triumphalism and the Wishful Liberals 167

13 Did 1968 Change History? 185

14 Bashing Public Employees and Their Unions 197

V Intellectuals and their Ideas 207

15 C. Wright Mills 209

16 Harvey Swados 222

17 B. J. Widick 230

18 Jay Lovestone 235

19 Herbert Hill 242

20 Do Graduate Students Work? 249

21 Why American Unions Need Intellectuals 254.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780252037856

0252037855

9780252079405

025207940X

OCLC:

828056022