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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Nelson Lichtenstein. State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 336. $29.95.
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Convinced that democracy and the labor movement are inextricably linked, Nelson Lichtenstein explains why a movement originating in the Progressive era to transform workers lives through union power lost its purchase on the national conscience beginning in the 1950s. He assumes that a "larger, more powerful and more democratic trade-union movement is essential to any progressive resolution" of contemporary social politics. His narrative of the rise and fall of the modern labor movement stresses ideas more than the everyday experiences of the movement and the workers in it, and he also incorporates the latest research on gender and race. Most important, Lichtenstein maintains that "the history and future of the nation's labor question remains primarily one of ideas, ideology, and social combat . . . labor's greatest deficit [today] is of the ideas necessary to again insert working America into the heart of our national consciousness" (p. 19). |
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