Transnationalizing
American Labor History

Marcel van der Linden

Labor History's Changing Global Context

Labor history is a small discipline facing big challenges. At one time, several decades back, labor historians in most countries knew fairly exactly, but mostly implicitly, what their object of study was (the organized workers' movement, its leaders, actions, and ideas), the methods that should be employed in the research, and what the appropriate framework for interpretation was. Although different approaches dominated in different countries (for instance, in the United States the so-called Wisconsin school of John R. Commons, Selig Perlman, and others emphasized the institutional logic of "pure and simple" unionism), almost everyone seemed to have a distinct "synthesis."1	1
These old syntheses began to be undermined in the 1950s and the 1960s—a process that continued with even greater force in the following decades. In Britain, Asa Briggs, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and others tried to contextualize workers' struggles. As Hobsbawm wrote in 1964, these historians accentuated "the working classes as such [and] the economic and technical conditions that allowed labour movements to be effective, or which prevented them from being effective."2 Somewhat later, similar trends became apparent in other countries. In the United States, Ira Berlin, David Brody, Herbert Gutmann, and David Montgomery, among others, were pioneers. In France, where the writers of événementiel labor movement history, focusing on the narration of events, had long been opposed by the followers of the Annales school, whose structural and serial historiography had largely left the people out, some rapprochement was apparent, especially after 1968. It was, however, such a slow process that Michelle Perrot felt the need to remark in 1979 that in French historiography "the study of the workers' movement has polarized historians for a long time and eclipsed other problems, such as the development of the working class and its culture. However, this is changing rapidly."3 In Germany, the Strukturgeschichte, which was founded in the 1950s by Werner Conze and others (and which incorporated some elements from the National Socialist Volkssoziologie, including its focus on the structured totality of the social order), has been modified and transformed into a modern approach combining Weberian and Marxian elements by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka, and others since the late 1960s.4	2
This second phase reached its peak during the 1970s, when former student militants began to write their own labor history theses and books. Their productivity was immense and impressive. Perhaps never again will so much be written about labor history in so few years as at that time.5 But this peak period did not last long. The organizing categories of the second phase were increasingly called into doubt, partly because of their continuities with the first phase. Frequently the teleology of the first phase had simply been reversed. While the "classic" labor historians had been inspired by an optimistic perspective, celebrating the emergence of mass organization and stressing the dynamics of unity and organization, the new generation tended to ask what had gone wrong with the movement. From a methodological point of view, an "epistemology of absence" (in Margaret Somer's words) became predominant:	3
Rather than seeking to explain the presence of radically varying dispositions and practices, [labor historians] have concentrated disproportionately on explaining the absence of an expected outcome, namely the emergence of a revolutionary class consciousness among the Western working class.6 . . .