Book Review

It was not supposed to be like this. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century labor activists confidently expected, and their bourgeois opponents feared, that capitalist development would produce a socialist transformation of society. Critical of their predecessors' compromises, the New Left of the 1960s expected a revolution led by students free of the entangling alliances that had prevented the labor movement from achieving its revolutionary mission. Neither the Old nor the New Left anticipated the turn that world politics would take after the mid-1970s—the rise of a particularly powerful Right and the collapse of social democracy.	1
There was always one catch in the Left's optimism: the United States. Long the world's most advanced capitalist economy, for most of its history the United States has had relatively weak and conservative unions without a significant socialist political movement. As long as the Left was growing in strength elsewhere, socialists could ignore this problem, dismissing it as a temporary anomaly, worthy of academic attention but without practical significance. Now, however, American capitalism stands tall while welfare states are under siege even in strongholds like Scandinavia and Germany. This worldwide swing to the right makes American exceptionalism the central intellectual problem for the political Left. No longer a unique case, American conservatism appears an early indicator of a general crisis.	2
Each of the works under review here makes a notable contribution to the collective project of understanding America's peculiar labor politics. Spanning a century of social thought, they use approaches from the simple determinism of the late nineteenth century to the sophisticated historical reasoning used by some contemporary scholars. Early scholars, such as August Sartorius von Waltershausen, explained the social circumstances of American exceptionalism as the result of material conditions particular to the United States. By contrast, some later scholars have explained the social outcome of American exceptionalism as the result of social experiences—the past politics and the particular history of labor in the United States.	3
First published in Germany in the early 1880s, Sartorius's Workers' Movement in the United States remained untranslated and largely forgotten until the current edition. It has found new relevance in our conservative times. A keen observer of American life, Sartorius acknowledged the conditions that favor American unions and radicalism. Lacking a strong central government to provide for their common needs, Americans of all social classes, Sartorius argued, are quick joiners, eager to come together to advance their common economic and social interests. Sartorius argued that American workers are "quick to form social combinations" and need little encouragement to unionize. Furthermore, American workers benefit from the experience of their English compatriots; by studying English models, they have been spared some of the expense and trouble of creating new forms of social life.	. . .