|
|
|
Review Forum
| STROMQUIST, SHELTON. Reinventing "The People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. x + 289 pp. Preface, introduction, notes, index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-252-03026-0; $22.00 (paper), ISBN 0-252-03026-5.
|
Editor's note: The following forum reveals how two historians with different intellectual perspectives approach a book relevant to both of them. The first review of Shelton Stromquist's ambitious, recent book on progressivism is by Nancy Cohen, whose writing so far focuses on political economy and economic thought. A second review of the book is by James Connolly, whose best-known work concerns urban politics and political culture. Then Shelton Stromquist concludes the forum with his response.
|
|
|
|
|
Review 1: The Progressives' Disappearing Act: Modern Liberalism's Retreat From Class
By Nancy Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles
| Shelton Stromquist, professor of history at the University of Iowa and author of several books of labor history, pursues his lifelong scholarly investigation of the place of class in American culture and politics into the well-trodden field of progressivism. In his earlier books, such as Generation of Boomers, Stromquist demonstrated particular acuity on the ebb and flow of class consciousness among working-class Americans.1 In Reinventing "The People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism, Americans' ideologies of class are central to the origin, program, and character of the progressive movement. |
1
|
|
The big questions of Progressive Era scholarship shape Stromquist's project. What was progressivism? Can it be described as a movement at all? Why did it disappear so quickly? Stromquist seeks to provide a new synthesis of the progressive movement and to identify the legacy of progressivism within modern liberalism. Stromquist argues that there was indeed an identifiable and distinguishable progressive movement and that a common ideology united progressive reformers. Like many other historians, Stromquist places class squarely at the center of the study of progressivism. He is not, however, interested in class origins, nor in a shared class project, nor in class interests as a unifying principle, some of the ways that earlier historians have approached the relationship. Rather, Stromquist finds the progressive movement crystallizing out of a common experience of "the class problem" and then forging a distinctive identity on the basis of a unifying ideology of class—or more accurately, the transcendence of class. In reaction to Gilded Age social conflict, progressives "crafted a common language that stressed the paramount need for social reconciliation in the service of democratic renewal." Disturbed by class conflict and the "'parochial' class loyalties" of working-class Americans, progressives "imagined 'the people' as a civic community in which class would lose its meaning" (viii). The passion of Stromquist's book flows from his dismay at the state of contemporary liberalism, which he views as the legacy of the progressives' act of purging class from the conscience and consciousness of American liberalism: "In their programmatic efforts to constitute an imagined people, they failed to come to terms with the structures of class power and domination that shaped 'public' interest and over time undermined their quest for democratic community" (viii). |
. . . |
There are about 4683 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
