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Unions, Cartels, And The Political Economy Of American Cities: The Chicago Flat Janitors' Union In The Progressive Era And 1920s, John Jentz

Library Faculty Research and Publications

In 1997, Ira Katznelson contributed to the ongoing discussion among social scientists and historians about how to analyze class formation and the development of the American state. He was particularly interested in tying this research to the history of liberalism in an effort to both historicize the generalizations of Louis Hartz and address the question of American exceptionalism. Evaluating the body of research, Katznelson argued that authors had too frequently abstracted the state from its context and then used it to explain the very phenomena that helped define the state's character in the first place. In part to imbed the …