History Commons^™

You Say You Want A Revolution? [Review Of The Book The Other Side Of The Sixties: Young Americans For Freedom And The Rise Of Conservative Politics], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Was the New Left a premature revolution, the fruits of which must await a future set of proper conditions to develop? Or was it more a victim of a giant government conspiracy that crushed a vibrant and growing oppositional tendency? Adherents of these and similar interpretations thus can explain the demise of the New Left while protecting its image as a tribune of a people in inevitable, if slow, political motion. But a perspective less protective of the New Left might reveal more. Perhaps treatments of that era have never fully captured either the complex turnings of America's political …

In The Jungle Of Cities [Review Of The Book Harold Washington And The Neighborhoods: Progressive City Reform In Chicago, 1983-1987], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] At first glance such a spatial transformation of work may seem positive, as indeed it was for the largely white work force that left the city and staffed these new positions. But left behind geographically, economically, and socially were the largely black (and to a lesser extent, Mexican) working-class residents. It was at this juncture, with jobs disappearing and the urban social structure fragmented, that black Chicago, symbolized in the person of Harold Washington, finally assumed political power. In Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods, editors Pierre Clavel and Wim Wiewel have collected a group of essays that examine the …

America Reborn? Conservatives, Liberals, And American Political Culture Since 1945, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] From the perspective of the early twenty‑first century, we can chide the good professor for not carefully considering the consequences of what he wished for half a century ago. For it is clear that the force of this conservative movement in America was in fact “stronger than most of us [knew]” or could have imagined in 1950, or, indeed, in 1968. This conservative “impulse”, those “irritable mental gestures”, has largely restructured American political thinking with a force and popular approval that remains stunning to consider. The growth of the conservative movement since 1945 was also accompanied by the slow …

Response To Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness And The American Labor Movement, 1790-1920", Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Wilentz's critique of the exceptionalist theme in American historiography is to the point. Whether one applauded the absence of feudalism, and therefore class conflict, in America with the historians of the 1950s or bemoaned that liberal democratic tradition as the "nail in the coffin of class consciousness" in the 1970s, either interpretative structure sacrifices empirical evidence for grand theory. In the former, the careers of Thomas Skidmore or Ira Stewart are all but incomprehensible; in the latter, men like Joseph R. Buchanan or Eugene V. Debs have little relevance. More importantly, the actual experience of the majority of American …

Faith, Politics, And American Culture [Review Of The Books Letter To A Christian Nation, Pity And Politics: The Right-Wing Assault On Religious Freedom, Faith And Politics: How The “Moral Values” Debate Divides America And How To Move Forward Together, The Compassionate Community: Ten Values To Unite America, Righteous: Dispatches From The Evangelical Youth Movement, And Believers: A Journey Into Evangelical America], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] In January 2004, before a black church congregation in New Orleans, President George W. Bush commemorated Martin Luther King's birthday with a spirited promotion of his faith-based initiatives. Appropriating the slain Civil Rights leader's profession of faith, Bush proclaimed his ultimate purpose was to change "America one heart, one soul, one conscience at a time." He emphasized voluntary action by citizens (four times he extolled them as "the social entrepreneurs") and he consistency denigrated the role of government but for one critical function: providing "billions of dollars" to faith-based social-service groups. Proclaiming the values of the Christian Bible as …

Contesting The Dinosaur Image: The Labor Movement’S Search For A Future, Richard W. Hurd

Richard W Hurd

[Excerpt] But the increased effectiveness of labor's political activities has not resulted in major improvements legislatively, and now there is a hostile President who opposes nearly every aspect of the union policy agenda. The promise for the future lies in the demonstrated ability to mobilize at the grassroots. But there are recent signs that national unions are breaking ranks and pursuing narrow self interest. The USWA joined with the steel industry to persuade the Bush administration to restrict imports, and even hinted at a possible endorsement for his reelection in 2004 (Murray). The UMWA has praised the president's energy policy, …

Rights Of Inequality: Rawlsian Justice, Equal Opportunity, And The Status Of The Family, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Is the family subject to principles of justice? In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls includes the (monogamous) family along with the market and the government as among the "basic institutions of society" to which principles of justice apply. Justice, he famously insists, is primary in politics as truth is in science: the only excuse for tolerating injustice is that no lesser injustice is possible. The point of the present paper is that Rawls doesn't actually mean this. When it comes to the family, and in particular its impact on fair equal opportunity (the first part of the the Difference …

Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, And Justice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

THIS PAPER IS THE CO-WINNER OF THE FRED BERGER PRIZE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW FOR THE 1999 AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE BEST PUBLISHED PAPER IN THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS.

The conflict between liberal legal theory and critical legal studies (CLS) is often framed as a matter of whether there is a theory of justice that the law should embody which all rational people could or must accept. In a divided society, the CLS critique of this view is overwhelming: there is no such justice that can command universal assent. But the liberal critique of CLS, that it degenerates into …

What's Wrong With Exploitation?, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Abstract: Marx thinks that capitalism is exploitative, and that is a major basis for his objections to it. But what's wrong with exploitation, as Marx sees it? (The paper is exegetical in character: my object is to understand what Marx believed,) The received view, held by Norman Geras, G.A. Cohen, and others, is that Marx thought that capitalism was unjust, because in the crudest sense, capitalists robbed labor of property that was rightfully the workers' because the workers and not the capitalists produced it. This view depends on a Labor Theory of Property (LTP), that property rights are based ultimately …

In Defence Of Exploitation, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

The concept of exploitation is thought to be central to Marx's Critique of capitalism. John Roemer, an analytical (then-) Marxist economist now at Yale, attacked this idea in a series of papers and books in the 1970s-1990s, arguing that Marxists should be concerned with inequality rather than exploitation -- with distribution rather than production, precisely the opposite of what Marx urged in The Critique of the Gotha Progam.

This paper expounds and criticizes Roemer's objections and his alternative inequality based theory of exploitation, while accepting some of his criticisms. It may be viewed as a companion paper to my What's …

Functional Explanation And Metaphysical Individualism, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

A number of (present or former) analytical Marxists, such as Jon Elster, have argued that functional explanation has almost no place in the social sciences. (Although the discussion is framed in terms of a debate among analytical Marxists, the point is quite general, and Marxism is used for illustrative purposes.) Functional explanation accounts for what is to be explained by reference to its function; thus, sighted organism have eyes because eyes enable them to see. Elster and other critics of functional explanation argue that this pattern of explanation is inconsistent with "methodological individualism," the idea, as they understand it, that …

Ceta Employers’ Guide, Manpower

Mayor Moscone

A pamphlet for employers explaining how the CETA program will work with George Moscone’s picture on the cover

Moscone And Cesar Chavez, [Circa 1972], Unknown

Mayor Moscone

Picture of George Moscone and Cesar Chavez marching in opposition to Proposition 22, an anti-union initiative.