Description
A transformation of labor relations in antebellum America pushed the Jeffersonian republican frame to the breaking point, drawing reformers into the wider ambit of transatlantic social-democratic ideas. Like their European counterparts, American labor reformers saw a civil society divided against itself, where a republican polity could not stand. Social-democratic thinkers invoked the agrarian ideas of Thomas Paine and “Gracchus” Babeuf; the critique of political economy by Owenite socialists (after Robert Owen); and the conception of a divided peuple by the French Revolutionary, Constantin-Francois Volney, to forge a new political language of “workers’ democracy.” This trajectory of American reform was part in parcel of an emerging cosmopolitan social-democratic politics, which reached across national barriers to grasp the common social predicament facing wage workers.This presentation focuses on the articulation of novel social themes in the political consciousness of labor reformers, which became an integral part of the transatlantic debates over the “Social Republic,” a proposal to extend the reach of political power into the sphere of social production and exchange.
About the Speaker
I am a social and intellectual historian of modern American society. Currently under contract with the University of Chicago Press, my book manuscript, “Reform in the Age of Capital: The Social Question in Nineteenth-Century America,” connects American social reformers to a lively movement of ideas across cosmopolitan social-democratic networks, with nodal points in London, New York and Paris. These social reformers broke with republican solutions to the “social problem”— the declining condition of laborers and the emergence of systemic unemployment. They demanded new rights for laboring citizens, including the “right to land,” the right to “the fruits of [their] labor,” the right to “free time,” and the “right to work,” and called for the establishment of a novel “social republic” to supersede the limitations of political representation. Throughout the book, I explore the common aspirations between radical abolitionists, labor reformers, English Chartists, German revolutionaries, and French utopians, who sought to realize the ideals of the revolutions of the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries under the unprecedented conditions of industrializing nations.
Respondent
Tobias Higbie, University of California Los Angeles
About the History of Capitalism Seminar Series
The History of Capitalism Seminar provides a works-in-progress forum for work from scholars at all levels. Proposals may consider a variety of subjects, including the history of race and racism, gender and feminist studies, intellectual history, political history, legal history, business history, the history of finance, labor history, cultural history, urban history, and agricultural history. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (Loyola University Chicago) and Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University) are the co-coordinators of the seminar.
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This event is free, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.
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