A shorter version of this essay was delivered as a paper to the Annual Meeting, Organization of American Historians, Los Angeles, CA, April 6, 1984. The author wishes to thank the commentator, Herbert G. Gutman, and the OAH audience, as well as David Abraham, Eric Foner, Gary Gerstle, Paul Johnson, Peter Mandler, and Michael Merrill for their helpful criticisms.

1. Aronowitz, Stanley, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin, “Why No Socialism in the United States,” in Bilaer, Seweryn and Sluzar, Sophia. eds., Sources of Contemporary Radicalism (New York, 1977), 31–149Google Scholar; Laslett, John H. M. and Lipset, Seymour Martin, Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City, 1974)Google Scholar; Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964)Google Scholar; Thernstrom, , The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Karabel, Jerome, “The Failure of American Socialism Reconsidered,” Socialist Register, (1979), 204–27.Google Scholar Among the recent works in labor history that take up the question of American exceptionalism, in one form or another, are Dawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass., 1976)Google Scholar; Walkowitz, Daniel J., Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855–84 (Urbana, 1978)Google Scholar; Hirsch, Susan E., Roots of the American Working Class: The Industrialization of Crafts in Newark, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia, 1978)Google Scholar; Laurie, Bruce G., Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia, 1980)Google Scholar; Davis, Mike, “Why the U.S. Working Class is Different,” New Left Review, 123 (1980), 3–46Google Scholar; Laslett, John H. M., Reluctant Proletarians: A Short Comparative History of American Socialism (Westport, Ct., 1984).Google Scholar On the twentieth century, see also Brecher, Jeremy, Strike! (San Francisco, 1972)Google Scholar; Schwantes, Carlos A., Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in Washington and British Columbia, 1885–1917 (Seattle, 1979).Google Scholar

2. I am forced to oversimplify. My point is not that all work on the United States has been addressed directly to the exceptionalism question, only that the interpretations described here have formed important conceptual boundaries to most of that work. Some of the most interesting and path-breaking recent work in American social history—above all on the history of women and the family—has tended to fall outside those boundaries, largely because it has usually not concerned itself with some of the more conventional questions asked by political, social, and intellectual historians.

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5. The most elaborate attempt to interpret the history of the labor movement in counter-Progressive terms is Grob, Gerald N., Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865–1900 (Evanston, III., 1961).Google Scholar

6. The shift is particularly noticeable in Hofstadter's work. See his The Age of Reform: Bryan to FDR New York, 1955; Anti-lntellectualism in American Life (New York, 1963; The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York, 1965. For an incisive critique of the broader intellectual trend of which this was a part, see Rogin, Michael Paul, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).Google Scholar

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8. These explanations are taken, more or less at random, from the “new” labor history works cited above fn. 1, as well as from Gordon, David, Reich, Michael, and Edwards, Richard, Segmented Labor, Divided Workers (Cambridge, 1982)Google Scholar; Laslett, John H. M., Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881–1924 (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; and Aronowitz, , False Promises, 137–213.Google Scholar

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10. Boorstin, Daniel J., The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1953)Google Scholar; Lasch, Christopher, preface to The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne, Selected Writings 1911–1918, ed. Hansen, Olaf (New York, 1977), 13.Google Scholar An extreme case of such condemnation is Kraditor's, Aileen The Radical Persuasion: Aspects of Intellectual History and the Historiography of Three American Radical Organizations (Baton Rouge, 1981).Google Scholar

11. For a clear exposition of the logical flaws of such negative questions, see Fischer, David Hackett, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York, 1970), 8–12.Google Scholar

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15. And even then, the SPD should not be analyzed in essentialist terms. See Nolan's, Mary excellent study, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Dusseldorf, 1890–1920 (New York, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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20. For a comprehensive comparative study that directly confronts the Sombart-Seligman view, see Holt, James, “Trade Unionism in the British and U.S. Steel Industries, 1885–1912: A Comparative Study,” Labor History, 18 (1977), 5–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The issues of race, ethnicity and class are taken up in Gutman, Work: on these and other related matters, see Greene, Victor, The Slavic Community on Strike (Notre Dame, 1968)Google Scholar; Buhle, Women: Freeman, Josh, “Catholics, Communists, and Republicans: Irish Workers and the Organization of the Transport Workers Union,” in Frisch, Michael H. and Walkowitz, Daniel J., Working-Class America (Urbana, 1983), 256–283.Google Scholar For a full treatment of the inadequacies of the exceptionalism question to explain the facts of U.S. working-class history, see Foner, Eric. “Why Is There No Socialism in America?” History Workshop Journal, 17 (Spring, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. William Manning. “Some proposals for Makeing Restitution to the Original Credtors of Government…” (1790), MS. Houghton Library. Harvard University. For details of Manning's life, see Morison, Samuel Eliot, ed., “William Manning's The Key of Liberty,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 13 (1956), 202–08.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. For the subsequent history of these ideas in rural America, see Goodwyn, Lawrence, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Palmer, Bruce, “Man Over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill, 1980).Google Scholar

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28. The connections between rural and urban small production and popular conceptions of republicanism—and particularly republican ideals of virtue, independence, commonwealth, citizenship, and equality—are too complex to explain in detail here. I have tried to specify them in the urban context in Chants Democratic, 87–97.

29. The best recent treatment of this transformation concentrates on the changes in contract, insurance, and tort law: Horwitz, Morton J., The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).Google Scholar See also Szatmary, David, Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst, 1980).Google Scholar

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