In the beginning was the Theory. Even before the collapse of Soviet communism, the glow of Marxism in American (and European) universities was beginning to dim. Now we look back on our own investment in Marxism, not always with satisfaction. At best, the theory did not so much fail historians, as historians, in their efforts to redress the lacunae in the theory, wrote around it to the extent that theory ultimately became marginal to their enterprise. This is hardly surprising since Marxism, having given up pretense to science by the mid-1960s, became largely a critical theory in the sense that its main sources were European thinkers – Gramsci, Adorno, Foucault, Althusser – who sought to repair the crumbling walls and beams remaining from the wreckage of Stalinism.

Ira's paper begins with an apparent paradox: He agrees with William Sewell's statement that labor history is not in crisis, and yet, the remarkable historical occurrences and the powerful methodological and epistemological challenges of the past decade have produced nothing less than “labor history's loss of élan, directionality, and intellectual purpose.” These developments are so serious that labor historians are encouraged to undertake a dramatic departure from the well-trod methodological and thematic pathways of labor history.Marxism, which in varying guises was hegemonic in our discipline for at least two decades, has all but collapsed under the double pressure of events and theoretical challenges. Its political project is undermined by a disappearing working class, a declining welfare state, and the end of European communism, its theoretical preeminence shaken by new deconstructive and Foucauldian approaches. These approaches have questioned the timelessness and solidity of Marxist categories, arguing that the “historical subject” of the theory—the working class—is not a sociological given or an ontologically secure phenomenon; it is a category that is not merely undifferentiated, but constituted in such a way as to obliterate its constitutive “other,” most preeminently “woman.” Poststructuralist historiography undercuts the teleological and triumphalist assumptions of Marxist philosophy of history, just as the aforementioned events have shown them to be counterfactual, if not “sentimental reminders of times lost and aspirations disappointed.”

I first met George Mosse in late August 1967. That summer I carried my worn copy of his book on the roots of Nazi ideology, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964), with Hubert Lanzinger's bizarre painting of Hider as a German knight on the cover, to Salzburg where I studied German before going on to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. Though I admired the book, it did not prepare me for meeting the man. In 1967 I drove out to the Midwest from New York in my VW bug. To my surprise, as soon as I arrived in Madison, someone pointed him out, sitting on the Terrace of the Wisconsin Memorial Union in his short sleeve shirt, smoking his pipe, and arguing intensely with a group of students who were planning to sit in to block the Dow Chemical Company campus recruiter in the Fall (Dow was chosen because the company was manufacturing napalm).