Is Liberalism Really the Answer?

Extract

I read the first pages of Ira Katznelson's provocative essay with enthusiasm and sympathy. While acknowledging that much interesting and valuable work is being done in the field of working-class history, he accurately pointed to a crisis that is at once political, theoretical, and methodological. He rightly urged us to refuse the currently fashionable alternatives: structure/agency, materialism/discourse, reality/signification, economy/culture.He wisely warned against any easy elision or conflation of these alternatives, favoring instead an exploration of their contradictions and disjunctures. But as I read on to his diagnosis of the ills besetting the field I became uneasy, fearing that while he had recognized some symptoms, he had ignored other, very prominent ones. And when I read his prescription —a labor history that centered on state-focused politics, institutions, and the law—I feared the patient might never recover.