Person:

Cohen, Lizabeth

Germany has been reunified. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have fractured into ethnically defined nationalist republics trying to dismantle decades of communist political and economic structures and replace them with free markets and free marketplaces of ideas. It seems only fitting that Ira Katznelson should publically embrace liberal political theory with a new “zest for political engagement”, enthusiastically endorsing the old liberal vision of political science as a discipline, and thrusting both onto labor historians as the perfect solution to political and epistemological crises in their field.In response, I would say to Katznelson, “You're working within the system now, but do we all need to?” Even more significantly, did the working-class populations we study operate within a liberal framework sufficiently enough to make liberal, state-centered concerns—the relationships and negotiations between actors in civil society (particularly articulated through unions and parties) and the liberal state—the “most potent tools” for political and historical analysis?

For two days, October 25–26, 1991, about forty scholars—mostly, but not exclusively, historians—sat around a conference table in the Alumni Room of the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and discussed “Tradition and the Working Class, 1850–1950.” We came from nine countries (the largest delegations were from France and the United States) to participate in the third of what has become a tradition in itself among historians of the working class, an international colloquium sponsored by ILWCH and the French social history journal. Le Mouvemem social, and supported as well by the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. CNRS. and DAGIC.

The first year of Barack Obama's presidency has returned consumer issues to center stage, with several contentious struggles over consumer protection. This moment can be viewed as a fourth wave of the twentieth-century consumer movement, and a comparison with the first three waves (during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the 1960s–1970s) offers instructive insights. In particular, the contemporary battle over the Consumer Financial Protection Agency bears striking similarities to the failed campaign for a Consumer Protection Agency in the 1970s.