A Contest of Ideas

For more than thirty years Nelson Lichtenstein has deployed his scholarship—on labor, politics, and social thought—to chart the history and prospects of a progressive America. A Contest of Ideas collects and updates many of Lichtenstein's most provocative and controversial essays and reviews.

These incisive writings link the fate of the labor movement to the transformations in the shape of world capitalism, to the rise of the civil rights movement, and to the activists and intellectuals who have played such important roles. Tracing broad patterns of political thought, Lichtenstein offers important perspectives on the relationship of labor and the state, the tensions that sometimes exist between a culture of rights and the idea of solidarity, and the rise of conservatism in politics, law, and intellectual life. The volume closes with portraits of five activist intellectuals whose work has been vital to the conflicts that engage the labor movement, public policy, and political culture.
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Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Shaping Myself, Shaping History Chapter 1. Writing and Rewriting Labor's Narrative Chapter 2. Supply-Chain Tourist; or, How Globalization Has Transformed the Labor Question Chapter 3. Historians as Public Intellectuals Part II. Capital, Labor, and the State Chapter 4. Tribunes of the Shareholder Class Chapter 5. "The Man in the Middle" Chapter 6. From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining Chapter 7. Communism on the Shop Floor and Off Part III. The Rights Revolution Chapter 8. Opportunities Found and Lost Chapter 9. The Lost Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement Chapter 10. A New Era of Global Human Rights Part IV. The Specter on the Right Chapter 11. The United States in the Great Depression Chapter 12. Market Triumphalism and the Wishful Liberals Chapter 13. Did 1968 Change History? Chapter 14. Bashing Public Employees and Their Unions Part V. Intellectuals and Their Ideas Chapter 15. C. Wright Mills Chapter 16. Harvey Swados Chapter 17. B. J. Widick Chapter 18. Jay Lovestone Chapter 19. Herbert Hill in History and Contention Chapter 20. Do Graduate Students Work? Chapter 21. Why American Unions Need Intellectuals Notes Index|