Christopher H. Johnson

Back to Politics: Some Recent Books in North American Labor History. A Review Article

These half-dozen books share a common emphasis and derive from what appears to be a common realization: now that labor historiography has achieved a solid base in localized, often quantitative, and sometimes blatantly apolitical social history, it will become increasingly fruitful to reexamine the institutional, intellectual, and political history of the labor movement. Many of the themes of the new labor history-culture, community, the structure of work and workers control, and labor market analysis-are found in these pages. But for most of the studies under review, the key concern is to understand power relationships in the political arena. There is no question that the political dimensions of labor history received short shrift in the scholarship of the 1970s. The influence of Thompson, Gutman, and others put culture and class experience at the top of the research agenda. Although much of this work examined the foundations of class con-