At a moment when labor history risks becoming an elegy for dashed hopes, I wish to tell a cautionary tale of missed opportunities and to counsel an alteration in intellectual focus. Not just a profound shift in the political climate, East and West, but a sustained assault on the operational premises of our craft from within has raised issues more challenging than those encompassed by the usual range of inquiries devoted to improving methods, incorporating neglected topics, and critiquing extant literatures.Not surprisingly, there has been a burst of historiographical stock-takings of late. When fields are in trouble, their practitioners are tempted to become planners. I fully agree with William Sewell's orienting judgment (in one of the most thoughtful of these recent considerations) that labor history cannot be judged to be in a state of scholarly crisis, even if the field has lost its unitary theoretical grounding. After all, assessed by the standards of the craft of history, more excellent work is being done now than ever before. Read as an empirical genre, irrespective of trends in the world or normative commitments, labor history has never been better, more diverse, or asrichly textured. Impressively, it is the site of important epistemological debates. Further, labor history has extended its domain to include subjects such as drink, crime, leisure, sexuality, and the family it once either ignored or relegated to the periphery of its concerns. Like Sewell, however, I am struck by labor history's loss of élan, directionality, and intellectual purpose. Engaged history, in possession at least of the conceit of making a difference, has moved elsewhere, to other subject areas.

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?

The New Labor History has, unexpectedly but inevitably, become middleaged. The mirror shows the same basic form, though more capacious and less taut than before. But the energy level is definitely lower; some of the enthusiasm is gone; newer, younger groups on the street have more “élan and purpose,” and are more fired up and politically engaged. There's pride in past achievements, of course, and plenty of consolation that the stuff now being turned out is better than ever.But the air contains a whiff of panic, an infectious sense that the best days are gone. Even the “oldfashioned” history, once so disdained, now seems to have redeeming points. Like Lord Melbourne in his dotage, labor historians wish they could be as sure of anything as they once were of everything. Marxism down the tubes, class stripped of its explanatory force, Lefebvre's French Revolution gathering dust, E. P. Thompson under attack. Where will it all end? Some blame an excess of theory for making the mind spin and the stomach queasy; they prescribe a strong dose of exercise in the archives. Others have begun to pin their hopes on the state or counsel premature retreat into institutions.

Linking the fate of labor and working-class history to the temporal fortunes of socialist parties or the collapse of the communist system seems to reduce history to a very meager function. It suggests that labor has somehow lost importance or interest as a historical subject because the political parties and movements which claimed to speak in its name have experienced drastic reversals or other profound changes.Apparently historians have periodically and repeatedly had to confront such narrow present-mindedness.Katznelson dwells on this sense of loss which he sees reflected in how “far more rapidly” the “agenda defended by Hobsbawm and Hill… has taken on something of the quaint feel of antiquarianism.”

Ira Katznelson's paper should be welcomed because it contributes to an urgently needed debate. One of the less-noted consequences of the breakup of the social movements of the sixties and seventies and of the disintegration of “Old Left” organizations has been the disappearance of relevant forums for discussing the overall direction of left-wing politics.The collapse and shattering of the left-wing movement of the sixties and early seventies and its dispersion into pockets of isolated separate issues and ad hoc social movements has reached such a state that it threatens the Left's ability to discuss larger issues of strategy and tactics.

I believe Ira Katznelson is quite right to link the condition of labor history as a scholarly field with bigger changes taking place in the world. The malaise he points to is a response to the striking, protracted, and continuing shift to the Right in political life; the prolonged and barely challenged erosion of working-class living standards, rights, and organizations; and the evident programmatic and strategic bankruptcy alike of Stalinist, social democratic, and even more explicitly business-minded labor leaders and labor parties. Those waiting for organized labor to stand up on its hind legs and fight back grow disappointed and disoriented.

Ira Katznelson has proposed that we labor historians can recover our lost élan by engaging the agenda of liberalism. Although he acknowledges that today's writings on working-class history are variegated and richly rewarding, he regrets that they have become uncoupled from controversies over public policy and social change and run the risk of becoming little more than “sentimental reminders of times lost and aspirations disappointed.”To revitalize our sense of engagement he recommends that we call a halt to “the continuing flight within labor history from institutional-political analysis.” We should focus our attention on historical relationships between the state and civil society, and we should inform our analyses with the political theory that historically has assumed its shape around those relationships: liberalism.

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.

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.”

Ira Katznelson urges labor historians to respond to a crisis in their field by returning to political, institutional, and state-centered history. This state of affairs has come about, he and others tell us, because of the dual challenge of “new social movements” and then the decline of labor movements, the crisis of social democracy, and collapse of communist states. Labor history is in crisis, he concludes, because class no longer provides the best categories with which to describe the world and the working class is no longer the principal historical actor.

Ira Katznelson's evocative and stimulating essay is an effort to chart how we got from there to here and to point to new directions in which labor history might fruitfully move. By some irony of coincidence (or, more likely, by a logic that easily could be traced) I was at all the events he mentions (except the recent “ambitious talk by a political theorist”—I was out of town that day), even the founding meeting of the European Labor and Working-Class History group and newsletter convened by Robert Wheeler at the American Historical Association 1971 Annual Meeting.I also read most of the key articles and books he cites at about the same time he did. My reading of this history and the present situation of labor history differs from his not because I disagree with the facts about labor history, but because I disagree with the scope of the epistemological debate behind its “loss of elan, directionality, and intellectual purpose.” Thus the fact that labor history is not in crisis, as he insists, must be extended to history in general, with the caveat that an epistemological debate is going on not just in labor history, but throughout the discipline of history, including women's history.

There is something predictable in hearing a political scientist preach the virtue of political science. But in Ira's case there is also something personal, even poignant—for just below the surface of his remarks there runs a stream of self-consciousness about how he made it through the academic battles of the 1980s. Many of us have been harboring our own reflections about what happened, letting go only with occasional irritated book reviews or with diatribes in the faculty lounge. Ira opens up the conversation and sets a welcome, candid tone.

In the past decade many “new labor historians” have shifted their emphasis away from a narrowly focused social and cultural history and, without abandoning social historical insights, have reengaged vigorously with political history. In addition to their earlier interest in defining a “working-class politics” and tracing how it fared within the electoral system, labor historians recently have begun to reassess the larger periodizing concepts in political history, including those relating to party formation, political mobilization, political language and ideology, and political culture. The result has been significant progress toward the goal first articulated by Herbert Gutman: to rethink the basic building blocks of American history in such a way as to take full account of the experiences, aspirations, and movements of working people and other subordinate groups studied by social historians.

Research by labor historians on the acquisition of power by the working class tends to focus on labor relations (acquisition of power in businesses) or on political relations (power through elections, with the government, and so on). This approach overlooks the third source of labor's power, which is based on patterns of consumption resulting from the collective use of purchasing power. This essay examines this source of power. Because the topic is a virtual terra incognita, I will merely discuss a few observations and some very provisional hypotheses that are not always well substantiated.

Over many years, academic journals on both sides of the Atlantic have carried articles debating the current state and future direction of labor historiography. One area of continuing discussion, central to the notion of a division between an “old” and a “new” labor history, is the importance of unions. As a consequence, historians of different persuasions are now more openly making judgments as to the value of the extensive body of industrial relations literature. This essay is a contribution to that particular discussion and an attempt to give it a more directed focus.