Illiberal reformers : race, eugenics & American economics in the progressive era
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Bibliographic Information
Illiberal reformers : race, eugenics & American economics in the progressive era
Princeton University Press, c2016
- : hardcover
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Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor.
Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors but to exclude them.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii Prologue ix Part I The Progressive Ascendancy 1 Redeeming American Economic Life 3 2 Turning Illiberal 17 3 Becoming Experts 27 4 Efficiency in Business and Public Administration 55 Part II The Progressive Paradox 5 Valuing Labor: What Should Labor Get? 77 6 Darwinism in Economic Reform 89 7 Eugenics and Race in Economic Reform 109 8 Excluding the Unemployable 129 9 Excluding Immigrants and the Unproductive 141 10 Excluding Women 169 Epilogue 187 Notes 193 Index 233
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