The Snares of Liberalism

The Making of ...

It's a long time ago! Thirty years... This started out as a by-product of the work that had led to my D.Phil., where I had initially thought I would be focusing on the development and impact of federal labor relations (and other) policies, before I changed tack and started reading and writing about business and management. Still, even after I had finished the dissertation and finished rewriting it for publication, I wanted to get some more mileage out of the research, and so I planned to do something with my unused notes about politics and the law. This intention led to the first paper I ever gave to an academic conference (the British Association for American Studies, at Swansea, in I think 1978 or 1979, where I first met Tony Badger, who either chaired the session or was commentator), and another to the American Politics Group of the Political Studies Association in Durham, in 1980 or 1981. It also underpinned the proposal I wrote that won me my Senior Fulbright Fellowship to Princeton in 1982 -- I was going to explore the Progressive Era and First World War origins of the U.S. industrial relations system, or something. Anyway, even before I got there I had met up with a couple of bright young research fellows at King's College, Cambridge, Steve Tolliday and Jon Zeitlin, who introduced me to ideas that were new to me (e.g. Jon's notions of "Industrial Relations History" and "Historical Alternatives to Mass Production") and could see a contribution for me within a research programme they were organizing about state policy and the shaping of industrial relations systems. Because I was going to be in Princeton, I could not participate in the conference they had already planned, except on paper. The opportunity was too good to pass up -- I could use up my old notes and, hopefully, get the results published in some good company. So one of the first things I did when I got to Princeton that summer was to do quite a bit of extra reading, and to write the first draft of this paper. It was written in a stark faculty office, with its grey metal furniture and incongruous early modern casement windows, and even in its first version was pretty good -- good enough for Jon and Steve to want it in the conference volume.

This took what seemed at the time to be forever to appear (only three years, not bad for a conference volume), so that by the time it did the scholarship on the history of labor law had begun to move on, and my contribution was looking a bit liberal and hackneyed when it finally got noticed (a bit) and reviewed. But it didn't get noticed much -- even people who went on to be friends, e.g. Mel Dubofsky, were happily unaware of it when they wrote on the same subject. A part of this invisibility may have resulted from the fact that the essay was published in one of C.U.P.'s massively overpriced miniature editions of essay collections. Reasonably enough, they must have anticipated a tiny market, planned accordingly, and were not disappointed. Neither was I, really, because my interests moved on and I never really wanted to return to this subject again; and the essay was well regarded by a few people whose judgement I valued. It has also picked up a reasonable number of citations, and is still available. What more can one ask?

Extras:

• A preprint (the thing itself is partly available online,
• Google Scholar's links to works citing this essay.
• Bibliography -- I have added links to many of the more important books published since this article. If I were ever to write a revised version, reworked in the light of subsequent research and, equally to the point, history (essentially the collapse of the right to organize a union, even while federal law remains textually unchanged, merely interpreted away), I would feel it much less important than I then did to defend a federal labor law that still seemed, on balance, necessary and beneficial in the very early 1980s, against the attacks of the academic left which I had got used in the 1970s to thinking of as essentially wrong-headed. I was still ready to battle Error in the mid-1990s, taking on Colin Gordon over his ingenious but fundamentally misleading interpretation of the origins of the Wagner Act. But this all seems comparatively unimportant to me now -- the real story is the one David Brody, James Gross, and others have told, of the subversion of the federal labor law (and, in David Brody's recent scholarship, the identification and exploitation of its latent anti-collectivist possibilities) by the politicians, judges, and bureaucrats charged with its interpretation and enforcement.