Download Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics by Thomas C. Leonard PDF
By Thomas C. Leonard
Praised by way of the New York instances e-book Review as a "vital account of the perils of highbrow arrogance," a troubling tale of liberal economists, race, and eugenics
In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the commercial progressives whose principles and reform schedule underwrote the innovative period dismantling of laissez-faire and the production of the regulatory welfare country, which, they believed, could humanize and rationalize commercial capitalism. yet no longer for all.
Academic social scientists comparable to Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, including their reform allies in social paintings, charity, journalism, and legislations, performed a pivotal function in developing minimum-wage and maximum-hours legislation, workmen's reimbursement, revolutionary source of revenue taxes, antitrust legislation, and different hallmarks of the regulatory welfare nation. yet while they provided uplift to a couple, financial progressives encouraged exclusion for others, and did either within the identify of growth.
Leonard meticulously reconstructs the impact of Darwinism, racial technology, and eugenics on students and activists of the overdue 19th and early 20th centuries, revealing a reform neighborhood deeply ambivalent approximately America's terrible. fiscal progressives championed hard work laws since it may elevate up the deserving terrible whereas with the exception of immigrants, African american citizens, ladies, and "mental defectives," whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the yankee workingman and to Anglo-Saxon race integrity.
Economic progressives rejected estate and agreement rights as illegitimate boundaries to wanted reforms. yet their overlook for civil liberties prolonged a lot additional. Illiberal Reformers exhibits that the highbrow champions of the regulatory welfare kingdom proposed utilizing it to not support these they portrayed as hereditary inferiors, yet to exclude them.
Read Online or Download Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era PDF
Best race relations books
Working Toward Freedom Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South
The chance for slaves to provide items, for his or her personal use or on the market, facilitated the advance of a family economic system principally self sustaining in their masters and the broader white neighborhood. Drawing from quite a number basic assets, those essays exhibit how slaves organised their household financial system and created an financial and social house for themselves less than slavery which profoundly affected relations and gender kinfolk.
Human Trafficking Around the World: Hidden in Plain Sight
This exceptional examine of intercourse trafficking, pressured hard work, organ trafficking, and intercourse tourism throughout twenty-four international locations highlights the studies of the sufferers, perpetrators, and anti-traffickers excited about this brutal exchange. Combining statistical facts with intimate bills and interviews, journalist Stephanie Hepburn and justice student Rita J.
Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles
In her first booklet, Shana Bernstein reinterprets U. S. civil rights activism by way of its roots within the interracial efforts of Mexican, African, Jewish, and jap american citizens in mid-century l. a.. increasing the body of ancient research past black/white and North/South, Bernstein unearths that significant family activism for racial equality continued from the Thirties during the Nineteen Fifties.
A gripping research within the vein of the podcast Serial—a summer time nonfiction choose through leisure Weekly and The Wall road magazine Justine van der Leun reopens the homicide of a tender American girl in South Africa, an iconic case that calls into query our realizing of fact and reconciliation, loyalty, justice, race, and sophistication.
- Race and Racism in Literature
- A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp
- The Menace of Multiculturalism: Trojan Horse in America
- Double Cross (Noughts and Crosses, Book 4)
Extra resources for Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era
Sample text
The German economists, though sometimes mocked as 舠socialists of the lectern,舡 were no friends of revolutionary socialism. They successfully positioned their welfare statism as a reformist via media between the extremes of English laissez-faire and proletarian dictatorship. Ely made clear the German academics were not socialists in the 舠vulgar舡 sense of the term, referring to the revolutionaries of Germany舗s Social Democratic Party. 4 Perhaps even more influential than the German professors舗 statism and historicist method was their professional status.
The progressive economists舗 rejection of individualism and their embrace of what Daniel Rodgers calls the 舠rhetoric of the moral whole,舡 was perhaps best embodied in Edward A. 舡26 Ross was not merely touting bigger government. He was asserting that the autonomous, self-reliant individual, a figure in both the liberal and republican traditions, was now a fiction in the age of industrialization. An industrial society shaped and made the individual rather than the other way around. Granted this premise, the only question was who shall do the shaping and molding.
Chapter 6 shows how the economic progressives (and their critics) drew deeply on evolutionary science舗s conceptions of heredity, progress, competition, selection, fitness, organism, and the role of human beings in controlling nature. Chapter 7 shows the uses economic progressives made of race science and eugenics, the social control of human breeding. Among other things, biological ideas offered Progressivism a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform舒its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint.