Nelson Lichtenstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 281341 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nelson Lichtenstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nelson |
| FAMILY NAME | Lichtenstein |
| SIGNATURE | LICHTENSTEIN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8000-4615 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 97 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 266 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 96 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Why No Corporatism in the United States? American Versus German Models of Industrial Relations in the Early Postwar Era
Today, industrial relations in the United States and Germany operate along strikingly divergent patterns, but in the early postwar years they had much in common. Indeed, the United States emulated Germany. That might seem an exceedingly strange proposition, because Germany was just emerging from utter destruction and the United States and Britain were occupying powers in the late 1940s. Moreover, the American economy then seemed a productive wond…
Mike Davis: The Road to City of Quartz and Beyond
This essay explores the historiographic ideas and political experiences that influenced the work of Mike Davis, the prolific Marxist historian who died in 2022. His first two books, Prisoners of the American Dream and City of Quartz, were shaped by his time as an editor of New Left Review in the early 1980s. Davis sided with Perry Anderson and other structuralists in their historiographic debate with E. P. Thompson. The former emphasized how the …
No Globalization without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality
Early in this century, Paul Adler spent a couple of years working for Public Citizen, one of the progressive nonprofits whose fight for a more equitable and just globalization stands at the heart of this admirable and heretofore largely unknown history. Covering the era from the early 1970s until the Battle of Seattle and the aftermath of 9/11, Adler's history offers a new, if somewhat narrowly focused, periodization of the campaign to reform one…
The United Auto Workers’ Southern Offensive
The “Stand-Up” Strike of 2023 Takes Its Place in UAW History
A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism
Why the New Deal Matters
Eric Rauchway calls the New Deal a peaceable form of patriotism, a moment of common purpose exemplified by a built environment transformed through the exercise of government power. At the most basic level the New Deal still matters because Americans can scarcely get through a day without coming into contact with some part of it. Rauchway's book is therefore a tour of selected venues that exemplify what he sees as the New Deal's most significant a…
Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies
Arguing the New Deal order is a product of a particular set of political institutions, social movements, ideological propensities, and legislative initiatives, Capitalism Contested offers an analysis of the degree to which that order persists and the ways in which it has been transcended or overthrown.
A Chinese Dystopia: Designed in California
Symposium on Barry Eidlin’s Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada
Barry Eidlin’s book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explains why unions are weaker in the United States than they are in Canada, but have not always been that way. Indeed, unionization rates were virtually identical for much of the twentieth century, then diverged in the 1960s. Against dominant accounts focused on long-standing differences in political cultures and institutions, Eidlin …
Comparative History of a Very High Standard, But It Is Still Tough to Make It Work
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From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era
"Are Trade Unions and Their Members "Populist
If in contemporary parlance “populism” stands for a social or political movement embodying otherwise unorganized and atomized anti-elite sentiment, then trade unionism is not populist. Labor organizations are anti-elitist, but they have a concrete program, a sense of social solidarity, a reasonably democratic leadership structure, and the capacity to exist once the fever or the election season has passed. Little of this is true of political campa…
Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America
This fine collection of essays calls attention to the efforts of businesspeople to advance their agenda through the political process. Although the editor Richard John and contributor Jason Scott Smith put the business historians Alfred Chandler and Thomas McCraw close to the center of our new interest in political economy and the history of capitalism, most of the contributors to this volume eschew the technocratic and organizational structurali…
Supply-Chain Tourist; or, How Globalization Has Transformed the Labor Question
This chapter, which yanks the reader from mid-twentieth-century Detroit to early twenty-first-century Guangdong Province, recounts the author's discovery that the labor question can have many different configurations, especially when some of the most important and characteristic enterprises of our day are the big-box retailers, whose employee rolls and annual revenues now far outrank those of the largest manufacturing companies. It appears that t…
The New Minority: White Working-Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality by Justin Gest
Justin Gest finished writing this book just as Donald J. Trump wrapped up the GOP nomination for president and during the very same month that the British voted to leave the European Union. An increasingly alienated and radicalized white working-class population was at the heart of both earthquakes, and it is this mentality that Gest explores in a book that seeks to explain how, from the point of view of so many blue-collar whites, both “Middle B…
Twenty-First Century “Populism: ” Not for the Unions and a Good Thing Too
On both the left and the right the phrase “populism” has lost any tangible meaning; or rather it is the default word used to describe otherwise unorganized and atomized anti-elite sentiment of almost any sort. The labor movement is a genuinely anti-corporate and anti-elite effort to empower workers both white and of color, but few commentators describe it as “populist,” and correctly so. This is because trade unions have an organized leadership, …
American Radicals: Margin and Mainstream
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Revolutionary Marx
Channeling the Past: Politicizing History in Postwar America
Journal Article Channeling the Past: Politicizing History in Postwar America Get access Erik Christiansen. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. xiv, 302 pp. Paper, $29.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 100, Issue 4, March 2014, Page 1264, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau112 Published: 01 March 2014
An Accident in History
A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor
For more than thirty years the author of this book has deployed his scholarship—on labor, politics, and social thought—to chart the history and prospects of a progressive America. This book collects and updates many of the author's most provocative and controversial essays and reviews. The book links the fate of the labor movement to the transformations in the shape of world capitalism, to the rise of the civil rights movement, and to the activis…
Robert H. Zieger
David Montgomery and the Idea of “Workers' Control”
Research Article| March 01 2013 David Montgomery and the Idea of “Workers' Control” Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2013) 10 (1): 65–71. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1725991 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site…
Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics and Labor
For more than thirty years Nelson Lichtenstein has deployed his scholarship--on labor, politics, and social thought--to chart the history and prospects of a progressive America. A Contest of Ideas collects and updates many of Lichtenstein's most provocative and controversial essays and reviews. These incisive writings link the fate of the labor movement to the transformations in the shape of world capitalism, to the rise of the civil rights movem…
Supply-Chain Tourist; or, How Globalization Has Transformed the Labor Question
This chapter, which yanks the reader from mid-twentieth-century Detroit to early twenty-first-century Guangdong Province, recounts the author's discovery that the labor question can have many different configurations, especially when some of the most important and characteristic enterprises of our day are the big-box retailers, whose employee rolls and annual revenues now far outrank those of the largest manufacturing companies. It appears that t…
Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement
Journal Article Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement Get access Robert Korstad, Robert Korstad historian with the School of Public Health University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein associate professor of history Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford …
China's New Labour Contract Law: Is China moving towards increased power for workers
China's new labour law is a significant reform that offers workers greater employment security and income protection. It is a product of both unprecedented industrial unrest as well as the Chinese government's decision to move its economy to a higher-wage, higher-technology future. The law has energised many workers, who are now using the courts and the Communist Party-controlled trade unions to press their claims. But the law has also evoked a s…
Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937-1955
Journal Article Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937–1955 Get access Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein assistant professor of history Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 67, Issue 2, September 1980, Pages 335–353, https://doi.org/10.2307/1890412 Published: 01 September 1980
Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise
A New World of Retail Supremacy: Supply Chains and Workers' Chains in the Age of Wal-Mart
In contrast to the mid-twentieth century era of transnational commerce, in which the US or European manufacturing multinationals played the leading role, twenty-first century globalization is increasingly structured by a set of retail-dominated supply chains, that of Wal-Mart first among them. This strategic shift in the locus of corporate power has arisen out of two conjoined phenomena: first, the logistical integration made possible and necessa…
State of the Union: A Century of American Labor
The Miners' Fight for Democracy: Arnold Miller and the Reform of the United Mine Workers
Journal Article The Miners' Fight for Democracy: Arnold Miller and the Reform of the United Mine Workers. By Paul F. Clark. (Ithaca: New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 1981. viii + 190 pp. Map, charts, tables, notes, and index. Cloth, $16.95; paper, $9.95.) Get access Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Sch…
The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor
Journal Article The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. By Nelson Lichtenstein. (New York: BasicBooks, 1995. xiv, 575 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-465-09080-X.) Get access Ronald Edsforth Ronald Edsforth Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 2, September 1996, Pages 685–686, https://doi.org/10.…
On the Line: Essays in the History of Auto Work
Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America
This fine collection of essays calls attention to the efforts of businesspeople to advance their agenda through the political process. Although the editor Richard John and contributor Jason Scott Smith put the business historians Alfred Chandler and Thomas McCraw close to the center of our new interest in political economy and the history of capitalism, most of the contributors to this volume eschew the technocratic and organizational structurali…
Twenty-First Century “Populism: ” Not for the Unions and a Good Thing Too
On both the left and the right the phrase “populism” has lost any tangible meaning; or rather it is the default word used to describe otherwise unorganized and atomized anti-elite sentiment of almost any sort. The labor movement is a genuinely anti-corporate and anti-elite effort to empower workers both white and of color, but few commentators describe it as “populist,” and correctly so. This is because trade unions have an organized leadership, …
The Return of Merchant Capitalism
To understand the economic character, transnational politics, and labor regime characteristic of contemporary globalization, it is useful to revisit the concept of “merchant capitalism,” a form of market exchange that dominated trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then as now, commodities proved crucial to world commerce, merchants held the whip hand over manufacturers, while workers found their remuneration and working conditi…
Reuther the Red
Victor g. devinatz, author of Reassessing the Historical UAW, has a good grasp ofthe historiography, such as it is, on the perennial question: When, if, and why was Walter Reuther a Communist?1 There is indeed much evidence, both direct and circumstantial, which might lead a historian to assert that this key figure in la bour history and midcentury political liberalism held membership in the US Com munist Party (CPUSA) during the months that foll…
It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States
This book purports to explain why socialism failed in the United States, but the ominoussounding It in the title is not organized socialism at all. Rather, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks are after even bigger game. Their target is not just the Socialist party, once led by Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, but the whole idea of social solidarity and of politics as something that reflects more than a distinctly American “exceptional” set of cult…
The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster
Journal Article The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster. By Martin Cherniack. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. xi + 194 pp. $19.95.) Get access Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 74, Issue 3, December 1987, Pages 1084–1085, https://doi.org/10.2307/1902221 Published: 01 Decem…
Ambiguous legacy: The union security problem during World War II
The “Stand-Up” Strike of 2023 Takes Its Place in UAW History
The Revolutionary Marx
An Accident in History
Class Unconsciousness: Stop Using “Middle Class” to Depict the Labor Movement
Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights
Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐c…
Supply Chains, Workers' Chains, and the New World of Retail Supremacy
Research Article| March 01 2007 Supply Chains, Workers' Chains, and the New World of Retail Supremacy Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2007) 4 (1): 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2006-032 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nelson Lichtenstein; Supply Chains, Workers' Chains, and the New World of Retail Supremacy. Labor 1 March 2…
Herbert Hill in History and Contention
Research Article| May 01 2006 Herbert Hill in History and Contention Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2006) 3 (2): 25–31. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2005-007 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nelson Lichtenstein; Herbert Hill in History and Contention. Labor 1 May 2006; 3 (2): 25–31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2005-007 …
Class Politics and the State during World War Two
The historiography of US labor during the Second World War has shifted away from New Left concerns with the fate of working-class militancy, becoming more attuned instead to the structure and development of the New Deal order. A quarter century ago, historians debated the extent to which the warfare state had emasculated working-class radicalism and constructed in its place a bureaucratized, corporate-liberal labor movement. Few scholars doubted …
Books reviewed
Serfs, Peasants, and Socialists. By William Derman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. x, 282 pp. $15.00. The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth‐Century City. By Joan Wallach Scott. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. xiv, 239 pp. $10.00 The Anzin Company, 1800–1833: Big Business in the Early Stages of the French Industrial Revolution. By Reed G. Geiger. Philadelphia, Universi…
Ambiguous legacy: The union security problem during World War II
Books reviewed
Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975. By Dolores Hayden. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976. ix, 401 pp. $16.95. Urban Masses And Moral Order In America, 1820–1920. By Paul Boyer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. xi, 387 pp. $18.50. Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820–1860: A Quantitative History. By Claudia Dale Goldin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. xvi, 168 pp. $12.95. Harpers Ferr…
Books reviewed
Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–177 By Sung Bok Kim. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pre for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979. xx 456 pp. $19.00. The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920. By Daniel T. Rodgers. Chicago and London: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978. xv, 300 pp. $15.00. Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885. By Jonathan M. Wiener. Baton Rouge: Lo…
Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937-1955
Journal Article Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937–1955 Get access Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein assistant professor of history Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 67, Issue 2, September 1980, Pages 335–353, https://doi.org/10.2307/1890412 Published: 01 September 1980
Frank Murphy: The New Deal Years
Journal Article Frank Murphy: The New Deal Years. By Sidney Fine. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. xi + 708 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $42.00.) Get access Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein American University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 66, Issue 4, March 1980, Pages 977–978, https://doi.org/10.2307/1887724 Published: 01…
Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II : with a new introduction by the author
Books reviewed
Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid‐Nineteenth Century Poughkeepsie. By Clyde and Sally Griffin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. xvi, 291 pp. $18.95. The Chicago Board of Trade 1859–1905: The Dynamics of Self‐Regulation. By Jonathan Lurie. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. xiv, 234 pp. $12.50. A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892–1919. By Steven J. Diner. Chapel Hill: Universit…
Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1906-1921
The Miners' Fight for Democracy: Arnold Miller and the Reform of the United Mine Workers
Journal Article The Miners' Fight for Democracy: Arnold Miller and the Reform of the United Mine Workers. By Paul F. Clark. (Ithaca: New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 1981. viii + 190 pp. Map, charts, tables, notes, and index. Cloth, $16.95; paper, $9.95.) Get access Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Sch…
Industrial Sociology for Labor Historians
There was a time back in the 1940s and early 1950s when industrial sociology was a vital and exciting discipline. Not yet the handmaiden to personal management, the new discipline still retained an earthy and leftish flavor. Like labor history in our time, the new field of industrial sociology was populated by a largely youthful group of scholars who identified with the aspirations of the working class and were strongly supportive of their collec…
Divisions of Labor History
The American Communist Party in Its Heyday: A Case of Premature Eurocommunism
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Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II
The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I
Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II
Labor History in the Realist Vein
The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster
Journal Article The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster. By Martin Cherniack. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. xi + 194 pp. $19.95.) Get access Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 74, Issue 3, December 1987, Pages 1084–1085, https://doi.org/10.2307/1902221 Published: 01 Decem…
La vie aux usines Ford de River Rouge: Un cycle de Pouvoir ouvrier (1941-1960)
The Making of the Postwar Working Class: Cultural Pluralism and Social Structure in World War II
Additional informationNotes on contributorsNelson LichtensteinThe author is Associate Professor of History at The Catholic University of America. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Sixth Soviet‐American Historians Colloquium, September 1986, Washington, D.C
The Norman Thomas Papers, 1904-1967
Journal Article The Norman Thomas Papers, 1904–1967. 85 reels with printed guide. 35 mm microfilm. (Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986. $4,250.) Get access Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 74, Issue 4, March 1988, Pages 1402–1403, https://doi.org/10.2307/1894517 Published: 01 March 1988
Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement
Journal Article Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement Get access Robert Korstad, Robert Korstad historian with the School of Public Health University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Nelson Lichtenstein Nelson Lichtenstein associate professor of history Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: Oxford …
On the Line: Essays in the History of Auto Work
Labor and social history records at the Catholic University of America
On the Line: Essays in the History of Auto Work
Political science (70 works) · Law (49 works) · Law (39 works) · Politics (37 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Economics (35 works) · History (35 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (31 works) · History (29 works) · Economic history (25 works)