Schools of Democracy

Clayton Sinyai surveys the political history of the labor movement from the Gilded Age through the 1968 presidential election and provides interesting discussions of important labor movement debates. A postscript surveys the recent period. The book is a philosophical rumination on the merits of craft unions, which “conserved the workers' civic virtues in the face of a new political economy designed to degrade and insult them” (p. 49). Sinyai surveys theories of republicanism and democracy from Aristotle to Alexis de Tocqueville, noting their tendency to characterize manual workers as lacking the necessary independence to be good citizens or as greedy people using “government to pursue vulgar material needs” (p. 5). Union leaders, he asserts without providing much evidence, were influenced by those ideas and sought to use their organizations as “schools of democracy,” training workers in civic virtues. Sinyai favors the voluntarism of the American Federation of Labor (afl) craft unions of skilled workers. The craft unions stayed free of government paternalism and enabled their members to achieve personal independence and become virtuous citizens akin to “yesterday's small proprietors” (p. 26). Their civic virtue consisted of practicing “self-rule,” defining and enforcing rules for their crafts and organizations (p. 48). On the other hand, Sinyai notes that the inability of craft unions to help the unskilled majority in the corporate age “failed democratic values” (p. 72)

Craft · Democracy · Economics · Gilded Age · Labor union · Labour economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Voluntarism (philosophy · Yesterday · History · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society

• New Directions in Political History

  Open Access•Jeffrey D Broxmeyer, Lisa M F Andersen et al.•The Journal of the Gilded Age and…•2022

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