From Social Responsibility to Social Welfare in Modern America

The outpouring of work in American social and its increasing division into a variety of subfields since mid-1960s has produced something of a backlash in recent years, with a number of prominent scholars decrying lack of synthesis in American historical studies. While many have called for new syntheses, however, few have answered that call. The reason is quite simple: once one moves beyond level of pseudo-textbook, genuine syntheses are difficult to produce. At a time when main thrust of profession has been toward specialization, few historians have either desire or conceptual orientation to undertake such architectonic studies. This makes Alan Dawley's Struggles for Justice all more impressive. Building upon a solid foundation in economic and labor history, Dawley has assimilated an enormous range of secondary literature in many different areas of social and political to produce an important interpretive overview of 1890-1940 period. Although Dawley's primary emphasis is on struggle to create a more egalitarian society, this is not exclusively history from bottom up. The author spends considerable time tracing response of political elites to social change, and policies of Progressives, Era conservatives, and New Dealers receive ample attention. He finds the crux of American in early twentieth century to be located in tension between a dynamic society and existing liberal state (p. 1), an unstable relationship that would go through many vicissitudes before coming to a kind of resolution in 1930s. Dawley divides period under consideration into three parts. The first

Political science · Social responsibility · Social Welfare · Sociology · Welfare · American History and Culture · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Race, History, and American Society