Introduction: From Bourgeois to Corporatist Europe

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles S. Maier
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World War I ◽  
European Society ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
World War ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Economic Stabilization ◽  
Elected Representatives

This introductory chapter explains that the book examines the process by which three European nations—France, Germany, and Italy—achieved political and economic stabilization in the decade after World War I. It shows how conservatives aimed at a stability and status associated with prewar Europe, employing the term “bourgeois” as a shorthand for all they felt threatened by war, mass politics, and economic difficulty. The book describes the emergence of a corporatist political economy that involved the displacement of power from elected representatives or a career bureaucracy to the major organized forces of European society and economy. This evolution toward corporatism meant the decline of sovereignty and of parliamentary influence. The book highlights two further significant developments that emerged only with the massive economic mobilization of World War I: the integration of organized labor into a bargaining system supervised by the state, and the wartime erosion of the distinction between private and public sectors.

Red-Blooded, Rugged Individuals

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-199
Author(s):  
Jarod Roll
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
World War ◽  
White American ◽  
Piece Rate ◽  
Mining Companies ◽  
Lead And Zinc

World War I made the Tri-State district more productive and profitable than ever before. War industry demand for lead and zinc raised prices and wages, and led to the dramatic expansion of mines in the Oklahoma part of the district. Wartime nationalism also supercharged the risk-taking masculinity of the district’s miners who asserted their racist claims to the piece rate with new fervor that further undermined the appeals of union organizers and government health and safety reformers. But in the 1920s miners found their employers, who had grown bigger and stronger during the war, newly reluctant to pay them high wages. This stand-off created new opportunities for union organizers in the district, but Tri-State miners ultimately rejected solidarity in favor of the economic advantages they believed loyal, white American men deserved. By the 1920s, their working-class communities were organized around a faith in capitalism, violent masculinity, and white racism now transformed during the war into a staunch white nationalism. Having abandoned organized labor, Tri-State miners found themselves without allies as mining companies moved in the late 1920s to constrain their risk-taking behavior through new health controls aimed to eliminate silicosis and damaged men from the district.

Ernest Hemingway

2020 ◽  
pp. 154-185
Author(s):  
David A. Rennie
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Writing ◽  
Private And Public

Hemingway’s World War I writing developed, first, as he honed his distinctive style and progressed toward completing his first novel. In the 1930s, Hemingway shifted approach, however, and his World War I-related writings came under the influence of his interest in social inequality (To Have and Have Not); his shift toward showing instead of implying interiority in Across the River and into the Trees; and the general imposition of his ego into his private and public writing. He remained committed, however, to the idea of the inherently complex nature of warfare.

SOME SECOND THOUGHTS ON PROGRESSIVISM AND RIGHTS

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eldon J. Eisenach
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
World War ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
War Experience ◽  
Governing Institutions

AbstractAfter summarizing the ways in which Progressive intellectuals attacked individualist understandings of rights and mechanistic understandings of constitutional government, a series of second thoughts on this argument are pursued. The first centers on the ways in which progressivism differed from New Deal liberalism, especially regarding “big government.” Progressive understandings of politics rest on a distinction between “government(s)” and “state,” derived from Tocqueville and Lincoln’s understandings of popular sovereignty. Secondly, this distinction is reinforced by their stress on an articulate and coherent public opinion that would provide democratic legitimacy to all forms of governing institutions, both “public” and “private,” that serve the common good. The Civil War experience was their model, one which they first thought would be reincarnated in the preparation for World War I. Given both private and public assaults on free speech, Progressives in the 1920s often led the movement for protections of civil liberties and for a new respect paid to the First Amendment. The conclusion examines the continuities and discontinuities of Progressive political thought in contemporary political discourse.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Goodall
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
American Character ◽  
Mccarthy Era ◽  
Domestic Security ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter analyzes how conflicting impulses for loyalty and liberty shaped the politics of countersubversion between World War I and the McCarthy era. By examining the ways this intellectual problem manifested in various historical contexts, the chapter uncovers a history of fits and starts rather than simple, linear progression: waves of growth in political policing followed by undercurrents of reform. The contradictory effort to retain historic freedoms while simultaneously limiting them is what gave American countersubversion its distinctively American character: populist, legalistic, voluble, and partisan. The chapter also seeks to explain how a country with a long-standing hostility to the centralization of power, and a strong disposition to associate activist government with tyranny, gradually reconciled itself to a domestic security state.

scholarly journals Domestic Coalitions, Internationalization, and War: Then and Now

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Etel Solingen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Building Block ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Political Economy ◽  
Recent Commentary ◽  
Domestic Coalitions ◽  
The World ◽  
International Behavior ◽  
Dominant Coalitions

Recent commentary on the centenary of World War I evokes similarities between Germany then and China now, and between globalization then and now. The nature of dominant coalitions in both countries provides a conceptual anchor for understanding the links between internal and external politics in 1914 and 2014. Coalitional dynamics draw greater attention to agency in debates that all too often emphasize structure, impersonal forces, and inevitability. Two core claims rest on this basic analytical building block. First, despite apparent similarities in domestic coalitional arrangements of putative revisionist challengers—Germany and China—important differences defy facile analogies. China now is not Germany then. Second, the regional coalitional cluster and the global political economy—and hence the links between domestic and external politics—differ across the two periods. The “world-time” against which coalitions operate today is significantly different as well. Thus ahistorical analogies between then and now may not only be imperfect; they can infuse actors with misguided and perilous protocols for international behavior. There is plenty that may recall World War I today but even more that does not, and all must make sure that gap never narrows.

scholarly journals Litvinov and Kamenev—Ambassadors Extraordinary: The Problem of Soviet Representation Abroad

Slavic Review ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-482
Author(s):  
Richard Kent Debo
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
European Society ◽  
Democratic Peace ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
World War ◽  
Leon Trotsky ◽  
Do So

In November 1917, the Bolshevik Party came to power in Russia with a foreign policy based on “proletarian internationalism” and the aim of spreading the socialist revolution to all parts of Europe. Developed by V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky this policy sought to take advantage of the disruption of European society caused by World War I to transform that conflict of state against state into a vast international civil war of class against class. Believing that the peoples of Europe were weary of war and ripe for revolution the Bolsheviks called for the negotiation of a “just and democratic peace” based on the principles of no annexations, no indemnifications and the liberation of all colonial, dependent and oppressed nations. The Bolsheviks hoped that bourgeois governments would be unable to accept these principles and that their failure to do so would generate sufficient popular unrest to ignite revolution everywhere in Europe.

“Soul Is But Harmony”: David Josef Bach and the Workers' Symphony Concert Association, 1905–1918

2008 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 66-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Koehler
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Cultural Divide ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
Great Attraction

Ifhigh culture, asTheodorAdornoonce proposed, promises a reality that does not exist, why, at the fin de siècle, did it hold such great attraction for Central Europe's populist politicians who were most attuned to the realities of everyday life? The answer, at least for imperial Austria, is that those politicians believed high culture to possess an integrative social function, which forced them to reconcile notions of “high” culture with “mass” culture. This was particularly true in Vienna, where the city's public performance venues for art, music, stage theater, and visual art stood as monuments to the values that the liberal middle classes had enshrined in the 1867 Constitution. A literate knowledge of this cultural system—its canon of symphonic music; the literature of tragedy, drama, and farce; and classical and contemporary genres of painting—was essential for civic participation in an era of liberal political and cultural hegemony. This article examines one cultural association that attempted to exploit the interaction between German high culture and two spheres, which are commonly thought to stand at odds with elite, high culture: popular culture and mass politics. Rather than a simple, cultural divide, this relationship created a contested “terrain of political and social conflict” in the decades preceding World War I. This terrain was of enormous consequence for Viennese of every social class.

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