Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?
Robin Archer

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ADDITIONAL REVIEWS:

"It's an old question, but despite the academic fashion of dismissing it, it's a question that returns in both academic and political guise with some regularity. Robin Archer of the London School of Economics gives some new answers."--Kim Moody, International Socialism

"Robin Archer has done a marvelous job of revisiting an old mysterious nugget of considerable frustration to scholars and students alike of American labor studies. . . . Archer's book makes an insightful contribution to the literature in this field as well as challenges scholar, teacher, and student alike to reexamine the reasons why America has never birthed a genuinely worker-based party. The text would be equally valuable in a labor history or political history class."--Bob Bruno, Labor Studies Journal

ADDITIONAL ENDORSEMENTS:

"Robin Archer's Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? is the most comprehensive, acute, and original exploration of 'American exceptionalism' to appear in many years. Archer boldly and rigorously argues that repression, religion, and socialist sectarianism shaped the politics of American labor far more than did the usual suspects--affluence, liberalism, democracy, and racial divides. Anyone interested in understanding the distinctive character of American politics during its industrial age will have to wrestle with this provocative and important book."--Gary Gerstle, Vanderbilt University

"This is a profound and searching study based on primary research that applies an entirely new perspective to the intriguing absence of an American labor party. Archer employs a comparative historical method with great ingenuity--matching up the United States with a 'most similar' case, that of Australia. He leaves virtually no stone unturned in his search for an answer, taking the reader on a fascinating journey that creatively integrates the politics of unions, ideological analysis, race, religion, and institutional design. A must for historians, sociologists, and political theorists."--Michael Freeden, University of Oxford

"Robin Archer's Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? is a splendid demonstration of the power of comparative history. Closely reasoned and extensively researched, it turns some of the oldest and most influential clichés about American politics on their head."--Daniel Rodgers, Princeton University

"Archer has some extremely important things to say about the U.S. experience based on his comparison of U.S. and Australian labor history. Indeed, he turns the conventional understandings of 'American exceptionalism' upside down, and, in doing so, he will make historians and social scientists reexamine and reinterpret the American past."--Melvyn Dubofsky, Binghamton University, SUNY

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File created: 11/5/2009

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