Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780691169590)

The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism

In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors but to exclude them.

Author: Thomas C. Leonard
ISBN-10: 0691169594
ISBN-13: 9780691169590
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/12/2016
Pages: 264
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.10w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 05/01/2016