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The Geography of American Socialism: Continuity and Change, 1900-1912

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Sari Bennett
Sari Bennett*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
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Extract

The history of American socialism is a history of failure, unless one accepts the more charitable interpretations of Michael Harrington (1972). Why did it fail? Why, among industrial democracies in the West, is the United States exceptional for its lack of a labor party? These questions are perennial ones, yet the lines of explanation invariably curve back to one of the two distinct points-of-view. One line of explanation was framed at the beginning of this century in the now-classic volume by Werner Sombart (1906 [1976]), Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Socialism, in Sombart’s structuralist interpretation, was an incompatible philosophy in an American environment characterized by high wages, a fluid social and economic structure, and—their precondition—cheap land. Yet perversely, at the very moment when Sombart’s thesis appeared in the Archivfur Sozialwissenschaft and Sozialpolitik in 1905, socialist politics experienced a remarkable expansion in the United States—an expansion that warranted skepticism toward the structuralist interpretation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Summer 1983 , pp. 267 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1983 

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