Like many other social science historians, since the late 1980s I have reflected on how postmodernist thinkers like Foucault and Derrida are useful for historians. In 1995 I taught a graduate course on the history of social history, and I looked back on the origins of the field through the eyes of my students who were intrigued with postmodernism. I realized that time has crept up on me. I barely noticed that this field that we developed over the years is no longer young but has come of age and is now part of the accepted canon, one of many subdisciplines. Indeed, my students thought of social science history in much the same way that social science historians viewed traditional political history, a field whose assumptions and perspectives should be critically analyzed, challenged, and revised. These students helped me to see postmodernist criticisms in a new light, not as a sharp break from social science history but rather as emerging at least in part from long-term developments within the field itself. The contributors to the debate on these pages see postmodernism in this way. In various ways, they contend that these challenges, poststructuralist and otherwise, can help us to see within social science history contradictions and tensions that result in both strengths and weaknesses. We can learn from postmodernism without accepting it uncritically; we can reevaluate materialist social history in light of new challenges without rejecting social science history's benefits.

As other contributors to this roundtable suggest, the practices of social and labor history as we have known them have been in methodological and epistemological turmoil for some time. The dominant paradigms that guided much of the work of social historians in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s have been thrown into question by poststructuralism and by the emergence of new analytical perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicities. Attention to culture and to the meanings that historical subjects imposed on the habits of everyday life, as well as to the constitutive power of language and cultural practices, have now become a central aspect of much historical work that has sought to analyze the operations of gender, race, and ethnicities as the subjects of social history and the history of working people in particular.

A sense of crisis and uncertainty seems pervasive among many social historians and historical sociologists who have studied the relationship between economic disadvantage and protest politics. Within the last five or so years, edited volumes and special issues of journals have encouraged scholars to “bring class back in,” to explore what some worry is the “end of labor history,” or to “rethink working-class history” in the wake of postmodernism, the turn to discursive and cultural analysis, and the growing number of scholars whose substantive interests involve issues of race and gender.

Even those who celebrate the rich diversity of subject matters explored by contemporary labor and working-class historians are worried about scholars jumping ship because “engaged history, in possession at least of the conceit of making a difference, has moved elsewhere, to other subject areas,” to quote Ira Katznelson (1994: 7). I myself have chosen to take a “leave of absence” from studying the mutual constitution of gender and class.

For social historians and historical sociologists working in the interdisciplinary fields of ethnic studies and women's studies, the challenges posed by poststructuralism are neither purely intellectual matters nor disciplinary quibbles. Rather, a concern with “rescuing political economy” from being washed away by the tide of poststructuralism is impelled by larger political commitments that transcend the academy.

Unlike mainstream disciplines, these fields historically have been connected to social movements dedicated to empowering people marginalized by reason of race, class, and/or gender. Poststructuralism has become a thorny issue in these fields: Many social science- and political economy-oriented scholars have come to feel, whether justifiably or not, that these fields are being “taken over” by literary, film, and cultural studies scholars.

The subject of this panel recently reminded me of a joke my father told me when I was eight or nine years old, “the 1929 knee-slapper.” It seems a traveling salesman was hopelessly lost in the countryside. After hours of driving around, he pulled up to a farmhouse and greeted the farmer. Hesitantly, the salesman asked the farmer, “Where does this road go?” The farmer rather adamantly replied, “This road don't go nowhere. This road stays right here.“

I imagine a philosopher spending hours trying to figure out the deeper meaning of the farmer's answer. Where is “right here“? What or who is in motion, and what is the real message to the harried and hurried salesman, confused by unmarked roads in the countryside, all of which “lead” somewhere without going anywhere? Is the farmer asserting a collective or individual sense of ownership of the roadway, or merely projecting his disdain at the linear logic of a representative of market capitalism?

For most of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Jamaica was the center of trade and commerce in the English Caribbean. Its economic growth was influenced little by the planter class, which was slow to develop and would not fully emerge until the mid-eighteenth century (Dunn 1973: 204; Sheridan 1965: 292–311). Jamaica grew prosperous, instead, from a merchant class that mediated international trade on one level and distributed goods to the island's inhabitants on another. It was the capital derived from such trade and commerce that ultimately fueled the island's agricultural revolution (Zahedieh 1986b), because many merchants became affluent from trade and then financed investments in sugar plantations, livestock, and secondary staples (Claypole 1970: 174–95). So, unlike other colonies in the Caribbean, where most capital investment originated in England and was sustained by agriculture, Jamaica's capital was locally generated with predominantly external commodities. The early merchants thus have a prominent position both in the history of the island and in Caribbean history in general.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, for the first time in American history, a movement based on a broad agenda of political reform arose to dominate the political discourse. It inspired the growth of the regulatory state, the doubling of the size of the electorate, many reforms that were aimed at weakening the grip of machine politics, and other changes too numerous to list here. According to influential studies, the period gave us a “new American state” (Skowronek 1982) combined with the “onward march of party decomposition” (Burnham 1970).

For both major parties, we are told, there were clear divisions associated with support for or opposition to the progressive movement. Within the Democratic Party, William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson held high the banner of progressivism, while Alton B. Parker, John W Davis, and other heirs of Grover Cleveland spoke for conservatives.