Book ID: CBB839187981

Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (2016)

unapi

Leonard, Thomas C. (Author)


Princeton University Press


Publication Date: 2016
Physical Details: 264
Language: English

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Randall Hansen (2018) Review of "Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era". American Historical Review (pp. 241-243). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB839187981/

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Authors & Contributors
Blatt, Jessica
McCoskey, Denise Eileen
Hannah Nicole Patton
Mossman, Craddock
Fletcher, Hannah
Nichols, Rachael L.
Concepts
Science and race
Eugenics
Race
Darwinism
Evolution
Science and gender
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
Progressive Era (1890s-1920s)
20th century
18th century
Places
United States
Germany
South Carolina (U.S.)
South America
Greece
Austria
Institutions
Social Science Research Council
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