The United States, virtually alone in the capitalist world, never used labor courts during the Interwar period; existing accounts incompletely explain why US labor policy design diverged here. In the early 1920s, the weak labor policy and incoherent labor law of the United States was a widely recognized, urgent problem. The US government was newly strong and economically interventionist. There was ideological consensus on the basic features of an acceptable labor policy, but owing in part to political support for several plausible models, and unsettled partisan and intellectual alignments, the US did not make progress on labor policy in these first post-War years. Controversy over the KCIR, founded as a provocation in this debate, helps make sense of these patterns. The intellectual, legal, and political effects of the KCIR’s failure extinguished American interest in labor courts generally. Position-taking, especially reaction against the KCIR, reveals the emerging alignments that were to be crucial to the design and political realization of the unique labor policy of the New Deal.

Kansas’ tumultuous, violent early years drove the development of a distinctively intrusive, inexpert model of reform. The KCIR was a clear elaboration upon this historical pattern. Constitutional restraints left the state persistently underfinanced. The conflicts of the Bleeding Kansas period catalyzed political and mob violence that persisted until the 1890s. Progressive Republicans, the dominant political force in Kansas from the 1890s through the 1920s, thus developed an aggressive program of regulation of economic and personal conduct, a program not reliant on rational administration, for which there was no fiscal capacity or expertise, but upon an expansive legal conception of regulatory (or flatly coercive) interventions justifiable by appeal to the public interest. These reforms were often ineffective or too bold to withstand scrutiny in the US Supreme Court. The state’s leaders, like Governor Allen, had considerable first-hand experience with the difficulties, and in many cases the violence, of settlement: Their commitment to the state’s forceful variant of progressivism rose from deep and genuine fear of social disorder.

Circumstances for labor after the pandemic resemble those of the early 1920s: fragmented, labor-unfriendly law has severely curbed the growth of unions under economic conditions and a climate of public opinion remarkably favorable to new organizing. Supreme Court rulings on contracts, employment, unions, and administrative power are restoring many features of law to the conditions before the New Deal. States are the most promising governmental level for protecting organizing and widening its reach in the immediate future; reformers of the 1920s provide a model for an engaged approach to scholarship that can shape state policy. Revisiting the state legal and policy history of the early twentieth century is urgently needed to prepare for foreseeable effects of further Supreme Court reaction, and to explore the era’s remarkable diversity of policy design, which may bring to light both ideas and dormant law useful in addressing labor’s contemporary challenges.

The chapter pursues the consequences of the claim that the Greek canon was made based on the performative qualities of its authors, emphasizing its internal friction. As such, it did not embody any timeless values. Its function could be replicated by other traditions influenced by it: first Roman, then European languages and then globally. There is no function today that is uniquely performed by the Greek literary legacy and, in this sense, there is no need to preserve the particular tradition of classical studies. Greek antiquity is worthy of study simply because of its pivotal role, but it essentially expired. And yet, the attitude of admiration toward this type of liberating past experience is a useful one to maintain, as part of an overall hopeful attitude toward the arc of the moral universe.

The conclusion reviews Schopenhauer’s conception of politics as the management of human strife. For Schopenhauer, politics was both indispensable and insufficient: rational political coordination can prevent society from descending into a chaos of mutual aggression, but because rationality itself is limited and metaphysically subordinate, it cannot redeem a fundamentally broken world. Schopenhauer’s attitudes – a sincere sensitivity to human and animal suffering, an uncompromising commitment to frank philosophizing, but also a fearful antidemocratic and anti-emancipatory view of society – place him outside the major ideologies of the modern age, such as liberalism, libertarianism, progressivism, and conservatism.

After the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution was also in full swing as a new form of capitalism took hold and the American economy leaped forward. The country also experienced sudden urbanization as immigrants from Europe and Americans flocked to the cities from the farms in search of better employment. At the same time, large corporations, with sophisticated Wall Street financing, were able to amass great wealth, often by using anti-completive means to eliminate competitors. Finance capitalism also brought a rash of social ills including slums, dangerous foods and drugs, dangerous workplaces, and increasing poverty as workers were forced to yield to the low wages offered by corporate employers. In response to the concentrated power held by private corporations, Progressive reforms urged countervailing power that was needed in the form of the federal government. Federal legislation was passed to control monopolies, monitor unfair railroad rates, and regulate tainted foods and meats among other forms of new regulation, as the federal government took on a new role of policing markets in addition to supporting economic prosperity.

Within the framework of the politicization of the personal, this chapter explores the essayistic writing of a loose group of socially conscious actors who belong to the political Left, a capacious category that includes leaders of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the New York Intellectuals, the New Left, the environmental movement, and groups with a range of progressive agendas. With a focus on the twentieth century, the wide variety of styles and themes of leftist prose writing is analyzed. The chapter dwells on the contributions of important figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Randolph Bourne, Jane Addams, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine Hong Kingston, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Richard Rorty. As a form of "prose that thinks," the essay has been an excellent site of intellectual reckoning where writers may publicly take strong positions on various political and social issues, expressing these in a highly personal style.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.