Visions of a New Industrial Order — Social Science and Labor Theory in America's Progressive Era

After years of labor unrest, America in 1915 was teetering on the brink of an industrial "civil war," thought economist John R. Commons. Commons, then a member of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, insisted that the gravity of the situation warranted its priority over banking, trusts, and railroads--targets of recent governmental regulation. In the commission's final months in 1915, Commons sent a memorandum recommending the creation of permanent national and state industrial councils to order labor relations. He urged that the governments in the United States expand their administrative capacities along European lines, blending neo-corporatist conceptions from the Continent with "public interest" regulation rooted in nineteenth-century American republicanism.
Clarence E. Wunderlin, Jr., in Visions of a New Industrial Order, takes a historical look at the twenty-year debate over labor relations policy and the accumulation of social science knowledge that accompanied that debate, which culminated in the recommendations of John R. Commons and the commission's Research Division in 1915. Wunderlin focuses on the ideas underlying the resulting expansion of the American administrative state, arguing that a key group of social scientists, equipped with both empirical and theoretical knowledge, played a major role in federal policymaking that helped stabilize industrial relations within the emerging corporate capitalist system. Commons, along with E. Dana Durand and Jeremiah W. Jenks, made significant contributions to the national discussion of labor relations during the progressive Era, a critical time in American industrial growth.
Scholars in the fields of labor, economic, and business history, as well as those in the multidisciplinary field of industrial relations, will find new understanding of the development of a uniquely American brand of twentieth-century neo-corporatism in Visions of a New Industrial Order.