The Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America: The Movement for Economic Democracy

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Through moments of social protest, policy debate, and popular mobilization, this book follows the campaign for economic democracy and the fight for full employment in the United States. Starting in the 1930s, Dennis explores its intellectual and philosophical underpinnings, the class struggle that determined the fate of legislation and the role of left-wing civil rights activists in its revival. Demonstrating how the campaign for full employment intersected with movements for women's liberation and civil rights, it explores how social groups and oppressed minorities interpreted and appropriated the promise of full employment. For many, full employment provided an indispensable path to racial and gender emancipation. In this book, Dennis uncovers the class dimensions and the resistance to full employment in the US. He demonstrates how the recurring debates over full employment consistently exposed the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society and challenged the assertion that an allegedly free enterprise system automatically generated employment for all.

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The Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America delivers an insightful and captivating account of a radical tradition that has never ceased to raise unsettling questions about the realities of free-market capitalism by denouncing the persistence of involuntary unemployment in Western societies. In the light of the intellectual stature of several full employment supporters examined in the book, one can only hope future generations of activists will be able to keep an equally sharp outlook in scrutinizing the socioeconomic challenges of their times. * H-Net Reviews *

Author Bio

Michael Dennis is Professor of American History at Acadia University, Canada. A Historian of US social and economic history, he has written widely on the impact of the New Economy on the American South in the late 20th Century.