Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Szapor, Judith

Reviews 113 
Lee Congdon, Seeing Red: Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge 
of Communism (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). 
No other non-Hungarian historian deserves more credit for introducing the 
Hungarian fin-de-sikcle and its legacy to North American academia than Lee 
Congdon, professor of history at James Madison University. His latest book, 
Seeing Red: Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism 
offers a complex portraiture of Hungarian exile intellectuals and the communist 
experience, deepening the work he had already done in earlier studies. In two 
previous books, Congdon turned to Hungarian social thinkers in exile in the 
interwar years and traced their intellectual roots back to the progressive 
Hungarian counterculture of the turn of the century. By the early 1980s, a rein- 
vigorated Hungarian historical scholarship transformed the image of this period 
and mapped out the formal and informal institutions of its progressive counter- 
culture, ranging from avant-garde literary journals, theatre and art groups to 
debating societies and open universities. Congdon drew on this work but also 
greatly contributed to it with his sensitive and measured approach to intellectu- 
al history. 
In The Young Lukacs (1983) he depicted the intellectual journey of the enig- 
matic young philosopher from his early "religious atheist" aesthetics and phi- 
losophy through his Bolshevik turn in 1918 to his 1923 History and Class 
Consciousness. Talung his cue from the deeply autobiographical and self-reflec- 
tive Lukacs, Congdon framed the biography around his seminal personal rela- 
tionships. Drawing on his semi-fictional portraits in the roman-a-clefs by the 
contemporary Hungarian writers Balazs, Sinko, and Lesznai as well as The 
Magic Mountain of Thomas Mann, he connected each of Lukacs's seemingly 
sudden philosophical and political turns to not only life-changing personal expe- 
riences but also to the various intellectual strands of the Hungarian turn of the 
century. 
While Lukhcs, much in vogue in Western academia during the neo-Marxist 
1960s and 1970s, needed no introduction, in his next monograph, Exile and 
Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 191 9-1 933 
(1991) Congdon set his sights on lesser lights of the "Hungarian Galaxy" of 
emigr6 intellectuals. The writer BCla Balazs, the artist Lajos Kassiik and the 
philosopher AurCl Kolnai, hardly household names in the Anglo-Saxon world, 
were paired up with such luminaries as Lukhcs, the Bauhaus-artist Laszlo 
Moholy-Nagy and the sociologist Karl Mannheim. They represented, respec- 
tively, the communist, the avant-gardist, and the liberal tradition, three tangents 
of the pre-war Hungarian intellectual community from which they all emerged. 
Despite the sharp differences in their politics and ideology, all Hungarian exiles 
shared an initial alienation from the mainstream society and official culture of 
their native Hungary, only exacerbated by their isolation in exile. Yet, as 
114 Reviews 
Congdon went on to show, this alienation also made for a powerful source of 
ideas and continued to drive their search, albeit along different paths, to regain 
a lost community. 
Through generous social and intellectual tableaux of pre- 1 9 19 Hungary, 
1920s Vienna, and Weimar Germany, and careful textual analyses of the works 
produced in exile, Congdon provided a composite portrait of an entire genera- 
tion. In the process, he unearthed the pre-history of what became a, if not the 
central, narrative of the intellectual condition in the twentieth century. The case 
of Hungarian tmigre intellectuals who had come of age in the progressive intel- 
lectual movements of pre-war Hungary but became influential social thinkers in 
exile supported the notion of exile as a metaphor for the intellectual condition. 
Congdon was also among the first to point to the eminent role of Hungarians in 
Weimar. Adding a corrective to Peter Gay's thesis on Weimar culture as one 
made by outsiders, Congdon went further to state that "it was only a slight exag- 
geration to say that exiled Hungarians created Weimar."' 
Published exactly ten years later, Seeing Red, the sequel, picks up where 
Exile and Social Thought left off, at the moment when Hitler ascended to power, 
forcing the Hungarian tmigres into yet another exile. It casts its net both wider 
and deeper, not only following them to London, Paris, Moscow and the United 
States but also including a chapter on a second generation of exiles, who left 
Hungary in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution. 
An ambitious undertaking in its scope and time frame, Seeing Red sets out 
to be "an interpretive study of two generations of Hungarian emigre intellectu- 
als7'(ix). It brings back most of the principals of Exile and Social Thought, catch- 
ing them at various points on the circuitous road of exile. Lukacs and other 
members of his erstwhile Sunday Society such as Mannheim, Balks, and 
Michael Polanyi as well as Auk1 Kolnai and Moholy-Nagy, are joined by a num- 
ber of slightly younger writers and artists, most notably Arthur Koestler who 
emerges as one of the central characters of the book. Congdon's inclusion of an 
ever-increasing number of members of the Hungarian intellectual Diaspora, 
from politicians to scientists, writers and filmmakers, at times makes the immi- 
grant scene seem teaming with Hungarians. It brings to mind Laura Fermi's 
tongue-in-cheek remark in her study on America's Illustrious Immigrants: 
"They [Hungarians] themselves explain that they seem more numerous because 
they have the gift of ubiquity - and some do seem to be in more than one place 
at the same time - which multiplies the effect of their presence." 
In the next three chapters we follow them on their political and intellectual 
journey through the 1930s, the war years and well into the Cold War. 
Compressed into just over a hundred pages, the sheer number of personalities, 
and the twists and turns of their personal and political lives often leave the read- 
er overwhelmed. And Congdon's decision to advance the narrative through a 
series of snapshots and frequent time shifts - intended, perhaps, to create a film- 
Reviews 115 
like flow - does not alleviate this problem; given the time span of over five 
decades, a more straightforward narrative may have been a better choice. (As 
well, the lack of a clear line separating this volume from Exile and Social 
Thought may be responsible for the considerable overlaps and long passages lift- 
ed, verbatim, from the pages of the first volume.) Yet, it is nch and compelling 
material, based on extensive use of primary and secondary sources previously 
only accessible in Hungarian as well as numerous interviews with the last sur- 
viving witnesses. 
Two of the Hungarian exiles figured prominently among the ranks of the 
anticommunist Left and the leadership of the Congress for Cultural Freedom; 
and the chapter that relates the politico-cultural battles of the Cold War through 
the alliance of Arthur Koestler and Michael Polanyi, adds important insights to 
this history. It is book-ended by summaries of Hungary's political develop- 
ments, the gradual communist takeover between 1945 and 1948 and the 1956 
revolution, providing both a much-needed context to the mind frame of the Cold 
War warriors and a transition to the last chapter. 
Its inclusive title - "The New ~ m i ~ r t s "  - and Congdon's claim notwith- 
standing, this chapter provides only the outline for an interpretive study of the 
second (post-1956) generation of Hungarian tmigrt intellectuals. In contrast to 
the exhaustive sample of the first generation, the line-up of social thinkers at the 
centre of the last chapter numbers only three: the Marxist philosopher Istvan 
Mtsziros, the historian of science Imre Lakatos, and the political historian Tibor 
Szamuely. Having arrived in England some time after 1956 (between 1957 and 
1964), they all made significant contributions in their respective fields. An4 
despite the small sample, they could very well be representative of their gener- 
ation of Hungarian exiles in England. Yet this is a point that remains to be made, 
as the context of tmigrt politics, provided in the previous chapters, is a missing 
dimension in this one. 
Congdon has a novelist's touch for storytelling and this chapter is no excep- 
tion; even a sketch of the pre-exile life of the Lukacs-favourite Istvan Mtszaros, 
the Machiavellian Imre Lakatos, and the Gulag-survivor Tibor Szamuely leaves 
a lasting impression of unforgettable characters and life stories. Yet the account 
of their background and early influences remains just that, a sketch, and even the 
added description of the Byzantine ideological intrigues of 1950s Hungarian 
higher academic and Party echelons cannot do justice to the complex set of val- 
ues they carried to their exile. 
Here we come to the book's true focus: the intellectuals' relationship to 
communism and the Soviet experiment. Emerging from a labyrinth of mean- 
dering life stories and random or fated encounters, the premise at the core of this 
inquiry is that, for most of the agnostic twentieth century, communism repre- 
sented the central challenge to intellectuals, its allure made irresistible by its 
ability to fill a spiritual void. And despite its broad framework and wealth of 
116 Reviews 
material, this is a study that is passionately interested in answering one question 
only: how the intellectuals at its center fared in their quest of finding faith, be 
that religious or secular. 
In this spiritual reading of the communist experience, Congdon joins a long 
line of conservatives from Burke to Whittacker Chambers, sidestepping other 
critics of communism who also make the connection with the Enlightenment 
and the French Revolution, but draw the line at a spiritual approach. (The mon- 
umental study of Fran~ois Furet, the doyen of French historians and himself an 
ex-communist, Le passt d 'une illusion: essai sur I'idte communiste au XYe si8- 
cle (1995) is a recent example.) 
Much of Congdon's thesis hinges on the testimony of The God that Failed, 
the volume that came to define an entire cohort of disenchanted fellow-travelers, 
including Arthur Koestler; and Congdon is right to point out the deeply confes- 
sional tone of the memoirs of the six former communist/fellow-traveler writers 
and their emphatic references to the spiritual heritage of the West. Yet we should 
also remember the very specific aims underwriting this volume: to recast the 
political and cultural alignments of pre-WWII Europe in a Cold War mould and 
to re-affirm the authors' place in the Western cultural elite (not to mention to 
erase the memory of their gross political missteps in the not-so-distant past). 
Even then, these former faithful Communists or sympathizers, revisiting the 
time of their recruitment in the late 1920s, listed communism's capacity to fill 
the spiritual void as just one among its many attractions; it satisfied equally 
pressing moral and political needs by offering viable answers to racial and class 
injustices, as well as the rising threat of Fascism. And that it was not just faith 
but also community they confessed longing for, is an aspect Congdon himself 
had identified succinctly in Exile and Social Thought. 
It is no accident that some of the most important figures of the Hungarian 
intellectual community in exile (and central to Exile and Social Thought) are 
rendered marginal in this study if, like Jaszi or Mannheim, they showed immu- 
nity to both religion and communism. In the roadmap that Congdon draws of 
this quest for faith, consecutive stations correspond to degrees of intellectual 
integrity; thus French fellow-travelers whose "flirtation" with communism 
(which, "at the deepest level, was the result of their search for a faith that would 
lend meaning to their lives,") remained unreflected, end up faring much below 
"the most thoughtful of Hungarian tmigrt intellectuals" whose "anticornmrnu- 
nism was no more satisfying than communism as a cause for which to live and 
die." For the latter, the overcoming of the temptations of these false creeds 
"cleared the way for new and more profound spiritual and moral searchesV(l 5 1). 
In this context, the inclusion of representatives of a second generation of 
Hungarian social thinkers in exile feels even more as an afterthought. As 
Congdon himself observes, none of them moved beyond political anti-commu- 
nism, or, as in the case of the Lukhcs-disciple Mkszaros, even communism. Yet 
Reviews 117 
Congdon only hints at the complex (and in this last case, truly Oedipal) ties 
between the two generations. These, along with the differences in their respec- 
tive defining experience vis-a-vis communism might offer a clue to their very 
different stand on it. While the first generation encountered communism in its 
brief Hungarian incarnation as the utopian episode of the 1919 Republic of 
Councils, the second generation had come of age during the feverish post-war 
years of a new, democratic Hungary, followed by the Soviet-controlled comrnu- 
nist takeover. And despite the anti-democratic nature of the new communist 
regime, they deeply identified with the large-scale social and cultural revolution 
it brought about, not to mention that they owed it their own ascendance to the 
political and academic elite. This may be the reason why all three representa- 
tives of the second generation remained committed to the idea of a democratic 
socialism. 
In this book, as before, Lee Congdon displays a mastery of his subject, 
including the most arcane details of Hungarian political and intellectual history 
in the twentieth century. His insistence, however, that intellectuals worthy of 
that name are driven solely by the desire to find faith is curious, given the degree 
to which it limits the freedom of the intellectual historian to draw his own con- 
clusions. It feels artificially drafted onto this multi-generational and multi- 
dimensional study whose rich biographical and intellectual details and loose 
ends alike provide much food for thought and will hopefully generate further 
debate. 
Judith Szapor 
University of Ottawa 
Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany 
and Austria 1919-1933 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 
1991), xi. 
Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 
1930-41 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 1 1 1. 
Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and 
Che (London: Verso, 2002). 
Revolution in the Air is a first-rate contribution to the recent history of radical- 
ism in the United States. Max Elbaum tells the story of the "new communist 
movement" and its role in the organized revolutionary left's climax and near- 
complete disintegration over the past thirty years. After its birth in the 1960s, 
the new communist movement reached its greatest density (numerical and intel- 
lectual, sad to say) in the 1970s, entered into profound crisis in the 1980s, and 


Lee Congdon — Seeing Red: Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism

Thomas, Mark

Errol Black and Jim Silver — Building a Better World: An Introduction to Trade Unionism in Canada; Jeffrey Taylor — Union Learning: Canadian Labour Education and the Twentieth Century

Camp, Stephanie M. H.

144 Reviews 
approach to market relations in the 1750s and 1760s is not a subject of discus- 
sion in this volume, however, and deserves further study. 
Kars' work also revisits ideas made popular in Rhys Isaac's study of the 
evangelical contribution to revolutionary ideology in Virginia. While recent 
work has emphasized the conservative nature of southern evangelicalism in the 
Old Dominion over the long haul, bringing Isaac's interpretation under review, 
Kars makes a supporting case for the socially challenging potential of dissent. 
In North Carolina a weaker established church and a greater variety of more rad- 
ical sectarians argue for the plausibility of this interpretation. While it is possi- 
ble that "evangelical revolt" found a home among the Tarheels, Kars' assertion 
that many denominations might be taken together under the rubric of the "new 
light" is open to challenge. To be sure, Quakers and Moravians demonstrated a 
pronounced willingness to disengage from the mainstream when it challenged 
their moral principles, but Baptists and Presbyterians in other colonies were 
decidedly less comfortable in that role. Historians of religion in colonial North 
Carolina are blessed with the journals of Anglican missionary Charles 
Woodmason, but his inability to distinguish between the dissenting groups he 
despised should not provide guidelines for scholars. 
In the end this book does a masterful job of uncovering the sources of the 
Regulation and tying backcountry farmers of the eighteenth century to their 
more famous nineteenth century descendants. We now must await the next chap- 
ter of the story from Kars' or others' pens to discover how participants in the 
Regulation went into, and came out of, the Revolution itself 
Jewel L. Spangler 
University of Calgary 
Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting 
Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North 
Carolina Press, 2002). 
In 1775 a small group of Philadelphians met at the Sun Tavern to form the 
Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery (PAS), the world's first organ- 
ization ending human bondage whose "distinctly conservative style of activism" 
"set the standard" (p. 16) for early national American abolitionism. The story of 
the PAS is the subject of this fine study by Richard S. Newman. In telling the 
history of this key organization, Newman also tells the story of American abo- 
litionism in the early republic and its transformation into a radical and interra- 
cial movement in the antebellum years. 
Not to be mistaken for a mere trend, the PAS incorporated in 1789, winning 
legal recognition and standing. Their membership, the group touted, was made 
Reviews 145 
up of "Gentlemanly" and "honorable" men of "character" (40). Their member- 
ship and leaders also included lots of lawyers, the PAS corps. Newman points 
out that after 1776, the law shaped American slavery more than ever before: 
"northern gradual abolition schemes, southern slave laws and anti-emancipation 
statutes, federal hgitive slave provisions, black challenges to slavery in court" 
all required a jurist's expertise. It was they who crafted proposals for new laws, 
looked for loopholes in existing ones, and plotted the tactics to be used in court 
to help runaways and kidnapped blacks. 
The PAS mastered the art of the petition, deferentially apologizing for their 
zeal and "requesting only constitutionally sanctioned doctrines from Congress" 
(4 1). The PAS did not seek to extend or amend the contours of the Constitution, 
least of all as it applied to individual states. Rather, federal PAS petitions 
addressed those areas of slavery that Congress could regulate: first, the Atlantic 
slave trade, a topic that drew at least ten PAS petitions between 1787 and 1820 
(to end the trade and to regulate the Middle Passage); and then, after 1808, 
enforcement of the ban. Pennsylvania's bill of rights, however, spoke of the state 
legislature's responsibility to ensure the "human freedom" of all of its "inhabi- 
tants" (45). Such broad language gave PAS lawyers plenty of material for their 
petitions, which they bolstered with back-room lobbying by members who made 
the most of their insider status to argue for petitions and to distribute reports and 
essays that provided information they wanted legislators to know. All the while, 
they heeded PAS guidelines: "join moderation to your zeal" (44). 
The PAS'S conservative strategies grew from the same Quaker roots that had 
given rise to its liberal ambition. Pennsylvania Quakers had a distinguished his- 
tory of objecting to slaveholding, one that dated back to the 1688 "Germantown 
Protest" document criticizing slavery. And by the 1750s, Quakers did not allow 
themselves to hold slaves; those who insisted on keeping their human chattels 
were banned from meetings. But Quakers were committed to this "privatist" 
strategy (17); they morally pressured members of their group, lectured to others 
against bondage, and wrote pamphlets. 
The PAS remained committed to the same emphasis on persuasion over 
legal compulsion. The reason, Newman argues, was the "politics of Union" (37) 
that prioritized the cohesiveness of the new union of states over the lofty princi- 
ples that had fired their fight for independence. (It was, in part, the politics of 
union that explains Massachusetts's early absence from organized anti-slavery 
work. Racial fears and the state's economic connections with slavery in Africa, 
the Caribbean, and the South also worked to dampen early abolitionist senti- 
ment. But Newman does not show that Pennsylvania lacked those same racial 
prejudices and economic connections.) PASers were equally committed to their 
insider strategy: political reform was best accomplished by elite men who could 
work among their own. Black Americans and women were not welcome to join 
them in their organizations. 
146 Reviews 
In many ways, the strategy worked. In 1780, Pennsylvania passed the 
world's first law manumitting the state's enslaved population - gradually. Other 
northern states followed suit and by the early 1800s all the northern states had 
abolished slavery, although the gradual form they adopted left many people 
unfreed throughout the antebellum years. And in 1808 participation in the 
Atlantic slave trade was outlawed. Perhaps most important of all, the PAS, the 
New York Manumission Society, anti-slavery groups in New Jersey, 
Connecticut, Rhode Island as well as the short-lived ones in Virginia, Maryland 
and Kentucky all reversed slavery's "centuries-long normative standing among 
philosophers and statesmen" (20) in the Atlantic world. These groups engaged a 
small but growing conversation among whites about how Thomas Jefferson's 
"sentiment" would have "been enhanced a thousand fold if Jefferson had prac- 
ticed what he preached," as one PAS member put it (20). 
Once the northern states had passed emancipation laws, and Congress had 
banned participation in the Atlantic slave trade, slavery became, in large meas- 
ure, a southern problem. Yet the politics of union prevented early national abo- 
litionists from insisting that Congress pass legislation regarding a state concern. 
The civic and legal strategy had hit a roadblock. Early republican abolitionists 
encountered another problem, this one of substance. The American Colonization 
Society (ACS), founded in 18 17 for the purpose of expatriating emancipated 
black Americans to Africa, seemed to a minority of its members, including a 
young William Lloyd Gamson, to be anti-black in its motives. 
Dissatisfied ACS members found common ground with the black and 
women's abolitionist societies that had sprung up out of exclusion from the abo- 
litionist establishment of the early national years. This second generation of abo- 
litionists came together around not only the principle of emancipation, but also 
rights for blacks in the U. S.; they shared the belief that American racism was 
the scourge to be eradicated, not black Americans. This second generation of 
abolitionists was a product of its political age and departed from many of the old 
ways. Eschewing their insider networlung of the first generation, young activists 
capitalized on new forms of print media and democratic politics, emphasized 
mass action, and appealed to the citizenry at large, not just the civic and legal 
elite. Second-generation abolitionists toured cities and the countryside giving 
speeches, wrote and distributed pamphlets, and underwrote the publication of 
"authentic" testimonials from those who knew slavery the best, ex-slaves. 
Indeed, their own inclusiveness and cooperation across race and gender lines 
embodied the more democratic ideal of the time. Garrison's "ardent and hector- 
ing electioneering style" (1 1) personified this aspect of the "immediatists," as 
Garrison coined the movement to which he belonged. Garrison's impassioned 
and self-righteous proclamations ("I will be heard!") were also shaped by the 
era's revivalism. Influenced by the Second Great Awakening's valorization of 
feeling (rather than the clergy or the law) as an avenue to truth and redemption, 
Reviews 147 
as well as by the tradition of black anti-slavery work, antebellum abolitionism 
strove to move Americans emotionally and stir them to action. Rejecting the 
abolitionist establishment's politics of deference and gradualism, they demand- 
ed abolition now. 
Newman's greatest accomplishment is his demonstration that antebellum 
abolitionism not only departed radically from the first generation in method, 
style, and mission, but built on the work of those categorically excluded from 
earlier organizational work: black Americans themselves. Refused admission to 
first-generation abolitionist groups and the halls of power, black Americans took 
their message directly to the people with "an arsenal of strategies and tactics that 
diverged sharply from the learned and dispassionate legal/political activism of 
white abolitionists" (87). Black abolitionists of the late eighteenth and early 
nineteenth century were convinced that the only way to win was to assault "slav- 
ery morally as well as politically" (87). In pamphlets, narratives, speeches, and 
essays, black abolitionists passionately and graphically drew a picture of what it 
meant to be enslaved and of what dangerous outcomes lurked ahead for white 
Americans. In 1813, well before Garrison founded the Liberator (1831) or 
founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society (1 832), James Forten was 
describing his work as an "appeal to the heart" (87). Garrison himself spoke of 
assimilating black abolitionists' "enthusiasm" and "authentic[ity]" (104) into the 
movement he envisioned. 
The Transformation of American Abolitionism is an exceptionally well- 
written and insightful study of the transformation in style and substance of 
American abolitionism between its first generation in the Revolutionary-era and 
early republic and its second, better-known generation in the antebellum period. 
It is a well-researched, careful, and detailed exploration of two generations of 
American abolitionism and the differences between them. A few criticisms are 
nonetheless in order. The book's analysis gives little attention to some key issues 
at the heart of the topic. Newman's account of the second generation's interra- 
cialism would be strengthened by acknowledgment of the tensions between 
black and white abolitionists; and his discussion of debates about the ACS would 
have been more nuanced had it included the debate among black Americans 
about the organization. Instead, Newman depicts the debate about the ACS as 
one between black abolitionists, who were against it, and many white abolition- 
ists, who supported it. The book's thoughtful discussion of black abolitionism 
might have benefitted from attention to the changes in black abolitionism 
between the early national and late antebellum years. The role of violence, for a 
single example, certainly gained more black support after the Fugitive Slave Act 
of 1850. Finally, neither first nor second-generation American abolition existed 
in isolation from British abolitionism. Did the transformation of American abo- 
litionism reflect a different relationship to British anti-slavery? 
Despite these criticisms, The Transformation ofAmerican Abolitionism is an 
148 Reviews 
engaging and edifying read. Historians of slavery, nineteenth-century social 
movements, African American politics, and American politics will do well to 
consult this study. Its conciseness also makes it well suited for the classroom 
where it will offer a great deal to students and professors alike. 
Stephanie M: H. Camp 
University of Washington, Seattle 
Ray Hudson, Producing Places (New York: The Guildford Press, 200 1). 
We live in a time when most urgent political questions relate to boundaries of 
one sort or another. Globalization, of course, is reconfiguring the shape and 
meaning of those at the national level. Related pressures have pushed back the 
institutional frontiers of the welfare state, rearranging communities and families 
to make room for market forces. A wide-ranging assault on civil society is now 
being conducted in the name of national security, using measures that only 
recently were considered beyond the pale. Those who oppose such intrusions 
find themselves grappling with the limits of solidarity, for inclusiveness and 
diversity demand attention to borders, if not respect for them. And any consid- 
eration of who is "us" and who is "them" is likely to be entangled - at least 
metaphorically - with spatial boundaries. The distinction between "core" and 
"peripheral" workers is illustrative here. 
In this context it seems reasonable to consult geographers on the 
changing meaning of space and place. And economic geographers seem 
to be well positioned to comment on the global extension and domestic 
intensification of work. In Producing Places, Ray Hudson examines both 
"places in which production occurs" and "the production of places" 
where "the realms of use values and exchange values" intersect (v-vi). 
Much of the book is an attempt to rehabilitate traditional Marxist 
economic theory by melding in regulationist approaches and highlighting 
the spatial dimensions of production (especially uneven development). 
This argument seems to be aimed at mainstream geographers who neg- 
lect or obscure the pervasive impact of capitalism on their objects of 
study. By focusing on production, Hudson is able to synthesize a wide 
range of theoretical material, covering production's relationship with 
states, labour markets, corporate strategies, worker organizing, places, 
spaces, and nature. He therefore makes a very comprehensive case for the 
relevance of Marxist theory in a geographic context. 
Those familiar with similar debates elsewhere may find little that is 
novel in this strand of the book beyond a useful synthesis of existing 
material. And at times they may be put off by Hudson's dry, abstract, and 


Richard S. Newman — The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic

Keach, William

Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre — Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter

Page, Brian D.

"An Unholy Alliance": Irish-Americans and the Political Construction of Whiteness in Memphis, Tennessee, 1866-1879

Dening, Greg

Left History 8.1 1 17 
Marxism and Literature (1977), could have never taken place without the 
numerous English translations of Western-Marxist texts spearheaded by 
Anderson and NLR. By the same token, Anderson always accorded great 
respect for Williams's work, especially after French intellectuals began moving 
to the Right en masse, following the disappointments of the May events. The 
connections between these two men were made possible by a shared commit- 
ment to the new left. Taken together, the work of John Higgins and Gregory 
Elliot demonstrate how rich a terrain it was. 
Dennis Dworkin 
University of Nevada at Reno 
1 Cornel West, "In Memorium: The Legacy of Raymond Williams" in C. 
Pendergast, ed., Cultural Materialism: Essays on Raymond Williams 
(Minneapolis 1999, ix. 
2 Dennis Dworkin, "Cultural Studies and the Crisis of British Radical Thought" 
in Dennis Dworkin and Leslie Roman, eds., Views Beyond the Border Country: 
Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics (London, 1993), 54. 
3 Ibid. 
4 Alan 07Connor, Raymond Williams, Writing, Culture, Politics (Oxford, 1989); 
Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams (London, 1995); and Dennis Dworkin, Cultural 
Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural 
Studies (Durham, 1997). 
5 For instance, Linn Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh, 1993). 
6 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review 
(London, 1979). 
Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. Piracy, Sexuality and Masculine 
Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 
There is not much rum, little lash and hardly any sodomy in Hans Turley's Rum, 
Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality and the Masculine Identity. Turley is 
not into "reality," he protests many times. He is interested in the way pirates 
were depicted as "the common enemy of humanity," why they were so disturb- 
ing and why they could be both criminals and romanticized antiheros. He does- 
n't know how many pirates were sodomites, and doesn't really care. He leaves 
the history of piracy to the Marcus Redikers, Christopher Hills and, less confi- 
dently, the B. R. (Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition) Burgs. 
True, Chapter One, "Life on Board an Early-Eighteenth Century Ship" 
1 18 Left History 8.1 
begins with a lurid description of one Captain Jeane's eighteen days of mur- 
derous sadism towards a cabin boy who stole a dram of rum. Captain Jeane gets 
his due, though. He dangles for a long eighteen minutes on the hangman's rope. 
Captain Jeane's grisly cruelty is real enough. It provoked moral outrage at the 
time, and a prurient interest in the story afterwards. But it is not what Turley is 
about. Turley uses Jeane's ugly extremes in violence to make his point. Jeane's 
violence is reality without mystique. Piratical violence? It is more extreme, 
bloodier, more outrageous both in reality and in fiction. But it has mystique. 
Take Blackbeard - take Kidd, Avery - take a near endless list of fictional 
pirates - they all have a touch of theatre that tweaks at something in us as we 
look at them. What that something is Turley's story of Piracy, Sexuality and 
Masculine Identity. 
There is going to be a lot of "wink wink, nudge nudge" in our reading for 
us to recognise this story. It is going to mean that we have to sense what 
"Inclinations," "wild oats," "dark secrets," "roguery," "rods in hand" really 
mean. Daniel Defoe described the transgressive, wild language of pirates as 
"Sodomy of the Tongue." There is much sodomy of the tongue, much double 
entendre in Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. Turley is always bending our heads to 
the hidden homoeroticism in a word, in a plot. Not for its own sake, but as an 
indicator of how truly subversive piracy was. It threatened masculine identity. 
No simplifying on my part will do justice to Turley's exhaustive readings 
and display of complex ideas. He hangs his narrative on Captain Johnson's A 
General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates 
(1 724), which he believes was written by Daniel Defoe. But he takes us through 
a considerable array of piratical literature, displayed in an extensive and inter- 
esting bibliography of over 250 volumes. Turley wanders through this literature 
always in the marginal spaces of the real and the fictional - the trials of men 
like Captain Kidd and Captain Avery's crew, and the early-eighteenth century 
equivalent of our tabloid press, the pamphleteers who transcribed the trials. 
There is a chapter on the making of an antihero, how Captain John Avery is 
"mythologized and eroticized" in the stories of his plundering of the Great 
Mogul's treasure ship and the ravishing of his granddaughter, and Avery's cre- 
ation of a Madagascar haunt. 
There is a reflective chapter on Captain Roberts, who Johnson/Defoe in a 
nice phrase writes "made more Noise in the World than some others." "Noise 
in the World" - that is the theatre that Turley is trying to catch. 
If I say that Rum, Sodomy and the Lash just ends with two chapters on 
Daniel Defoe's novels, I am being both precise and ungenerous. Ungenerous 
because the last two chapters are the best in the book. Precise, because the book 
just ends. There is no conclusion, no stage exit for Turley's theatre. 
That is a pity. As a book it deserves much better. 
So Turley is in my hands. I think that this is what he is saying to us. The 
Left History 8.1 1 19 
mystique of pirates - the reason why their theatre is so attractive - is not their 
show of macho masculinity. On the contrary, it is the subversive femininity in 
their masculinity. That makes a blurred genre of living, an attractive model 
because that is what living actually is. It is the "reality" of rhetorical certainty 
that is so unreal. The good in evil; the evil in good: the centre in the margins; 
the margins in the centre. Piracy is a parable on the edginess of living. 
This is what I hear in Turley's wonderful chapter on Daniel Defoe's novel 
Captain Singleton, anyway. Quite rightly Turley brings this chapter into Rum, 
Sodomy and the Lash from elsewhere in his writings. Turley's gentle, wistful 
style lingers on the sweetness of a life-long relationship that Defoe presents 
between Captain Singleton and Quaker William. These two dissenters - 
Singleton dissenting to the power of the state, William dissenting to establish- 
ment belief and values - marry their edginess. The love of men for one anoth- 
er is truly subversive. Defoe, Turley writes, "challenges the standards by which 
individuality must be integrated with and defined by social norms."(127) 
That's piracy for you! 
Greg Dening 
Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, 
Australian National University 
Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender; Race, and the Making of British 
Columbia, 1849-1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 
Adele Perry's On the Edge of Empire offers a very unique study of the history 
of colonial British Columbia. By carefully combining feminist theory with 
post-structuralism, post-colonial research an4 to a lesser extent, Marxist theo- 
ry, Perry adeptly weaves a powerful argument that the region Jean Barman calls 
"the West beyond the West" was a colonial project at once powerfUl and vul- 
nerable, asserting whiteness as the dominant norm despite the resistance to 
Victorian ideals by working-class white men, many working-class white 
women, and, of course, the numerous First Nations peoples of the region. 
Perry's analysis uses gender as the central category to demonstrate the signifi- 
cant gap between imperialist theory and actual imperialist experience, particu- 
larly emphasizing "the importance of race to the social experience of gender in 
nineteenth-century British Columbia" (8). 
Perry's study locates her within several schools of research. First of all, by 
placing gender as the central organizing principle describing the colonial expe- 
rience, Perry is positioned within feminist postcolonial scholars such as AM 
Laura Stoler, Robert J. C. Young, and Anne McClintock, all of whom she refers 


Hans Turley — Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality and Masculine Identity

Chenier, Elise

162 Left History 8.1 
provided for women to engage with a commercially, readily available mass- 
market feminist product, and of the ways in which Ms. worked to publicize the 
goals of second wave feminism. Merely to proclaim its "feminism" from the 
magazine racks was, according to Farrell, a boldly revolutionary statement. 
Some might dispute that, and had Farrell provided more space for her post- 
structuralist and semiotic emphasis on the text and the images from Ms. it 
might have strengthened her case for the revolutionary nature of Ms. Equally, 
though she had access to a vast amount of unpublished correspondence, she is 
not completely convincing in her assertions that the anger some readers 
expressed regarding the lack of diversity in the periodical were primarily due 
the requisite tensions of trying to satisfy a mass audience. Nor is her defense of 
popular feminism, as opposed to liberal feminism, as consistent with her find- 
ings as she might care to admit. 
What is clear, is that caught between the juggernaut of advertisers and the 
noisy complaints of readers, MS' editors attempts to modify their message to 
make it more palatable to the advertisers was never successful, and indeed, was 
the beginning of the end of their vision of a commercial, feminist periodical. 
The first Ms. era might have gone out boldly, buoyed up by the fight to main- 
tain American women's reproductive rights but the real end came years earlier 
when Ms. compromised their editorial vision to make themselves a better buy 
for advertisers. Those caveats aside, Farrell has produced a significant book 
within the field of second wave feminism and periodical history, and it is hoped 
that it finds an audience. Those who do find this gem will be rewarded by a 
study of an icon of American mass-market feminism that is both engaging and 
provocative reading. 
Valerie J. Korinek 
University of Saskatchewan 
Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Kraflt-Ebing, Psychiatry and the 
Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 
Responding to Michel Foucault's provocative claim that homosexuality was a 
nineteenth century medical invention, historians of modem sexuality are show- 
ing an increasing interest in the history of medicine, and especially psychiatry. 
In this context, the much accomplished but little remembered psychiatrist 
Richard von Krafft-Ebing emerges as a key figure, not only in Austria and 
Germany where his influence was most immediately felt, but in Europe, Britain 
and North America as well. Krafft-Ebing was on the frontlines of a movement 
to expand the courtroom role of forensic psychiatry beyond the assessment of 
Left History 8.1 163 
physical evidence (anal exams in sodomy trials, for example) to include expert 
testimony on theories of human motivation. In this vein, one of his major con- 
tributions was to argue that "sex perverts" acted not out of immoral or criminal 
intent, but as a result of a "psychopathological condition" that made men vic- 
tims of an "irresistible urge7'(86). In his private practice, Kraftt-Ebing spent 
much of his time trying to assist these men - who he once described as 
"stepchildren of nature" - to overcome, or at least control, these urges. 
Because this pathological model of sexuality came to dominate twentieth 
century western conceptions of "sex," an in-depth study of Richard von Krafft- 
Ebing is a much welcome addition to this burgeoning field. In Stepchildren of 
Nature, Harry Oosterhuis traces Krafft-Ebing's professional career from its 
early days to his death in 1902, and charts his ever-evolving approach to under- 
standing and accounting for sexuality. It is a project of considerable scope 
greatly facilitated by the discovery of Krafft-Ebing's case files and personal 
papers in the attic of a descendant. The family not only granted Oosterhuis full 
access to this historical treasure chest, but also welcomed him as a guest in their 
home while he conducted his research. 
And what an impressive body of research it is. Never mere biography, 
Oosterhuis uses Krafft-Ebing's career as a launching pad to explore the nine- 
teenth century evolution of European psychiatry with useful overviews of the 
range of mental disease theories, and their impact on the emergence of sexual 
science. In Part I we are presented with the variety of European efforts to 
define, quantify and account for "sex" in its many forms. Part I1 draws our 
attention to the field of psychiatry as an area of professional "expertise," 
shaped by both a humanitarian desire to cure and a middle class desire to 
respectability and success. We learn about the professional limits of institu- 
tional psychiatry - a fairly well documented transitional period - and about 
Krafft-Ebing's own move toward private clinical care that earned him a reputa- 
tion as a "society doctor" who dealt only with "fashionable" topics like sexual 
perversion (9 1). 
Though only a minority of Krafft-Ebing's patients suffered from sexual 
perversion, they came to be his most important. His signal publication, 
Psychopathia sexualis (1886) drew on their stories and experiences to delineate 
four main perversions: sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feel- 
ing, a diagnosis that contained the seeds of what would later become homo- 
sexuality. It quickly became the premier courtroom guide for lawyers and doc- 
tors trying sex-related cases, and remained a definitive text well into the sec- 
ond half of the twentieth century. However, like other early sexologists, Krafft- 
Ebing was not without his critics. Even though the "filthy" bits were translated 
into Latin, other medical experts complained "the book is eagerly read, even 
devoured, by numerous unauthorized persons, including workers." (1 86) 
Indeed, it was difficult to hide the book's success: at the time of Krafft-Ebing's 
164 Left History 8.1 
death Psychopathia sexualis was in its twelfth edition, was available in nine 
languages, and grew from its original l l0 pages to a much-revised 437 page 
version. 
Much to Krafft-Ebing's advantage, many of those "unauthorized persons" 
responded to the publication with detailed letters to the author, meticulously 
describing their own sexual lives and secret desires, and often praising him for 
daring to speak openly about a taboo topic. For this reason, Oosterhuis casts 
Krafft-Ebing in a benign, and sometimes even benevolent, light. Foucault and 
others attribute too much power to psychiatrists, Oosterhuis argues (despite his 
own claim that Psychopathia sexualis "eventually set the tone, not only in med- 
ical circles but also in everyday life" (47)), and consequently unfairly charac- 
terize them as a homogeneous (and hegemonic) force. Only by assessing them 
in the context of their own profession, he suggests, can we uncover the contra- 
dictions, disagreements, and diversity of medical opinion. While this approach 
is not without merit, in Oosterhuis' case it results in an aversion to subjecting 
Krafft-Ebing to the lund of critical assessment he quite ably applies in the open- 
ing and closing sections of the book dealing with psychiatry more broadly. 
Oosterhuis's analysis of the content and significance of the patient files is 
illustrative. He insists that doctor and patient created categories of pathological 
sexuality together through dialogue. Other historians, most notably Jennifer 
Terry, have also explored the complicated and often cooperative relationship 
between sexologists and their subjects. But where Oosterhuis argues that 
Krafft-Ebing and his patients had a symbiotic relationship, Terry highlights the 
unequal power relations that ultimately defined such relationships. It must be 
remembered that while Krafft-Ebing used medical science to relieve his clients 
of criminal charges, his text - which was intended as a courtroom guide after 
all - was also used to against men charged with homosexual (and other sex) 
acts. By paying attention only to those middle and upper class clients who spent 
leisurely hours discussing their sexual history with Krafft-Ebing, Oosterhuis 
provides a narrow view of the impact of sexology. Given the centrality of the 
link between medicine and the criminal courts in the birth of sexology, atten- 
tion to Psychopathia sexualis in action is a substantial missing piece of the puz- 
zle. 
This book is a valuable, if limited, contribution to our understanding of the 
process of sexual modernization. A more critical accounting of the implications 
of Krafft-Ebing's work remains to be done. Let's hope that this rich resource 
will find a home in an accessible archives where other scholars might have the 
opportunity to do just that. 
Elise Chenier 
McGill University 


Harry Oosterhuis — Stepchildren of Nature: Kraft-Ebbing, Psychiatry and the Making of Sexual Identity

Hardman, Stephen

Left History 8.1 175 
quate. It does not provide an adequate explanation of how union officials come 
to exist within class relations as a social layer with distinct interests. Nor does 
it capture how bureaucracy in the worlung-class movement involves the rela- 
tions between members and officials. This is not unrelated to the book's weak- 
ness in terms of working-class history, especially in light of its enormous 
advances first sparked by New Left scholarship. The New Men of Power only 
mention African-Americans and women in passing in a handful of places, with 
no sense of the significance of racism and sexism for class formation and pol- 
itics in the US. Mills's suggestion of the importance of worker intellectuals is 
correct. Unfortunately, it is plain that the heirs of the leaders he studied in the 
mid- 1940s have not helped develop the kind of worker intellectuals needed to 
deal with the crisis wrought by decades of bureaucratic business unionism, and 
this book provides no clues about how they can be fostered. 
David Camfield 
York University 
Robert Seguin, Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in 
American Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 200 1). 
Robert Seguin, in common with many visitors to the United States, is both 
fascinated and disturbed by the absence of any substantial discourse on class 
conflict. For a country that has experienced such violent labour struggles and 
visibly exhibits so much disparity in wealth and opportunity this absence has 
proved to be a constant puzzle. Seguin, in Around Quitting Time, examines 
the role and concept of the middle class in perpetuating and explaining this 
lack of class discourse. In the United States almost anybody from an assem- 
bly line worker to a wealthy stockbroker can make a legitimate claim to be 
middle class. Seguin identifies this ubiquity of middle classnessness as iron- 
ically and inextricably entwined within the American belief in a classless 
society. The novels under study here, by Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, 
Nathanael West, John Barth and Ernest Hemmingway, in various ways 
dramatise and engage with the development of what he terms a "middle class 
imaginary" from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. 
This middle class imaginary is produced between the real material con- 
ditions of life and the realm of ideas and cultural discourse. This space is sig- 
nificant in that it creates a particular identity - the middle class - which 
appears to have a real anchor in the material conditions, but which is in fact 
ideologically driven and only a partial reflection of real conditions: 
176 Left History 8.1 
In this space - which is ideological, but also material, physical 
- class itself and the exigencies and investments attendant upon 
it are, I argue, at once produced but then occluded and reartic- 
ulated, to the point where the term "middle class" itself 
becomes synonymous with "classnessness" (2) 
For Seguin the development of the middle class is a dynamic process which 
constantly maintains an equilibrium between the real conditions of life and an 
investment in an identity grounded in these conditions which is essentially 
idealistic. The implications of this for any radical or socialist understanding, 
or investment in contrary class identities, is crucial: 
Middle-classnessness, along with a host of other forces and 
possibilities, cuts across the domain of social conflict, disrupt- 
ing the pedagogical potential of differential class perception. It 
subsists, finally, on the very boundary between reason and 
emotion, between knowledge and affect, providing perhaps an 
unstable sense more than a clear certainty.. . (4) 
The novels under study here participate in differing ways within this 
space; exploring and negotiating the connections between lived experience 
and emotional responses. The novels are important in that they allow Seguin 
to explore what he calls the "semantic complex" of the middle class which 
he sees as "the combined histories of narrative and socioeconomic change 
that converge in its emergence." Novels do not merely respond to and nego- 
tiate these changes, but as products are physically embedded within these 
processes. 
The phrase "quitting time" is taken from the opening of Nathanael West's 
1939 novel The Day of the Locust: "Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard 
a great din on the road outside his office." Seguin focuses on the word 
"around" in that this denotes not a clear demarcation of time but a coming 
together of moments, specifically where work and non-work exist simultane- 
ously. This zone of work and non-work is central to identifying the space with 
which the middle class imaginary is developed in that it is an ambiguous 
moment where the definitions of the terms work and leisure become ambigu- 
ous. Seguin points out that work itself is a "realm of freedom and of necessi- 
ty all at once" while leisure "posits itself as the simple renunciation or nega- 
tion of work, thus forfeiting any larger political potentiality.. . ." Suspended 
between these two states the middle class imaginary can then suspend the 
radical political agency implicit in both. Throughout the book Seguin builds 
a series of related oppositions within which this middle class imaginary 
exists. 
This middle class imaginary is a twentieth century phenomena and 
Seguin traces its origins to the late nineteenth century and opens his analysis 
with a look at Chicago in the 1880s and Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie. Carrie 
arrives in Chicago at a significant period in the economic development of the 
Left History 8.1 177 
United States, epitomised most notably by Frederick Jackson Turner's paper 
on the frontier delivered at the Chicago World Fair of 1893. Carrie's fragile 
position within the newly industrialised and urbanised city allows Seguin to 
identify and develop a series of oppositions within which this new middle 
class emerges. The zone of work and non-work is a central mediating oppo- 
sition and identified early in the novel when Carrie watches the workers leav- 
ing at the end of the day. For Seguin this moment captures "a fleeting period 
when labour and leisure effectively interpenetrate one another.. . ." This state 
between work and non-work exists in a specific historical moment and there- 
fore coincides with other middle states, most notably the one between the 
rural and the urban. Sister Carrie is primarily concerned with the "ideologi- 
cal function of an older image of idealised agrarian production being trans- 
lated into the terms of modern consumer ideology.. .." Dreiser's use of the 
pastoral urban ideology suggests an "exemplary middle space or landscape, 
where invidious extremes of any kind are wondrously neutralised." This of 
course serves as the central point of Seguin's argument regarding all these 
sites. Importantly Sister Carrie explores "a new ideological world of middle- 
classnessness, to which social class as such stands as a kind of constitutive 
outside." [my italics] 
Seguin traces the development of this middle class imaginary as it devel- 
ops through the twentieth century. Each writer is seen to engage with differ- 
ing formulations of this middle space as the United States emerges into a 
mature capitalist system. While each writer is seen to negotiate differing ten- 
sions and oppositions as economic and labour conditions change, Seguin 
identifies a common concern with this middle space and the implications for 
political agency. In his reading of Willa Cather he places the novels A Lost 
Lady (1923) and The Professork House (1925) within the context of the rise 
of the professional and managerial classes, alongside a redevelopment of a 
work/leisure opposition. In a rereading of these novels, and attention to 
Cather's own ambiguous position as a writer, he argues that the traditional 
view of Cather as a conservative, especially regarding her belief in hierarchy, 
is "not so much wrong as insufficiently elaborated." For Seguin, Cather 
demonstrates such an ambivalent response to the rise of these managerial and 
professional classes that it is possible to locate a much more radical tension 
that is implicit within her novels. Cather's attempts to read back into the 
prairie past a class hierarchy that never actually existed is not necessarily a 
conservative yearning, but a potentially radical response to the rise of the 
middle classes, of which Cather's own position as a writer is inextricably 
bound. 
Seguin moves through to the 1930s and examines the rise of mass culture 
and consumerism alongside the radical promise of the New Deal and the 
178 Left History 8.1 
Popular Front. In a reading of West's The Day ofthe Locust he argues that the 
failed desire and violence within the novel is symptomatic not only of the 
"disappointments of consumption and mass culture" but of the "failure of the 
possibility of collective action as such, and the commensurate weakening of 
the individual." The "missed opportunity" of the 1930s leads into the final 
chapter on the 1940s and 1950s. During the period of the "Fordist golden 
age" John Barth's The Floating Opera (1956) and Ernest Hemmingway's The 
Old Man and the Sea (1952) emerge during a troubled period for radical 
action. Collective challenges to capitalism become muted within the collec- 
tive experience of a matured middle class, where even the novel itself is fight- 
ing for survival. 
About Quitting Time is engaged with that long-standing issue as to why 
socialism has constantly failed to impress in the United States. Whereas other 
recent studies such as Seymour Martin Lipset's and Gary Mark's It Didn't 
Happen Here have focused on the economic and political structures in the 
United States, Seguin engages with the cultural and ideological pathways that 
work in and around such structures. Specifically he highlights the importance 
of literary texts in their ability to reveal such ideological movements, but also 
as products become integral to ideological resistance, negotiation and occa- 
sionally capitulation. Issues such as literary form, aesthetics, readership and 
criticism therefore become crucial in engaging with the development of what 
Seguin terms the "cultural presence" of "social class in its specifically capi- 
talist sense." 
Seguin's approach necessitates a highly theoretical understanding of cul- 
tural processes within the realms of politics and economics and as such there 
is the occasional difficulty of grounding such a theoretical method within the 
vagaries of everyday life. Seguin is well aware of this and in this light he calls 
for an understanding of class theory that holds together an understanding of 
class as being "much more than an economic category" while simultaneous- 
ly accepting that class is "indeed, ruthlessly, economic." Such a balancing act 
has always been difficult to maintain within Marxist theory and practice, 
especially when operating in such an inhospitable environment as the United 
States. Seguin sees recent attempts to overcome this problem by downplaying 
class in favour of lived experience and difference as tending towards a ratifi- 
cation of the underlying political and economic structures of capitalism. As a 
rejoinder to these moves he attempts to re-articulate the role of class in the 
United States as a dynamic and crucial category while avoiding the reduc- 
tionism that has often attended a merely functional understanding of class. 
About Quitting Time is an excellent study of cultural formations of class 
grounded in political and economic change while maintaining a focus on 
close, critical readings of the novels. Whether he has succeeded in offering 
Left History 8.1 179 
some form of resolution to the problem of class and political agency in the 
United States I feel will be vigorously debated. 
Stephen Hardman 
University of Canterbury, New Zealand 


Robert Seguin — Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction

Creagh, Ronald

150 Left History 8.1 
as Duncan Tanner's important book, merit further attention. Some engagement 
with important post-Thatcher era works on miners, their unions and politics in 
Britain is also lacking, although this book admittedly appeared just prior to the 
publication of Alan Campbell's second volume on the history of the Scottish 
miners. Finally, especially considering the rightwards turn of contemporary 
Labour politics, an evaluation of recent work on the persistence of late nine- 
teenth and early twentieth-century "popular radicalism," the term coined by 
Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid to indicate the shared ideological heritage of 
both Liberals and Labour, would also seem to be in order. 
Such reservations aside, Professor Laslett has written a unique book. Few 
historians are willing to tackle the logistical and historiographic morass of sys- 
tematic comparative history and even fewer are able to directly confront major 
interpretive puzzles. This book succeeds on both counts. 
James Jaffe 
University of Wisconsin at Whitewater 
Pamela Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx: Workers, Women and the 
Social Question in France (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University 
Press, 2000). 
Pamela Pilbeam asks "was Cabet the Barbara Cartland of the 1840s?" In 
other words, did his book, Voyage en Icarie, merely offer artisan readers 
"a dream world in which to escape"? 
This provocative question, in addition to numerous allusions to contem- 
porary figures such as Jospin and Blair, discloses the author's interest in 
showing how early French nineteenth century socialism is relevant to our 
times. 
This is a very difficult undertaking, in view of the great changes in 
the meaning of socialism over time. Pilbeam is aware of this, of course, 
and in a brilliant introduction she presents a review of how contemporary 
historians have modified their approach of that period. 
Her study offers a new line of attack by focusing on a thematic inves- 
tigation of theories and actions, strategies and solutions, rather than on 
individual biographical studies or  philosophical analysis. As the work 
progresses, this approach succeeds in uncovering continuities within a 
movement that has changed its discourse markedly as it has grown from 
a repressed minority to a important locus of political power. 
The author's analysis shows very clearly the important fact that all 
socialist writers concentrated on concrete economic issues, even when 
Left History 8.1 151 
their critics called them utopians. Although ideological issues such as the 
ideal of fraternity, and political and cultural issues, such as universal suf- 
frage and education, are also discussed, the questions that receive the 
most attention are the socio-economic ones. These include topics such as 
private property, the collectivization of production and distribution, the 
abolition of  money and competition, economic equality, and so on. The 
book discusses a wide range of practical activities, including the role of 
women, worker-run newspapers, mutual aid associations, producer and 
consumer co-ops, and political clubs. Indeed, the author argues that the 
economic concerns of socialism have great continuity in the long run. 
Yet, for many historians, the economic dimension was only part of a 
more global philosophy. The socialists of the period presented radically 
different answers, but these were only the devices to achieve what all 
considered to be the primary meaning of socialism: to build a world view 
in response to new social challenges. 
The work is very clearly written and is accompanied by a useful bib- 
liography. It would have perhaps been more accessible to the student and 
the general public if references to the movement's historical predecessors 
(Rousseau, Condorcet and so on), as well as to events of the period, had 
been presented in a first chapter, rather than throughout the text. 
There are a number of issues that deserve further consideration. The 
bourgeois or middle-class origin of almost all early socialist writers, as 
well as the Marxists of a later period, deserves discussion. There are also 
important issues concerning the meaning of the term "socialist" and its 
theoretical content: can one include in this category people as different 
as Cabet and Proudhon, not to mention Fourier? 
One may also hope that, in some not too distant future, the study of 
French socialism includes those members who were deported or exiled in 
Europe and in America and their publications that contributed to the 
debate within the movement and to its propaganda. This is not simply a 
matter of comprehensiveness but also one of explanation, because the 
diffusion of socialism is not a simple consequence of deprivation and 
class relations, but also the result of a transatlantic network, that delib- 
erately disseminated its ideas even in non-industrial countries of Europe 
and in both Americas. 
Ronald Creagh 
Universitt Paul Valery 


Pamela Pilbeam — French Socialists Before Marx: Workers, Women and the Social Question in France

Allswang, John M.

126 Left History 8.1 
It is a great pity that the extraordinary richness of the text was not accom- 
panied by more suitable maps and tables, as the four included maps are not 
tremendously valuable and the great quantity of data presented in the text is 
somewhat harder to digest than should have been the case. The changing rates 
of landownership and farm size described here lend themselves to graphic 
presentation, and in this form might well have invited comparison with Euro- 
American experiences beyond Kulikoff's disappointing exclusion of all but the 
canonical thirteen mainland colonies. As a master narrative, ColonialAmerican 
Farmers succeeds in elegantly synthesizing a massive body of literature, prob- 
ing the relationships between economy, demography and society, and in vigor- 
ously shaping and inspiring debate on the formation of American society for 
years to come. 
Neil Kennedy 
University of Western Ontario 
Daniel A. Coleman. The Anarchist: A Novel (Chapel Hill, NC: Willowbrook 
Press, 2001). 
The assassination of Pres. William McKinley in September 1901 seriously 
shook the bubble of comfort and optimism that had developed within the 
American middle class. The depression of the 1890s was well behind them; 
increasing wealth was apparent in the cities and on the farms. The U.S. had won 
its "splendid little war" against Spain in 1898, and found itself a newly impe- 
rial power, stretching across the Pacific and the Caribbean. 
Two things at the turn-of-the-century epitomized this confidence. The first 
was McKinley's reelection in 1900. He seemed to represent the new, expand- 
ing, industrial and commercial America, unified and stable; while his oppo- 
nent, as in 1896, was William Jennings Bryan, echoing the pre-industrial past 
and a discordant society. McKinley and his Republican Party were definitely in 
control. 
Second, nothing seemed to better express America's new-found leadership 
in commerce, science, and world affairs than the place where McKinley was 
shot - the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, an ebullient exhibit of indus- 
trial development and American wealth, and the greatest display of the power 
of electricity anyone had ever seen. 
There was, of course, a darker side, which middle class America tried to 
ignore but which tended to intrude at regular intervals. Wealth in the new 
America was hardly general: the new urban working class, largely immigrant, 
was consistently exploited and many led lives of true desperation. That, in turn, 
Left History 8.1 127 
ignited frequently bloody strikes like that in Homestead against the Carnegie 
Steel works in 1892, and the national Pullman strike of 1894. Middle class 
Americans were worried by such events, and even more by the strain of revo- 
lutionary radicalism that had been spearheaded by the anarchists since the 
1880s. Such radicalism was alien to American values, they believed, and was 
driven by alien peoples, immigrants from a Europe that lacked America's supe- 
rior social order. 
Emma Goldman was the b&te noire of middle class fears: a foreigner, a 
Jew, a woman, and an advocate of everything from women's rights and birth 
control to violent overthrow of capitalist society. It was her lover and colleague, 
Alexander Berkrnan, who had shot and stabbed (but failed to kill) William C. 
Frick of Carnegie Steel during the Homestead strike. It was Goldman who 
defended Gaetano Bresci, the anarchist Italian immigrant who traveled back to 
Italy in 1900 to assassinate King Umberto I. An4 as it turned out, it was she 
who served as an inspiration and ideal to Leon E Czolgosz, the man who assas- 
sinated McKinley. 
There were, in fact, real fears expressed for McKinley's safety in a crowd- 
ed venue like the Exposition. Some in the president's entourage thought his 
appearance was a bad idea. But the president was persuaded of his own safety; 
his America was not a land of assassins. Leon Czolgosz counted on that, 
stalked the president, and shot him on September 6'h; McKinley lingered until 
the 14th. Czolgosz was quickly tried, condemned on September 26, and then 
electrocuted at Auburn Prison on October 29fh, less than five weeks later. 
Czolgosz, contrary to popular perception, was not an immigrant. He was 
American-born, of Polish immigrant parents. Like other presidential assassins, 
he was a "loser" and a dreamer, a drifter whose life had been rarely other than 
sad. He was not politically sophisticated, but had been a member of the 
Socialist party in Cleveland, and was "inspired" when he heard Emma 
Goldman speak. Whether he was actually an anarchist continues to be a matter 
of dispute, as is the question of his true mental and psychological health. 
Daniel Coleman's historical novel treats of these matters. It is a "serious" 
historical novel, in that the author is concerned with probing the issues involved 
as much as in providing a readable narrative. The book focuses on the brief 
period when Czolgosz was in Auburn prison, awaiting execution, but looks 
back via fictional interviews with the assassin. Except for Czolgosz and Emma 
Goldman, all the book's characters are fictional, and the main scene in which 
Goldman appears is fictional as well. The reader, therefore, should understand 
that much that is general can be learned from the novel, but that the specifics 
are entirely imaginary. 
The story is a first-person narrative by the book's protagonist, Jon Parker, 
a medical student serving an internship with the chief physician at Auburn 
Prison. His experiences and perceptions frame what we see and hear, Since 
128 Left History 8.1 
Parker is aiming at a career in psychiatry, he becomes much involved in the 
most controversial questions surrounding Czolgosz: is he sane or insane? is he 
really an anarchist? were there others involved? Ultimately, Parker is permitted 
to conduct several interviews with a willing Czolgosz, which permits Coleman 
to investigate these questions, ultimately and wisely avoiding easy answers. 
The narrative itself is a pleasant one, carrying the reader along quickly and 
easily. One shares Parker's perceptions not only of Czolgosz, but of the prison 
in general, daily life in Auburn, and turn-of-the-century American life in gen- 
eral. While definitely middle-class, Parker, as a student, is not wealthy, and 
therefore frequents a working-class bar, which lets Coleman portray the "other 
side" of the community. Likewise, Parker's romance with his mentor's head- 
strong daughter, Lucy, permits the author to bring in issues of women's rights 
and late Victorian morality. At the end, of course, the questions of capital pun- 
ishment and of the electric chair also make their appearance. 
The author is interested in questions of social justice, and of the nature, 
controversiality, and role of anarchism at the time. By making his protagonist 
both inquisitive and open-minded, Coleman is able to explore these issues in an 
impartial way, to the reader's advantage. 
It is difficult to tell how much actual research went into this book. The 
author seems well-informed on the central and peripheral questions he deals 
with in the narrative, but the bibliographic note is extremely brief. Notably 
missing is any reference to A. Wesley Johns' 1970 book, The Man Who Shot 
McKinley, probably the leading secondary source. (If the reader wants to look 
at the book American Assassins, which Coleman does list, its author's name is 
misspelled there: it is James W. Clarke, with an "e.") 
Overall, it is a successful book. For the general reader, it is an "easy r ead  
that also provides a good historical background to an important time and 
important events. For the professional historian, the book's value is somewhat 
less clear, but it is informative in a general way, and reminds one of issues that 
are not entirely in the past. 
John M. Allswang 
California State University, Los Angeles 
Robert McIntosh, Boys in the Pits: Child Labour in Coal Mines (Montreal & 
Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000). 
The boys in the pits both impressed and dismayed American journalist Stephen 
Crane in his 1894 visit to a Pennsylvania coal mine. They "swore long oaths with 
skill," he reported, and while their boss thought he controlled them, Crane was 


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