Illiberal Reformers: Race Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era
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About this book
The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism 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 workmens 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 Americas 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.
