Political Trade Unionism: Industrial Citizenship and the Regulation of Social Conflict in European Thought, 1890 - 1919

Abstract

This dissertation uncovers a tradition of thought in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France and Germany that understood socialist trade unions as morally transformative institutions in capitalist society. The main figures in this transnational tradition were the socialists George Sorel, Eduard Bernstein, and Jean Jaurès and the broadly left-liberal thinkers Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. According to these theorists, socialist unions provided workers with a unique moral education that led them to moderate and regulate social conflict. This was a form of working-class politics that advanced society’s general interest because it generated social cohesion among citizens and facilitated their cooperative self-government in the economy. The theorists analyzed in this dissertation argued that socialist unionists were able to moderate social conflict because they changed other workers and capitalists’ perception of their interests. Specifically, they took political and industrial action, which led unorganized workers and capitalists to see their common interest in cooperation in industry. Socialist unionism therefore offered an intermediate path between a working-class politics bent on expropriation and a capitalist politics focused on preserving absolutism in industry. This dissertation identifies two different views on the type of morality that unionists needed to develop in order to regulate social conflict and influence other social groups. The first view of unionist morality, which Sorel and Weber advanced, was that of sectarian asceticism. The second view of unionist morality, which Bernstein, Jaurès, and Durkheim defended, was that of general human sympathy. For Sorel and Weber, ascetic unionists publicized their unique morality in the course of conflict with capitalists. This was a transparent and programmatic form of class struggle, which led capitalists to change their understanding of their interests. In Bernstein, Jaurès, and Durkheim’s eyes, unionists endowed with a capacity for human sympathy had a sense of social duty, which made them place constraints on their actions in the industrial arena. Through deliberation in arbitration institutions, these socially aware unionists would induce moral change among capitalists, leading them to embrace cooperation in industry. I label the first unionist strategy social-regulation-through-honorable-struggle and the second strategy social-regulation-through-democratic-deliberation.