CSLS Speaker Series – “Liberalism Revisited: Reapproaching State Formation and Class Compromise in the New Deal”

Featuring Gabriel Winant, Assistant Professor of History, University of Chicago

This will be less an argumentative lecture than a historiographical exploration of the grounds for a new project—an attempt to reopen the history of a closed topic: the New Deal. With a few notable exceptions, most of the historical scholarship on the origins and character of the New Deal was written a generation ago. Overwhelmingly, that work formed intellectual reaction to the rise of Reagan and what would eventually be called neoliberalism, rejecting an earlier New Left tradition and emphasizing the successful relationship of political representation between an organized and united working class and farseeing liberal policymakers. A sustained period of defeat and disappointment for the political hopes embodied in this scholarship now suggests the need for revision. I will inquire into two ways of approaching this revision: at the social-historical level of working-class organization, on which I offer a somewhat more pessimistic note; and in the linkage between the social and the political, where I hope to renew the tradition of “social explanation” displaced by neo-Weberian social science.  

Reception: Lunch 12:15-12:45p.m. in the Kadish Library 
Program: 12:45-2:00p.m. in the Philip Selznick Seminar Room

Register here for the livestream via Zoom.    
Add this event to your Google Calendar. 

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact csls@law.berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.