Radical Democracy, Jewish Universalism, and Social Democracy

Abstract

The American democratic socialist tradition began with radical democrats of the early American Republic, acquired movement infrastructure with the founding of the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Party, and established a socialist flank in the American Federation of Labor. Scholarship on American socialism has been overdetermined by two contrasting ways of looking down on it represented by Ira Kipnis and Daniel Bell, and has persistently underestimated the importance of religious socialism, through which most of the early movement’s female and African American socialists came into the movement.