David Levine's provocative article poses a timely challenge to labor historians. It is timely for two reasons. First, he makes an ambitious attempt to integrate ideas of Michel Foucault into working-class history?an attempt whose time has surely come. Second, he proposes a new grand narrative for labor history that deviates sharply from usual epic mode?in which proletarians struggle heroically and repeatedly against overwhelming odds in an attempt to overcome exploitative power of capitalism. Levine dismisses labor struggles, perhaps too hastily, as epiphenomena of resistance. He writes in an ironic mode and focuses on what he calls the toils of everyday life, by which he means primarily politics and history of proletarian family and education. He recounts not a continuing heroic quest, but gradual cumulative fashioning of a Weberian iron cage that progressively incarcerates Foucauldian docile bodies. In current historical conjuncture, this new narrativization of labor history has a certain appeal. The numerical decline of industrial proletariat, sclerosis of Western labor movements, and ossification and subsequent collapse of communism have made implied Whiggism of standard labor history seem increasingly implausi ble, if not downright quaint. If, as I believe, history should help us understand how we arrived at present, it seems self-evident that labor historians need to experiment with new grand narratives. Levine's narrative has much to offer, but I do not find it fully satisfactory. I like turn from virtually exclusive concentration on work and work-related struggles to Foucault's problematic of bio-power and discipline, and to politics of reproduction in families, schools, and bureaucracies. I also agree that historical demography, a perspective virtually ignored by labor historians, offers important insights. But if standard grand narrative of labor history errs in its stubborn optimism, Levine's error is opposite. The account he has fashioned in this arti cle repeatedly threatens to slip beyond a healthy irony into a kind of historical paranoia. The paranoic style should be recognizable to any reader of Foucault. Like many historians who have been influenced by Foucault's brilliant and agenda setting studies of discipline, sexuality, and institutions of surveillance, Levine adopts, perhaps unconsciously, some of Foucault's most characteristic and most questionable rhetorical strategies. First, in spite of some brave words to