Lost Promise Research Articles

Refounding Denied: Hannah Arendt on Limited Principles and the Lost Promise of Reconstruction

This article argues that Hannah Arendt’s essay “Civil Disobedience” contains a critique of white constitutionalism. A close reading of Arendt’s comments on the failure of Reconstruction to durably found Black citizenship reveals that the anti-Blackness of her account does not consist in ignoring the racialization of constitutional order but, to the contrary, in a dismissal of Black politics due to the limitations of a white constitutional heritage. In “Civil Disobedience,” Arendt thus stood on the edge of an insight that she failed to develop more fully: Black movements had brought to light the limitations that racial domination places on the “augmentation” of America’s founding principles. For Arendt, the notion of the “principle” is meant to mediate the novelty of action with the durability of order. But to the extent that she views American institutions as defined by the “inherited crime” of slavery, feedback across temporal strata—between a principle in past, present, and future—is structurally blocked. The symbolic whiteness of citizenship undermines institutional durability, as it generates a crisis of constitutional authority for all. Tracing the sources behind Arendt’s pessimistic vision, the article demonstrates echoes between her account and the literature on which she relied: Tocqueville; Stanley Elkins; and, possibly, W. E. B. Du Bois. It concludes with a reading of Arendt’s commentary on Reconstruction as the attempt to recover a lost moment of foundation, an unredeemed promise of refounding.

The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s by Ellen Schrecker (review)

The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s by Ellen Schrecker (review)

Ellen Schrecker. The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 621pp.

Ellen Schrecker. The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 621pp.

The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s

Review of The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, by Ellen Schrecker.

Planning Brady’s Comeback: Public Defenders Are Needed as Judges to Lead the Restoration of Brady’s Lost Promise

Planning Brady’s Comeback: Public Defenders Are Needed as Judges to Lead the Restoration of Brady’s Lost Promise

African Diaspora Studies and the Lost Promise of Afrocentrism

African Diaspora Studies and the Lost Promise of Afrocentrism

The Lost Promise of Arbitration

This article disputes the notion that arbitration, a historically informal process, tends to disadvantage minority disputants or provide them with quick decisions tainted by prejudice. Responding to Richard Delgado’s seminal work, Fairness and Formality: Minimizing the Risk of Prejudice in Alternative Dispute Resolution, this article attempts to shed greater light on the benefits of modern arbitration for minority disputants. Although still capable of improvement, arbitration may well provide greater protections to minority disputants than does litigation. Since Delgado first wrote his article, the use of arbitration as a primary dispute resolution mechanism has increased dramatically, particularly among businesses and employers. As arbitration expanded, critics of the informal process worked to reform arbitration so that it provided sufficient protection to disputants who were compelled to use it. Modern arbitration provides a more formalized and structured process that resembles litigation, but continues to offer resolution more efficiently and cheaply. Assuming Delgado’s premise — that formality matters in promoting equality in dispute resolution — arbitration’s enhanced formalism suggests significant promise for reformers who seek to improve minorities’ fair and effective representation in dispute resolution. This article opens the dialogue for further innovation by proposing impactful changes to the arbitration process. These reforms would include such improvements as mandatory reasoned opinion-writing and greater diversity in arbitrator appointments. In turn, these process-based reforms would enhance arbitration’s formalism and thereby improve its protection for minority disputants and any other party likely to be at a disadvantage in a dispute resolution venue. This contemporary perspective on arbitration fosters a fair and equitable dispute resolution mechanism for those with less bargaining power than their opponents.

The Lost Promise of Democratic Socialism in Russia

:To explain the failure to create democratic socialism in Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, I apply Thorstein Veblen’s vision of economic democracy as a cure for vested interests. In late imperial Russia, many socialist thinkers imagined socialism primarily in terms of workplace democracy, worker ownership, local governance, and economic decentralization. Their vision was destroyed, first, by Bolshevik policies and then by Stalin’s tyrannical command economy. Thereafter, vested interests reemerged in the Soviet Union as an underground economy, rife with theft of public resources, and then, with the beginning of transition, capitalism in its most neoliberal form was restored.

The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

Book Review| September 01 2012 The Lost Promise of Civil Rights The Lost Promise of Civil Rights by Risa L. Goluboff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010 376 pp., $18.95 (paper) Nan Elizabeth Woodruff Nan Elizabeth Woodruff Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2012) 9 (3): 106–108. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1599684 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nan Elizabeth Woodruff; The Lost Promise of Civil Rights. Labor 1 September 2012; 9 (3): 106–108. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1599684 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Labor and Working-Class History Association2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

The Lost Promise of Civil Rights by Risa L. Goluboff

The Lost Promise of Civil Rights by Risa L. Goluboff

Commentary: The Abject and the Grotesque: Broken Bodies, Broken Dreams, and the Lost Promise of Harlem

Precious is a difficult film to watch, not only because it deals with uneasy topics such as incest, poverty, illiteracy, and the disease of HIV/AIDS, but also because of its unflinching focus on the irrepressible and corpulent body of one Claireece “Precious” Jones. Hers is a body born out of a life of trauma, yet this body powerfully disrupts the visual and aural boundaries typically experienced by a viewing audience—so much so that critics Daniel Engber and David Edelstein resort to vicious and dehumanizing language to describe their encounter with the film. As Engber bewails, “the film’s most arresting figure of urban poverty is the one that lumbers through nearly every frame: The 300-pound Gabby Sidibe.” New York’s David Edelstein echoes these same sentiments, “[Precious’s] head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin . . . her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits. That’s part of the movie’s XXXtreme social realism, no doubt.”1 No doubt? Besides overlooking the powerful association between the figurative and the literal, the seen and the imagined, Engber’s and Edelstein’s viewing practices focus the film through rigid lenses. More than benign illustrations, artistic images potently exemplify the nature and meaning of American values and beliefs. Engber’s and Edelstein’s inept and offensive attempts at defining the grueling and heartbreaking struggles of black folks in

Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.

Concord Park, Open Housing, and the Lost Promise of Civil Rights in the North

Concord Park, Open Housing, and the Lost Promise of Civil Rights in the North

Aquinas and Modernity: The Lost Promise of Natural Law. By Shadia B. Drury. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. 224p. $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper. - Sovereignty: God, State, and Self. By Jean Bethke Elshtain. New York: Basic Books, 2008. 334p. $35.00.

Aquinas and Modernity: The Lost Promise of Natural Law. By Shadia B. Drury. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. 224p. $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper. - Sovereignty: God, State, and Self. By Jean Bethke Elshtain. New York: Basic Books, 2008. 334p. $35.00.

Crossroad Blues: Civil Rights Paths Taken and Forsaken

When legendary bluesman Robert Johnson recorded Cross Road Blues in 1936, he could not have known that legal meaning of civil rights was about to be standin' at [a] cross of its own. In The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, a book as powerfully wrought and painfully wrenching as Johnson's song, Risa Goluboff surveys scene from this cross road from roughly late 1930s through early 1950s. During this time, the world of civil rights was conceptually, doctrinally, and constitutionally up for grabs or, to phrase it somewhat differently, since the unwieldy thing called Jim was a multifaceted phenomenon, destruction of Jim was open to a number of understandings of that mission (pp. 5, 239, 127, 11). Among these, understanding of, and challenge to, Jim Crow reflected in Brown v. Board of Education represented only one possible angle of attack (p. 4). Moreover, when viewed from cross road where Goluboff fixes her attention, path that pointed to Brown was not one that appeared most likely to be followed (p. 9). Nor was it one that held greatest promise for removing economic nooses that hung around necks of African American workers such as Mississippi Delta plantation cotton-picking parents of Robert Johnson for whom Jim Crow was a Gordian Knot of racial oppression and economic exploitation (p. 7). What those civil rights roads not taken were, why they were forsaken, and how strategic litigation choices about which cases to pursue and which to avoid led to Brown and away from other civil rights roads that held greater hope for remedying harms that black workers faced these are questions that The Lost Promise of Civil Rights tackles (pp. 13, 269). Goluboff begins by tracing contours of different approaches to civil rights that commenced when Lochner era in United States legal history concluded in mid-1930s. After three decades of striking down laws it deemed to encroach upon individual rights to property and contract, such as maximum hour legislation at issue in Lochner v. New York in 1905,

:The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

:The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

Is American Liberalism Singular or Plural?

REINVENTING “THE PEOPLE”: The Progressive Movement, The Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism. By Shelton Stromquist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2006. THE LEADER AND THE CROWD: Democracy in American Public Discourse, 1880-1941. By Daria Frezza. Translated by Martha King. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2007. THE LOST PROMISE OF PATRIOTISM: Debating American Identity, 18901920. By Jonathan M. Hansen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003.

CONFRONTING CONSUMERISM

Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (University of Chicago Press, 2003)Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004)To recapture the ideal vision that many late nineteenth-century American thinkers held for their society one can do no better than Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward, 1887–2000 (1888). In it Bellamy transports his young protagonist, Julian West, from the Boston of his day to a far more appealing version of the same city imagined as it was about to enter the twenty-first century. Julian finds a consumers' paradise, where each citizen receives a credit card to use in selecting from a virtually limitless variety of goods available for sale at local distribution centers. With everyone receiving a per capita share of the burgeoning national output, the entire society has now become securely middle class. Indeed, there is so much wealth that citizens are actively encouraged to spend rather than save. “The nation is rich,” we are told, “and does not wish the people to deprive themselves of any good thing.” Labor unions, strikes, and class conflict have all become a distant memory. Along with the working class, the unsightly factories that once dominated so much of the urban landscape have essentially vanished. A cornucopia of goods miraculously appears, with the apparatus required for manufacturing them entirely out of sight. Given this happy state of affairs, all citizens exhibit a strong degree of patriotism. Dissent and disloyalty have become unknown, since there is no longer any need for them.

The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era

Thomas E. Woods Jr. has written the first major study of American Catholic intellectuals during the Progressive Era. His thesis is evident in his title. Catholic intellectuals challenged the emerging Progressive Era men-talité. In four separate chapters on pragmatic philosophy, a secularized sociology, progressive education, and economic issues, Woods outlines the Catholic confrontation with major movements of the era. Woods relies to a considerable extent on Eldon Eisenach's argument (presented in The Lost Promise of Progressivism, 1994) that behind the emerging Progressive Era mentality was an attempt to create a “national ethic that discouraged excessive attachment to competing creeds or sources of authority” (p. 8). A fifth chapter focuses on Catholic challenges to this Progressive Era attempt to base American nationality on a humanitarian ethic devoid of dogma and religious beliefs. Although the Catholic intellectuals Woods examines were hostile to the antidogmatic and pragmatic temperament of the times, they were not uniformly opposed to elements of modernity that they found useful within and compatible with Catholicism. But the selective Catholic appropriation of elements of the Progressive program tended to undermine the Progressives' goals; Catholic intellectuals used these elements for their own Catholic purposes.

Reviews of Books:The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920 Jonathan M. Hansen

Reviews of Books:The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920 Jonathan M. Hansen