The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914

Tracing the transformation of liberal political ideology from the end of the Civil War to the early twentieth century, Nancy Cohen offers a new interpretation of the origins and character of modern liberalism. She argues that the values and programs associated with modern liberalism were formulated not during the Progressive Era, as most accounts maintain, but earlier, in the very different social context of the Gilded Age.

Integrating intellectual, social, cultural, and economic history, Cohen argues that the reconstruction of liberalism hinged on the reaction of postbellum liberals to social and labor unrest. As new social movements of workers and farmers arose and phrased their protests in the rhetoric of democratic producerism, liberals retreated from earlier commitments to an expansive vision of democracy. Redefining liberal ideas about citizenship and the state, says Cohen, they played a critical role in legitimating emergent corporate capitalism and politically insulating it from democratic challenge.

As the social cost of economic globalization comes under international critical scrutiny, this book revisits the bitter struggles over the relationship between capitalism and democracy in post-Civil War America. The resolution of this problem offered by the new liberalism deeply influenced the progressives and has left an enduring legacy for twentieth-century American politics, Cohen argues.

• The Populist Vision
• Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (American History)
• The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900
• The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War
• The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)
• A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
• Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present
• The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Jefferson Memorial Lecture Series)
• A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (New Histories of American Law)
• The Allure of the Archives (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)