Chapter 6 traces the intellectual consequences of the unravelling of Ireland’s grain export boom at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. For British political economists such as Malthus and James Ramsay McCulloch, the path towards Irish recovery could only lie through the assimilation of Ireland to what they took to be an English model of large-scale tenant farming and concentrated land ownership. For European thinkers, however, the parlous condition of the Irish countryside was proof not of Ireland’s divergence from, but its identity with, the monstrous and unsustainable condition of Britain’s ‘aristocratic’ social order. Their critiques were taken up in Britain by a new generation of liberal economists led by John Stuart Mill, and in Ireland by a group of Francophile nationalist intellectuals, Young Ireland. These thinkers re-cast the problem of Irish improvement anew, tying it not to the integration of Ireland into British or imperial markets, but on the creation of a stable class of peasant proprietors to match those that had been created in large parts of continental Europe through French, or French-inspired, land reforms.

Paul Butler considers NWA’s 1988 song, “Fuck tha Police,” as an invitation to think about putting the police on trial for crimes against African Americans. It examines the resonance of “Fuck tha Police” over time, up to and including the George Floyd inspired protests. It will also use the song to analyze how civilians should feel about cops in a democracy. Are they a positive good, as many white people might suggest, a necessary evil, as some people of color might suggest, or an unnecessary evil, as suggested by the “defund the police” movement? Butler also will explore the meaning of the trial metaphor in the song – what would it mean for African Americans to put the police on trial? What would be the crime and the appropriate punishment?

Did capitalism, including the ethics of some of its leaders, go astray as a result of the upheavals of World War I and democratic politics? Did one witness a new phase of “political capitalism,” a term sociologist Max Weber coined originally with respect to ancient and premodern forms of capitalism? These questions not only reflected anticapitalist resentments but were a way to describe the close cooperation of political and economic interests and some of the more excessive forms of “booty” and “adventure capitalism,” including political and economic corruption. They also addressed certain enterprises, social groups, and individuals. Although not outright antisemitic, “political capitalism” always provided a springboard for antisemitic agendas. With the onset of the Great Depression, the latter was to become crucially important in the context of efforts not just to restore forms of a “rational” neoliberal economic order but also to purge the excesses of the previous years, including the persons who appeared to represent this “political capitalism.” These purges lasted well into the National Socialist period, which at the same time witnessed new and excessive forms of booty capitalism directed against the “enemies” of the Volksgemeinschaft and later also the occupied countries.

In recent decades the contribution of collective labor law as a core element of social democracy has been questioned. The existing institutional pathways that deepen democracy have eroded, for labor organizations and the workers represented by them. Unions and workers have reoriented their strategies in order to recover spaces of participation and influence – deeply shaping democratic outcomes through new types of mobilization. The case of platform workers’ mobilization is an emblematic example of local strategies in the face of global problems. New types of mobilization by new actors have reaffirmed labor’s ability to foster democracy’s depth despite the erosion of older institutional channels supportive of that same end.

This chapter argues that a pro-democracy First Amendment should also be a pro-union First Amendment. It is an article of faith that a significant purpose of the First Amendment is to enable and improve democracy, by helping Americans access the information they need for democratic deliberation and participation. Further, a considerable body of research shows that labor unions make American democracy stronger and more representative. But despite this, the Supreme Court has treated unions’ political advocacy in cases involving union agency fees with suspicion and disdain. After describing this unfortunate situation – one that is likely to get worse under the current Supreme Court – the chapter closes on a note of optimism, looking ahead to a time when scholars and advocates can realistically begin the work of rebuilding a First Amendment that recognizes labor unions as democracy-enhancing institutions.

The chapter looks at the relationship between workers and democracy over time, discussing how different workers (skilled and unskilled) relate to three different concepts of democracy (political, egalitarian, and formal-institutional, or Democracy I, II, and III). I argue that while there is a strong link between workers and Democracy I, the association frays with respect to full inclusion of all citizens and the autonomy of institutions. I then reflect on the alternative trajectory of Poland’s Solidarity union: an energetic proponent of Democracy II and III during state socialism, which after the state’s embrace of neoliberalism became a chief supporter of current right-wing efforts to undermine those aspects of democracy. In the end, capitalist societies give many workers “rational” reasons to oppose Democracy II and not care about Democracy III.

This chapter traces Latin America’s labor movement’s long, tumultuous struggle for workers’ rights, equity, and democracy through periods of corporatism, authoritarian rule, neoliberalism, and contemporary left- and right-wing populist governments. This chapter argues that, while segments of Latin America’s labor movements have, at times, collaborated with autocratic elites, a significant share of labor leaders and members have fought for democratization not out of perceived partisan advantage, but rather out of commitment to the principles of liberal democracy – and labor has often realized that commitment by strengthening democracy. This chapter examines theoretical debates on labor and democracy and labor’s role in the struggle for democratization and equity during crucial periods in regime formation and transition in Latin America.

Concepts of labor and democracy have infused the theory and practice of higher education in the USA since the development of the modern university in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. Higher education’s social role in promoting the common good in a democratic society is linked to its internal labor model that provides faculty with academic freedom and collective self-governance. These are contested institutional goals and structures, however, in tension with the competing use of higher education to serve the private interests of industry. This chapter explores the ongoing push-pull between private economic interests, on the one hand, and higher education’s contribution to wider democratic political culture and its correlative internal commitment to its faculties’ academic freedom, tenure, and rights to govern jointly with administrators, on the other.

Both worker bargaining power and political democracy have been gripped by a mutually reinforcing crisis that has worsened for decades, harming working people (especially communities of color) and undermining our social fabric. This chapter argues that this crisis had become existential by 2020 as the pandemic, policing, privatization, financialization, growing monopoly, and rising unemployment exacerbated inequality, sparked social unrest, and threatened democracy.  It contends that our response must link the defense of political democracy to the fight for bargaining power for workers in the twenty-first century economy through innovative movement campaigns and new alliances that tie together the degradation of the environment, the upending of democratic oversight, and the more general degradation of the political economy to the exploitation of the workforce by rent-seeking corporate power.

Opponents of unions have often portrayed them as a threat to democracy. Rather than speaking for workers, they contend, unions were a “special interest” or “third party” who took away workers’ voices, along with their hard-earned money. Reviewing labor’s post-World War II history – particularly the domestic record of the AFL-CIO since its foundation in 1955 – this chapter shows that unions were not a third party, but an important force for democracy. Throughout the post-World War II era, organized labor provided a voice for all working people, not just its members. Unions were a much-needed watchdog, consistently fighting for safer workplaces, higher pay, and workplace democracy. They also gave a stronger voice to working people in politics – and could bring them into the streets. Despite their imperfections, no other organization performed this role in quite the same way.

The importance of the struggle for labor rights and challenges to democracy in Africa can be linked to the decolonization process in the 1960s. Trade union formations had relative collective capacity to support agitation for political emancipation. The post-colonial relationship between labor movements and the state have been a mixed experience. We explore the role of labor rights as enhancers of democratic governance in Africa, using several countries as proxies for the continent. Exploration is informed largely by the ILO’s recent Centenary reflections, the link between labor rights and social justice, issues canvassed by the Global Commission on the Future of Work. The Commission provided a basis for continuing reflection among scholars and policy makers. It culminated in a rejuvenation and renewal of ILO mandate at the Centenary International Labor Conference, 2019.

Labor’s role in forging and sustaining democracies has long been recognized in international human rights law and social science literature, but union rights and density are declining around the globe, and unfavorable domestic law jurisprudence in many parts of the globe has undermined collective rights. This chapter explores the juxtaposition of labor’s exalted place in international human rights law with its subordinate position in domestic law. In international human rights instruments and jurisprudence, labor unions hold a special position, and freedom of association is the critical foundational right upon which other rights and interests are advanced. In social science literature labor unions have pro-democracy attributes. This chapter explores whether the decline in union strength has created a political void that has been filled by more authoritarian tendencies.

Plato’s tripartite theory is used as a lens to increase our understanding of Dialogical Self Theory (DST) and to stimulate the further exploration of its personal, social, and societal possibilities. Plato creates links between (a) body parts (head, chest, belly), (b) faculties of the soul (logos, thymos, eros), and (c) societal groups (philosophers, military, artisans). Whereas in Plato’s vision, three main body parts are distinguished, DST is based on the assumption of a multiplicity of body parts that are linked to a multiplicity of embodied I-positions. Furthermore, whereas Plato puts reason (logos) structurally above emotion (eros), DST sees reason and emotion as equivalent and “cooperative” systems. The assumption of reason-with-emotion, instead of reason-above-emotion, creates room for the emergence of dialogical relationships among these central faculties. Finally, whereas Plato distinguishes three hierarchically organized societal groups, DST, as a multipartite theory, interiorizes a broader variety of social groups as participants in a multivoiced democratically organized self.

This chapter explores the development of social provisioning as a matter not of right but of democratic administration in France and the United States in the nineteenth century. The authors take issue with conventional chronologies of rights development, which see civil and political rights being developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with social rights appearing in the twentieth. Such categories and sequencing obscure the ways in which democratic administrations took the problem of social provisioning seriously. A history of socio-economic rights cannot be distinguished from the less formal technologies of socio-economic regulation that were an integral part of the democratic question across the nineteenth century, and, in particular, the modernisation of regulatory governance. The democratisation of administrative powers precluded any sharp distinction among the political, the social and the economic. For better and for worse, this process took place through the building, rescaling and redefining of older, pre-democratic technologies of governance in response to what were perceived as pressing public problems.

The Epilogue shows how the defamatory stories that began to emerge in the 1930s crystallized after Raúl’s death into an individualized “black legend” about “el negro Raúl.” I demonstrate the patterned and repetitive nature of these stories, which plagiarized each other and echoed master narratives of race rather than reflecting Raúl’s lived experience. The Epilogue brings the story of Raúl’s Black legend up to the present, where the largely unchanged contours of his tale suggest the tensions and incomplete transformations of Argentina’s newfound multiculturalism, and the ongoing seductiveness of “black legend” stories even within the emergent Black movement. Finally, I discuss the challenges (archival and conceptual) of researching Raúl’s story in a country that denies its African heritage, and I reflect on how the interest it sparked among my fellow Argentines suggests that Black Legend may, after all, help shift the narratives on Blackness in Argentina and beyond.

The American support for the Zionist movement and later Israel was based on three premises: religion, shared values, and history. Religious belief and the Old Testament were significant components of the identity of the first Americans, the Puritans, and their descendants. Taking their cue from their devotion to the Bible, its stories, and geography, the Americans became convinced that if God’s prophecies were to be fulfilled, then the Jews should return to their homeland, and the Americans should propagate the restoration of the Jewish homeland. The American belief in democracy, a civic expression of religious beliefs and self-determination, in which they believed in for the Jews, led the United States to a sense of commitment towards the restoration and permanent well-being of the Jews in their own homeland. History was another component in the American commitment to the Zionist movement and Israel, the sense that it was America’s duty to undo the injustices that the Jews suffered for thousands of years from Christians, most recently the Holocaust. Contrary to the American idealistic commitment to the Zionist cause and to Israel, the Zionists and Israel viewed their alliance with the Americans more pragmatically.

Thirty-years on, the high expectations that accompanied the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet communism have been largely confounded by the emergence of the autocratic Putin regime and the rekindling of Great Power rivalry between Russia and the United States. In this chapter, we argue that these outcomes were not inevitable, but rather were significantly the result of failures in Western, and particularly American, statecraft during the 1990s. First, the democratic transition was undermined by the type of economic transition, which Western policy networks promoted in post-Soviet Russia. Had Western influencers promoted a New Deal or social democratic model of economic transition, the distributional effects which undermined the legitimacy of the Yeltsin regime would have been far less severe. Second, the American failure to devise and pursue a strategy to effectively integrate Russia into a post-NATO European security architecture made it almost certain that “left out” Russia would react negatively to NATO expansion to the East. Had the United States followed up on Gorbachev’s vision of security architecture for a “Common European Home,” the ongoing clash between Russia and the West might well have been averted.

The scholarly debate on the causes of the end of the Cold War has placed significant emphasis on the role of communist economic stagnation in bringing about the collapse of communism. This chapter brings a new material factor – communist sovereign debt – to the forefront, and in so doing, it offers a redefinition of the materialist explanation for the end of the Cold War. The global financial history of the end of the Cold War has four important implications. First, it makes the timing of the end of the Cold War far less contingent upon Gorbachev’s rise than previously thought. Second, it allows us to refine the causal connection between Soviet relative decline and the peaceful nature of the end of the Cold War. Third, global financial history transforms our understanding of Western leverage over the events that comprise the end of the Cold War. And fourth, the history of sovereign debt in the Eastern Bloc de-exceptionalizes the revolutions of 1989 in world history and places them within the context of broader global currents that continue to this day.