Books by Chad Alan Goldberg
Available for purchase:
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5821.htm
296 pages | 4 b/w illus. | 6 ... more Available for purchase:
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5821.htm
296 pages | 4 b/w illus. | 6 x 9 | © 2020
What is the role of the public university in a democratic society? This book is about one conception of that role, which came to be known as the Wisconsin Idea. In a collection of lively and highly readable essays, contemporary thinkers and activists revisit the Wisconsin Idea as it has developed since the early twentieth century, with deep concern about what it means today and what it can mean in the future. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from the arts, conservation biology, English, history, human ecology, journalism and mass communication, political science, and sociology, the essays are nevertheless bound together by four overarching themes. One theme is the value of new knowledge and its potential to serve as a catalyst for good government. Another theme is the university’s outreach and service to the public. A third theme takes the form of an enduring question: who are the people the university should serve, and to whom is it responsible? A fourth theme concerns recent challenges to the Wisconsin Idea and the changing conditions that explain them. Read together, the essays underscore the urgent need for a renewal of the Wisconsin Idea. This idea emerged in a particular time and place, but it has more general relevance because the problems it addressed are confined neither to Wisconsin nor to the past; it is a conception that has changed and developed since its beginning but has remained tied to the core principle of service to democracy; and it is a conception that has been severely undermined in the twenty-first century by forces hostile to it but for that very reason is more timely than ever.
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Available for purchase:
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo26032660.html
256 p... more Available for purchase:
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo26032660.html
256 pages | 2 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2017
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions and emphasized different features of modern society, they repeatedly invoked Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity in a context of rapid social change.
In Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought, Chad Alan Goldberg brings us a major new study of Western social thought through the lens of Jews and Judaism. In France, where antisemites decried the French Revolution as the “Jewish Revolution,” Émile Durkheim challenged depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. When German thinkers such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, they reproduced, in secularized form, cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city and its new modes of social organization in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, social thinkers invoked real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of their own wider societies. Goldberg rounds out his fascinating study by proposing a novel explanation for why Jews were such an important cultural reference point. He suggests a rethinking of previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America, arguing that history extends into the present, with the Jews—and now the Jewish state—continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the twenty-first century.
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Available for purchase:
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5509185.html
336 pa... more Available for purchase:
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5509185.html
336 pages | 6 halftones, 2 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2008
There was a time when America’s poor faced a stark choice between access to social welfare and full civil rights—a predicament that forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.
Citizens and Paupers explores this contentious history by analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship—conflicts that were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social activists.
This combustible mix of racial tension and social reform continues to influence how we think about welfare, and Citizens and Paupers is an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.
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Papers by Chad Alan Goldberg
U.S. Intellectual History Blog, 2024
These remarks were originally prepared for the session “A Hundred Years of Cultural Pluralism” at... more These remarks were originally prepared for the session “A Hundred Years of Cultural Pluralism” at the 2024 American Jewish Historical Society Biennial Scholars Conference. The historian David Weinfeld organized the session to mark the centennial of the publication in 1924 of Horace M. Kallen’s Culture and Democracy in the United States.
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Responses to 7 October: Universities, 2024
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The Sociological Quarterly, 2024
While previous scholarship highlights the importance of cross-class alliances between intellectua... more While previous scholarship highlights the importance of cross-class alliances between intellectuals and workers in past social-democratic and labor movements, the growth of right-wing populism may signal the breakdown of this political alignment today. We investigate the extent to which intellectuals and workers remain politically aligned through a case study of political developments in the state of Wisconsin, which pioneered social-democratic reforms in the US in the early twentieth century and then turned toward right-wing populism in the twenty-first century. We draw on Alvin Gouldner and Pierre Bourdieu to theorize intellectual-worker alliances. We then present historical evidence that an intellectual-worker alliance played an important role in the earlier period. Logistic regression analysis with survey data shows continued political antagonism between the state’s wealthiest and most highly educated citizens in the later period, as well as an enduring political alignment of highly educated and working-class Wisconsinites. Our results demonstrate that right-wing populism prevailed in Wisconsin despite an intellectual-worker alliance, not because the alliance broke down. We conclude with a discussion of what these findings imply about contemporary right-wing populism beyond Wisconsin.
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American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2023
Previous scholarship suggests that American Jews have been the beneficiaries of a multicultural m... more Previous scholarship suggests that American Jews have been the beneficiaries of a multicultural mode of incorporation since the 1960s. If so, what explains the recent resurgence of antisemitism in the United States? Evidence of such a resurgence is adduced in the form of increasing antisemitic incidents and changing patterns of cultural representation. The contemporary resurgence of antisemitism is then traced in part to problems of boundary definition and identity that multiculturalism generates. These problems lead to anxiety within the core group about the continuing viability of its own identity and the national identity, which fosters antisemitic efforts to reestablish hierarchical boundaries that multiculturalism has obscured. The article provides additional support for this thesis by means of a historical comparison to cultural attitudes toward Jews in the Calvinist tradition, particularly among the Puritans. Although the Puritans were not multiculturalists, their identification with Jews gave rise to similar problems of boundary definition and identity, which the Puritans resolved by redefining the boundaries of their community to exclude Jews. The article's conclusion discusses the implications of this argument for the relation of Jews to the civil sphere in the United States today.
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American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences, 2022
An explanation for Donald Trump’s political appeal is developed, drawing mainly on Herbert Marcus... more An explanation for Donald Trump’s political appeal is developed, drawing mainly on Herbert Marcuse’s study Eros and Civilization. Trump does not represent the authority of a strong father-leader so much as filial rebellion. His rebellion against the father-rule, now transmuted into an impersonal “rigged system,” permits and even encourages the explosive release of suppressed sexual and aggressive drives. However, this release does not constitute the liberation of Eros that Marcuse envisioned. Instead, Trumpism explodes suppressed sexuality within the institutions of the performance principle, gives sadistic expression to the sexual drive, conditions the abolition of sexual taboos on the creation of new objects of humiliation, and turns a collectivized sense of guilt “against those who do not belong to the whole, whose existence is its denial.” In sum, Trumpism was a betrayed revolution from the beginning; what it really represents is the political utilization of sex and aggression to reinforce social domination.
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The Stranger in Early Modern and Modern Jewish Tradition, 2021
In his seminal "Exkurs über den Fremden" ("The Stranger"), published in 1908, the German-Jewish s... more In his seminal "Exkurs über den Fremden" ("The Stranger"), published in 1908, the German-Jewish sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel provided an incisive description of the stranger as a social type and linked it indelibly to "the history of European Jews," whom he identified as the "classic example" of this type. More than a century after its publication, the essay remains an influential touchstone for discussions about Jews and Fremdheit (strangeness). However, other social thinkers have never simply adopted or reproduced Simmel's ideas in a straightforward fashion. On the contrary, social thinkers who took up his conception of the Jew as stranger transformed it in significant ways. This essay illustrates this point by comparing Simmel's discussion of the Jew as stranger (Fremde) to related descriptions of Jews by two of his contemporaries: the depiction of Jews as semi-citizens (Halbbürger) by the German historical economist Werner Sombart, and the portrayal of the Jew as a "marginal man" by Robert Park, a leading figure of the Chicago school of sociology in the United States.
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Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea, 2020
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Journal of Classical Sociology, 2020
This essay is part of a symposium on Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University... more This essay is part of a symposium on Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and responds to comments on the book by Angel Adams Parham, Joseph Gerteis, Peter Kivisto, and Fuyuki Kurasawa. As all these commentators recognize, the history of social theory at its best involves more than conserving, inculcating, and consecrating the sociological canon or even remaking the canon through the addition of previously neglected authors. The history of social theory also allows scholars to address fundamental questions in the sociology of knowledge, the comparative investigation of different kinds of alterity, and the study of social solidarity and belonging. This essay reflects on how best to address these questions and suggests ways that new research in the history of social thought can build upon and extend existing scholarship.
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Człowiek i Społeczeństwo, 2019
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, a multivolume masterpiece by William Thomas and Florian... more The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, a multivolume masterpiece by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki published between 1918 and 1921, came to define early American sociology. One of its most important contributions was the influential social disorganization paradigm, which distinguished primary-group organization, social disorganization, and social reorganization. This paper contends that nation-building and the civil incorporation of Jews in postwar Poland and the United States were important background conditions for the creation of this social disorganization paradigm. This thesis is supported with a threefold comparison. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America is contrasted to Old World Traits Transplanted, a book published in 1921 and largely written by Thomas, though credited to the American sociologists Robert Park and Herbert Miller. This textual comparison makes possible a further comparison of social reorganization in Polish territory and the United States. Lastly, the essay highlights the contrasts that Thomas and Znaniecki drew between Poles and Jews within each of these national contexts, and the role these contrasts played in the development of the social disorganization paradigm. The paper concludes with some reflections drawn from The Polish Peasant in Europe and America about why the civil incorporation of out-groups sometimes fails, and how it might succeed. [This is a Polish translation. The paper is available in English upon request.]
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“Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology,” in The Anthem Compan... more “Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology,” in The Anthem Companion to Robert Park, ed. Peter Kivisto (New York: Anthem Press, 2017), 159–180.
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Laboratorium, 2012, vol. 4, no. 2: 199– 217.
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Journal of Classical Sociology, 2015
This article identifies two different patterns in how Karl Marx, in collaboration with Friedrich ... more This article identifies two different patterns in how Karl Marx, in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, portrayed the relationship between the Jews and modern capitalism. The early Marx described modern economic life as domination by a Jewish spirit that is internalized by non-Jews and objectified in economic institutions. The Jews did not drop out of Marx’s mature work, as is sometimes supposed, but there was a major shift in how he linked European Jewry to capitalist development. The mature Marx, it is argued, substituted a new narrative in which the Jews, after contributing to the creation of modern capitalism, were then superseded. In addition, the article seeks to explain these patterns: it argues that assumptions about the Jews originally derived from Christian theology but subsequently secularized and transposed to economic life formed part of the cultural toolkit with which Marx and other classical German social thinkers constructed their understanding of modern capitalism.
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Theory and Society, Jul 2013
Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of democratic politics that is at least as indebted to civic r... more Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of democratic politics that is at least as indebted to civic republicanism as to Marxism. He was familiar with the civic republican tradition, and it increasingly influenced both his political interventions and sociological work, especially late in his career. Bourdieu drew above all on Niccolò Machiavelli’s version of republicanism, though the French republican tradition also influenced him via Durkheimian social theory. Three elements of Bourdieu’s work in particular—his concept of field autonomy, his view of interests and universalism, and his understanding of how solidarity is generated and sustained—may be understood, at least in part, as sociological reformulations of republican ideas. By drawing attention to these republican influences, the article aims to show that the conceptual resources which some critics, including Jeffrey C. Alexander, consider indispensable to an adequate theory of democracy are not entirely absent in Bourdieu’s work. On the basis of this reassessment, the article concludes that Bourdieu and Alexander are not as opposed in their thinking about democratic politics as it might first appear.
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Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research, 2012
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Sociological Theory, Dec 2011
The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and earl... more The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is investigated through a case study of one sociologist, Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. Reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism are distinguished and contrasted to Durkheim's sociological perspective. Durkheim's remarks about the Jews directly addressed anti-Semitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French anti-Semitism. In sum, Durkheim's work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews.
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Sociological Theory, Dec 2008
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Political Power and Social Theory, 2008
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Books by Chad Alan Goldberg
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5821.htm
296 pages | 4 b/w illus. | 6 x 9 | © 2020
What is the role of the public university in a democratic society? This book is about one conception of that role, which came to be known as the Wisconsin Idea. In a collection of lively and highly readable essays, contemporary thinkers and activists revisit the Wisconsin Idea as it has developed since the early twentieth century, with deep concern about what it means today and what it can mean in the future. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from the arts, conservation biology, English, history, human ecology, journalism and mass communication, political science, and sociology, the essays are nevertheless bound together by four overarching themes. One theme is the value of new knowledge and its potential to serve as a catalyst for good government. Another theme is the university’s outreach and service to the public. A third theme takes the form of an enduring question: who are the people the university should serve, and to whom is it responsible? A fourth theme concerns recent challenges to the Wisconsin Idea and the changing conditions that explain them. Read together, the essays underscore the urgent need for a renewal of the Wisconsin Idea. This idea emerged in a particular time and place, but it has more general relevance because the problems it addressed are confined neither to Wisconsin nor to the past; it is a conception that has changed and developed since its beginning but has remained tied to the core principle of service to democracy; and it is a conception that has been severely undermined in the twenty-first century by forces hostile to it but for that very reason is more timely than ever.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo26032660.html
256 pages | 2 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2017
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions and emphasized different features of modern society, they repeatedly invoked Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity in a context of rapid social change.
In Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought, Chad Alan Goldberg brings us a major new study of Western social thought through the lens of Jews and Judaism. In France, where antisemites decried the French Revolution as the “Jewish Revolution,” Émile Durkheim challenged depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. When German thinkers such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, they reproduced, in secularized form, cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city and its new modes of social organization in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, social thinkers invoked real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of their own wider societies. Goldberg rounds out his fascinating study by proposing a novel explanation for why Jews were such an important cultural reference point. He suggests a rethinking of previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America, arguing that history extends into the present, with the Jews—and now the Jewish state—continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the twenty-first century.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5509185.html
336 pages | 6 halftones, 2 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2008
There was a time when America’s poor faced a stark choice between access to social welfare and full civil rights—a predicament that forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.
Citizens and Paupers explores this contentious history by analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship—conflicts that were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social activists.
This combustible mix of racial tension and social reform continues to influence how we think about welfare, and Citizens and Paupers is an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.
Papers by Chad Alan Goldberg
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Laboratorium, 2012, vol. 4, no. 2: 199– 217.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/solidarity-justice-and-incorporation-9780199811908?cc=de&lang=en&
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5821.htm
296 pages | 4 b/w illus. | 6 x 9 | © 2020
What is the role of the public university in a democratic society? This book is about one conception of that role, which came to be known as the Wisconsin Idea. In a collection of lively and highly readable essays, contemporary thinkers and activists revisit the Wisconsin Idea as it has developed since the early twentieth century, with deep concern about what it means today and what it can mean in the future. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from the arts, conservation biology, English, history, human ecology, journalism and mass communication, political science, and sociology, the essays are nevertheless bound together by four overarching themes. One theme is the value of new knowledge and its potential to serve as a catalyst for good government. Another theme is the university’s outreach and service to the public. A third theme takes the form of an enduring question: who are the people the university should serve, and to whom is it responsible? A fourth theme concerns recent challenges to the Wisconsin Idea and the changing conditions that explain them. Read together, the essays underscore the urgent need for a renewal of the Wisconsin Idea. This idea emerged in a particular time and place, but it has more general relevance because the problems it addressed are confined neither to Wisconsin nor to the past; it is a conception that has changed and developed since its beginning but has remained tied to the core principle of service to democracy; and it is a conception that has been severely undermined in the twenty-first century by forces hostile to it but for that very reason is more timely than ever.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo26032660.html
256 pages | 2 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2017
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions and emphasized different features of modern society, they repeatedly invoked Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity in a context of rapid social change.
In Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought, Chad Alan Goldberg brings us a major new study of Western social thought through the lens of Jews and Judaism. In France, where antisemites decried the French Revolution as the “Jewish Revolution,” Émile Durkheim challenged depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. When German thinkers such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, they reproduced, in secularized form, cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city and its new modes of social organization in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, social thinkers invoked real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of their own wider societies. Goldberg rounds out his fascinating study by proposing a novel explanation for why Jews were such an important cultural reference point. He suggests a rethinking of previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America, arguing that history extends into the present, with the Jews—and now the Jewish state—continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the twenty-first century.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5509185.html
336 pages | 6 halftones, 2 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2008
There was a time when America’s poor faced a stark choice between access to social welfare and full civil rights—a predicament that forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.
Citizens and Paupers explores this contentious history by analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship—conflicts that were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social activists.
This combustible mix of racial tension and social reform continues to influence how we think about welfare, and Citizens and Paupers is an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Laboratorium, 2012, vol. 4, no. 2: 199– 217.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/solidarity-justice-and-incorporation-9780199811908?cc=de&lang=en&