When the Past is Not Prologue: The Wagner Act Debates and the Limits of American Political Science

The debates over the Wagner Act could have represented a key moment in the ongoing development of the discipline of American Political Science, as neo-Marxist and related class analyses of American politics began to be taken seriously. Instead the debates have been forgotten, and neo-Marxism remains as marginalized as ever. This article examines how one influential scholar, Theda Skocpol, successfully characterized neo-Marxism as hopelessly reductionist and functionalist. Despite successful rebuttals to Skocpol's arguments by Michael Goldfield in particular, the discipline proved more than willing to continue to ignore what neo-Marxism had to offer.