Labour Politics in the New World: Werner Sombart and the United States

Abstract

One hundred years ago, Werner Sombart offered one of the earliest and most influential systematic attempts to explain why the American labour movement had failed to establish a significant labour or socialist party. Both the comparative approach that Sombart adopted, and the substantive conclusions he reached, have remained central to conventional explanations ever since. This article seeks to reassess these long-established orthodoxies by comparing the United States, not with Old World Europe, but with another New World country — Australia — a country with which it shared a great many characteristics during a critical period in the 1890s. The article considers, in turn, each of the main explanatory factors that Sombart proposed, and demonstrates that a most-similar comparison with Australia casts doubt on many of them.