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About the author
Thomas C. Leonard is research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, where he is also lecturer in the Department of Economics.
Summary
The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism
In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors but to exclude them.
Additional text
"Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era represents scholarship of the highest order. It draws on research that Thomas C. Leonard has been conducting for more than a dozen years (pp. vii–viii). He clearly explains and teases out the nuances and various strands of the Progressive agenda. He provides an excellent account of the emergence of these early economists, the evolution and basis of their thinking, and their subsequent propelling to the centre stage of American policy debates."---Braham Dabscheck, ELRR
