French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)
Cambridge University Press, 7/4/1996
EAN 9780521563598, ISBN10: 0521563593
Hardcover, 296 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
This study explores the evolution of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), and its interaction with the French public sphere, between 1900 and 1920. Kenneth Tucker examines the triumph of this productivism and instrumental rationality, in contrast with other visions of society and the future. He gives a Habermasian twist to the recent linguistic turn in labour history, focusing on the role of competing bodies of knowledge in influencing the self-understanding and strategies of the CGT. He also goes further to situate the rise of productivism within the social and cultural context of the French Third Republic.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prologue
1. The Belle Epoque and revolutionary syndicalism
Part I. Reconfiguring the Language of Labour
The Advantages and Limitations of a Habermasian Historical Sociology
2. Syndicalism, the New Orthodoxy and the postmodern turn
3. Public discourse and civil society
Habermas, Bourdieu and the new social movements
Part II. Visions of Modernity in the Liberal and Proletarian Public Spheres
Positivism, Republicanism and Social Science
4. The liberal and proletarian public spheres in nineteenth-century France
5. The fin-de-siècle public sphere, the academic field and the social sciences
Part III. Exploring Revolutionary Syndicalism
6. Pelloutier, Sorel and revolutionary syndicalism
7. Reformulating revolutionary syndicalism
8. Toward a new public sphere
Taylorism, consumerism and the postwar CGT
Conclusion
9. The legacy of syndicalism
Notes
Index.