Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934
Author: Vincent Roscigno
The 1934 strike of southern textile workers, involving nearly 400,000 mill hands, remains perhaps the largest collective mobilization of workers in U.S. history. How these workers came together in the face of the powerful and coercive opposition of management and the state is the remarkable story at the center of this book.The Voice of Southern Labor chronicles the lives and experiences of southern textile workers and provides a unique perspective on the social, cultural, and historical forces that came into play when the group struck, first in 1929, and then on a massive scale in 1934. The workers' grievances, solidarity, and native radicalism of the time were often reflected in the music they listened to and sang, and Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher offer an in-depth context for understanding this intersection of labor, politics, and culture. The authors show how the message of the southern mill hands spread throughout the region with the advent of radio and the rise of ex-mill worker musicians, and how their sense of opportunity was further bolstered by Franklin D. Roosevelt's radio speeches and policies. Vincent J. Roscigno is associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University. William F. Danaher is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Charleston.
Read also Unwelcome and Unlawful or Automotive Service Management
Theories of Distributive Justice
Author: John E Roemer
Equally at home in economic theory and political philosophy, John Roemer has written a unique book that critiques economists' conceptions of justice from a philosophical perspective and philosophical theories of distributive justice from an economic one. He unites the economist's skill in constructing precise, axiomatic models with the philosopher's in exploring the assumptions of those models. His synthesis will enable philosophers and economists to engage each other's ideas more fruitfully.
Roemer first shows how economists' understanding of the fairness of various resource allocation mechanisms can be enriched. He extends the economic theory of social choice to show how individual preferences can be aggregated into social preferences over various alternatives. He critiques the standard applications of axiomatic bargaining theory to distributive justice, showing that they ignore information on available resources and preference orderings. He puts these variables in the models, which enable him to generate resource allocation mechanisms that are more consonant with our intuitions about distributive justice. He then critiques economists' theories of utilitarianism and examines the question of the optimal population size in a world of finite resources.
Roemer explores the major new philosophical concepts of the theory of distributive justice—primary goods, functionings and capability, responsibility in its various forms, procedural versus outcome justice, midfare—and shows how they can be sharpened and clarified with the aid of economic analysis. He critiques and extends the ideas of major contemporary theories of distributive justice, including those ofRawls, Sen, Nozick, and Dworkin. Beginning from the recent theories of Arneson and G. A. Cohen, he constructs a theory of equality of opportunity. Theories of Distributive Justice contains important and original results, and it can also be used as a graduate-level text in economics and philosophy.
Library Journal
Roemer maintains that the work of economists and philosophers on distributive justice can benefit from mutual acquaintance. He first discusses approaches influential among economists, such as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and Nash's Axiomatic Bargaining Theory. He effectively shows that these approaches, if viewed as complete theories of justice, make assumptions that are vulnerable to philosophical criticism. He next turns to philosophers' views, including the theories of Rawls, Dworkin, and G.A. Cohen, applying economic analysis in an effort to clarify them. Although he devotes one chapter to Nozick's Lockean account, he concentrates almost entirely on egalitarian theories but fails to discuss challenges to their fundamental assumptions. Nevertheless, the book is valuable, although it will be hard going for all but specialists. -- David Gordon, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Library Journal
Roemer maintains that the work of economists and philosophers on distributive justice can benefit from mutual acquaintance. He first discusses approaches influential among economists, such as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and Nash's Axiomatic Bargaining Theory. He effectively shows that these approaches, if viewed as complete theories of justice, make assumptions that are vulnerable to philosophical criticism. He next turns to philosophers' views, including the theories of Rawls, Dworkin, and G.A. Cohen, applying economic analysis in an effort to clarify them. Although he devotes one chapter to Nozick's Lockean account, he concentrates almost entirely on egalitarian theories but fails to discuss challenges to their fundamental assumptions. Nevertheless, the book is valuable, although it will be hard going for all but specialists. -- David Gordon, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Brian Barry
This book is a synthesis of work on distributive justice carried on in the past fifty years by economists and political philosophers...I know of nobody else who combines Roemer's mastery of formal analysis with his respect for the integrity of political philosophy and his deep understanding of it. Times Higher Education Supplement
Table of Contents:
| Acknowledgments | ||
| Introduction | 1 | |
| 1 | The Measurement of Utility and Arrow's Theorem | 13 |
| 2 | Axiomatic Bargaining Theory | 51 |
| 3 | Axiomatic Mechanism Theory on Economic Environments | 95 |
| 4 | Utilitarianism | 127 |
| 5 | Primary Goods, Fundamental Preferences, and Functionings | 163 |
| 6 | Neo-Lockeanism and Self-Ownership | 205 |
| 7 | Equality of Welfare versus Equality of Resources | 237 |
| 8 | Equality of Opportunity for Welfare | 263 |
| Appendix: Envy-Free Allocations | 317 | |
| References | 323 | |
| Index | 331 |
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