Papers by Nicholas Toloudis
Pedagogical conferences and stillborn professionalism among nineteenth centuryinstituteurs, 1830–1848
Paedagogica Historica, Sep 28, 2010
By the time of the July Revolution of 1830, the matter of training elementary school teachers had... more By the time of the July Revolution of 1830, the matter of training elementary school teachers had become important in French politics. But the literature on teacher training does not properly examine the linkage between training institutions and professionalism. The standard narrative of the development of primary education suggests that the July Monarchy (1830-1848) was a key time for the development of secular teachers' professional status. However, if we accept Andrew Abbot's notion of professionalism as conflict over legitimate jurisdiction over service provision, then the instituteurs of this era were not professionals. Not only was the Catholic Church an important competitor to the secular schoolteachers but, just as importantly, the persistence of localism and lack of central coordination of training institutions ensured that no professional esprit de corps would be possible among the teachers. After examining the historical literature and outlining the significance of Abbot's notion of professionalism, I devote the longest section of this paper to a less-studied teacher training instrument of the era: the pedagogical conferences. The conferences were opportunities for working teachers to meet and learn to improve their pedagogical skills and knowledge. However, they display both of the dilemmas that prevented secular schoolteachers from being professionals: the presence of a more legitimate competing authority, the Catholic Church, and the persistent tension between centre and periphery.
Mark Kesselman and the Study of Comparative Politics*
New Political Science, May 16, 2008
... 30 Mark Kesselman and Donald Rosenthal, Local Power and Comparative Politics, Sage Profession... more ... 30 Mark Kesselman and Donald Rosenthal, Local Power and Comparative Politics, Sage Professional Papers in Comparative Politics, eds AR Zolberg ... 34 Derek W. Urwin, The Price of a Kingdom: Territory, Identity, and the Centre-Periphery Dimension in Western Europe, in ...
French Politics, Culture & Society, Dec 1, 2014
At around noon on 27 February 1851, dozens of students gathered in the courtyard of the Collège d... more At around noon on 27 February 1851, dozens of students gathered in the courtyard of the Collège de France in Paris's Latin Quarter.* Clustered by the door of the amphitheater, dozens swelled into hundreds over the next 45 minutes. The suspension of the popular history professor Jules Michelet had stirred the already-politicized student body to a new height of animosity toward the government, and they awaited his final lecture with heated excitement. According to a municipal police report, nearly 1,200 people were in the school's courtyard by the time the amphitheater doors opened at 12:45. Between 500 and 600 students found seats; the others were turned away. At 1:00, when Michelet entered the room to deliver his lecture, cries of "Vive la République!" echoed through the hall. Even before the cries died down, the professor had begun his lecture-a lecture that had little to do with his academic interests. Michelet began by reproaching a series of newspapers for not rendering a faithful account of the previous week's lecture, at which there had been similar crowds and "disturbances." 1 He then proceeded to address the topics that, over the past decade, had become his chief concerns: the crimes of the Catholic Church and his intention to teach the history of the French Revolution to his students. 2 Michelet was only one of many higher educators to become politicized by the 1848 Revolution in France and the conservative reaction to the June Days. This article deals with the impact of the 1848 Revolution on secondary school teachers and university professors (professeurs) during the French Second Republic (1848-1851) and the months that immediately followed its abrupt end. While there is no shortage of studies on the social and political upheavals of this period, most of these analyses treat violence as the main way that
Baltic Journal of European Studies, Oct 1, 2015
This paper tests the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) framework to explain variation in fiscal stimu... more This paper tests the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) framework to explain variation in fiscal stimulus measures across OECD countries in response to the 2008-2010 economic crisis. Following Soskice (2007), I argue that coordinated market economies are less flexible with fiscal policy than liberal market economies. Multivariate analysis across 23 OECD countries demonstrates that VoC is more powerful than three competing theories: fiscal institutions, which hypothesizes more stimulus in countries with less restrictive budgetary rules; debt credibility, which hypothesizes more stimulus in less indebted countries; and political partisanship, which hypothesizes more stimulus in countries governed by the left.
Mark Kesselman and the Study of Comparative Politics*
New Political Science, 2008
... 30 Mark Kesselman and Donald Rosenthal, Local Power and Comparative Politics, Sage Profession... more ... 30 Mark Kesselman and Donald Rosenthal, Local Power and Comparative Politics, Sage Professional Papers in Comparative Politics, eds AR Zolberg ... 34 Derek W. Urwin, The Price of a Kingdom: Territory, Identity, and the Centre-Periphery Dimension in Western Europe, in ...
Political Science and The Capital Order: A Review Essay
Political Science Quarterly
The relationship between capitalism and democracy has been a preoccupation of political science f... more The relationship between capitalism and democracy has been a preoccupation of political science for at least half a century. It has appeared in different forms, but the basic question remains the same: can capitalism and democracy coexist? Through an analysis of post–World War I austerity policy, Clara Mattei's Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism puts the incompatibilities between the two on stark display. Mattei demonstrates that austerity is a not a neutral policy tool for economic management, as its supporters and critics assume. Rather, it is a mechanism of class control. This interpretation helps to make sense of austerity's apparent “failures.” By calling attention to the class character of economic policy in general, Capital Order suggests that political scientists revisit the notions of the structural dependence of the state on capital and class compromise. It also asks readers to take seriously the politically constructed na...
Back to Heraclitus: What Contentious Politics Looks Like When Everything Is in Flux
American Behavioral Scientist
This article examines the Dynamics of Contention research program against the backdrop of politic... more This article examines the Dynamics of Contention research program against the backdrop of political science’s emergent concern with institutions during the 1990s. By the time Charles Tilly had developed his mechanism-based explanatory framework for understanding contentious politics, the study of institutions had come to dominate political science. Although the contentious politics framework has some similarities with historical institutionalism, I argue that the two approaches are incompatible, precisely because of the latter’s focus on institutions. The contentious politics approach requires historicizing everything, including institutions, in such a way that anything analyzable becomes a process. Historical institutionalism relies on historical fixedness and some understanding of equilibrium, both of which Tilly came to reject for the study of contentious politics, in favor of open-ended political conflict and causal mechanisms as explanatory building blocks. To probe the tension...
Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate
This article places the historian Francis Jennings’ life in political history. Before becoming a ... more This article places the historian Francis Jennings’ life in political history. Before becoming a professional historian, Jennings was a high school history teacher and a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. The connective tissue that bound Jennings’ high school teaching career to his career as a professional historian was not the history, but the politics. This article argues that Jennings’ experiences with Communism and anti-Communism profoundly shaped the way he understood the relationship between politics and history. Jennings the historian believed in a sharp division between academic history and political action. This perspective was a consequence of his repudiation of something that Communism and Truman-era anti-Communism had in common: the insistence by authorities—governmental and revolutionary—that politics could not be meaningfully separated from any other facet of life. Jennings’ willingness to toe the Party line and his subsequent HUAC testimony led him to see po...
How Local 192 Fought for Academic Freedom and Civil Rights in Philadelphia, 1934-1941
Journal of Urban History, 2018
While historians have often discussed the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) expulsion of thr... more While historians have often discussed the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) expulsion of three of its locals in 1941 due to their Communist affiliations, only the two New York unions have been the subjects of sustained scholarly attention. This article examines AFT Local 192, the Philadelphia Teachers Union, during its heyday between 1934 and 1941. Using archival documents and newspaper accounts, it argues for the significance of Local 192 as an example of social justice unionism, combining commitments to robust advocacy of classroom teachers in city and state government, fighting for racial equality, and fostering deep social networks with the families whose children appeared in union teachers’ classrooms.
Pennsylvania’s Teachers and the Tenure Law of 1937
Journal of Policy History, 2019
:While the American teachers’ unions are commonly understood to be guarantors of public school te... more :While the American teachers’ unions are commonly understood to be guarantors of public school teachers’ job security through their backing of teacher tenure laws, the relationship between tenure and teachers’ organizations is historically contingent. This article shows how in 1937 Pennsylvania teachers pushed their state legislature to pass what was at the time the most empowering teacher tenure law in existence. Using primary documents, the article examines how nonunionized teachers politicized tenure in the early 1930s, before the New Deal reshaped the political environment. Women activists from Philadelphia’s AFT Local 192 successfully lobbied the legislature in Harrisburg in 1937 to pass a far-reaching tenure law that not only guaranteed due-process rights for teachers, but did so without allowing for a probationary period and without exception for married women teachers. Pennsylvania’s teacher unionists fought against efforts to reform the law in the years that followed.
Labor History, 2019
By eliminating mandatory agency fees, the US Supreme Court's Janus decision has created an opport... more By eliminating mandatory agency fees, the US Supreme Court's Janus decision has created an opportunity for the American teachers' unions to renew their commitment to organizing teachers. This article returns us to the preagency fee era, when on-the-ground organizational work was essential for building teachers' unions. Drawing from archival documents, it shows how dedicated activists from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh reached out to Pennsylvania's classroom teachers to draw them into the AFT during the later Depression years. It details the changes in their organizational strategy, the challenges organizers faced in the field, their successes and failures, and the work accomplished by a paid AFT organizer-Vivian Dahlin 1938. Above all, it documents both the dividends of face-to-face interactions between organizers and prospective unionists and the difficulties of such work in an ideologically polarized political environment, among a group of workers dominated by the hierarchical ethos of professionalism.
New Political Science, 2017
This article is an effort to situate the conflict between the Syriza government, elected in 2015,... more This article is an effort to situate the conflict between the Syriza government, elected in 2015, and Greece's creditors in the context of broader changes in the structure of European political economy over the past quarter of a century. It explains the dynamics by which the leftist government of Alexis Tsipras shed its commitment to ending austerity through the lens of Stephen Gill's "new constitutionalism. " While sovereign power helps show why Tsipras was unable to negotiate a new deal for Greece, two mechanisms of disciplinary power clarify different aspects of crisis politics: market reification, which obscured the role of the European Central Bank, and the reconstitution of truth claims, which led to the attribution of responsibility for the crisis to Greece itself.
The Greek Inquisition
New Labor Forum, 2015
Teacher Unions conflict in New York City, 1935–1960
Labor History, 2015
Abstract While studies of the New York City Teachers Union (TU) generally attribute its eventual ... more Abstract While studies of the New York City Teachers Union (TU) generally attribute its eventual demise to the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s, this article situates the TU in the history of New York City teachers’ associations more generally. It argues that the Union’s fate was a consequence not simply of anticommunism, but of competition between the Union and other city teachers’ associations. In particular, the Teachers Guild fought with the Union for the mantle of teacher radicalism. While the two organizations fought for some of the same issues, the liberal Guild was accommodating to the government, while the radical Union was confrontational. When it came to the Union’s ideology, however, the Guild consistently sacrificed its commitment to academic freedom by collaborating with public authorities to reveal the extent of the Union’s Communist commitments. Using archival data – private correspondence of teacher unionists, minutes of Union meetings, and articles from the teachers’ unions’ official periodicals – this article documents the Guild’s efforts at subverting the Union, particularly at moments when the Union’s political commitments became salient in public affairs.
The Golden Dawn
New Labor Forum, 2013
Instituteur Identities: Explaining the Nineteenth Century French Teachers' Movement
Social Movement Studies, 2008
Recent social movement research has focused particularly on movements whose lack of organizationa... more Recent social movement research has focused particularly on movements whose lack of organizational structures makes their emergence rather mysterious. The study of identity politics has been an important paradigm in this line of research, most of which examines the ‘new social movements’ of the past four decades. But, as Calhoun and others have noted, identities have always been a constitutive
Mark Kesselman and the Study of the French Left
French Politics, 2007
From his early work covering local politics in France to his most recent studies of the French la... more From his early work covering local politics in France to his most recent studies of the French labor movement, Mark Kesselman has been a keen analyst of the trajectory of the French left. His work has always been a reaction against current trends in political science. The analyses of local politics rejected the then-current modernization paradigm. His examination of the Mitterrand experiment of the early 1980s held out for the possibility of a progressive shift in France. And his recent work on French trade unions moved to the local level, showing how labor has dealt with firm-level responses to technological change.
Tocqueville’s Guizot Moment
French Politics, Culture & Society, 2010
Baltic Journal of European Studies, 2015
This paper tests the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) framework to explain variation in fiscal stimu... more This paper tests the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) framework to explain variation in fiscal stimulus measures across OECD countries in response to the 2008-2010 economic crisis. Following Soskice (2007), I argue that coordinated market economies are less flexible with fiscal policy than liberal market economies. Multivariate analysis across 23 OECD countries demonstrates that VoC is more powerful than three competing theories: fiscal institutions, which hypothesizes more stimulus in countries with less restrictive budgetary rules; debt credibility, which hypothesizes more stimulus in less indebted countries; and political partisanship, which hypothesizes more stimulus in countries governed by the left.
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Papers by Nicholas Toloudis