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For many reasons, the notion of "American exceptionalism" has lost the interest of American historians [Dawley, 1988; Zuckerman, 1995]. Indeed a generation of scholarship has questioned the very premises (the relative conservatism of American workers, the assumption of an undifferentiated and "unexceptional" Western European experience) of the "why no socialism?" riddle [Foner, 1984; Wilentz, 1984]. While I share these reservations, I do not share the enthusiasm with which many have thrown the exceptionalist baby out with the "why no socialism" bathwater. While historians have found it difficult to separate the idea of exceptionalism from its historically celebratory implications and shied away from the comparative muddle of claiming that any national experience is "exceptional," other social scientists have effectively used the American case to draw important conclusions about both the United States and the larger logic of democratic capitalism.
The problem, in this sense, lies not in the exceptionalist paradigm itself, but in its narrow and ultimately futile focus on the pathology of American socialism - a confusion of prescription and description, symptom and disease. The history of American democratic capitalism is distinguished by much more than the absence of socialism, and its logic and limits are not confined to the organization or aspirations of workers gacoby, 1991; Brand and Schmitter, 1979]. By any measure, the American political economy is the clown prince of "corporatism": each of the three pillars of a corporatist order - business, labor, and politics - are very weak. None can claim either consistent patterns of peak organization, or clear and meaningful political ties between those they represent and others. In the absence of programmatic political parties, interests engage in a piecemeal and largely unregulated scramble for political influence and favor. Private organization is pervasive, but also fragmented and toothless [Schmitter, 1974; Wilson, 1982; Salisbury, 1979]. In turn, the intertwined disorganization of business, labor, and politics tips the uneasy balance between economic inequality and political equality implicit to democratic capitalism by magnifying both the political advantages enjoyed by those with resources and the political disadvantages of those without.
Any serious effort to untangle all of this would need to examine both discrete patterns of labor, business, and political organization, and the points at which they cross - in labor relations, in...