Mark Pittenger

• Ph.D.
• Professor at University of Colorado

Since the Gilded Age, social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to "pass" as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor. In...

Triumphant capitalism seems nowadays to be a fact of nature, requiring no name and admitting, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, of “no alternative.” Neither American Capitalism nor Transcending Capitalism shrinks from “naming the system,” as perplexed New Leftists once struggled to do when trying to articulate their own alternative. But having...

The Soul's Economy: Market and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920. By SklanskyJeffrey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiii + 313 pp. Index, notes. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $19.95. ISBN: cloth 0-807-82725-8; paper 0-807-85398-4. - Volume 77 Issue 4 - Mark Pittenger

Posing, living, and laboring as American workers, several 1920s reformist labor investigators sought to develop an alternative to Frederick Taylor's famous characterization of a typical manual laborer as mentally akin to an ox. Through their experiences as workers, they believed that they gained real if limited access to working-class psychology. A...

American Quarterly 49.1 (1997) 26-65 --Stephen Crane, "An Experiment in Misery" "Why not find out about the waitress?" the shopper mused as she browsed in the fashionable department stores and glanced through the gleaming restaurant windows of Chicago's Loop. On this Saturday morning in 1917, Frances Donovan -- a sometime school teacher, office exe...

"American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920" demonstrates how evolutionary theories fundamentally shaped, and ultimately undercut, the American socialist movement. Mark Pittenger examines the attempts of radicals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to synthesise the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer with so...

This dissertation seeks to clarify the role played by evolutionary theory in American socialist thought, and to clarify the socialist movement's role in the controversy over the social and political implications of Charles Darwin's and Herbert Spencer's ideas. These aims require first a consideration of the significance for Marx and Engels of the r...