The Tragic Pragmatism of the Wagner Act

The Wagner Act established a right to collective action as the keystone of industrial democracy. In doing so, it also articulated a radical conception of the self: that individuals form genuine desires and attain full self-actualization through collective action. This conception ran counter to the traditional liberal idea of selfhood, which took possessive individualism as the fundament of democratic governance. This paper places the Wagner Act and its reception in the context of changing conceptions of the self in American political thought from 1920 to 1950. The Wagner Act derived its conception of democratic activity from a pragmatist and progressivist theory of the “social self.” But its reception took place amidst a very different intellectual context. By midcentury, a liberal hostility to “mass society” and its deleterious effects on individual choice had repudiated the older pragmatist collectivism. In other words, the Act’s core provision—the notion of collective action as central to the formation of workers’ individual desires—was born of a dying moment in American thought. The immediate hostility that the new labor law regime faced in Congress and the courts was a consequence, in part, of that disjuncture.