The British Labour model in the American Political and Intellectual Debate of the 1920s

The aim of this contribution is to elucidate a theme that is only marginally addressed by studies which, even recently, have dealt with the relationship between American and British intellectuals and reformers (including James Kloppenberg, Daniel Rodgers, Kenneth Morgan, Marc Stears). Most of the efforts made during the first half of the 1920s to establish a Labor party in the United States took the British Labour Party as a model. The hypothesis I wish to formulate is that the political debate of the period 1919-1925 on the constitution of a Labor party provides a crucial litmus test in analyzing the central problematic issues of US political and intellectual development in the twentieth century: the motivations underlying the crisis of progressive liberalism and of the Trans-Atlantic project that was strictly bound to it. My aim is to focus on the interweaving of political culture and public intellectual debate, in an endeavour to trace the origins of a redefinition of the concept of liberalism, which would end up constituting a stronger, but more flexible “binder” than the one proffered by “Anglo-Saxonism”, for the construction not so much of an Anglo-American “special relationship”, as of a “Western” political model which, in the post-world-war period, was destined to assert its superiority precisely in its adhesion to Anglo-American (democratic and liberal) political values.