Eric foner communist russia

Why is There No Socialism in the United States?
from History Workshop -- Spring 1984

It is now nearly eighty years since the German sociologist Werner Sombart raised the question, "why is there no socialism in the United States?" In the ensuing decades, the problem has been a source of apparently endless debate among historians examining the distinctive qualities of the American experience, American radicals seeking an explanation for their political weakness, and Europeans alternately fascinated and repelled by the capitalist colossus to their west.

Indeed, long before Sombart, the exceptional economic and political history of the United States commanded attention on both sides of the Atlantic.

Marx and Engels themselves occasionally sought to solve the riddle of America, the land where, as Marx once put it, capitalism had developed more "shamelessly" than in any other country.

They could never quite decide, however, whether