Capital, Labor, and State analyzes and explains this result by means of the changing and conflicting “policy strategies” of unions, employers, and labor reformers as well as the influence of political institutions in shaping and selecting among policy strategies. By the onset of the twentieth century, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had concluded that it could not rely on government to protect workers. It abandoned the strategy of seeking inclusive public policies in favor of the union shop approach, whereby unions relied on their own economic power to organize employers, control the supply of labor, and manage the terms and conditions of employment through labor contracts. The strategy was decisively defeated, however, by the open shop campaign of both large and small employers in the first two decades of the century.

Thereafter the AFL retreated into a narrow defense of craft unions and skilled labor, otherwise conceding employer sovereignty in labor markets. Labor reformers led by John R. Commons and his colleagues, who initially favored governance of labor markets by industrial commissions staffed by middle-class experts, also then tailored their policy proposals to employer dominance. Later, the New Deal “mounted the most formidable challenge to employers' labor market prerogatives in the nation's history” (p. 260). But Robertson argues that New Deal labor market policies were limited in duration and effect, and by the 1950s employers again had an exceptional degree of control.

These strategies and conflicts were shaped and resolved by the limited authority of the federal government, the separation of powers at both the federal and state level, and economic competition among the states (“competitive American federalism”). From the Civil War to the New Deal this institutional structure, according to Robertson, made it very difficult for labor to win—or even place on the public agenda—policies that meaningfully limited employer authority and thereby channeled it along the path of “voluntarism” and the union shop strategy. The structure not only favored employers opposed to changes in the policy status quo but also, by allowing mergers but prohibiting collusion, encouraged large and small firms alike to resist unions rather than use them to help stabilize production and prices. Even during the Depression this institutional structure limited the extent to which New Deal policies curbed employer sovereignty in labor markets.

Capital, Labor, and State has many virtues and makes a substantial contribution. It is distinguished by its careful conceptualization of labor market policy, thorough research in both primary sources and secondary literature (in political science, labor history, and industrial relations), focused and well-developed argument, and effective blending of historical, institutional, and political-economic analysis. To my knowledge no other work analyzes developments before the New Deal so comprehensively and systematically (a separate chapter is devoted to each of the four types of labor market policy) or with such careful and sustained attention to all four actors—unions, employers, academic reformers, and government.

Moreover, various scholars have emphasized the role of law and courts in shaping labor politics and industrial relations in the late nineteenth century, but Robertson makes a very strong case that other political institutions, especially federalism and separation of powers, had at least as great an influence. Indeed, even for political scientists not deeply concerned about labor market policy, this book should be of interest as an unusually detailed and cogent case study of how the distinctive governmental structure of the United States molded the development of political conflict and public policy.

I have two reservations about Robertson's argument. First, the claim that at the start of the twentieth century the AFL's union shop strategy aimed at a “fully unionized industrial capitalist economy” (p. 66) and “posed a militant, sweeping, and credible challenge to employers' prerogatives” (p. 85) surely exaggerates the potential of that strategy. Although the AFL grew significantly between 1897 and 1903, which generated an employer counterattack, the federation's small size and narrow social base, exclusion from or weakness in key new industries, subordination of industrial to craft unions, and lack of solid political allies all weigh against such a claim, which could not reasonably be made even of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of 1937 or 1945.

Second, although Robertson makes a powerful argument that U.S. labor market policy has been and remains exceptional among the Western capitalist democracies, the “exceptionalist” approach limits his comparative analysis and the light it could shed on the U.S. case. That approach inevitably downplays differences in labor market policies, or any other characteristic, among the other Western countries and does not reveal whether and why the United States is closer to some countries than to others in its labor market policies or union political strategies. Capital, Labor, and State is by no means blind to these issues, but they are overwhelmed in the exceptionalist form of argument it pursues.

Yet, any reservations are themselves overwhelmed by Robertson's remarkably rich and impressive study of an issue that so agitated American politics from the late-nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Capital, Labor, and State is a considerable achievement that should be widely read and discussed.