Stokes Hall South 316
Email: william.stratford@bc.edu
Europe in the World I, The Power of Ideas/Ideas of Power II, America and the World I and II
Modern European Intellectual History, Labor History, Marxism, German Social Democracy, The Second International
My interests concern the history of ideas in the modern era, especially Marxism and its concomitant labor history. I am currently pursuing research abroad for my dissertation, tentatively entitled, Pursuing Contradiction: Dialectics of German Social Democratic Marxism, 1890–1914. Against enduring myths of the vulgar, economic determinism of early Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) theory, I recover how party intellectuals developed a complex body of thought aimed at converting Marxist theory into a concrete revolutionary politics, based on a dialectical strategy of exacerbating political crises to bring about successively more acute crises eventually ending in revolution.
In my first three years at BC, I have written two research papers for publication. The first addresses America’s first Socialist congressman, Victor Berger, and aims to recover the lost history of early twentieth-century American socialism from the obscuring lenses of Progressivism, Populism, anarchism, scientism, official Communism, and American Exceptionalism. The second examines the intellectual relationship between the Frankfurt School’s critiques of “state capitalism” in the 1930s and 1940s and Joachim Bruhn’s “Anti-German” (Antideutsche) critique of the capitalist state in the 1990s.
I have been a Graduate Fellow at the Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy for the 2020–2021 and 2021–2022 academic years. In addition to my scholarly work, I serve as a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society, an international educational organization on the history of the left. On campus, I lead reading groups and public fora as the founding president of Platypus BC. My writings on politics, history, and the left have appeared in Weekly Worker, Sublation Magazine, and Platypus Review.
-“Rediscovering Revolutionary Socialism in America: The Marxism of Victor Berger at the Height of the Second International,” Moving the Social 68 (Dec. 2022): 33–65.
-“The Antideutsche and the Frankfurt School: Joachim Bruhn’s Critique of the Capitalist State in the 1990s,” New German Critique (Under peer review, May 2023).