(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
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He was born on December 9, 1888 in Bialystok, Poland, the son of Mordecai Perlman and Pauline Blankstein. His father was a yarn spinner and jobber whose livelihood was steadily undermined by the encroaching factory system.
Perlman grew up in the revolutionary ferment of the Pale of czarist Russia.
He received religious and secular training in the local schools, and attended the Bialystok School of Commerce from 1900 to 1906. Barred from further education because he was a Jew, Perlman enrolled at the University of Naples with the intention of studying medicine.
In Naples he struck up a friendship with Mr. and Mrs. William English Walling, prominent American socialists, who arranged for him to go to America in 1908 and to enroll at the University of Wisconsin. At that time John Rogers Commons was making Wisconsin the leading American center for labor economics. He quickly recognized Perlman's exceptional promise and, while he was still an undergraduate, took him on as a research assistant. Thus, "by an unusual stroke of good luck, " Perlman began a lifelong association with the Commons school and with the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He received the A. B. in 1910, the Ph. D. in 1915.
After further service on Commons' research staff, he was appointed a full professorship in 1927. From 1913 to 1915, Perlman served as a special investigator for the U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations.
Later he undertook to write a section of the monumental History of Labor in the United States that Commons was directing. Perlman's historical work, which appeared in the second volume of the History (1918), led to a decade of reflection about a theory of labor-movement development. A Theory of the Labor Movement (1928) established Perlman as the leading labor scholar of his generation. This work, long in gestation, was the intellectual framework from which he did not deviate for the remainder of his career, notwithstanding the changes in the American labor movement and in its political and economic environment after 1929, or the scholarly criticism leveled against the Theory after its reissue in 1949.
Perlman's creative energies went, rather, into the classroom. Perlman was for many years the main force in the School for Workers at the university. Off campus, he was comparatively inactive. He rarely attended professional meetings or gave outside lectures and, except for membership in the Wisconsin Commission on Human Rights from its founding in 1947, took little part in government service or private work as a labor economist.
Perlman retired in 1959. That summer, while in Philadelphia as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he died.
Selig Perlman has been listed as a noteworthy economist, educator by Marquis Who's Who.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
He never joined a political party or radical movement, however, and his advocacy remained more theoretical than practical.
He came to America filled with "certainty" about the dialectical laws of social development. His Marxist convictions soon gave way before the empirical approach of institutional economics, as a result of what he described as Commons' "method of deducing labor theory from the concrete and crude experience of the wage earners. " The evolution from socialism to trade unionism reversed the order of events expected by Marxist thinkers, and suggested to Perlman the idea that experience invariably pushed workers "towards collective control of their employment opportunities, but hardly towards similar control of industry. "
Workers everywhere, he believed, shared a common mentality that was based on a perceived scarcity of opportunity and that led to collective action intended, above all, to control the job. The resultant labor movements were, in Perlman's view, "organic, " genuine expressions of the "psychology" of the working class. The chief threat to job-conscious unionism derived from the intellectuals, the radical ideologues who viewed labor as "an abstract mass in the grip of an abstract force. " In an elaborate comparative analysis Perlman argued that the fate of the labor movement was determined by the interaction of three factors: its own maturity, the vigor of the intellectuals, and "the resistance power of capitalism. " It was in America, he concluded, that job-conscious unionism had triumphed most completely.
He never held any memberships in professional organizations.
He was a shy man, by all accounts, an unusually gifted and dedicated teacher. His lectures were famous for their clarity, wide-ranging erudition, and lively presentation.
He was well-read in Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky, and Georgi Plekhanov.
Perlman married Eva Shaber on June 23, 1918; they had two sons. She died in 1930, and on August 22, 1930, he married her sister Fannie Shaber; they had two daughters.
