This book appropriately begins with an attempt by its editor to define its title. Suriano includes here the usual suspects that fell under the late-nineteenth-century rubric of “the social question”: concerns or anxieties about urban growth and poverty, immigration, labor militancy, working women, criminality, public health, and tenement housing. He adds, however, an item (the Indian “problem”) that seems out of place chronologically (the conquest of the Indian frontier had been accomplished by 1880) and conceptually (contemporaries rarely included the issue under the notion of the social question). His description of civil society as endemic and suffocated by state power would only hold true with the narrowest definition of “civil” as having to do with legal citizenship. After all, in this country of immigrants, the number and activity of secondary associations ranked among the highest in the world. Likewise, the depiction of local liberalism as a mainly discursive trend that...
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