*** I am grateful to the Argentine Fulbright Commission and the Ministry of Education for funding my research stay at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMASS). Therefore, this article argues that Bellamy’s conception of equality involves several dimensions and functions as a background condition for effective (republican and liberal) freedoms that these liberties are not at odds with voluntary equality and that fraternity-understood in Rawlsian terms-makes sense in a free and equal society, as it is guaranteed both by institutional means and by personal decisions.
Although unfairly overlooked as theoretical works, Bellamy’s utopias can be read today as offering insights that bring together and combine key modern ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. From this perspective, Edward Bellamy’s radical and pluralistic egalitarianism can be read not only as a relevant precedent but as a source of sophisticated arguments capable of enriching current debates. In the process, it argues that the Knights of Labor should be considered as the most significant international labour body active between the famed First and Second Internationals, and for this reason that Order deserves to be recognized as the First and a Half International.Ĭontemporary political theories have made significant progress toward identifying the principles for an egalitarian society. It secondly compares the Order with other international labour institutions of the nineteenth century. This article firstly integrates the Knights within the chronological narrative of international labour organisation. In view of the Knights and their activities outside North America this history must must be altered, if not necessarily overturned, if we place the Knights back in. This also has implications for the history of international labour organisations, a subject which is almost exclusively concerned with European bodies.
This article argues that the Knights of Labor must be considered as an international and not merely North American institution. Yet they have tended to view the Knights as an exclusively American, and perhaps also a Canadian, Order. American labour historians have long considered the Order of the Knights of Labor to be one of the most important labour organisations of the late nineteenth century.
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