We are thrilled to announce that the annual Leo P. Ribuffo Dissertation Prize has been awarded to Casey Cyrus Eilbert, “Conceptualizing the ‘Iron Cage’: Bureaucracy in Modern America.” In addition, an Honorable Mention has been awarded to Emily Hawk, “The Movements of Black Modern Dance: Choreography, Education, and Community Engagement, 1960-1976.” The Society for U.S. Intellectual History established the Leo P. Ribuffo Prize for Best Dissertation in U.S. Intellectual History in 2023. Ribuffo, a revered scholar and exemplary mentor, reshaped the field during his long and illustrious career at George Washington University. The award seeks to honor his life and career by recognizing the distinguished work of emerging scholars and to advance the highest levels of research, writing, and scholarship. Many thanks to the committee (Tona Hangen, Amy Kittelstrom, Douglas Rossinow) for their thoughtful work.
The committee writes: “In a strong field of contenders, Casey Cyrus Eilbert’s “Conceptualizing the ‘Iron Cage’: Bureaucracy in Modern America” (Princeton, 2024) is an outstanding accomplishment in research and interpretation that has earned this year’s Leo P. Ribuffo Prize. A classic intellectual history that focuses on formal thinkers, authors, and public-opinion shapers, this dissertation also draws business history and political history into its heart, demonstrating an unusual mastery of several disparate literatures as Eilbert intervenes in debates about the legacy of Progressive politics, neoliberalism, and the relations between the public and private spheres in modern life. While strictly historical in its scope, “Conceptualizing the ‘Iron Cage’” brings its readers into a “fuller understanding of our present normative landscape” (19) by presenting the first comprehensive history of debates over bureaucracy in modern America, a history that rearranges such central topics of the period as the New Deal, the New Left, unions, corporations, and political polarization itself.
By beginning with Max Weber and ending right around the ascent of Bill Clinton—although the November 2024 conclusion hints at a strikingly sound preimagining of DOGE—Eilbert picks up the argumentation of Robert H. Wiebe’s seminal The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967) and astutely charts the changing cultural fortunes of bureaucracy, which came to prominence in American government during the late nineteenth century as a means to combat patronage, corruption, nepotism, and discrimination in favor of democracy, fairness, and efficiency. The Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 exemplifies this Progressive-era quest for impersonal standards of governance. Under standards that did not yet have the name bureaucracy—a name that came, Eilbert shows, from Leon Trotsky—those who took up Progressive standards for such structures could claim rationality-driven efficiency, which created the theoretical basis that united New Deal programs, Fordist corporations, and labor unions, the inter-related foundations of post-World War II prosperity. At that very time, however, Eilbert shows that the discourse on bureaucracy changed. A whole cast of figures known for other things turn out to have agreed on bureaucracy: what it gets wrong and how it is undemocratic. The New York intellectuals and other mid-twentieth century figures such as Talcott Parsons, Seymour Martin Lipset, David Riesman, Dwight Macdonald, and Paul Goodman all wrote against bureaucracy in ways that carried Progressive-era critiques of Taylorism, or scientific management, into the era of the organization man. C. Wright Mills then influenced Tom Hayden and Mario Savio, and the New Left made anti-bureaucracy central to its embrace of participatory democracy. The election campaign of 1968 looks different here than ever before, as Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, and Nixon all agreed that bureaucracy was a problem. Unions and corporations followed the same path, leading to a consensus that bridged the divides that had looked central to modern America: Right and Left, public and private, reformist and corporatist.
According to the political scientist Michael C. Lipsky’s important work on “street-level bureaucracy,” as Eilbert explains, unelected officials of the municipal state discriminated against those deemed outside their alleged constituency of affluent whites, and the problem with bureaucracy therefore was its lack of fairness and representativeness. In the program-slashing chainsaw of the Trump administration, bureaucracy is a problem because it has benefited those deemed unworthy by an alliance of plutocrats with anti-credentialist working-class voters. Bureaucracy was and is beset by enemies on both the left and the right. Eilbert’s well crafted, timely, and gracefully written account shows us that the complex disputes over the meaning and ends of bureaucracy lie at the heart of American democracy and its trials.”
Of Hawk’s work, the committee writes: “Emily A. Hawk’s dissertation, “The Movements of Black Modern Dance: Choreography, Education, and Community Engagement, 1960-1976” (Columbia University, 2024), earns Honorable Mention for its discerning and distinctive contribution to U.S. intellectual and cultural history. This dissertation brings varied and innovative research as well as a fine prose style to a deep dive into dance history during the heyday of the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. Hawk’s work brings intellectual history to places the field often neglects, fashioning an interpretation that challenges both the traditional boundaries of intellectual history and certain familiar refrains about African American culture during a period of intensive and explicitly politicized cultural work.
Hawk argues for the vitality and importance of a set of practitioners, as well as thought and culture leaders, in “Black dance” who embraced a concept of cultural hybridity that they believed was both authentically Black and universal in its potential reach and relevance. Becoming what Hawk conceptualizes as a cohort of public intellectuals (p. 11), these African American writers, dancers, and choreographers, including Carole Johnson, Rod Rodgers, and Alvin Ailey, conducted expressly antiracist cultural work that ran against the grain of the perceived, and sometimes real, cultural separatism of the broader Black Arts Movement. They synthesized European-derived “classical” dance training and traditions with African-diaspora influences of bodily movement (drawing on knowledge of Afro-Caribbean as well as African American cultures). They embraced a special mission, very much of its time, to bring this synthesis to African American communities—as Hawk shows in her accounts of both the “Dancemobile,” which brought dance performance to Black neighborhoods in New York City, and dance programs at historically Black colleges and universities. Yet these artists and thinkers also insisted on the universal qualities of Black dance as they understood, practiced, and developed it.
This dissertation’s methodological and conceptual innovations merit recognition. Hawk draws together a varied and—in some respects—unconventional range of primary source materials with a sure command of a multidisciplinary array of scholarship in dance history, dance studies, and Black studies that will be new to many readers of her work who are trained in intellectual and cultural history. Its primary sources include not only published articles in journals and newspapers as well as personal papers of numerous relevant individuals, but also materials including foundation records, choreographic notes, lesson plans, and visual materials (still and video). Methodologically, Hawk’s dissertation brings to the field’s attention ways of understanding and interpreting human bodies in time and in action as physical entities that condense and convey specific histories and well-considered ideas and intentions. It makes a significant contribution to deeper and wider historical comprehension in both traditional and untraditional ways.”
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