Voluntarism

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Voluntarism. This concept is identified with the early American Federation of Labor (AFL), when Samuel Gompers dominated the organization. First used by Gompers to summarize his view of the AFL's goals, voluntarism stressed the importance of freely chosen and noncompulsory relationships within the union movement. Subsequently, historians adopted the term to describe the AFL's early emphasis on the trade union as central to workers' lives, its focus on economic objectives, and its rejection of most forms of government intervention.

The trade unionists who created the AFL in 1886 wanted the resources and strength of a federation, but they refused to sacrifice the power or autonomy of their individual unions. Thus the federation emerged structurally as a fairly weak and decentralized organization. Gompers celebrated this decentralization and from this emerged his emphasis on the “voluntary coming together of unions with common needs and common aims.”

Gompers's emphasis on voluntary cooperation was linked to his political attitudes. Workers, he believed, should rely primarily on their union and its economic activities for assistance and resources, rejecting the government intervention and partisan alliances that would limit their independence. While espousing these notions ideologically, Gompers and other AFL leaders in practice largely ignored them. In the early twentieth century, the federation entered wholeheartedly into politics, including lobbying campaigns and electoral mobilization. By 1908 this strategy had resulted in a de facto alliance with the Democratic party. The AFL worked closely with the Woodrow Wilson administration to pursue its legislative agenda. During World War I, AFL leaders even accepted government intervention into industrial relations. Meanwhile, local trade unionists also ignored the voluntarist principle, working during the Progressive Era for legislation benefiting workers and forming partisan alliances toward that end. Despite this gap between ideology and political reality, voluntarism remained central to the AFL perspective, and historians have continued to rely upon the concept in interpreting the federation's history.
See also Labor Movements.

Bibliography

Michael Rogin , Voluntarism: The Political Functions of an Antipolitical Doctrine, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 15, no. 4 (July 1962): 521–35.
Julie Greene , Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881 to 1917, 1998.

Julie Greene

voluntarism A term usually contrasted with determinism, voluntarism denotes the assumption that individuals are the agents of their actions, and have some control over what they do. Voluntarism's alliance with action contrasts with the deterministic emphasis associated with structure. By accepting human unpredictability, voluntarism renders sociological analysis more difficult, though arguably more interesting. Voluntaristic theories place issues of decision, purpose, and choice at the forefront of sociological analysis. In The Structure of Social Action (1937), Talcott Parsons develops a voluntaristic theory of action, so called because it includes normative elements, subjective categories, choices about means and ends, and effort.

Voluntarism in social science raises the philosophical issue of free will: namely, the belief that choice means freedom, in the sense of individuals being free to will what they will. Most sociologists—even those of a voluntaristic persuasion— recognize that individuals can only do otherwise than they do within limits (perhaps of a cultural or psychological kind). That is, a residual determinism is implied, even though social action is typically not reduced to physical and biological variables.

vol·un·ta·rism / ˈväləntəˌrizəm/ • n. 1. the principle of relying on voluntary action (used esp. with reference to the involvement of voluntary organizations in social welfare). ∎  hist. (esp. in the 19th century) the principle that churches or schools should be independent of the state and supported by voluntary contributions. 2. Philos. the doctrine that the will is a fundamental or dominant factor in the individual or the universe. DERIVATIVES: vol·un·ta·rist n. & adj.vol·un·ta·ris·tic / ˌväləntəˈristik/ adj.