Both political scientists and popular commentators have reacted to the culture wars of the 1990s as something new in American politics, a deviation from the durable grounding of politics in economic interests. However, as recent work, along with many of the classic treatments of the Populist and Progressive eras demonstrate, American politics has long been infused with both culture and economics. The interesting question is thus not “which one” but rather “how” these two dimensions of political value have intersected through time and what the dynamics of those intersections reveal. The paper uses congressional family policy debates to demonstrate two alternative policy frameworks during the Progressive Era, each with its own alignment of the two dimensions and one emerging as a harbinger to the New Deal welfare state. Through systematic discursive analysis of committee hearings transcripts of the Fifty-sixth to Sixty-sixth Congresses, it assembles two dominant conceptual frameworks of family as illustrative of the two approaches. The progressive understanding viewed family economics as foundational, circumscribing its cultural qualities and legitimating state intervention. In contrast, the traditionalist conception privileged self-regulating families' cultural qualities as more fundamental, only loosely related to economic condition, such that active state intervention into family economics was seen as inappropriate and ineffective. These alternative approaches to state and family relations viewed culture or economics alternatively as foundational or epiphenomenal, if related at all. As history unfolded, the progressive conception ultimately prevailed in New Deal and postwar social policies, which continued to emphasize the economic dimension as subsuming the cultural one. Investigating the dynamics of intersectionality between economics and culture is suggested as a potential pathway to bridge work emphasizing durable economic interests in politics with other work focused instead on the endurance of moral conflicts in political deliberations, implying that in the Progressive Era the parties were not only divided in terms of which set of issues were more important but also over how the two dimensions of political value related to each other, if at all.

Louis Hartz asked some very important questions in The Liberal Tradition in America. One that seems especially relevant in the aftermath of invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and to which I will point only briefly, concerns America's relationship with the rest of the world. Hartz wrote that America's “messianism is the polar counterpart of its isolationism,” and that it had “hampered insight abroad and heightened anxiety at home.” He contended that America had difficulty communicating with the rest of the world because the American liberal creed, even in its Alger form, “is obviously not a theory which other peoples can easily appropriate or understand,” and that absence of the experience of social revolution in America's history lies at the heart of our inability to understand how to lead others. Henry Kissinger contends that, in a post-cold war era, American exceptionalism with its rejection of history, extolling “the image of a universal man living by universal maxims, regardless of the past, of geography, or of other immutable circumstances,” is a kind of innocence ill-suited to successful diplomacy in the emerging world order. We talk a great deal about bringing freedom, democracy, and self-determination to the Middle East, but this hardly seems an apt description of what is happening on the ground. Do we have anything to teach? Hartz, who was quite skeptical about our ability to export the American liberal tradition, might still have something useful to say about our interactions abroad, even in a post-cold war world.

This article argues that the Populist legacy is embodied by the constrained conception of democracy underlying the American state, which restricts popular sovereignty from the economic sphere. Charles Macune led the Farmers’ Alliance according to a robust conception of democracy that insisted on subordinating economic law to popular sovereignty. Macune's distinct economic thought marked a departure from previous antimonopoly movements, but his reliance on an inductive, empirical, institutionalist economic methodology was shared by the founders of the American Economic Association. Populism did not fail because it relied on outdated economic theory; it was defeated because it represented a coherent and credible threat to the established order. A successful campaign established the hegemony of the deductive method, which posited that manmade laws must serve the natural, universally valid laws of economics and that popular sovereignty must therefore be restrained from the economic realm. Without the means to conceive an alternative relationship between the state and economy, the path of twentieth-century American political development has been limited to those possibilities available under a constrained conception of democracy. This article articulates Macune's political strategy and highlights its underlying principles in order to present a more robust conception of democracy and illustrate the mechanisms by which it was defeated.

This article proposes a new explanation for the origins of entrenched judicial review, or judicial review supported by supermajority constitutional amendment requirements. The explanation is based on ex ante levels of economic inequality: Where economic inequality is higher, economic elites have more to lose from the advent of majority rule. These elites will have both greater incentives and greater ability to resist or check institutions responsive to popular majorities. We may then be more likely to see the adoption of less democratically responsive institutions, like entrenched judicial review, where more unequal wealth and income distributions are threatened by majority rule. The theory is consistent with the qualitative historical record from several former British colonies, including that of the United States. It also finds considerable support in an econometric analysis of the presence of entrenched judicial review in the first year of continuous democracy for those former European colonies that had become democracies by 2008, where pre-independence European mortality rates are used as a proxy for pre-independence economic inequality. These findings suggest that the adoption of entrenched judicial review in democracies may have been motivated at least in part because of its anticipated protection for higher levels of economic inequality.

Dartmouth College v. Woodward is taken to be the seminal case in the rise of the corporation. In recognizing a charter as a contract that vested private rights against many forms of state regulation, the case paved the way for the private business corporation and helped usher in large-scale commercial development against Jeffersonian agrarianism. In this “classical liberal story,” Dartmouth College is understood to have preserved a private corporation against public interference. Yet this understanding of Dartmouth College neglects what the actual case was about and erases an important moment of constitutional development. American colleges in the colonial period were church–state schools forged when the church and state were not separated. The Dartmouth College case was part of a wider constitutional debate over what many saw as a public institution that, in the wake of the American Revolution, needed to be “disestablished” from the church. Doing so was part of a revolutionary constitutionalism that would help frame how we understood the relationship between public and private, church and state. This was a conflict about recasting institutions and embedding them in constitutional ideas. While advocates failed to solidify Dartmouth as a “public” institution, they succeeded in forging distinctions between public and private that shape how we think today.

Policing is a prominent but understudied part of American politics. This article asks: Why did some, but not all, American states adopt a state police force in the early twentieth century? The state police force—a statewide policing agency with general jurisdiction over crimes throughout a state—was a prized progressive policy reform for decades. Yet many states declined to adopt the innovation. That puzzle becomes even more interesting given that all forty-eight states adopted the closely related innovation of a state highway patrol during the same period. This article applies diffusion theory to explain the origins of a familiar feature of American policing. Using a multimethod research design, I found that labor-capital struggles and regional pressures for diffusion were most important in shaping the adoption of state police forces. By contrast, adoptions of highway patrols appear to have been influenced by factors such as urbanization and fiscal capacity.

As conventional thinking once had it, Vormärz Prussia and the antebellum United States mapped out opposite ends of a “strong-state, weak-state” spectrum. But several decades of research have rendered both images increasingly untenable. Revisions began on the American side in the 1940s when a group of scholars set out to re-evaluate the state governments' role in antebellum American industrialization. These studies of state legislation and political rhetoric—the first to take federalism seriously, one might say—collectively laid to rest the myth of laissez-faire during the antebellum period. Since then scholars of the antebellum political economy have examined the American state from another angle, shifting attention to the role of the state and federal courts in economic growth. Others, mean-while, have taken a closer look at the federal government's role before the Civil War and discerned interventionist tendencies in the federal legislature and executive as well. The cumulative effect is clear: it has become impossible to speak of laissez-faire in the antebellum American context. On the Prussian side, too, historians have begun to rethink the state's role in industrialization as mounting evidence has undermined the conventional image. Initially, few historians questioned the extent of the state's involvement in economic activity during the first half of the 19th century; instead, they debated its consequences—beneficial or not, intended or not. On balance the first round of revisions judged Vormdrz Prussian policies to have been rather contradictory in nature, some encouraging industrialization but others either hampering economic change or proving irrelevant.5 Historian Clive Trebilcock has gone a step further, however, debunking what he labels “myths of the directed economy” in nineteenth-century Germany.

A recognized strength of modern constitutional democracies is their ability to insure legitimate political succession through the use of elections.For a review of the contribution of democratic theory to the succession problem, see: Peter Calvert, “The Theory of Political Succession” in The Process of Political Succession, ed. Peter Calvert (London: Macmillan, 1987), 245–66. We do not challenge this assessment; rather, we suggest that the process of producing a legitimate leader is a complex social construction with numerous variations. The pathway to political legitimacy can be conceived thus as a passage through a series of “gateways” and “rituals” that, when successfully confronted, confer political authority. The public, the press, and political elites participate in the process of conferring legitimacy on the “winner.” The 2000 presidential election is a prime illustration of this process because its contested nature clarifies and highlights gateways that have been less visible in other elections. We present an analysis of the social construction of legitimacy in the post-election and early weeks of George W. Bush's presidency, including examples of strategies designed to negotiate successful passage through these rituals. Finally, we note the capacity of these rituals to produce legitimate successions even when irregular events pose a challenge to democratic theory.

This essay examines the development of Andrew Jackson's ideas about nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty within the southern borderlands of the post-Revolutionary United States. It argues that he was in many respects a conventional borderlands leader—that is, someone with little sense of attachment to any particular polity, who speculated in Indian lands while pursuing commercial ventures through American, Spanish, and Native jurisdictions. But an especially devastating war between the settlers of Middle Tennessee and some Cherokee warriors during the 1790s forced Jackson and others to articulate their attachment to the United States in new ways. Bitterly rejecting a Federalist model of citizenship that assumed clear territorial limits, they invented a new “protection covenant,” whereby the people themselves, imagined within a brutal state of nature, retained full sovereignty to deploy violence. In addition to a fresh look at Jackson, the article demonstrates the importance of international as well as Constitutional law in the formation of early American nationalism.

Taken as a group, the three commentaries reveal many of the difficult challenges, as well as opportunities, that confront social scientists exploring issues of temporality. Although the three authors take quite different stances, each highlights important issues for further work sensitive to historical process. Here I begin with Amy Bridges's more critical commentary before turning to the responses of Jervis and Thelen.

On the opening day of the 1972 Democratic convention, the women's caucus gave George McGovern a standing ovation. Its first meeting was packed, with 700 female delegates in attendance, exuberant over their numbers at the convention—triple the representation from four years earlier—and their new clout in presidential politics. Of all of the presidential candidates appearing, only Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for president, was greeted with enthusiasm comparable to the warm reception for McGovern. Most of the women at the meeting were fervently anti-war and respected McGovern for his early and courageous stance on Vietnam. However, the size of the gathering attested to another of McGovern's achievements: his chairing of the reform commission that had rewritten the Democratic Party's rules on delegate selection, leading to the huge leap in the representation of women. As Liz Carpenter, a former White House aide to LBJ, put it when introducing McGovern, “We know we wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for you.”

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were convinced that their meeting represented the last great chance to save the Union from dismemberment.See, for example, the following observations by George Washington, Elbridge Gerry, and Edmund Randolph, respectively:That something is necessary, none will deny; for the situation of the general government, if it can be called a government, is shaken to its foundation, and liable to be overturned by every blast. In a word, it is at an end; and, unless a remedy is soon applied, anarchy and confusion, will inevitably ensue. (Letter of George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, May 30, 1787, repr. in Max Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, rev. ed., 4 vols. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937] 3:31)The object of this Meeting is very important in my Mind unless a System of Government is adopted by Compact, Force I expect will plant the Standard: for such an anarchy as now exists cannot last long. (Letter of Elbridge Gerry to James Monroe, June 11, 1787, ibid., 45)Are we not on the eve of war, which is only prevented by the hopes from this convention. (Opening remarks of Edmund Randolph as recorded by James McHenry of Maryland, May 29, 1787, ibid., 1:26. By the same token, they recognized that the constitution they were to draft would determine the fate of the states composing the Union. In a letter to Edmund Randolph in advance of the Convention, James Madison highlighted the dichotomous nature of the task confronting the delegates intent on strengthening the national government without eliminating the states as political entities.

“Rebuilding the American State” was written in the manner of a bozzetto: it is a sketch drawn to reshape interlocking analytical and historiographical conversations and to suggest pathways joining the era of Roosevelt to the qualities and conundrums of postwar Democratic party liberalism. We underscored the key role of what might be called the long 1940s, stretching from the economic and political crisis faced by the New Deal in 1937–38 to the election in 1952 of the first Republican president since Hoover. We claimed that institutional and policy decisions taken across a number of domains in this period coherently recast the state and, in so doing, the contours and possibilities of American politics. We argued as well that old and new institutionalist approaches to state capacity have shared an unfortunate propensity to inventory organizational resources without regard to the normative and practical policy visions that define the content of what it is the state actually is meant to accomplish. In this light, simple dichotomous distinctions between weak and strong states appear as too blunt to sharply etch our understanding of the past half-century of American political development.

In what sense were the 1940s a turning point for the postwar development of the American state? This is an odd question since the decade is not usually considered a moment of lasting political transformation, as were the New Deal and the Great Society. Rather, it is more characteristically rendered as a period of political stalemate, memorably captured by Samuel Lubell's description of Harry Truman as “The Man Who Bought Time.” Yet the choices of the 1940s have been recently characterized by Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski as far more significant than hitherto understood. Out of the conflict and debate over the New Deal emerge, they argue, a rather “crisp choice … about the character of the national state,” one that decided between alternative models of state-economy relationships.

The continuing repression by jurists and scholars of the role of Dred Scott in our constitutional history has given that case a pervasive influence that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged. The following discussion will abstract from the moral embarrassment of Dred Scott in order to treat its jurisprudence as the missing link that connects the underlying framework of Marshallian constitutionalism with later struggles over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Without such a link the Civil War is left as a constitutional silence, perhaps a second American Revolution, separating two discontinuous systems of government. That silence can be filled only by acknowledging the fundamental continuities between our present conceptions of constitutional equality and the system of government that could permit the existence of slavery.

This narrative demonstrates how public and private power interacted during the post–World War II era to create America's unique health care system, a system based on a high-cost, corporate model financed and managed by insurance companies. The article compares the divergent political, organizational, and economic strategies of the American Medical Association (AMA), which represented physicians, and the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), which represented for-profit insurance firms. Even after the defeat of President Harry Truman's plan for a universal, government-managed system, policymakers in both parties attempted to reform the health care market, because most observers recognized that the embryonic insurance-company-funded model had inherent cost problems. In order to defeat numerous reform proposals, AMA and HIAA leaders allied to rapidly develop the market around insurance-company financing. Insurers and physicians constructed overlapping institutions to manage their increasingly close financial relationship, thus creating a pseudocorporate arrangement. In an attempt to control costs, insurance companies expanded their function beyond simply underwriting the risks associated with medical services consumption to also assuming a supervisory role, albeit distant, over health care delivery. When policymakers designed Medicare, they adopted the organizational framework that private health interests had already created, thereby legitimizing the previously contested high-cost model.

This article revisits Nelson Polsby's classic article “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives” fifty years after its publication, to examine whether the empirical trends that Polsby identified have continued. This empirical exploration allows us to place Polsby's findings in broader historical context and to assess whether the House has continued along the “institutionalization course”—using metrics that quantify the degree to which the House has erected impermeable boundaries with other institutions, created a complex institution, and adopted universalistic decision-making criteria. We empirically document that careerism plateaued right at the point Polsby wrote “Institutionalization,” and that the extension of the careerism trend has affected Democrats more than Republicans. The House remains complex, but lateral movement between the committee and party leadership systems began to reestablish itself a decade after “Institutionalization” was published. Finally, the seniority system as a mechanism for selecting committee chairs—the primary measure of universalistic decision-making criteria—has been almost thoroughly demolished. Thus, most of the trends Polsby identified have moderated, but have not been overturned. We conclude by considering the larger set of interpretive issues that our empirical investigation poses.

I wish, first, to thank Michael Brown, Kenneth Finegold, and David Plotke for their thoughtful and provocative responses to my book. Historians and political scientists, even those who work on similar issues, exchange views far too seldom. This discussion, therefore, offers an opportunity to consider not only reactions to my book, but also some of the connections (and differences) between our two disciplines.

From today's vantage point, the radical potential originally envisioned for parcel post is hard to imagine. One historian facilely characterized postal savings banks (1910) and parcel post (1912) as small incremental advances in the evolution of state action: “From legislation designed to restrain harmful practices in big business, it was but a step for the government to embark in business on its own accord.” Yet parcel post marked a dramatic departure in public-sector initiatives: it put the federal government in the transportation business to compete with well-established private firms. That the United States started parcel post so late – it was the last major industrialized nation to do so – suggests the extent to which the service raised fundamental questions about the proper sphere of state action.

For much of the post-WWII era, conservative forces blocked progressive labor policy from reaching a floor vote. With huge Democratic majorities in Congress, the 1960s represented a rare opportunity for unions to substantively alter industrial relations policy. The decade served as an important moment of policy development for numerous groups in the coalition. Organized labor, however, made few gains during this prolific era. Despite labor's central position within the governing coalition, Democrats repeatedly failed to pass their most important legislative ambition, the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act's right-to-work clause. In 1965, Democrats nearly achieved this goal when such a bill passed the House, only to be blocked by a filibuster in the Senate. By analyzing the Democrats' legislative priorities during the Great Society, I show how coalitional politics structured the party's policy agenda and how this ordering affected legislation in turn. With the infusion of new coalitional demands, party elites strategically placed labor's controversial issue at the end of a long legislative agenda, effectively eliminating any chance for passage. Rather than locating all blame with the usual suspects, this rarely studied episode suggests that President Johnson and his leaders in Congress played a central role in the bill's failure. The study provides new insight into the process, and consequences, by which party leaders decide whose issues to prioritize when setting the agenda.