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Federalism, State Action, and “Critical Episodes” in the Growth of American Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Ballard C. Campbell
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Extract

The publication of Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987) has interested students of the expansion of governmental activity. Despite a large literature on the growth of the public sector, Crisis is one of the few book-length historical accounts of the subject for the United States (Larkey et al. 1984). In this respect, Higgs’s study resembles Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State (1982), which also examined the historical transformation of government, albeit within a limited temporal perspective (1877–1920), and which like Crisis encased the story within a distinct theoretical framework. Skowronek argued that expansion of the public sector depended on the reconstruction of national administrative capability during the Progressive era. Higgs contended that major crises in American life functioned as the catalyst of “Big Government.” Although each author emphasized different dynamics propelling growth, both held that temporally specific disjunctures in governmental history date the emergence of the modern state. Higgs and Skowronek share one other similarity: neither of them adequately integrated federalism or the states into their analyses. Omission of these critical dimensions of the American polity raises questions about the utility of their research designs and the accuracy of their conclusions.

Type
Politics
Information
Social Science History , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , Winter 1992 , pp. 561 - 577
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1992 

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