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“The Burdens of Urban History”: Comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Ira Katznelson
Ira Katznelson
Affiliation:
New School for Social Research
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Extract

How, if at all, can studies of the city help us understand the distinctive qualities of the American regime? In “The Burdens of Urban History,” which refines and elaborates his earlier paper “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History,” Terrence McDonald, a historian who has written on urban fiscal policy and conflict, argues that students of the city have focused their work too narrowly on bosses and machines, patronage and pluralism. In so doing, they have obscured other bases of politics and conflict, and, trapped by liberal categories of analysis, they have perpetuated a self-satisfied, even celebratory, portrait of American politics and society. This unfortunate directionality to urban research in some measure has been unwitting because historians and social scientists have been unreflective about the genealogies, and mutual borrowings, of their disciplines. Even recent critical scholarship in the new social history and in the social sciences under the banner of “bringing the state back in” suffers from these defects. As a result, these treatments of state and society relationships, and of the themes that appear under the rubric of American “exceptionalism,” are characterized by an epistemological mish-mash, a contraction of analytical vision, and an unintended acquiescence in the self-satisfied cheerleading of the academy that began in the postwar years.

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Forum
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Studies in American Political Development , Volume 3 , Spring 1989 , pp. 30 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1. McDonald, Terrence J., “The Problem of the Political in Recent American History: Liberal Pluralism and the Rise of Functionalism,” Social History 10 (10 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDonald, Terrence J., The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860–1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; McDonald, Terrence J. and Ward, Sally K., eds., The Politics of Urban Fiscal Policy (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1984)Google Scholar.

2. A critique of the new state-centered tendencies in American and comparative politics for their conservatism in implicitly supporting a strong state and for being insufficiently attuned to the values of the liberal tradition can be found in Binder, Leonard, “The Natural History of Development Theory,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (Spring 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I take up these questions below in my discussion of the distinctive aspects of the nineteenth-century state.

3. Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 451–52Google Scholar.

4. Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians, 453. Hofstadter observes in a footnote that “my own assertion of consensus history in 1948” in The American Political Tradition “had its sources in the Marxism of the 1930's” (452). Elsewhere in this chapter, he makes clear his own ambivalences about the work of the consensus historians, especially their timelessness, their lack of institutional specificity, and their tendency to celebrate what they describe. Hartz makes much the same point as Hofstadter in rejecting the antimony of conflict and consensus: “So one cannot say of the liberal society analysis that by concentrating on national unities it rules out the meaning of domestic conflict. Actually it discovers that meaning, which is obscured by the very Progressive analysis that presumably concentrates on conflict … The argument over whether we should ‘stress’ solidarity or conflict in American politics misleads us by advancing a false set of alternatives” (, Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955], 20)Google Scholar. At the same time, as Hofstadter notes, “it is a valid comment on the limits of consensus history to insist that in one form or another conflict finally does remain, and ought to remain, somewhere near the center of our focus of attention. … Certainly, American history, even without feudalism and socialism, has been far from bland” (458, 462).

5. Sombart, Werner, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (White Plains, N. Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, “Reflections on Violence in the United States,” in Hofstadter, Richard and Wallace, Michael, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage Books, 1971.)Google Scholar Certainly this is how Michael Rogin, who is praised by McDonald for his “powerful and important analysis of the postwar transformations of theories of politics” (fn. 16), understood the contribution of Hartz. Rogin wrote that he considered The Liberal Tradition in America to be a “thoroughgoing, creative analysis of American political culture” that helps explain these distinctive features of working class formation in the United States: “The uprooted, conservative European peasants who migrated to European cities produced a politics of revolutionary socialism. For those who settled in American cities, that same uprooting migration from farms to cities resulted in a narrow, self-concerned machine politics” (Rogin, Michael Paul, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Spector [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969], 35–37)Google Scholar.

6. McDonald has singled out my own work for this criticism in “The Problem of the Political,” 344–45.

7. Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1957), chap. 1, esp. 72ffGoogle Scholar.

8. Some of the works said to build on the others hardly make reference to them, if at all. Lowi, for example, cites Merton and Handlin perfunctorily, but he does base some pages on Hofstadter's distinction between the Yankee and immigrant styles, and these categories recur in modified form in Banfield and Wilson. Dahl cites none of these authors. Although there are traces of functionalist language in some of the work of the various authors cited, the evidence for the linear transmission of influence presented in these pages is weak.

9. Thus, the important differences between the various authors cited, as, for example, the important ways in which Bridges's and Shefter's analyses differ from Banfield's and Wilson's, for example, are never considered. Further, although McDonald mentions Pendelton Herring's 1940 contribution, he misses out on the more influential 1937 volume by Gosnell, Harold, Machine Politics, Chicago Model (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar, which was reissued with an introduction by Theodore Lowi.

10. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 38–45, 71. On Marxism and functionalism, see Cohen, G. A., Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), especially chaps. 9 and 10Google Scholar.

11. This kind of criticism is mounted with great passion and effect in Gouldner's, AlvinThe Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970)Google Scholar. As part of his larger enterprise of a critical investigation of Parsonian structural functionalism, Gouldner takes Merton to task for promoting an ascetic, depoliticized version of social utilitarianism. He argues that this type of theorizing is a substitute for politics, and that it turns basic normative questions into technical ones. I think it necessary to distinguish between the Grand Theory of Parsons that presents a contentless portrait of the social order as a substitute for a macroanalytic and historical vision of social organization and the middle-range theorizing of Merton, whose tools can be put to use within alternative macroanalytic understandings of the modern world, and of social order and social change. How effective they are as tools, of course, may be another question, but their suitability for use is a matter largely independent of their original grounding within the Parsonian framework.

12. Gouldner, Coming Crisis, 335.

13. Ibid. 335–36.

14. For discussions, see Stinchcombe, Arthur L., Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968)Google Scholar; Elster, Jon, Ulysses and the Sirens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory; and the symposium, “Marxism, Functionalism and Game Theory,” Theory and Society 11 (07 1982).

15. Schlesinger, Arthur Jr, The Vital Center (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948)Google Scholar.

16. Schumpeter, Joseph, A History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 7Google Scholar.

17. Ricci, David M., The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

18. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, pp. 75–77; Bridges, Amy, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Amy Bridges, “Becoming American: The Working Classes in the United States before the Civil War,” and Shefter, Martin, “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization and Disorganization of the American Working Class in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide, eds., Working Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

20. This is one of the central organizing themes of Katznelson and Zolberg, eds., Working Class Formation.

21. Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bensel, Richard, Sectionalism and American Political Development. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

22. Nettl, J. P., “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics, 20 (07 1968): 559CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tilly, Charles, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

23. Nettl, “The State,” 562–66.

24. Tilly, Formation, 32. The Nettl-Tilly perspective on state building and stateness is grounded in the postfeudal separations of property, sovereignty, and civil society, which under feudalism, had been fused in the segmented units of the mode of production (Nettl, “The State,” 568–72, 577–81).

25. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 3, 8.

26. His construction of a baseline antebellum state is thus shadowy and elusive only in part because it is not his manifest object of analysis; and he treats the “patchwork” and “hapless giant” successor without much content being ascribed to the society or to the economy with which they are in interaction.

27. On the former point, see Schmitter, Phillipe, “Neo-Corporatism and the State,” European University Institute Working Paper no. 106, 1984Google Scholar. Schmitter stresses a level of rationality that is neither at the systemic nor the individual level, but at a middle level linking the interests of classes, groups, and sectors and the interests of actors in the state located at organizationally specific places. On the latter point, see Binder, “The Natural History of Development Theory”.

28. Benjamin, Roger and Duvall, Raymond, “The Capitalist State in Context,” in Benjamin, Roger and Elkin, Stephen L., eds., The Democratic State (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985), 22–27Google Scholar. These authors present these dimensions of stateness as alternative conceptualizations of the state. I do not see why this is the case, since the one I have put first can encompass the others.

29. Greene, Jack, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Politics of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

30. Lowi, Theodore J., “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” Society 22 (Spring–02 1985): 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brock, William R., Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. Katznelson, Ira, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981)Google Scholar; also see Katznelson, Ira and Weir, Margaret, Schooling for All: Race, Class and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1985)Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, “Working Class Formation and the State: Nineteenth Century England in American Perspective,” in Evans, Peter, Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and the treatment of late nineteenth-century America by Martin Shefter, “Trade Unions,” in Katznelson and Zolberg, eds., Working Class Formation.

32. Lowi, “Why Is There No Socialism,” 39–40.

33. This point is argued in the regrettably neglected volume, Yearley, Clifton, The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Governmental and Party Finance in the North, 1860–1920. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

34. Laitin, David, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19Google Scholar.

35. McDonald, “The Problem of the Political,” 344–45.