In 1997, Ira Katznelson contributed to the ongoing discussion among social scientists and historians about how to analyze class formation and the development of the American state. He was particularly interested in tying this research to the history of liberalism in an effort to both historicize the generalizations of Louis Hartz and address the question of American exceptionalism. Evaluating the body of research, Katznelson argued that authors had too frequently abstracted the state from its context and then used it to explain the very phenomena that helped define the state's character in the first place. In part to imbed the state more concretely in its environment, he suggested “a shift in angle of vision away from the state as such to the character of the rules and institutions that govern the transactions between the state and civil society.” This shift would also contribute to the study of America's prevailing liberalism, which has shaped the environment of the working class and the state, even while its own particular character has been the subject of some of the most profound divisions in American public life. Using J. David Greenstone's work, Katznelson defined liberalism as a “boundary condition,” that is, “‘a set of relatively permanent features of a particular context that affect causal relationships within it' even as it remains subject to dispute.” In times of crisis, conflicts over liberalism's “grammar of rules,” or it's “bundle of institutions and norms,” spill across the line between state and civil society, because they involve redefining the relation between the two.Ira Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation and American Exceptionalism, Yet Again,” in American Exceptionalism? US Working-Class Formation in an International Context, ed. Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 36–55, quotations on 40 and 42.

Parallel statements through the 1970s and 1980s can be found regarding study of the religious elements in early modern liberal political thought, notably that of Hobbes and Locke. By any measure, the study of religion in American politics, history, and culture, and in political philosophy today, is not only flourishing, it threatens to overwhelm us. This is true not only in the bureaucratic sense of the Religion and Politics Section of the APSA, but in the focus on religion across the discipline and in the use by these political scientists of the work of political, social, cultural, racial, and gender historians and literary critics. And where enough entrepreneurial academics go, grant-giving foundations are sure to follow.

On December 8, 1896, the Supreme Court heard arguments in United States v. Trans-Missouri Freight Association.166 U.S. 290 (1897). The defendant was an association of 18 railroads locked in competition for traffic between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean. By memorandum of agreement, member railways had voluntarily agreed to cease all price-based competition and abide by a common schedule of rates. Attorneys for the railroads maintained that the effects of ruinous competition upon solvency justified the imposition of competitive restrictions. The rates set by the association, they argued, afforded the roads a fair return on their investments, simultaneously offering the public both reasonable rates and adequate facilities. In addition, uniformity of rates facilitated compliance with the Interstate Commerce Act's prescription that charges be nondiscriminatory as to person and place.

By the end of the 1940s, it was clear that New Deal liberalism had changed. Cabell Phillips, a journalist, wrote that the Fair Deal had abandoned a liberalism preoccupied with poverty and inequality and “focused on the creation and equitable distribution of abundance, which now loomed as an attainable reality.” Economic growth had become the talisman of liberal policies, both foreign and domestic. Fair Deal conservation policy, for example, abandoned the New Deal's emphasis on resource planning and redistribution of economic power and reshaped federal land, water, and grazing programs into tools of economic expansion. Similarly, postwar America put production and efficiency at the center of international debates over foreign exchange and foreign aid to war-torn Europe. The place of economic growth in postwar liberalism is often understood to reflect the conservative turn in American politics that followed the war with Harry Truman's presidency and the cold war's onset.

The “tions” came to the United States in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: industrialization, urbanization, immigration, centralization, and bureaucratization. As befits such an impersonal suffix, these developments have been analyzed as parts of a systematic reorganization of society. Processes, not persons, have figured as the sources of motivation in the story of America's transformation from a rural society of loosely connected communities to an industrial nation integrated by corporations, communications, and the regulations of a government trying to catch up with the pace of change.

In his response to my essay on the connection between partisan machinations in the Confederate Constitutional Convention and the disappearance of Democrat-Whig divisions in the Confederacy, Professor Richard Bensel raises a number of interesting arguments as to why partisanship was not a factor during the making of the Confederate Constitution. Additionally, Professor Bensel suggests a different avenue to examine the link between partisanship and constitution-building, specifically state-level constitutional conventions in the South where parties were known to be active and played a crucial role in decision-making.

Richard Bensel's comment on my article “Populism, Paranoia, and the Politics of Free Silver” is, like all of his writing, thoughtful, careful, detailed, and well written. However, I find that I disagree with a number of Bensel's points. In this response I try to clarify areas of disagreement and point to several cases where I believe my argument has been slightly misconstrued, which is understandable given the length and complexity of the paper.

Democracy in America has greatly influenced not only how political scientists think of democratic government, political equality, and liberalism in general, but also how we think of the United States as a whole. This article questions Tocqueville's interpretations of Americans’ habits and beliefs, given how little time Tocqueville actually spent in the South and the near West and given that he all but ignored the founding of Virginia and the other colonies not settled by the Puritans and for religious reasons. Contrary to Tocqueville's emphasis on the Puritan “point of departure,” I use historical evidence from the U.S. Census, state constitutions, and historical scholarship on slave ownership, tenant farming, political participation, and the American colonies and the early United States to show the existence of hierarchy among white Americans, rather than the ubiquitous social and political equality among European Americans described by Tocqueville. His writings actually indicate an awareness of another American culture in the South and near West—one that disregards education, condones coarse manners, tolerates aggressive behavior, and exhibits unrestrained greed—but Tocqueville does not integrate these observations into his larger conclusions about Americans’ mœurs and institutions. Because of the existence of these important, non-Puritan habits, the political institutions Tocqueville sees as facilitating democracy in America and hopes to apply to France and Europe may not have the effects he believes they will have.

Thomas Jefferson is often invoked as an advocate of limited government and a defender of individual rights. This article argues that rights were Jefferson's starting place. Jefferson also believed that American citizens should have opportunities to develop the capabilities necessary to enjoy the full use of their rights. Rather than thinking about Jefferson as progovernment or antigovernment, this article concludes that we must understand the particular kind of government Jefferson desired, the ends he had in mind, and why and how those ends differed from his Federalist predecessors. A better understanding of Jefferson's statecraft not only offers a new perspective on the relationship between government and rights in Jefferson's thought but also how and why Jeffersonians in power used the state to promote individual freedom.

After defeat in the Civil War, the white South used time as a tool of political oppression. Myths of the “Old South” and the “Lost Cause” distorted history and public memory; vagrancy laws and labor regulations controlled the time of the newly free; grandfather clauses distributed rights based on past conditions; and attacks on education, labor, and democratic rights undermined progress in the “New South.” In this article, I show that Black southerners also recognized the political value of time. My source for their sentiments is the Colored Conventions Movement. From 1865 to 1900, dozens of conventions gathered in the South, at a significantly higher rate than in other regions. Delegates deployed temporal rhetoric of the past, present, and future in pursuit of equality and justice by (1) publicly recounting African American history and national contributions to counter white narratives, (2) arguing that emancipation was a new founding moment and the present a time of ongoing crisis, and (3) demanding labor and education rights to secure the future. Scholars of American political development often consider time in studies of institutional change; we should also explore the use of time as a political tool and how temporality illuminates American racial dynamics.

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.

Recently, Victoria Hattam and William Forbath have separately defended new explanations of the development of the distinctive, relatively apolitical labor movement in the United States. Their explanations differ from earlier accounts that saw the failure of socialism in the United States as the result of either the distinctive liberal tradition in the United States or of ethnic and other divisions within the working class. Their alternative view is that distinctive structural features of the U.S. state – in particular, the independent judiciary – played a decisive role in shaping the development of the labor movement. This paper questions some of the shared assumptions of these new accounts, focusing on Victoria Hattam's recent book, Labor Visions and State Power. Without denying that the judiciary played an important role in the development of the U.S. labor movement, I want to suggest a different account of the relationship between the judiciary and the legislative and executive branches.

Beginning in the late 1840s advocates of municipal reform in the United States campaigned to throw rascals out of public office, reconstruct the legal foundations of municipal government, and install regimes of at least modest virtue in place of local government's shameless vice. More profoundly, reformers hoped to replace municipal political cultures of partisanship and patronage with different values and expectations. In these efforts reformers met with the militant opposition of party leaders and their constituents; party leaders too had a vision of what local political life ought to be, and of their own central role in making it so.

Whether secession movements in Europe draw support from the disintegration of the Soviet Union into multiple units based on separate national identities or whether there are also independent centrifugal forces, the “right to secession” has emerged as a pressing question of democratic theory, one which is intertwined in complex ways with the current debate over the foundations of modern democratic society. This essay seeks to clarify the issue of right to secession through a critical examination of a single modern statesman: Abraham Lincoln.

The shifting salience of political parties is a central issue in American political development. From the debates over colonial “parties” to debates over the relevance of realignment theory in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars have attempted to assess the impact of political parties on political development. One topic that has provoked particularly extensive debate is the status of parties since World War II. Scholars point to confidence gaps, realignment, and institutional displacement, among other factors, to explain the postwar decline of political parties. But there are problems: Analytical frameworks explaining decline cannot account for recent signs of party resurgence; frameworks explaining resurgence typically account for little of the decline. Those focused on one aspect of the party system (e.g., parties in Congress) rarely offer insights on other aspects (e.g., parties in the electorate). What is needed is an approach that places parties within their structural settings. If these settings change, parties may change.

The increase in writing by political historians and political scientists about the United States in the 1940s registers concerns about origins – after some major endings, notably of Democratic political predominance and the Cold War. That decade also saw the beginning of serious national efforts at reform in racial politics.

I examine the exploitation of quorum rules in American legislatures from the colonial era to the present. After documenting changing quorum standards, I examine instances where minorities (and occasionally majorities) have exploited them through disappearing quorums and bolting quorums. This analysis allows me to identify the conditions under which quorum rules have been more easily abused for partisan purposes.

U.S. Grant was stumped: “The muddle down there is almost beyond my fathoming,” the president told the New York Herald in the summer of 1871. What had him flummoxed was the recently adjourned “Gatling Gun Convention” in New Orleans, a Republican state nominating gathering that reads like a passage from a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The run-up was punctuated by open combat in the trenches and foxholes of countless ward clubs and party conventions—the so-called “War of the Factions.” When the sitting Republican governor, the colorful and roguish Henry Clay Warmoth, hobbled by a boating accident earlier in the summer, led delegates supporting his candidacy to the designated meeting place inside the U.S. Customhouse on Canal Street, federal soldiers manning the latest in automatic weaponry turned him and his followers away when they tried to barge into a rival group's caucus. Warmoth thereupon guided his followers to another meeting hall. For the next 18 months, warring Republican factions moved in and out of opportunistic alliances with Conservative-Democrats. They divided into rival legislatures, used force to achieve quorums, and arrested and impeached their own senior leaders. If some of the more scurrilous allegations are to be believed, they even poisoned their lieutenant-governor. Were Louisiana politics on the verge of becoming “Mexicanized”—plunged into chronic crisis and political tumult? That was the question beginning to trouble Republican observers north of the Ohio River.

Through the 1880s, Senator Henry Blair (R-NH) spearheaded an effort to erode local control of education by turning Congress into a source of funds and oversight for state-level primary and secondary schools. The Blair Bill won support from an interregional, interracial, bipartisan coalition. It passed in the Senate on three separate occasions, was endorsed by presidents, and was a frequent topic of discussion among party elites. Yet in 1890 the bill failed for the last time, and local control would go largely unchanged until the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In this article we explore the decade-long battle surrounding Blair's proposal. Our analysis focuses on this lost opportunity as a way of highlighting the coalitional and institutional dynamics that work to prevent reform in an otherwise favorable environment. In this way, we contribute to a large literature on the uneven course of American state development.