The story of American political thought has been told in many different ways. Three genres stand out. The first is written within the larger framework of intellectual history and takes the form of anthology and narrative summary. Among its most prominent features are an eclecticism of sources (from Roger Williams to Walt Whitman to Erich Fromm) and a heavy emphasis on the period from the first New England settlements through the victory of Jeffersonian democracy. A second form is constitutionalist. Charting the major struggles over legal and institutional relationships through time, this perspective gives prominence to landmark court decisions and articulations of major constitutional issues by party and political leaders. As articulated in the late nineteenth century, it examines the major forms of constitutionalist thinking that lie behind these constitutional and institutional struggles. The third genre, I label populist-progressive. Here, the story of American political thought is Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Southwestern Political Science Association annual meeting, March 23–26, 1988, Houston, Texas, and at the American Politics Group meeting in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, January 4–6, 1988.

The period roughly encompassing the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century has been described as one in which America embarked on a “search for order.” It has also been characterized as a period that witnessed the genesis of the modern American administrative state. The time was one of profound change, marking the transition from a principally agrarian to an industrial society and economy. Positions on the most contentious issues of the era tended to fall along sectional lines that reflected regional disagreement on the scope, as well as the propriety, of that transition. Even after appeals to the “bloody shirt” had waned, the fundamentally sectional nature of the national debate over these issues, and the state's capacity to deal with them, remained.

There is perhaps no topic that has generated more sustained interest and controversy in the United States during the past three decades than the public policies called “entitlements.” From the Great Society innovations of the 1960s to the guaranteed income plan of the 1970s to the “health security” proposal of the early 1990s, debate over the issue of which U.S. citizens should be entitled to what kind of national-level benefits has been a constant in American political life. Though consensus has occasionally been reached, moments of accord have been fragile and fleeting. Late 1995 and early 1996 found both President William Clinton and a large, bipartisan majority of Congress targeting poor Americans and their benefits, advocating an “end to welfare as we know it.” Yet interbranch disagreement over the way that “welfare” reform should be implemented reached such heights that the annual U.S. budget development process broke down, resulting in repeated shutdowns of government agencies and the threat that, for the first time in the history of the American nation, the United States would default on its obligations to its creditors.

In this article, I trace the historical lineage and dynamic processes leading to the creation of the Southern slaveholding Supreme Court of antebellum America. Supported by case studies of several Jeffersonian and Jacksonian era legislative battles over judicial reform, I argue that the complex, multistage creation of the Southern slaveholding Court—the Court that decided cases such as Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and Ableman v. Booth—was the inadvertent result of certain institutional strictures concerning the size of the Court and the geographic organization of the federal circuit system. In so doing, I illustrate how the creation of a fundamentally Jacksonian but also disproportionately Southern and undeniably slaveholding Court was not simply about who was appointed but about the structures that determined who might be appointed, who could be appointed, and who should be appointed. It was these considerations, in turn, that shaped not only the makeup and composition of the Court during this tumultuous period of American political development but also the very character of the momentous decisions it was likely to make.

In the late nineteenth century, public outdoor relief came under severe and sustained attack from reformers. Municipal reformers attacked it as a source of machine patronage and corruption, and charity reformers saw it as the cause of pauperism and moral turpitude among the poor. But in New York City, the critical decision to cut the municipal program came not from the reformers, but from the city's Democratic machine, Tammany Hall itself. In December 1876, the machine administration of Tammany Mayor William Wickham and Boss John Kelly terminated municipal outdoor relief funding for 1877, except for the distribution of coal. The previous “reform” administration had, by contrast, kept the program intact.

In 1908, the Supreme Court struck down Section 10 of the Erdman Act of 1898 in the notorious case of Adair v. United States.1 Section 10 made it a misdemeanor for employers in the railroad industry to blacklist members of railroad unions or to require employees to sign “yellow-dog” contracts, that is, contracts promising that the employee would not join a labor union. The Court ruled that Section 10 was unconstitutional because it interfered with the “liberty of contract” allegedly protected by the United States Constitution.

To be taken seriously is the hope of a serious author, next to which being agreed with is a petty affair. If this sentiment sounds inhuman, and too good to be true, it is because it abstracts from the desire for recognition, which can take the form of desire for political power. Sheldon Wolin takes my book Taming the Prince1 seriously as—as if it were!—an important political influence. He flatters the all-too-human side of my soul by fastening on the book's conclusion and working backwards from that.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, the book remains more controversial than ever. As Philip Abbott has recently catalogued, the book has been attacked from literally every direction possible. Sean Wilentz summarizes the feelings of many when he argues that Hartz should be forgotten, or at best considered “a figure of historical interest.” Hartz has been accused of being loose with the facts, inappropriate in comparing America to continental Europe, and blind to other perspectives such as race or morality. Even those who take him seriously argue his theory is anything but a complete explanation of American political development and thought, but rather one that at best represents a mere slice of America's “multiple traditions.” Finally, of course, there is a very large and influential school of American political development that argues ideas have very little role at all in explaining politics, and for adherents to this way of thinking, Hartz is simply irrelevant. For many members of the American political development scholarly community, there is simply no room left for taking Hartz's thesis seriously any more, if there ever was.

What explains the development of repressive employer coordination? Classic historical American business and labor literature focuses on institutions of labor repression and employer associations, but little systematic examination of such associations exists, particularly during the interwar period. Similarly, recent political science literature on the origins of industrial institutions underemphasizes the importance of repressive employer associations. I use new quantitative subnational evidence from the U.S. interwar period, with data from the open-shop movement in the United States at the local level after World War I. I test a variety of families of hypotheses regarding variation in repressive employer coordination, with specific data measuring the threat posed by organized labor. I find that such threats posed by unions are correlated to repressive employer associations. The results have implications for understanding local-level variation in the business repression of labor movements in the early twentieth century and contribute to our understanding of labor repressive institutions and the incentives of firms to collectively act.

The traditional view of the 1920s as a decade of economic avarice, political corruption, and self-indulgence has been replaced by a more nuanced interpretation. Innovative approaches to the use of governmental power which thrived in the Progressive era were carried forward into the Age of Normalcy, and new dimensions were added, sometimes with quite interesting results. Moreover, the ideas and institutions tested in the 1920s were then at hand for expanded use and further modification in the next cycle of major reform, in the 1930s.

Social scientists have long been interested in the development of education. Mustafa Emirbayer and Clyde Barrow, whose essays appear in this volume, have many illustrious predecessors including political scientists Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir; economists Max Weber, Albert Fishlow, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, and Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin; and sociologists Emile Durkheim, John Meyer, Martin Trow, Randall Collins, Joseph Ben David, Julia Wrigley, and Margaret Archer.

The judicial role in the construction of the twentieth-century state was decisively structured by the interaction of developments in jurisprudence and by changes in the organization of the regulation of economic activity. Individual judges brought their backgrounds and political predispositions to the task as well, and we will gain a full understanding of the judicial role in structuring the state only by integrating biography, jurisprudence, and political economy. This article examines the work of Justice Thurgood Marshall in constructing the post-New Deal settlement of the relations among people in their capacity as consumers, people in their capacity as workers, and capital. That settlement was expressed in legal forms that departed from the common law doctrines that had for two centuries provided one of the legitimating ideologies of social relations. With the construction of the administrative state came the need to reconstitute not only the legal structures that supported the agencies of government, but also the ideological structures that explained the legitimacy of these innovations. While legal academics articulated carefully thought out defenses of the administrative state, judges provided the citizenry with less developed but, perhaps, more easily understood ideologies. Justice Marshall's work in areas of labor law and civil procedure provides insight into the dimensions of the legal legitimation of the administrative state, while his unique experience as a lawyer and his place within the Court illuminate the importance of biographical factors in a full explanation of the construction of the legal structures of the administrative state.

I seek to counter a view commonly held by scholars that the Burger Court is pragmatic in its constitutional choices in contrast to the Warren Court, which is viewed as ideological. I propose a methodology to study the effects of process values and rights values held by members of the Burger Court on their decision making. To view its decision making as pragmatic, without awareness of underlying values of process and rights, results in an oversimplified view and leads to the unwarranted conclusion that the Burger Court is case-specific in making constitutional choices. I limit my discussion to separation of church and state cases, primarily in the area of aid to parochial education, because traditionally scholars have emphasized the pragmatic nature of Burger Court choices in this area. A finding of consistency of values in justices' orientations in this area suggests that the methodology reported here might have general utility in the study of Supreme Court decision making.

Liberal political analysis is ordinarily based on a sharp distinction between domestic and international politics, and an assumption that domestic politics is the proper arena for democratic self-determination. But self-governing citizens have never exhausted the cast of characters who populate liberal states. Living alongside them there are often domestic aliens – permanent residents who are subject to the law, and may be protected by it, but who do not participate in making it. Refugees and remnants also inhabit liberal states. Whether citizens or not, they tend to bear the historical consciousness of victims or potential victims wherever they may live. A correlative fact is that in many now-liberal societies the meaning of citizenship itself is indelibly marked by the “missing” – the emigrant and the exile, the expelled and the extinct. Such identities – and the historical presence or absence of individuals who claim them – are generally regarded as messy details in the state-centered conceptual framework that dominates liberal political thought.

This analysis explores why a farmers-led social movement mobilized against federal government policy in the late twentieth century. It also explores where that revolt may lead and whether it was different from previous farm protests. Was it, as populist rhetoric of the 1980s charged, a reflection of structural changes in farmers' own agricultural production systems? Or was it simply a case of farmers wanting more federal income support? The distinction is important because the answer determines producer commitment to the central agricultural development premises of U.S. public policy. Farmers always have promoted the agrarian value of hardworking independence. Yet they also have been caught, especially since midcentury, in a cycle of farm industrialization. Technical innovation and federal agricultural policy have combined to make industrialization unavoidable for individual farm operators who want to remain as full-time, commercial growers. Has there been a link between the dissenting politics of farm protest and industrialized agricultural change? This linkage is the subject of concern in the following pages. Why industrialization might well have caused policy dissent is examined first.

Near the end of his important and challenging essay, Martin J. Sklar briefly considers an alternative path of development to the corporate-liberal reorganization that he identifies with the era between the 1890s and 1916. “A statist resolution might have taken hold,” Sklar writes,

had the American capitalist class, or its corporate sector, been less developed in its market powers and proficiencies and hence more dependent on the state for its wealth and power; had the liberal republican tradition of the supremacy of society over the state (the sovereignty of the people) been weaker; had the working class been less imbued with that republican ideology, less developed, and hence more inclined to statist rather than associative-constitutional ideas and principles; had the corporate sector of the capitalist class sought and found alliance with a statist-oriented sector of the working class or a statist-oriented petty bourgeoisie, especially in the farm and rural population; had the corporate sector of the capitalist class sought and found alliance with civilian or military professionals, technicians, administrators, and managers—or a “managerial class”—looking to the state as a base of power. (p. 210)

Traditional accounts of presidential hostility toward judicial authority rely on the federal judiciary's structure for explanatory leverage, focusing particularly on the court's potential to reach countermajoritarian rulings. By evaluating executive-judicial relations during the early republic, that is, the years prior to the Civil War, I suggest that anti-court sentiment stemmed not only from antipathy toward unelected judges or the seemingly undemocratic possibilities of judicial review, but also from a civic republican apprehension toward opposition. I show, first, that Jefferson, Jackson, and Van Buren considered open and stable opposition to be a harbinger of civil unrest and strove to preserve unity among the federal branches, and second, that this fear and corresponding aspiration toward unity underlay these presidents' concerns about judicial authority. As such, I argue that the presumption of the judiciary's countermajoritarian difficulty could be understood as a political development rather than a structural anomaly of the Constitution. In making this claim, I highlight the power of entrepreneurial presidents to drive conceptual change. Furthermore, focusing on the politics of opposition as a key element in the development of presidential-judicial relations broadens how we think of civic republicanism as an organizing political principle, defining not only early American political culture and electoral politics, but also influencing matters of governance.

How powerful are national security bureaucrats? In the United States, they seem to be more than mere administrators, while remaining subordinate to elected politicians. However, despite a rich literature in American political development on bureaucratic autonomy across a variety of policy areas, national security remains undertheorized. Although the origins and evolution of the national security bureaucracy have received substantial scholarly attention, the individuals within this bureaucracy have not. In this article, I examine a case study of how one of these individuals bluntly ran up against the limits of his power. After the Second World War, J. Edgar Hoover's plans for a “World-Wide Intelligence Service” were swiftly shot down by the Truman administration, which adopted a sharp distinction between domestic and global intelligence instead. I pin this abject defeat on three interrelated factors: the resistance of President Truman, the array of bureaucratic competitors emerging from the Second World War, and deep aversion among key decision makers to the prospect of an “American gestapo.” While tracing this historical narrative, I also challenge accounts of Hoover as a near-omnipotent Washington operator, question the extent to which war empowers national security bureaucrats, and foreground the role of analogies in shaping the national security state.