Vol. 14 No. 2 (February 2004)

THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT: NEW DIRECTIONS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY, edited by Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. 464 pp. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 0-691-11376-9. Paper $19.95. ISBN 0-691-11377-7.

Reviewed by James C. Foster, Oregon State University—Cascades. Email: James.foster@osucascades.edu .

Eight years ago, a collection of eleven disciplinary essays was published under the title THE HISTORIC TURN IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES. The title’s play on words was problematical. As a description of a decisive change of intellectual direction in mainstream social science research, the adjective “historic” was both premature and a species of wishful thinking. Political science, at least, is “riven by theoretical and methodological, as well as epistemological divides” (Ulmer 2004, 5). Nevertheless, in terms of describing the essential character of a recent methodological shift among some among us, “historic” was accurate. (Many of the essays themselves are thought-provoking. I especially commend to readers of Law and Politics Book Review (LPBR) those by Terrence J. McDonald, Rogers M. Smith, and Robert W. Gordon.)

The turn toward history or, more accurately, the return to history in political science had begun over a decade and a half prior to the 1996 publication of the McDonald collection. Theda Skocpol’s STATES AND SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FRANCE, RUSSIA, AND CHINA is perhaps the earliest example of work that “brought the state back in” (Rueschemeyer, et al. 1985), meaning that her analysis situated historically the ways that the politics of social revolutions was played out within, was shaped by, and shaped various state institutional settings. Stephen Skowronek’s BUILDING A NEW AMERICAN STATE is generally viewed as another “foundational” (Jacobs, et al, p.17, ftn.16) book in a revitalized discipline of political history. No doubt, many LPBR readers are familiar with Skowronek’s analysis of the struggles that transformed the United States from “a nation of courts and parties” to having a more centralized state with administrative capacity. Other seminal contributions to this burgeoning approach are another offering by Skocpol (1992), books by Richard Bensel (1984; 1990; 2000), Amy Bridges (1987), Ira Katznelson (and Zolberg 1986; and Milner 2002; and Shefter 2002), Marti Shefter (1993), and Elizabeth Sanders (1999), and two important journal articles authored by Paul Pierson (2000) and Pierson with Skocpol (2002).

Now comes THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT, another collection of scholarly interventions into ongoing intramural debates over how to study American politics. The collection is a compelling invitation, and an instructive demonstration project. It consists of fifteen essays (by twelve historians and two political scientists). More specifically, twelve of the chapters “examine key moments of transformations in American institutional arrangements and reigning political culture” (p.8). These contributions are prefaced by an introductory essay by two of the volume’s editors, Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer, and followed by two scholarly polemics by, respectively, James T. Kloppenberg and Ira Katznelson. For readers either unfamiliar with, or not persuaded by (or both), the two complementary methodologies that students of American political history currently employ, the three “bookend” essays offer useful overviews of the field. For adepts, the twelve individual studies are significant contributions to the field.

Readers of LPBR would find useful insights throughout this volume. The authors’ explorations of “how struggles over the role of the central state and the character of representative democracy shaped public life” (p.2) are integrally related to the central project of judicial politics, namely, to understand law in action in American (and other) society(ies). That said, six of the fifteen essays seem especially pertinent to Law & Courts Section members.

In their introductory essay, Jacobs and Zelizer identify the “two important methodological approaches to political history—the new institutionalism (which is composed of the subfields of organizational synthesis, policy history, and American Political Development) and sociocultural political history” (p.3). Both approaches seek to situate and to contextualize political contests. The so-called “new” institutionalism—a mode of inquiry as hotly contested as the various politics it seeks to explain (see Orren and Skowronek 1994)—focuses on “institutional settings” (p.6); on “‘bounded change’” stressing “the influence of path dependence whereby state builders were constrained by policies and institutions that had been put into place during earlier eras” (pp.5-6). Sociocultural political history blends “cultural, intellectual, social, and political history . . . [to look at] how ideologies, languages, and symbols shaped all political actors in given historical periods” (p.7). Practitioners of the former strand take their inspiration from work by such notables as Samuel Hays, Ellis Hawley, Morton Keller, Robert Wiebe, Barry Karl, and Louis Galambos (p.24); the latter from the likes of Clifford Geertz and Thomas Kuhn (p.7).

In practice, political historians generally synthesize the two approaches that Jacobs and Zelizer break out for purposes of explicating them. The three essays in this volume that I believe are particularly pertinent to LPBR readers illustrate this synthesis. Michael Vorenberg challenges “the historiography of Civil War constitutionalism” (p.122). Criticizing both the conventional scholarly view that sees the U.S. Constitution as a social anchor during the sea changes wrought by the Civil War and its aftermath, and the view of some who portray the Civil War era as transformative in terms of state-building, Vorenberg argues that the most “revolutionary constitutional change wrought by the war [was] the awakening of public awareness that the Constitution, specifically through its amending device, could be an instrument of reform” (p.123). His analysis of this political development entails examining how group alliances drove debates over the Thirteenth Amendment and, in the process, brought amending the Constitution in to the political mainstream.

Sven Beckert also discusses political clashes precipitated by a constitutional amendment—an 1877 proposed amendment to the New York constitution that would have created a Gotham board of finance elected only by property tax payers and rent payers. The proposal, which eventually foundered, would have disenfranchised “[a]s many as 69 percent of all potential voters” in New York City (p.151). The amendment’s appearance marked “a decisive moment in the emergence of a self-conscious bourgeoisies” (p.147). “Disenchantment with democracy thus became a hallmark of the late-nineteenth-century economic elite. This may surprise those who assume that the unfolding of capitalism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and democracy are unproblematically correlated or those who hold the United States to be a truly ‘exceptional’ society” (p.165).

The third essay I have singled out is by Michael Willrich. His fascinating contribution adds an important dimension to Skowronek’s influential argument by bridging, one might say, the transformation of the United States from a nation of courts and parties to the administrative state as we know it. Willrich focuses on the displacement of traditional justice-of-the-peace courts with more professionalized municipal courts during the Progressive Era. Making the “case for courts,” as the title of his essay has it, Willrich argues against the conventional view of courts as obstacles to reform, that “in America . . . legal institutions served as preeminent sites for the production of urban social knowledge and social governance well into the twentieth century” (pp.213-214).

The keynote of this volume comes at the end, in the two essays by James T. Kloppenberg and Ira Katznelson. That keynote has twin themes, both captured by Katznelson’s vivid imagery of “boundary crossing” (p.383). First, Kloppenberg advocates a “multidimensional and essentially contested concept of democracy”—contra the monocular vision of, say Louis Hartz (pp.350-356). For Kloppenberg, the study of democracy’s “ceaseless wrangling” requires the “continual cross-fertilization of history and political science . . . between the historian’s interest in the particular and the social scientist’s quest for the universal” (pp.351, 354). Second, Katznelson offers Richard Hofstadter’s call for a “new analytical history” as a “trustworthy guide” (pp.382, 394). What manner of “guide”? “[D]raw on social scientific questions, propositions, theories, and methods without any sacrifice of [our] grounding in the particularities of time and place” (p.383). Katznelson situates the field of American Political Development (APD), revitalized along Hofstadter’s suggested lines, in terms that are strikingly familiar to any student of judicial politics: “APD sits alongside rational choice, grounded in microeconomics and game theory, and behavioral studies, an extension of psychology, as one of the three main players in the discipline’s studies of American politics” (p.385).

Boundary crossing: today’s student of judicial politics must be both a fox and a hedgehog (Berlin 1966), simultaneously knowing many things and one big thing—and understanding the complex, contingent dynamics between these social phenomena. And there are instructive examples of such scholarship, of “political jurisprudence” (Smith 1988), close to home. The two collections of “institutionalist” essays edited by Cornell Clayton and Howard Gillman (1999) cited below are useful places to start. Read in conjunction with the Jacobs, Novak, and Zelizer volume reviewed here, there is much to inform a graduate seminar and/or to sustain a research program.

REFERENCES:

Bensel, Richard F. 1984. SECTIONALISM AND AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT, 1880-1980. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Bensel, Richard F. 1990. YANKEE LEVIATHAN: THE ORIGINS OF CENTRAL STATE AUTHORITY IN AMERICA, 1859-1877. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Bensel, Richard F. 2000. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AMERICAN INDUSTRIALIZATION, 1877-1900. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Berlin, Isaiah. 1966. THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX: AN ESSAY ON TOLSTOY’S VIEW OF HISTORY. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Bridges, Amy. 1987. A REPUBLIC IN THE CITY: ANTEBELLUM NEW YORK AND THE ORIGINS OF MACHINE POLITICS. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Clayton, Cornell W. and Howard Gillman. 1999. SUPREME COURT DECISION-MAKING: NEW INSTITUTIONALIST APPROACHES. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Gillman, Howard and Cornell Clayton. 1999. THE SUPREME COURT IN AMERICAN POLITICS: NEW INSTITUTIONALIST INTERPRETATIONS. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Katznelson, Ira and Helen V. Milner. 2002. “American Political Science: The Discipline’s State and the State of the Discipline.” POLITICAL SCIENCE: STATE OF THE DISCIPLINE. Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner, eds. New York, NY and Washington, D.C.: Norton and American Political Science Association

Katznelson, Ira and Martin Shefter (eds.). 2002. SHAPED BY WAR AND TRADE: INTERNATIONAL INFLUENCES ON AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Katznelson, Ira and Aristide R. Zolberg. 1986. WORKING CLASS FORMATION: NINETEENTH CENTURY PATTERNS IN WESTERN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

McDonald, Terrence, J., (ed.). 1996. THE HISTORIC TURN IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Pierson, Paul. 2000. “Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes.” 14 STUDIES IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT 76.

Pierson, Paul and Theda Skocpol. 2002. “Historical Institutionalism in Contemporary Political Science.” POLITICAL SCIENCE: STATE OF THE DISCIPLINE. Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner, eds. New York, NY and Washington, D.C.: Norton and American Political Science Association.

Orren, Karen and Stephen Skowronek. 1994. “Beyond the Iconography of Order: Notes for a `New Institutionalism.’” THE DYNAMICS OF AMERICAN POLITICS: APPROACHES AND INTERPRETATIONS. Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson, eds. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Theda Skocpol, and Peter Evans. 1985. BRINGING THE STATE BACK IN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sanders, Elizabeth. 1999. ROOTS OF REFORM: FARMERS, WORKERS AND THE AMERICAN STATE1877-1917. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Shefter, Martin. 1993. POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE STATE. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Skocpol, Theda. 1979. STATES AND SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FRANCE, RUSSIA, AND CHINA. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Skocpol, Theda. 1992. PROTECTING SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS: THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF SOCIAL POLICY IN THE UNITED STATES. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Skowronek, Stephen. 1982. BUILDING A NEW AMERICAN STATE: THE EXPANSION OF NATIONAL ADMINISTRATIVE CAPACITIES, 1877-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Rogers M. 1988. “Political Jurisprudence, the `New Institutionalism,’ and the Future of PublicLaw.” 82 AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW 89.

Ulmer, Sidney. 2004. “Remarks from S. Sidney Ulmer from the Lifetime Achievement Award Presentation. LAW & COURTS. http://www.law.nyu.edu/lawcourts/pubs/newsletter/winter04.pdf 5-8.

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Copyright 2004 by the author, James C. Foster.