The Midlife Crisis of
the New Political History

Paula Baker

Middle age has crept up on the new political history, bringing with it the infirmities we might expect. The essays by Ronald P. Formisano and Mark Voss-Hubbard are one indication of restlessness with the questions, methods, and interpretive breakthroughs that gave shape to the field when it came of age in the 1960s. The characteristic approach of the new political history—attention to systematic regularities in patterns of political behavior, the use of social science methods and concepts, a focus on parties and voters as the measurable links between popular political behavior and policy—seems arthritic and slow. This is true not only because age caught up with the endeavor but also because its established practitioners did not produce many heirs to extend or revitalize the field. During the heyday of social history and the beginning of the ascent of cultural history in the late 1970s and 1980s, political history was hardly a magnet for ambitious graduate students. But immigration has filled the demographic gap. As interest in politics grew in recent years, scholars who worked in other specialties and lacked an immersion in the family lore of the new political history have entered the field. New work by such scholars rarely engages the central questions of the new political history—indeed, it often takes hunks of the field's arguments as given. Instead, its questions often return to social and cultural historians' concerns with gender, race, and class: politics is a way to get at those relationships, not the thing to be explained. While spirited disputes over specific issues carried on, neither the established practitioners nor their few students significantly challenged the middle-aged political history's central assumptions, which social and cultural historians in turn usually either bypassed or absorbed.	1
A reassessment of how new work on gender, race, class, and consumption might reshape what has become traditional political history is therefore welcome. The essays by Formisano and Voss-Hubbard begin to do this. Formisano discusses the problems that new work poses for one staple argument of the new political history—the dominance of party and partisanship in nineteenth-century government and public life. Formisano stops short of suggesting that political history do the equivalent of buying a red sports convertible; while intrigued, he remains skeptical of alternatives to the "party period" such as the "public sphere." Voss-Hubbard returns to a classic problem of the new political history—the relationship between governance and popular politics. He does this by assessing what the margins of the party period, third parties, contributed to nineteenth-century politics and what third parties can reveal of popular expectations for politics and government. Both authors are impressed by the need to rethink a basic conclusion identified especially with Joel H. Silbey and Richard L. McCormick: that nineteenth-century politics, especially in contrast to that of the twentieth century, was intensely partisan. They suggest new connections between politics and society, a topic that inspired a great deal of important research in the 1960s and 1970s.	2
Having myself worked the margins of traditional political history, including gender and nonpartisanship, I am sympathetic to Formisano's and Voss-Hubbard's aims. Yet their problems and proposals go both too far and not far enough in refurbishing the party period framework. The themes they share—antiparty sentiment, the links between parties and public policy, and gender in politics—illustrate the potential and limitations of their challenges to the party period framework.	3
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