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Book Review
| The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History. Ed. by Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xvi, 421 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-691-11376-9. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-691-11377-7.)
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Political history is back. Its recovery from what two of this volume's editors term "the professional decline of political history since the 1960s" (p. 3) has been brought about by historians and social scientists who have created
two important methodological approaches to political history—the new institutionalism (which is composed of the subfields of the organizational synthesis, policy history, and American political development)—and sociocultural political history. (p. 3)
Most of the thirteen topical essays tend to cluster around themes of political development, while a concluding essay by Ira Katznelson attempts to pull together the diverse work presented and to sketch out an agenda for future research. |
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This collection is a useful introduction to the literature that has emerged impressively in political development since the 1980s. Several of the essays sparkle and testify to the intellectual vitality of political history and its absorption of interdisciplinary perspectives, as well as the cumulative influence of first social and then cultural history since the 1960s. |
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The work of younger scholars predominates in essays deriving from or extending arguments made in recently published books or in books (two) soon to be published. In the introduction, Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer highlight two major themes to come: (1) antistatism, along with the uneven, nonlinear growth of a strong central government; and (2) "the changing meaning and mechanisms of representative government" (p. 2). In fact, antistatism is sporadically present, while the editors' claims for the novelty of work striving "to integrate institutions, culture and society" (p. 2) are inflated. |
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Joanne Freeman's chapter treating the Sedition Act to the kind of cultural analysis she used so provocatively in her recent book is really about the absence of political development in a political culture still antipartisan and dominated by gentlemen guided by an obsessive concern with personal reputation and honor. This sophisticated political-cultural analysis can be traced back to, among many others, Bernard Bailyn, David Hackett Fischer, and more recently, in the 1980s and 1990s, Bertram Wyatt-Brown and Kenneth Greenberg. |
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The next three essays, by Richard R. John, William J. Novak, and Michael Vorenberg, exemplify the political development literature. John builds on his earlier work on the antebellum state, the Jacksonians' use of antistatism, and their turning the world's best postal system into the service of party building. He concludes that the Jackson Democratic party's weakening of the central government and suppression of antislavery formed part of "a prelude to civil war" (p. 74), a theme that first reached this reviewer in Lee Benson's classroom decades ago. John, however, has linked mass parties, patronage, the post office, and antiabolition in a powerful new blend. |
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In a brilliant revisionist critique, Novak engages historians who in his view have incorrectly applied a modern citizenship framework to nineteenth-century law. Legal historians disagree about these matters, but this nonspecialist found Novak's taking of this past on its own terms persuasive. Rounding out this trio, Vorenberg argues for the significance of the Civil War in bringing about a new, instrumentalist view of the Constitution among lawmakers and citizens, rather than seeing it as a fixed point of reference. The abolition of slavery proceeded together with a shift toward seeing that the Constitution could be rewritten to advance social change and reform. His emphasis on "contingency" (p. 133) seems exaggerated, as do claims regarding public opinion (did the "Americans" referred to several times, for example, on pp. 130, 133, 135, and 137, include Southerners?). |
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