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Politics, Power, and Problems: Perspectives on Writing Policy History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

W. Andrew Achenbaum
W. Andrew Achenbaum
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Twenty-five years ago H. Stuart Hughes observed that “the study of history is entering a period of rapid change and advance such as characterized the science of physics in the first three decades of the twentieth century.” Amid such ferment, he believed, professional historians could become more “scientific” in stating their assumptions and executing their analysis without sacrificing an “aesthetic” style of discourse. Professor Hughes correctly predicted the professional excitement and intellectual controversy unleashed since the mid-1960s, but he underestimated the extent to which historians’ relative standing in the academy would be adversely affected by external and internal developments. Other social sciences attracted more students, tenure lines, and grant support; they had more success in formalizing their investigations. Many humanistic endeavors (including historical inquiries), critics charge, have concurrently become inscrutable. Historians themselves have expressed serious concern about the future of their discipline. With the Balkanization of knowledge, with a growing number of subfields and specialized journals, historical synthesis seems more and more to be an elusive goal. The current debate over how to “(re)present the past” goes far beyond disputes over approach, style, or ideology.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , April 1989 , pp. 206 - 231
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1989

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References

Notes

1. Hughes, H. Stuart, History as Art and as Science (New York, 1964), 21.Google Scholar

2. John Modell, “History Prides Itself on Being an Eclectic Discipline. But Is It Really a Discipline at All?” unpublished paper prepared for conference on history of consciousness, Carnegie Mellon University, May 1988.

3. The Report of the Commission on the Humanities, The Humanities in American Life (Berkeley, 1980)Google Scholar, offered recommendations to change the situation.

4. Bender, Thomas, “Wholes and Parts,” Journal of American History 73 (June 1986): 120–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. History was not alone. See, for instance, Collins, Randall, “Is 1980s Sociology in the Doldrums?” American Journal of Sociology 91 (Spring 1986), 1336–55.Google Scholar

5. Compare Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr., “The Challenge of Poetics and Politics to (Normal) Historical Practice,” unpublished paper, August 1986 to his A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

6. Hughes, History as Art and as Science, 77.

7. LeGoff, Jacques, “Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?” Daedalus 100 (Winter 1971), 13.Google Scholar

8. Stearns, Peter N., ed., Expanding the Post (New York, 1988), 12.Google Scholar

9. Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hays, Samuel P., “Society and Politics: Politics and Society,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15 (Winter 1985), 481–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Neustadt, Richard E. and May, Ernest R., Thinking in Time (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

11. Berkowitz, Edward D., “History and Public Policy,” in Kemp, Barbara J. and Kemp, Emory L., eds., Public History (Malabar, FL, 1986), 417.Google Scholar

12. Frisch, Michael, ”The Memory of History,” in Benson, Susan Porter, Brier, Stephen, and Rosenzweig, Roy A., eds., Presenting the Past (Philadelphia, 1986), 17.Google Scholar

13. American Historical Association, Perspectives (February 1988), 5.

14. Essays that trace the evolution of Hays's thought are conveniently collected in his American Political History as Social Analysis (Knoxville, 1980).Google Scholar

15. Hays, Samuel P., Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York, 1987), 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. For this reason, I suspect that “environmental” historians would criticize Beauty, Health, and Permanence because changes in the environment per se are merely a component of Hays's analysis, not its dominant motif.

17. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 206.

18. This characterization, needless to say, deserves much debate. Suggesting that coalition-building and selfish interests are endemic in the political behavior (broadly understood) of nearly any kind of institution is a worthwhile observation. Yet, in the perennial debate between the nomothetic generalization and the particularist observation, it is equally important to delineate differences in the interaction.

19. Ibid., 286.

20. Hays, Samuel P., “The Structure of Environmental Politics Since World War II,” Journal of Social History 14 (Summer 1981), 719–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 42. See also 428–32.

22. Similarly, I am not wholly persuaded by Hays's case concerning the roots and contours of new environmental values (ibid., 26–39). His analysis of public-opinion polls do chart some of the changes, and it seems logical that a middle class blessed with greater affluence and more education could effectively make demands to improve the quality of life. But I think Hays is too hasty in making connections among Americans’ images of the environment (as shaped by the media), their newfound leisure interests, the fitness craze and concern with healthy living, and a desire for personal and familial autonomy. They may be all of a piece, as Hays implies, just different levels of a ecosystem ranging in size from an endangered fish or the human body to wetlands or a national park. But we need more evidence before we should accept this hypothesis.

23. Ibid., ix.

24. Ibid., 344.

25. Though he claims not to be an “environmental historian,” Hays apparently is a familiar figure in the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club, has a large collection of files on grassroots activities across the country, takes nature photographs, and cascaded down the Colorado River on his thirty-ninth anniversary in a small craft rather than a “banana boat.” Such tidbits can be gleaned from ibid., 549 n. 21; Tommy Ehrbar, “The Greening of American History,” Pitt Magazine (November 1987), 39–41; and Phil Coleman, review of Beauty, Health, and Permanence in Sylvanian (August—September 1987), 10. But they really do not tell us much about why Hays seized on this topic.

26. Ibid., 541.

27. Ibid., 528.

28. Worster, Donald, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity & The Growth of The American West (New York, 1985), 4.Google Scholar

29. Donald 's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York, 1985), viii.Google Scholar

30. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 7.

31. Ibid., 256.

32. Worster, Nature's Economy, xi.

33. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 111.

34. Ibid., 259.

35. Ibid., 334.

36. McEvoy, Arthur, The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (New York, 1986), 175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. McEvoy, Fisherman's Problem, 254.

38. On p. 7, McEvoy states that targeting a conservative yield from a fishery is basically a problem in stochastic analysis. This might have been an intriguing theme to develop, for it could have shown the strengths and weaknesses of a quantitative approach to policy analysis.

39. Of particular use to those interested in writing policy history are Hurst, James Willard, Law and Markets in United States History (Madison, 1982)Google Scholar; McCraw, Thomas K., ed., Regulation in Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1981)Google Scholar; Scheiber, Harry N., “Federalism and Legal Process: Historical and Contemporary Analysis of the American System,” Law and Society Review 14 (1980), 663–772.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. McEvoy, Fisherman's Problem, xii.

41. While McEvoy and Hays seem to be establishing comparable timelines for their respective studies, they do not always agree on the particulars as they make their cases. McEvoy, for instance, sees more parallels between the conservation and environmental movements than Hays. He also suggests a more explicit link between ecological activities and the “new social regulation” movement (228) in government, though Hays gives a fuller account of changes in administrative, legislative, and judicial contexts at the federal level.

42. For a succinct analysis describing how such differences were resolved, see McEvoy, Arthur F. and Scheiber, Harry N., “Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and the Policy Process: A Study of the Post-1945 California Sardine Depletion,” Journal of Economic History 44 (June 1984), 393–406.Google Scholar

43. McEvoy, Fisherman's Problem, 254.

44. Ibid., 253.

45. Ibid., 14.

46. By the same logic, abstracts would be appropriate for journal articles on policy history.

47. See, for instance, Steel, Ronald, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, 1980)Google Scholar; McJimsey, George, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Isaacson, Walter and Thomas, Evan, The Wise Men (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

48. Quadagno, Jill S., The Transformation of Old Age Security (Chicago, 1988)Google Scholar; Berkowitz, Edward D., Disabled Policy (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Achenbaum, W. Andrew, Social Security: Visions and Revisions (New York, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. Heclo, Hugh, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven, 1974)Google Scholar; Flora, Peter and Heidenheimer, Arnold J., eds., The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (New Brunswick, 1981)Google Scholar; Fox, Daniel M., Health Policies, Health Politics (Princeton, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hollingsworth, J. Rogers, A Political Economy of Medicine (Baltimore, 1986).Google Scholar

50. Achenbaum, W. Andrew, “Public History's Past, Present, and Prospects,” American Historical Review 92 (December 1987), 1162–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Compare, for instance, the exchange between Alice Kessler-Harris and Rosalind Rosenberg over their respective positions in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears, Roebuck and Company reprinted in Signs 11 (Summer 1986), 751–79, with the exchange between William Graebner and me in Old Age in a Bureaucratic Society, ed. Tassel, David D. Van and Stearns, Peter N. (Westport, CT, 1986), 217–27.Google Scholar

52. Brodkey, Linda, Academic Writing as Social Practice (Philadelphia, 1987), 23.Google Scholar