Info the 1870s, Republican Leaders were preoccupied with the danger that a Southern re-entry into the political system might produce an overthrow of their coalition at the polls and a restoration of the Jacksonian coalition to its former dominance. Nor was this a chimera: the success of the Republican revolution in national policy-making had been predicated upon enormous artificial majorities that were produced in a Congress in which the Southern states were not represented. Indeed, the Republican fears were partially realized after 1872. Southern “Redemption” and the persistence of traditional Northern support for the Democrats resulted in a unique period of partisan deadlock which lasted from 1874 until Republican capture of all branches of the federal government in 1896.

From Aristotle and Hobbes through Bentley, Truman, and Riker, many writers have claimed, more or less directly, that they are founding or helping to found a true political science for the first time. Modern scholars have usually expressed this aspiration via criticism of earlier “unscientific” approaches. Thus William Riker in 1962, advocating rational choice theory as the basis of political analysis, dismissed “traditional methods—i. e., his-tory writing, the description of institutions, and legal analysis” as able to produce “only wisdom and neither science nor knowledge. And while wisdom is certainly useful in the affairs ofmen, such a result is a failure to live up to the promise in the name political science ”. l Subsequently, rational choice has indeed become the most prominent pretender to the throne of scientific theory within the discipline.

Conventional wisdom maintains that the enduring structures of American politics make rapid policy change unlikely. This proposition is confirmed by much political science. Our institutions are designed to bridle and domesticate reform impulses, dissipating the constant pressures for new political and social arrangements. The separation of powers establishes numerous veto points, making initiatives of any kind difficult. The political culture's firm commitment to broad participation and due process places a much higher value on consultation than on decisiveness or direction. Special interests tolerate only incremental changes. The major parties clothe themselves in the familiar as they move toward the political center and its embrace of the status quo. New ideas are of only marginal importance; their transformative power is routinely blunted by one of America's oldest ideas, pragmatism. Stability, not innovation, is the master theme of our politics.

Recent theoretical and historical studies of working-class formation have raised important doubts about standard interpretations of the American working class. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the renewed debate over “American exceptionalism,” that unexpected combination of political conservatism and weak working-class institutions in the nation that underwent the modern world's first democratic revolution. Once it was popular to argue that American workers felt no need for collective action, either because of a classlessness that was firmly rooted in the psyche of the first new nation or because of an innate job consciousness that was able to attain full flowering only in the United States, that most bourgeois of countries. But two decades of social history have documented such a rich diversity of militant working-class activity that such explanations are now rarely invoked.

The political foundations of the modern presidency were laid during the New Deal years. Franklin Roosevelt was the New Deal president. The relationship between these two facts is a matter of some consequence. On it hinges our understanding of presidential leadership and modern American government generally, not to mention the political significance of Roosevelt himself.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

In May, 1990, a conference was held at UCLA on the theme of “American Politics in Historical Perspective.” Panels were organized on political institutions and social history, on periodization, and on political identity. The panel presentations on political identity are printed below, along with some of the exchanges among the conference group. Slightly edited for clarity, they are offered to readers in the interest of conveying some of the intellectual ferment currently surrounding the focus on political identity and its use as an approach in historical study. The editors of Studies in American Political Development do not endorse any of the views or interpretations expressed.

For those interested in understanding the role of government in modern life, important public policies have long been objects of close scrutiny. Traditionally, however, policies were treated only as outcomes that needed to be explained. More recently, there has been growing interest in the political consequences of policy development. Policies are no longer seen simply as effects, with attention focused on why these policies emerged. Policies have important repercussions as well: once adopted, they restructure the political and social environment that produced them.

In his “Ninth Annual Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education” (1846), the Secretary of the Board, Horace Mann, discussed the teaching of moral and civic virtues inside the classrooms of American public schools. “The question now arises,” he declared, “and it is a question on which the worth or worthlessness of our free institutions is suspended—whether [our schools] be put in requisition to impart a higher moral tone to the public mind; to enthrone the great ideas of justice, truth, benevolence, and reverence in the breasts of the people.” For Mann, of course, the answer was self-evident: it was the special task of public schooling to carry out “a revolution…down among the primordial elements of human character” itself. “[E]very fibre in the nation,” he declared, “should be strained to the endeavor…. It is the mission of our age to carry this cause one step further… in its progress of development.”

The origins of the American university system are generally traced to a reform cycle that began in the late 1890s and culminated in the 1920s when most colleges and universities adopted institutional structures, faculty routines, and financial systems that approximated those of a modern corporation. As contemporary educational historians have rewritten the saga of higher education reform, the institutional changes that swept through colleges during this formative period have come to be viewed as a virtually inevitable functional response to the demands of political and economic modernization. The underlying historiographic theme of modernization theory is that as higher institutions expanded in size, internal diversity, and organizational complexity, university presidents responded with the only feasible administrative alternative that could restore effective control and economic efficiency to educational institutions. Indeed, Laurence Veysey's classic rendition of this scenario concludes that a corporate type of bureaucratic administration became “essential” if higher institutions were to avoid educational confusion and fiscal insolvency, while adjusting to the cultural, economic, and political demands placed on them by industrial society.

The literature on the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 is curiously at odds with our understanding of the politics of the Gilded Age. Labels like “the party period” and phrases such as “the triumph of organizational politics” and the “full flowering of the American party state” attest to the vibrant partisan life of the late 19th century. Stephen Skowronek offers one important reason for this state of affairs: The nature of electoral competition in these years further extended the hegemony of party concerns over governmental operations. More than ever before, the calculations of those in power were wedded to the imperatives of maintaining efficiency in state and local political machines and of forging a national coalition from these machines for presidential elections.

Scott James is gutsy to attempt a refutation of the power of district-level constituency interests on regulatory policy voting in an arena like railroad policy. I believe that his case is weak, but I want to emphasize that party and district political economy interests are intimately interrelated. Party is, as the author argues, a powerful (the most powerful) coalitional mechanism. Representatives often support positions that represent the preferences of party colleagues and not their own, in order to win or maintain political control and support for critical policies, so long as those “vote trading” issues do not represent central concerns at home. Thus southern agrarians included important labor provisions in the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act in order to get the support of Northern Democrats who had already loyally backed the (agrarian) Democratic position on the tariff bill of 1913. On such a vote, representing an intraparty, biregional coalition bargain, party will naturally “predict” voting positions better than region. But the legislative history leaves little doubt from whence each policy (labor, tariff, and antitrust) originated.

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.

It is quite true, as Kevin Dougherty points out, that “we need a theoretical perspective [in the study of American educational history] that synthesizes the various theories of social conflict and social integration,” and that incorporates as well the insights of state- or policy-centered analysis. Such a perspective, indeed, is explicitly and deliberately what I elaborate in the above essay.

Professor Sanders raises several issues, not all of which can be addressed adequately in this brief response. Therefore, I will confine my remarks to those issues which I consider most important, in particular, those that bear on the key theoretical differences between us. I also take issue with her interpretation of the Hiscock vote.

Taming the Prince has a claim on our attention not only for its theoretical qualities and for its politics but because at one time both would have been considered extreme. As a theory it is possibly the first attempt to compose a philosophical discourse about a singular political office, variously named kingship, prince, executive, or president, and to situate it within the con-text of (what used to be confidently called) “the history of political philosophy.” Mansfield's treatise is distinctive, not as a history of an idea or of a concept, indeed not historical in the usual understanding of that term, but as the passionate assertion of an expansive conception of the executive, virtually Gaullist in its grandeur, in its contempt for interest-politics, its dismissive silence about parties, and its scorn for democracy.

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.