In keeping with the social character of the advancement of knowledge, and in spite of a strong competitive impulse among scholars to magnify small differences into warring schools of thought, the leading historical writings in the past four decades have yielded substantial agreement on the identification of critical trends that were transforming United States society in the period of the 1890s to 1916. Implicitly, at least, they may well have been anticipating the way to resolving some latest of these small differences before they get too far out of hand, such as that between “social history” and “political history” and, in a variation upon the theme, that between “society-centered” (or “movement-centered” or “interest-centered”) and “state-centered” history. The common acknowledgment of critical trends has served newcomers and veterans alike, including partisans on either side of these differences, and historians in the various genres, in the selection of authoritative frameworks of continuing research into the period. In this respect, the historical discipline shares with other disciplines, including those in the physical sciences, attributes held to be common to a “normal science.”

Near the end of his important and challenging essay, Martin J. Sklar briefly considers an alternative path of development to the corporate-liberal reorganization that he identifies with the era between the 1890s and 1916. “A statist resolution might have taken hold,” Sklar writes,

had the American capitalist class, or its corporate sector, been less developed in its market powers and proficiencies and hence more dependent on the state for its wealth and power; had the liberal republican tradition of the supremacy of society over the state (the sovereignty of the people) been weaker; had the working class been less imbued with that republican ideology, less developed, and hence more inclined to statist rather than associative-constitutional ideas and principles; had the corporate sector of the capitalist class sought and found alliance with a statist-oriented sector of the working class or a statist-oriented petty bourgeoisie, especially in the farm and rural population; had the corporate sector of the capitalist class sought and found alliance with civilian or military professionals, technicians, administrators, and managers—or a “managerial class”—looking to the state as a base of power. (p. 210)

I wish to thank Steven Hahn for helping me to think more critically about some of my own ideas and those of others. The substantive questions that he raises will be subject matter for vital ongoing inquiry and thinking among interested scholars for some time to come. He has also raised some very important questions of method that provide the occasion to extend the discussion, briefly, in ways that readers may find of interest, as I do. In what follows, I confine myself to some of the questions of method.

Electoral campaigns are a distinguishing feature, worldwide, of modern representative democracies. For most citizens in most polities, campaigns provide a compelling incentive to think about government. So campaigns thus are a, perhaps the, main point of contact between officials and the populace over matters of public policy. If, as democratic theorists postulate, rulers are responsible to the ruled, the nexus of responsibility, the time and place that we impose it, is during campaigns and the elections in which they culminate.

Over the past decade, William Riker has written a series of articles that reinterpret the founding of American politics in light of insights gleaned from theories of rational choice. In the course of these efforts, he has invented a new subject, “heresthetics,” having “to do with the manipulation of the structure of tastes and alternatives within which decisions are made.” With Evelyn C. Fink, for example, he has shown more systematically than previous analyses how the federalists structured the the ratification process by attaching an informal promise of future amendment to a formally unconditional ratification. In the present essay, Riker moves from heresthetics to rhetoric: “Rhetoric and heresthetic are both techniques of winning. But they are different kinds of techniques. Rhetoric is persuasion.… With heresthetic, on the other hand, conviction is at best secondary or not involved at all.” Riker describes federalist and antifederalist ratification rhetoric in an effort to display the persuasiveness of “negative” campaign appeals for those who wish to attract the support of marginal voters.

It is a bit difficult for me to figure out the main theme of Tulis' often inconsistent commentary. For example, he ends his essay with the claim that my insights are “epistemologically equivalent” to those of whom I “seek to supersede.” Apart from gratuitously attributing to me an intention to “supersede” Main and Storing, two scholars for whom I have the deepest respect and whom I wish to correct only in one particular, my insights cannot, on Tulis' own grounds, possibly be “epistemologically equivalent” to theirs. Much of his essay is devoted to criticizing my method as an unnecessary and undesirable departure from the traditional method of rhetorical analysis by literary criticism. So, by his account, my method cannot be “epistemologically equivalent” to theirs. I suppose he meant to write “substantively equivalent.” Whatever his intent, this illustrates my difficulty with interpretation.

From the vantage point of a critical moment in the history of statebuilding in the United States, we wish to take a fresh look at questions about the resources and wherewithal of the national state. Within modern American political science, a focus on state capacity is at least as old as the landmark essay by Woodrow Wilson on “The Study of Administration” and as current as the important scholarly impulse that has revived interest in the state at a time of struggle about the size and span of the federal government. The dominant motif of these various accounts of American statebuilding has been a concern with organizational assets, which usually are assayed by their placement on a linear scale of strength and weakness.

“Hegemony” has become a fashionable catchword in a number of intellectual circles. One encounters it among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, even (or, perhaps, especially) literary critics. Many a frustrated radical finds it a useful explanation for the quiescence of the masses. Marxist scholars frequently see it as a liberating departure from Marx's economic reductionism. More mainstream social scientists often detect little harm in it, since the notion that people are not ruled by force alone, but also by ideas, seems highly congruent with what they have learned from Max Weber and Talcott Parsons.