Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Part I The state-building problem in American political development
- Part II State building as patchwork, 1877–1900
- Part III State building as reconstitution, 1900–1920
- Epilogue: Beyond the state of courts and parties – American government in the twentieth century
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index
Epilogue: Beyond the state of courts and parties – American government in the twentieth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Part I The state-building problem in American political development
- Part II State building as patchwork, 1877–1900
- Part III State building as reconstitution, 1900–1920
- Epilogue: Beyond the state of courts and parties – American government in the twentieth century
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
So thoroughly have the Judges, with very few exceptions, been imbued with the liberal spirit in later years, that the danger at present does not seem to lie in a reluctance of the Court to bow to the Legislative will, but rather in a too facile readiness to confirm whatever the Legislature may temporarily have chosen to decree.
Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History, Vol. II, 1947Anything as close to the vital process of representative government as the party system is bound to affect the nation's political life in more than one way. Whatever impairs the essential operation of the party system also produces serious difficulties in other spheres of national existence.
American Political Science Association, “Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System,” 1950Reform and the limits of regeneration
State building is prompted by environmental changes, but it remains at all times a political contingency, a historical-structural question. Whether a given state changes or fails to change, the form and timing of the change, and the governing potential in the change - all of these turn on a struggle for political power and institutional position, a struggle defined and mediated by the organization of the preestablished state. Herein lies the key to the state-building achievement in twentieth-century American development. Modern American state building successfully negotiated a break with an outmoded organization of state power. The modern American state represents an internal governmental reconstruction worked out through incremental political reform.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Building a New American StateThe Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920, pp. 285 - 292Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982