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Structure, Sequence, and Subordination in American Political Culture: What's Traditions Got to Do with It?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Karen Orren
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Extract

Rogers Smith's American Political Science Review article, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions of America,” poses challenging substantive and methodological questions for the study of American political development. Whether or not it intended to do so, the article has struck a chord in several programs of research. The following colloquy between Smith and me centers on Smith's reading of political culture in terms of “traditions.” In a spirit of advancing our common enterprise, I have sharpened rather than muted the differences between Smith's views and my own in order to bring them into relief in a short space.

Type
Forum
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 1996 , pp. 470 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1996

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References

Notes

1. These remarks were presented in a slightly different version at a roundtable devoted to Smith's article at the Annual Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 1994. All page numbers in parentheses refer to Smith, Rogers, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 549–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Borelli v. Brusseau, 12 Cal. App. 4th 647 (1993).

3. Zeigler, Sara, “Family Service: Labor, the Family, and Legal Reform in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1996).Google Scholar

4. Stephen Skowronek and I have described institutional politics generally in terms of “multiple orders.” See “Beyond the Iconography of Order: Notes for a New Institutionalism,” in Dodd, Lawrence and Jillson, Calvin, eds. The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Perspectives (Boulder, Colo., 1993), 311–30.Google Scholar

Note that neither Smith nor I addresses the challenging question of why the patterns we observe should occur.