Scholarship on the political development of the United States since the 1960s is dominated, not surprisingly, by social scientists. Such recent events fall within the penumbra of “contemporary history,” the standard research domain of social scientists but treacherous terrain for historians. Social scientists studying American government and society generally enjoy prompt access to evidence of the policy-making process–documents from the elected and judicial branches of government, interviews with policy elites, voting returns, survey research. Historians of the recent past, on the other hand, generally lack two crucial ingredients–temporal perspective and archival evidence–that distinguish historical analysis from social science research. For these reasons, social scientists (and journalists) customarily define the initial terms of policy debate and shape the conventional wisdom. Historians weigh in later, when memories fade, archives open, and the clock adds a relentless and inherently revisionist accumulation of hindsight.

In a world increasingly dominated by high technology and esoteric scientific knowledge it is not surprising that political scientists and sociologists have begun to ask what role experts and specialists play in the policymaking process. Inaugurated almost a century ago by Weber's seminal essay on bureaucracy and the rationalization of authority, this issue was subsequently developed out of neo-Marxist debates over the relative autonomy of the state into a more explicitly state-centered perspective. Though state-centered theorists have not abandoned pluralism altogether, bureaucrats and policy experts have increasingly taken center stage in policy analyses. These state actors are portrayed as “policy experts,” free from political pressure, focused on making policy recommendations based on the most up-to-date knowledge of the field. Instead of pursuing votes and campaign money, policy experts seek the most efficient answers to social problems, a rationalized process of positivistic scientific inquiry and experiential learning. In most areas of public policymaking, this boils down to the reductive analysis of prior, presumably analogous, policy outcomes, drawing lessons for the future from the successes and failures of the past. Seen from this perspective, policymaking is portrayed as “a deliberate attempt to adjust the goals or techniques of policy in response to past experience and new information.” History thus not only transforms state capacities (as in historical institutionalist accounts) but also directly effects the ways in which policymakers think about social problems. Political scientists refer to this as a “social learning” process.

Ira Katznelson seems to like a lot of things about Grand Expectations. I thank him for his words of praise and for giving the book a careful, thoughtful reading. Although he says little about my many specific judgments and interpretations, he helps readers grasp my main themes. As he points out, I argue that Americans between 1945 and the late 1960s developed ever-grander expectations about their capacity to create a better world abroad and a happier society at home.

I welcome Professor Patterson's robust reply, not least because it affords me the chance to clarify my appreciative critique. Our differences and misunderstandings, such as they are, are products of propinquity. We read many of the same books, work on similar themes, care about common issues, and, more often than not, as he notes, share interpretations of American history in the past half-century. We broadly agree about how to straddle the divide of analysis and narrative. We both would wish to distinguish our ambitions from simple sequential chronological description and from social theory too removed from history. We also are committed to mutual learning and collaboration across disciplinary lines.