The state of policy history is good. This is a dramatic change from only four years ago, when I started an article in this very journal about the evolution of policy history by asserting: “The future of policy history remains unclear.” At the time, my statement reflected the sentiment shared by many fellow policy historians who did not feel that professional opportunities had fully caught up with the intellectual vitality of the subfield.

Most public problems can be approached in many ways. Urban noise, the honking of car horns, for example, could be tackled by building effective mass transit and discouraging automobile use, by forbidding the use of horns within city limits and fining violators, by encouraging harmonious social circumstances, or at least stress-reduction education programs, to make drivers less aggressive, by developing horns that target sound waves only at offending motorists, or by encouraging everyone to wear noise-reduction earphones. The problem of sexually transmitted diseases can be solved by encouraging chastity and fidelity as virtues, by strictly criminalizing transmission, or by prescribing antibiotics after the fact. Such varying approaches are qualitatively different. They do not just reflect distinct degrees of statutory intervention. States that adopt divergent solutions may, in a similar fashion, be fundamentally different from one another, not just stronger or weaker versions of an abstract ideal of public authority.

What do we mean by the term “policy history”? In conventional usage, “history” refers to one of two kinds of investigation: the study of something that happened at some point in the past, or the study of how something came to be what it is. It is this second usage—the idea of policy history as an unfolding story of policy development—that I want to examine in this essay. Understanding the sources of policy often requires that we pay attention to processes that play out over considerable periods of time.

Henry David Thoreau's influential essay “Civil Disobedience,” published in 1849, began with a ringing declaration of opposition to government: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—‘That government is best which governs not at all.’…the character of the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.” Thoreau's statement summarizes a central thesis in political theory, what has become a historical constant in the minds of researchers seeking to explain the development and parameters of the American welfare state. This thesis is that any power given to the government is subtracted from the liberty of the governed, a concept best captured by the term “antistatism.” Thus, Lipset contends that the United States is dominated by an encompassing liberal culture that honors private property, distrusts state authority, and holds individual rights sacred. Similarly, according to Huntington, Americans live by a creed that views government as the most dangerous embodiment of power. For Morone, American government is a “polity suspicious of its own state.” Hartz, too, asserts that the master assumption is that “the power of the state must be limited.”

Twenty years ago, just as the study of policy was emerging out of the morass of political history, historians of women rediscovered the state. What I will name the policy turn challenged a kind of intellectual separate sphere in which women's history addressed home, family, and intimate life and left to other historians everything else. The policy turn shifted attention from Carroll Smith Rosenberg's “Female World of Love and Ritual” without losing the self-activity and focus on female difference that investigations of women on their own terms had supplied. It answered the “Politics and Culture” debate of 1980, which revolved around the efficacy of domesticity as an arena for power with a resounding move toward the public, political realm—namely, to social politics. The Reaganite assault on the New Deal order and accompanying New Right attack on women's rights intensified investigation into the origins and growth of a welfare state whose strength seemed precarious and whose history was up for grabs—a welfare state that blurred the separation of private and public and constructed, even as it reinforced, unequal social locations.

It is difficult to imagine two fields of scholarly inquiry with so much in common and yet so little interaction as diplomatic and policy history. Policy, policy process, policymakers, policy origins, policy intentions, policy consequences—those terms and ones of a similar stripe roll just as easily off the tongues and word processors of diplomatic historians as of self-described policy historians. Moreover, the questions asked and the methods employed by the two groups of scholars bear a striking resemblance. Both fields focus perforce on the state and state-centered actors, concern themselves with elite-level decision making, interrogate fundamental issues of power within societies, and concentrate overwhelmingly on the twentieth century to the relative neglect of earlier periods. Each field occupies as well an embattled position within the larger historical profession, where social and cultural history have predominated since the 1960s.

In January 1938, James Landis, Dean of Harvard Law School, author of much of the New Deal's securities legislation, and a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, to deliver the prestigious Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School. His subject was “The Administrative Process.” Of particular interest to Landis was defining the correct relationship between courts and the administrative state. According to Landis, the interaction between agencies and courts “gives a sense of battle.”1 He continued: “Here one is presented with decisions that speak of contest between two agencies of government— one, like St. George, eternally refreshing its vigor from the stream of democratic desires, the other majestically girding itself with the wisdom of the ages.”2

The welfare state—the complex of policies that, in one form or another, all rich democracies have adopted to ameliorate destitution and provide valued social goods and services—is an increasingly central subject in the study of American history and politics. The past decade has unleashed a veritable tidal wave of books on the topic, including, from historians, Alice Kessler-Harris's In Pursuit of Equity and Michael Katz's The Price of Citizenship, and, from political scientists, Robert Lieberman's Shifting the Color Line and Peter Swenson's Capitalists Against Markets. Journals ranging from the American Historical Review to Political Science Quarterly (and, with less regularity, even the American Political Science Review) now routinely feature analyses of U.S. social policy. And going back just a few years more, the early 1990s saw the publication of several influential works on the subject, notably Paul Pierson's Dismantling the Welfare State? and Theda Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, each of which won major book prizes in political science. If any moment deserves to be seen as a heady time for writing on the American welfare state, this is it.