Abstract
This article attempts to resolve a contradiction noted by Charles Tilly between my earlier writings on education and later writings on the welfare state. The earlier work on education was critical of governments’ role in constructing bureaucratic school systems that reinforced inequality; the later work on the welfare state argued for the extension of government social provision. This article shows how the contradiction poses a false dichotomy. It then uses history to show how assessments of governments’ role reflect the political context in which they are written but rest on consistent values and priorities. The article emphasizes, as well, the absence of a counter narrative to the political right’s assertion of government policy failure; the truncated and inappropriate use of “state” in much writing on public policies; and the need for historians of policy to develop means of assessing the success or failure of government policies and programs.
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Notes
Perhaps the most important book making this argument was John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe (1990).
Schwarz (1984) offers a persuasive overview of government-driven successes in the 1960s and 1970s.
Another prominent example is Sugrue (1996). For examples that lean more to the right, see Morris (1980) and Banfield (1970). A partial exception to this trend is emerging among historians of public housing who emphasize the early halcyon days of the projects. For a review of some of this literature, see Fairbanks (2008).
See chapter 1 of Frugg (1999) on the legal basis of American cities.
In The Price of Citizenship (2008), I discuss devolution throughout various branches of the American welfare state.
Another book that shows how institutional structures shaped policy implementation is Robert C. Lieberman (1998).
An outstanding collection illustrating the new political history is Jacobs et al. (2003).
Steffes’s work will appear as the revision of her dissertation, “A New Education for a Modern Age: National Reform, State-building, and the Transformation of American Schooling, 1890–1933,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2007.
For instance, see Nelson (2005).
I do not mean to imply that Skocpol would claim this outcome as the only measure of success. It is success according to the question she is posing.
See Rosen (2009) on “democratic constiutionalism” as an emerging theory of law.
I have developed the idea of a social policy dialectic in Reconstructing American Education (1987)
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Acknowledgments
For a careful and astute reading of the first draft of this article, I am indebted to Daniel Amsterdam.
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Katz, M.B. Was government the solution or the problem? The role of the state in the history of American social policy. Theor Soc 39, 487–502 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-010-9114-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-010-9114-4