Re-imagining the State through Society in American Political Development

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

This Roundtable discusses the imbrication of state and society relations in American political development (APD), with a view to highlight overlooked terrain and to suggest new and emerging frameworks. State-centered approaches are foundational in the field. Indeed, one of APD’s major theoretical contributions is attention to how political institutions re-shape society over time. To the extent that society has been conceptualized, however, it is typically to emphasize voluntarism’s role in building institutional capacity and the role of interest groups in fostering bureaucratic innovation and administrative autonomy. To be sure, grassroots movements, like those of farmers, workers, consumers, and civil rights advocates, have been viewed as a society-centric locus of democratization.

Yet, contests within the so-called “private” life of Americans, for example, over political identity, family relations, property ownership, and community, have long been submerged or unnoticed within the subfield, and their relevance to state formation and development has been largely disregarded. Scholarship in recent years is beginning to move in these directions, arguably adopting a more ‘society-centered APD.’ This Roundtable brings together scholars whose work pays attention to the conceptualization and treatment of society and culture in the study of historical political processes and state formation. Discussion will take stock of new and renewed debates over family political development, the genesis of ideas, historical political economy and the social production of race, gender, and sexuality. From these dynamics hail forms of “private” social and relational authority that are mutually constitutive of state and public authority, engendering a multidimensional politics that is intimate and abstract, coercive and cooperative, inclusionary and exclusionary. What are the possibilities and limits of renewing and developing theoretical and empirical society-centered approaches? Can they give us fresh leverage on longstanding puzzles? Do they suggest new avenues of research? What can we learn from current debates and trends in adjacent fields, like historical sociology, political history, Black studies, cultural and social theory, when it comes to reimagining the state through society? In turn, what do those fields have to learn from APD about how politics can shape society?

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Chair

• David Alexander Bateman Cornell University

Presenters

• James A. Morone Brown University

• Julie L. Novkov University at Albany, SUNY

• Gwendoline M. Alphonso Fairfield University

• Jeffrey Broxmeyer University of Toledo