It is an honor and a pleasure to have three such accomplished and thoughtful scholars as Professors Cox, Raadschelders, and Szymanski comment on my publications and my approach to research, and interesting to see the different ways they perceive it. They have said a number of astute things and I am not going to have time to respond to them all, although I will try to respond to each of the major questions that have been posed to me. But let me do it in the course of saying a little bit about how I see the logic of my own theoretical, methodological, and normative career in comparative and historical social science. 

People often ask me what has tied together the work that I have done over my career. How could I go from writing a Ph.D. thesis about the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions to working on the history of social policy making and civic democracy in the United States? Partly this movement represents a career strategy. When I was a young scholar, I noticed that a lot of my elders were spending the latter parts of their lives trying to explain why they were "right" when younger scholars said they were "wrong". I decided that the best way to avoid this rut was to be always on to something else before people discovered what was wrong with earlier writings! So I have moved on regularly. And I have never felt any respect whatsoever for disciplinary boundaries, or for the internal differentiations within political science between comparative politics and American politics. I have felt very free to range across those divides.

But there is something that has tied it all together. I have been interested throughout my career in the way in which politics - as a set of processes, struggles, policy outcomes, patterns of conflict and institutional changes - develops at the intersection between the state and society. I have approached such issues by taking up different substantive problems. Social science, in my view, should take up important, real-world problems and not simply engage in navel gazing discussions of purely internal theoretical or methodological issues. In that sense I agree with Professor Raadschelders' point about a civilizing mission - and I take that, in my language, to mean that social scientists should take up substantively important problems with broader significance to the communities with whom they are communicating, and then seek rigorous answers about outcomes of interest.

Theoretically, I have developed an approach to the way politics grows out of the intersection of state and society that was originally outlined in the 1985 book, Bringing the State Back In. That book was an agenda setting enterprise, produced with colleagues. Everything I have done has always been done with a community of colleagues. It has never been an attempt to build an individual empire. This is not not self-effacing; it is the most effective approach, because scholarly life is a set of arguments, and groups whose members all think alike rise and fall like meteors. They do not have longer-term influence. So Bringing the State Back In was an attempt to set up a series of debates about what it would mean to take seriously governmental institutions and administrative and military institutions as sites of independent action, of independent interest articulation, interacting with social movements and classes. Back then, I outlined two ways to do this. One, which seems to have made a very strong impression on Professor Szymanski, is the Weberian approach, which posits that states could be potentially autonomous actors. The term has always been potentially autonomous; I have never asserted that states are invariably autonomous. Sometimes, in fact, states (or parts of states) are captured by classes or social or interest groups. In Bringing the State Back In, my colleagues and I tried to talk about the conditions under which groups of people situated in representative institutions or administrative and military institutions could articulate their own goals and at times even carry through their own goals. Asking this question was important for comparative politics and for American politics alike. State agencies often act on their own, not at the behest of dominant social groups. 

But I also suggested another perspective, which I called the "Tocquevillian" approach in that original essay. I was referring to the approach toward state and society used by Alexis de Tocqueville in the Old Regime and the French Revolution, where Tocqueville discussed how historically evolved state institutions had an impact on society and helped to shape the political identities, the goals, and the political capacities of groups and coalitions of groups. In this perspective, states are not analyzed as actors; they are considered as sets of institutions influencing society and politics.

My book, The States and Social Revolutions, was written primarily in the Weberian mode. It was, after all, about bureaucratic monarchies and how they broke down and were transformed by revolutions. My work on welfare states and on American politics has been much more in the Tocquevillian mode, because I have been very interested in understanding how social identities get defined into politics (or out of it) partly in response to the kind of governmental institutions people are interacting with over time. How do the capacities of various groups, classes, social movements, interest groups to do politics (or not) fit with the institutions of government with which they are interacting? And how can that help us explain policy outcomes and non-outcomes? I am just as interested in explaining things that do not happen as I am in things that do. Why, for example, has the United States never developed a universal system of health insurance coverage?

Now, if that has been my theoretical agenda, very broadly speaking, I do think it is right to say that I and others in the historic history and politics wing of political science have proceeded by transgressing the boundaries between American and comparative politics. We also take historical process seriously. And here I guess I would like to disagree with the notion that we just look at events. We do, often, look for "outcomes", which may be events, but we also seek to understand how processes over time work. I am interested in "path dependencies", in which you often take what you have explained at time one and use it to help explain what comes next. I actually think it is a strength of comparative-historical studies of welfare states that they have evolved in the direction of asking what difference the varied histories of welfare states make for contemporary struggles to modify social policies. The work of my colleague Paul Pierson is exemplary in this regard, and it uses "policy feedback" I developed in my 1992 book Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. It may be, for example, that some debates about welfare in Europe resemble debates we are having here in the United States. But Europeans are not dismantling their national guarantees, while Americans dismantled our national welfare guarantee in 1996. You cannot understand this difference without taking the contrasting histories of European and U.S. welfare states into account. Many European welfare states have included provision for the poor in broad, universal programs that are hard to dismantle.

Approaches ranging from the Marxist to the structural functionalist to the rational choice often try to understand politics as a function of an immediate economically determined equilibrium. I simply do not believe we can understand political outcomes without highlighting historical path dependencies. Another feature of my approach is a clinging to the organizational level of analysis. That is my way of trying to make my way through the middle of the disputes between individualists and collectivists in social science. We need to avoid speaking about "social systems" as a whole, or institutions in very vague ways. I agree with the rational choice critique that this is too collectivist; it ends up imputing motivation to entities that are so far from individuals that it is very difficult to make that leap. On the other hand, reducing all of social life to a series of maneuvers among individuals who are assumed to be disconnected from one another and acting as if they are in one giant market, is one of the most unrealistic approaches I can imagine! Human beings come imbedded in relationships and identities. By looking at organizations and networks, we come a lot closer to finding an appropriate level of analysis. We can ask how individuals are recruited into organizations and networks, and consider whether or not they are disciplined to behave in conformance with, say, an organization's goals. But we can also recognize that organizations are often actors in their own right. A focus on organizations is a theme of my work all the way from my studies of social revolutions to my present research on the voluntary associations, which I analyze as organizations.

What does all this have to do with ideas? Let me wrap up by responding to the questions very effectively put about that by Professor Cox. Certainly there is a place for the analysis of ideas in this sort of organizationally grounded historical institutionalism. But my approach differs from thinking that ideas or idea systems are constitutive of social reality. I don't really believe that. Ideas are carried by individuals and by groups, who often interpret and re-interpret ideas and selectively appropriate different ideas. People's identities and what they think they are doing are informed by available cultural ideas, if you will, but I don't think you can derive group goals or identities from the idea systems themselves. Take the example of the "welfare state" itself. As I have written in some of my work, the welfare state is not an unproblematic normative ideal. First of all, the whole term "welfare state" means very different things in Europe and the United States. The "welfare" state came to be identified with programs for the poor in the United States, but it came to be identified with the universal programs in some European countries. This difference can be explained historically, and the contrasting ideas then "feed back" into further political struggles. The very term "welfare state" was born at a specific historical moment. It was invented at the time of World War II to contrast the British system with the German totalitarian system, the welfare state versus the military state. We cannot understand where that idea came from simply by reading political texts. Ideas about "welfare"need to be situated in terms of actors, institutions, and conflicts.

So I believe ideas should be brought into historical institutional analysis, but in a way well grounded in sequences of events, patterns of conflict, and the institutional and resource situations of the people who deploy and change ideas. This is not equivalent to treating ideas as mere instruments, because we must ask what cultural streams people can draw upon at the time that they are defining themselves and defining conflicts. Thus I recommend treating ideas as semi-autonomous, but not all-determining. 

Institutions embody ideas. Actually they marry them to resources and patterns of power, social power, and institutions certainly offer definitions of the situation. At the level of political psychology, that explains why people simply are not short-term instrumentalists. They accept definitions of the situation that seem workable and are backed by powerful relationships. People have to deal with such institutionalized definitions of the situation on a day to day basis. 

Liberty is a powerful idea, yet this idea has been interpreted quite differently by people on different sides of particular battles. Some would say, for example, that Americans are individualists who believe in liberty and therefore there can be no welfare state in America. I just don't agree with that, because I have seen people use particular understandings of individualist values to justify very powerful government programs. In fact, I argue in my latest book, The Missing Middle: Working Families and the Future of U.S. Social Policy, about to come out from the Century Foundation that there is a normative theme that runs through successful social policy making in America. This normative theme bridges the individual/collectivist gap, because social programs are instituted in terms of rewarding individuals for their past or future contributions to the community. Now, do I think such ideas alone explain why some programs happen and why others don't? No, because plenty of people have tried to offer such justifications, but they have not always been able to marshal resources for successful political movements. Nevertheless, we can look back on most successful, enduring, generous and inclusive social programs in America and see that they are justified with similar normative arguments. Such ideas may be necessary, but they are not sufficient to explain political outcomes.

As a result of this finding, when I sit down with people on the left, I argue that we should find ways to talk about poor people and others as "contributors" to American society along a certain dimension. I suggest devising alliances and justifications for social programs that include the poor but do not refer to them alone. That specific policy recommendation comes out of an understanding of ideas, institutions, and politics (that have shaped outcomes again and again) throughout American social policy history.

When I wrote my first book, States and Social Revolutions, I was arguing against other scholars who tried to explain revolutions simply in terms of class consciousness or ideology. You always have to ask about any scholar, who are they fighting with? Not just what are they saying, but who are they disagreeing with? Scholarship is argument. Because I was countering scholars who took ideas too seriously, I got a bit carried away in the other direction. Young scholars usually get carried away. And if I had not gotten carried away, I would not have made a name for myself. After I made a name for myself, I could relax a little bit. In my later work, I have developed a more nuanced analysis of ideas in politics.

I want to close by commenting on one thing Ann-Marie Szymanski said very emphatically. She suggested that there is a normative, almost a one-to-one relationship between taking the state seriously, analytically, and a kind of left liberal political stance. It is no secret to people that I am a left liberal (though I don't actually use that label "liberal"; I am really a moderate social Democrat). But I do not believe that my historical and institutionalist approach to studying politics and the state is inherently partisan. This approach can be used by people of any persuasion. It does not offer predictions. It is not a narrowly instrumental kind of knowledge. You cannot take it to the Department of Health and Human Services and use it to design a health care program. You are going to need some statistics too. But historical institutional work can offer a sense of political and policy possibilities just as well to people who want to dismantle a welfare state as to people who want to build social programs.

Conservative theorists have taken the state seriously as an autonomous actor; there is a whole school of public choice economics that treats the state as a rent seeker, and liberals can learn from such theories, too. Similarly, anything that I write about the advantages of universal social programs versus programs targeted only on the poor, not only can be used by conservatives, but has been used by them. Conservatives know that programs for the poor alone are easy to attack and dismantle. I wear one hat as a scholar and one hat as a normative person and I am not afraid to speak normatively on certain occasions and to relevant audiences. But the knowledge that my fellow historical institutionalists and I have developed can be used by people with a range of perspectives. In that sense I am a social scientist. I believe there is a difference between science and normative work, and good social science is not exactly the same thing as advocacy, though advocacy always benefits from sound scholarship.

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She has held research fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her first book, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge University Press, 1979) won the 1979 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1980 American Sociological Association Award for a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1992) received five scholarly awards, including the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association. Her other publications include Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Social Policy in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1995), and Civic Engagement in American Democracy (co-edited with Morris Fiorina, Brookings Institution Press, 1999). As the 1999 Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecturer in Representative Government, she delivered three lectures on civic engagement in America and these will be expanded in a forthcoming book with the University of Oklahoma Press. 

Professor Skocpol can be reached by email at ts@wjh.harvard.edu.