From a sociology of knowledge viewpoint, the significance of Theda Skocpol's scholarship for the study of American politics may be divided into three interrelated perspectives: the intellectual, the disciplinary, and the ideological. The first, intellectual perspective would address the analytical advances made by Skocpol's work as they are evaluated by standards internal to political science. The second, disciplinary perspective would step back from the internalist evaluation to ask what developments within American academe explain the revival of the historical-institutionalist approach associated with Skocpol. Finally, the ideological perspective would situate Skocpol's work within a larger, and historically-evolving, matrix of normative engagement that has structured American intellectuals' participation in public life since the professionalization of the social sciences beginning in the late nineteenth century. The following remarks are necessarily brief and impressionistic; however, the significance of a public intellectual with Skocpol's range, ambition and entrepreneurial ability can only be fully appreciated by triangulating these three perspectives.

Until twenty years ago, American political science did not engage the "state" in a self-conscious way. Reflecting the dominant pluralist perspective, what Americans studied was the "government," either vertically as a federated structure, or (more typically) horizontally across the three basic constitutional branches (and the bureaucracy as a fourth and more recent growth). In part, this focus simply reflected a basic historical reality: as J. P. Nettl noted over thirty years ago, "the relative 'statelessness' of American social science coincides with the relative statelessness of the United States."¹ Compared to its European counterparts, public authority in the United States lacked the consistent ability to impose its will on powerful social actors and interests. While this fact was well known, it encouraged a scholarship that regarded the government as an arbiter or, at worst, a "cash register" for conflicting socioeconomic interests. Since the state is taken for granted from an international relations perspective, some of the earlier statist work appeared as studies in comparative political economy and foreign policy.² Skocpol herself entered the fray with a massive reworking of Barrington Moore's argument as to the relation between revolution and social class; in contrast, Skocpol's account underscored state capacity as an explanatory variable. 

This emphasis on the state reappeared several years later in the programmatic fanfare of Skocpol, et. al.'s call for "bringing the state back in" to American political studies, in particular to rescue the Weberian tradition of historical sociology from the structural-functionalist influence of Talcott Parsons.³ While not a little unfair and even condescending to existing American scholarship - political scientists and historians had hardly overlooked the "state", even if they had not called it that⁴ - the statist turn in political studies proposed treating the state as a distinct, independent entity with some measure of autonomous action. The key innovation here was less intellectual than perceptual: armed with workable (if not unproblematic) definitions of state strength, capacity, and autonomy derived from comparative, historical sociology, scholars seeking to "bring the state back in" approached the same familiar facts about the American political system in a new light. 

Rather than regard the American state as a terrain of interest group conflict, or at best as something to be captured by these groups, state structure itself now became an explanatory variable that shaped policy outcomes in interesting ways. Above all, it was the relative weakness of the American state that accounted for the lack of an integrated framework for welfare policies such as were typical of postwar European democracies. To this extent, Skocpol's work - and the historical-institutionalist turn more generally - has emphasized the politics of the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Whether in the areas of macroeconomic stabilization, agriculture, pensions, or social policy, Skocpol and others have argued that the distinctive structure of the American state - federalism, party competition and patronage, and fragmented bureaucratic authority - led by the 1930s to a decisive break between the policy trajectories of the United States and other industrialized nations.⁵

Again, these were not novel insights, even if they were new to an ahistorical American political science accustomed to behavioral explanations. The older historians of administration and government had long appreciated these features of the American state, as had the "Organizational Synthesis" School of American history.⁶ However, these older accounts assumed a modernization imperative not shared by the newer statists, unless one construes Skocpol's focus on the Progressive Era and New Deal as a kind of teleology of the counterfactual (an integrated American welfare state didn't happen, and the task is to determine why). More broadly, the turn to the state in American political studies belatedly acknowledged two empirical developments: first, that modernization theories erred in treating the Anglo-American experience as a convergent model for new nations (especially when the United States was bombing these nations or otherwise subverting their governments); and second, that in the developed countries themselves, the sheer expansion of government responsibilities had made it increasingly plausible to speak of states as autonomous actors. 

At the same time, the work of Skocpol and her colleagues differed from mere historical narrative in their theoretically self-aware appropriation of the comparative method for testing historical causality. In a sense, Skocpol's success in this has been at once intellectual and cultural. Her analytical framework essentially took the traditional Marxist analysis of social change in terms of modes and relations of production, introduced feedback and the contingent possibility of autonomous praxis, and treated praxis not just as the prerogative of vanguard classes, but of other actors as well. In this way, Skocpol has enhanced the intellectual appeal of a domesticated Marxism - a Marxist science without Marxist teleology - for American intellectual audiences suspicious of historicism and wedded to at least some measure of methodological individualism. Much like Marx, however, Skocpol in her work has downplayed the power of ideas, a stance that is otherwise at odds with the Weberian notion of ideas as the "switchmen" of history's tracks.

Theda Skocpol's more specific influence upon American political science has made itself felt through the growth of the subfield of American Political Development (APD), and of its institutional home in the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association. Indeed, Skocpol served as the section's first president and remains one of its most prominent members. Barely ten years old, Politics and History thrives as a sort of homeless shelter for scholars whose work does not fit into mainstream American social science. In addition to the specific intellectual agenda promoted by Skocpol and her students, Politics and History houses diverse research interests which, beyond a minimum regard for history, contingency, the importance of ideas, or the constraining effects of political structures, lack a programmatic commitment to the comparative methodology of Skocpol's original historical-institutional analysis.⁷ What explains the rapid growth of this subfield of American political science? In part, the diversity of APD reflects an entrepreneurial urge to embrace as much existing scholarship as possible. Rather like Mormon posthumous conversions, APD reaches into economic history, political and normative theory, political economy, and comparative politics for intellectual antecedents and allies. Furthermore, the scientistic behavioralism of mainstream political science tends to generate maverick recruits for this subfield as a matter of course.

In addition to these factors, the historical-institutionalist turn in American political science has also been abetted by the waning of political history within the humanities. With the rise of social history since the 1960s, the production of scholarly narratives focusing upon elite actors (white male presidents, bureaucrats, and statebuilders, among others) fell into disrepute. Reflecting the inclusive, participatory values of the New Left, (and perhaps also the publishing imperatives of an expanding discipline), American historians have turned to chronicling the experiences of ordinary people, particularly those marginal groups along the victim-privileged axes of race, class, and gender. More recently, the popularity of French-inspired literary theory has underpinned burgeoning "culture studies" which seek to render these ordinary experiences as the disciplining (alternately, the emancipatory) effects of "discourse". The result has been the eclipse of what Joel Silbey calls "ordinary politics" among the concerns of professional historians.⁸

In response to this abandonment of political history, political scientists like Skocpol have stepped in to fill the vacuum, engaging in archival research themselves rather than simply attempting interpretive syntheses of narratives provided by historians. This new role for political scientists (or new home for political historians) is reflected in the tone and appearance of journals like Studies in American Political Development. Its articles tend to be far longer than those found in other political science journals, where brevity bespeaks the scientific reporting of quantitative "results." In addition, APD-friendly journals eschew the in-text citation practices of mainstream publications like the American Political Science Review, along with the muscular insinuation such citations give that social knowledge is cumulative. Characteristically, APD scholarship revels instead in the texture and pedantry of the historian's footnote. More importantly for its intellectual prestige, this scholarship is taken seriously by historians, as witnessed by the respectful reception given Stephen Skowronek's Building a New American State or Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers.

Much as APD scholars sometimes question the rationale for a field whose boundaries are so blurred, the very amorphousness of APD is its source of strength within political science. Its shifting synthesis of structure, agency, and contingency offers points of contact for diverse styles of scholarship. For example, in her more recent work on the nineteenth-century origins of American welfare policy, Skocpol herself has moved away from the state autonomy perspective to incorporate such diverse factors as bureaucratic politics, party structure and patronage, and federalism to explain the emerging distinction, by the New Deal, between welfare and social security. 

This kind of explanatory eclecticism is typical of APD. Students of ideas will find them taken seriously and not dismissed as mere rationalizations of interests. Students of political history will find that individuals matter, when they participate in those important choices out of which path dependency is made. Students of social and political structures like parties, bureaucracies, and states will find broad latitude for the sort of middle-range theorizing that treats structural variation either as an explanans or an explanandum. Here also exists a fruitful point of contact between historical approaches and the theory of rational choice, which otherwise brackets structural change as exogenous to its models. Finally, APD makes room for the conceptualization of longer-term periodizations of American politics, as well as for regional-level variables like economic core and periphery that come closest to the Marxist treatment of structure.

An agenda this wide is held together more by thematic than by theoretical coherence. If APD is characterized by anything, it is by a shared commitment to historical inquiry, to a belief that politics cannot be reduced to economics or psychology but that policies do shape politics, and to the acceptance that institutional evolution is both path-dependent and subject to the feedback loops of constrained choice. Or, as Marx put it more elegantly, "men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.⁹ 

In addition to its intellectual and disciplinary aspects, a third dimension of historical institutionalism, and Skocpol's significance within it, resides in its ideological valence. This is not to suggest that the research methods and conclusions inspired by Skocpol are somehow reducible to a partisan viewpoint. Nonetheless, a case could be made that the analytical agenda set by the statist turn in American political science has been informed by the normative concerns of the Old Left. Swamped by the tides of conservatism in politics and postmodernism in the academy, "bringing the state back in" represents a lifeboat for the liberal-progressive interpretation of the American experience. Of course, as a public intellectual, Skocpol has engaged the recent debate on national health care, as well as ongoing discussions concerning civic renewal. In these endeavors, the ideological significance of state-centric analysis is obvious: if the state is indeed autonomous, instead of being a mere instrument of class or group interest, then a left-liberal alternative is guaranteed, at least as a structural possibility. Skocpol's scholarship thus permits Skocpol's advocacy. Per contra, rational choice theory delegitimates the autonomous state (and supports conservative causes) to the extent that it systematically reduces state action to the self-seeking behavior of bureaucrats.

Moreover, the statist approach associated with Skocpol, with its insistent focus upon criteria of stateness like centralized authority, administrative capacity, and policy autonomy, tends to exclude certain interpretations of the state. In regards to what, after all, might the state enjoy authority, capacity, and autonomy? The only answer is social forces and actors. Yet the state-society differentiation underlying the statist approach makes most sense only when the state is itself small and weak relative to society, such as in nineteenth century America. As the state grows, it recasts the very categories of capacity and autonomy by expanding the boundaries of the public sphere. Ironically, this intuition has not escaped practitioners of social history, with their enlarged notions of "the political"! In Skocpol's hands, the state remains instrumental, albeit not in the vulgar Marxist sense of serving class interests. Rather, the state is instrumental vis-à-vis society. On these terms, the statist approach excludes radical critiques of the state, both from the left and the right, which condemn it for its indefinite potential for acquiring power, and for its ability to corrupt the authenticity and initiative of community life.¹⁰

Much as Skocpol and her followers have sought to revive a Weberian appreciation of the state, they have emphasized a particular side of Weber. While Max Weber the political sociologist did provide taxonomies to describe the modern state, Weber the social theorist also meditated upon the rationalization of social life (the "iron cage") implied by the growth of the state. To the extent that the second side of Weber is absent from contemporary state scholarship, "bringing the state back in" has also brought in a technocratic sentimentalism for what an executive-centered New Deal American state could have accomplished had it not been for its retrograde features (e.g. an elected Congress responsive to constituent interests). 

In this regard, Skocpol resembles an updated version of that Progressive-era intellectual who, in Dorothy Ross' interpretation, attempted to adopt the myth of American exceptionalism to the changing conditions and stresses of modernity. Like her predecessors, Skocpol's work in its most general sense seeks to deny the inevitability of history "as a process of continuous, qualitative change, moved and ordered by forces that lay within itself."¹¹ And, along with her scholarship, her advocacy expresses the Progressive's abiding faith in the ability of concerted state action to alter the preferences and behavior of recalcitrant individuals.

Professor Szymanski can be reached by email at ams@ou.edu.

1.  J. P. Nettl, "The State as a Conceptual Variable" World Politics 20 (July 1968), 561.

2.  Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial Nations, (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Stephen Krasner, Defending the National Interest, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978).

3.  Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).

4.  Gabriel Almond, "The Return to the State," American Political Science Review 82 (September 1988), 853-74; Leonard White, The Republican Era: 1865-1901, (New York: MacMillan, 1958); Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977).

5.  Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, "State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal," Political Science Quarterly 97 (Summer 1982), 255-78; a more extended version of this argument can be found in Finegold and Skocpol, State and Party in America's New Deal, (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1995). See also Skocpol and John Ikenberry, "The Political Formation of the American Welfare State in Historical and Comparative Perspective," Comparative Social Research 6 (1983), 87-148; Margaret Weir and Skocpol, "State Structures and Possibilities for 'Keynesian' Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States,"in Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In, op. cit., 107-63; Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1992).

6.  Leonard White, Trends in Public Administration, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933); Louis Galambos, "The Organizational Synthesis in American History," Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970), 279-90.

7.  See Jeffrey Tulis, "Reflections on the Rhetorical Presidency in American Political Development," in Richard J. Ellis, ed., Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective, (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 211-222.

8.  Joel Silbey, "The State and Practice of American Political History at the Millennium: The Nineteenth Century as a Test Case," Journal of Policy History 11 (1999), 1-30.

9.  Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d. ed., (New York: Norton, 1978), 595. 

10.  Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects, (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1990), 81-83.

11.  Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), xv.