Book Review: Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920

Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)

       Since the Civil War, American history was greatly changed. In the societal level, the social movement promoted the moral reform; in the political sphere, the American government changed its political institutions and the United States became an empire and expanded its force to Asia and Latin America; in the field of economy, accompanying with the scientific management, it became a kingdom of automobile. During this period, American history was changed so much that it greatly attracted the attention of American historians to work on them.

The United States is a strong state in contemporary world that Americans could feel a “sense of the state” as an American citizen. However, it might be not so obvious for Americans to feel it between 1877 and 1920. In order to explore the transformation of the state building of the United States in this period, Stephen Skowronek published his work ─ Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 in 1982. 

In this book, Skowronek thought the state-building was the core of the American political development, and “the exceptional character of government in early America presented a knotty problem in American political development around the turn of the twentieth century and that this developmental problem shaped the character of the modern American state. Unraveling the state-building problem in modern American political development places the apparent statelessness of early America in a new light and makes the past a valuable source of insight into the ominous organization of power we are so conscious of today.”[1] Focusing on the state-building, Skowronek attempted to explore the American political development at the turn of the 20^th century.

Skowronek’s purpose was rather clear. “First, to comprehend this change in government as a rather remarkable achievement in political reform claiming a special place in the comparative study of state development; second, to identify in this change the historical origins of modern institutional politics in America, a politics distinguished by incoherence and fragmentation in governmental operations and by the absence and fragmentation in governmental operations and by the absence of clear lines of authoritative control.”[2] He assumed that 1900 was a watershed of the state building in American history. Between 1877 and 1900, state building as patchwork; between 1900 and 1920, state building as reconstitution. Through comparing these two periods, he wanted to examine the change of the state-building of the United States.

We might ask: how can we understand the state building? Skowronek argued that there were several determinants that accompanied with the operation of the American state. These determinants were:  “the organizational orientations of government, the procedural routines that tie institutions together within a given organizational scheme, and the intellectual talents employed in government.”[3] Then he further explained his understanding of these determinants. In the organizational dimension, according to him, a nation should have these four features: “1. The concentration of authority at the national center of government; 2. The penetration of institutional controls from the governmental center throughout the territory; 3. the centralization of authority within the national government; 4. The specialization of institutional tasks and individual roles within the government.”[4] While in early America period, “the Article of Confederation had concentrated governing authority in the separate states, but the national authority it did provide had all been centralized in a single congressional assembly;”[5] in the procedural dimension, early America as a state of courts and parties; and in the intellectual dimension, lawyers in the state of courts and parties. Through analyzing these determinants of early American state, Skowronek pointed out that “the operational determinants of the early American state were all innocuous enough to make it seem as if there was no state in America at all.”[6] Paying attention to these determinants and factors, he believed that they could help him to interpret the political development of the state-building in American history.

In order to convince his readers, he compared the great change of the state building during the two periods. In the first phase, he presumed that the American state was a weak state and not very powerful, because the American politics were dominated by the state of courts and parties. In the field of civil administration, the American state was limited to reform its civil administration; in the sphere of army, it was also limited to enforce its authority; in the sphere of business, the government failed to regulate the administered capitalism. In contrast to the state-building in the first phase, the state building of the United States in the second period was reconstituted and the American state became a strong state. It not only reconstituted the civil administration, but also reconstructed the army and the business regulation. Comparing these two periods together, then he noticed that the state-building of the United States was an obvious phenomenon in American history.

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[1] Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3.

[2] Skowronek, ibid, viii

[3] Skowronek, ibid, 19.

[4] Skowronek, ibid, 20.

[5] Skowronek, ibid, 21.

[6] Skowronek, ibid, 34.