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H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by [log in to unmask] (March, 1998)
J. Richard Piper. _Ideologies and Institutions: American Conservative and
Liberal Governance Prescriptions Since 1933_. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1997. ix + 451 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, and index.
$74.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8476-8458-X; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8476-8459-8.
Reviewed for H-Pol by Patrick D. Reagan <[log in to unmask]>, Tennessee
Technological University
Political History Redivivus
Over the last fifteen years, scholars in political science, historical
sociology, and a slowly reviving political history have called for
renewed attention to the role of the state, political parties, ideology,
and institutions in different societies.[1] Yet an inherent tension
between the synchronic snapshot of the social scientist and the diachronic
tapestry of the historian has oftentimes hindered this rebirth of interest
in the state side of the state and society nexus. While the social
scientist looks to test a hypothesis or build a model, the historian
usually looks for the particulars to explain the context and changes over
time. The two approaches do not always work in concert. In this
ambitious, but repetitious work, University of Tampa political scientist
J. Richard Piper attempts to synthesize the last generation of work by the
new institutionalists in order to understand the changing relationship
between political ideologies and state institutions over time. This
thoroughly researched, unevenly written account might be taken as a good
example of the renaissance of political history that traces the changes in
liberal and conservative ideologies, policies, and governmental
institutions between the emergence of New Deal liberalism after 1933 and
the fragmentation of Reagan conservatism by 1993. The implicit assumption
behind Piper's approach is that there has been an ongoing ideological
debate between liberals and conservatives vying for capture of the
presidency, control of Congress, activist use of the federal court system,
and maneuvering through the institutions in a system that Theodore Lowi
has called "interest-group liberalism."[2] Piper seeks to test two major
theses. Have liberal and conservative coalitions used ideological values
and prescriptions to create theories of governance, to propose principled
policies, to use institutions to implement programs, and to rely on
established and new institutional power bases to reflect those
assumptions? Second, have ideologically based recommendations by liberals
and conservatives had real consequences (even if unintended ones) on
government institutions and operations? Moving beyond a traditional focus
on the presidential synthesis, Piper identifies five areas for study
including constitutional interpretation, the administrative state,
federalism, presidential-congressional relations, and the role of the
judiciary to test these two hypotheses.
Rather than providing a synchronic methodology aimed at confirming a
social science theory or model, Piper recognizes the value of longitudinal
historical study as the best way of making sense of continuity and change
over time. In four parts, each dealing with a specific time period, he
tracks changes in values and programmatic policies, power bases, theories
of governance, and the instrumental origins and impact of theories of
governance. During the 1933-1945 period, the New Deal system of
interest-group liberalism emerged based on a flexible interpretation of
the Constitution, expansion of the administrative state, coexistence with
a federalist polity, presidential leadership of a strong executive branch
and a weak Congress, and a bifurcated attitude of judicial activism in
socioeconomic matters and judicial restraint in civil liberties. In the
following period of 1945-1966, liberal Democratic presidents and
Eisenhower via Modern Republicanism consolidated this liberal ideology
which culminated in the revival of domestic reform and an ongoing activist
Cold War foreign policy under Kennedy and Johnson. Yet already by the
mid-1960s, Piper argues, this liberal-dominated ideology based in the
presidency and Democratic interest groups was being challenged by
conservatives in Congress and the postwar emergence of new conservative
intellectuals, journals, and think tanks that modified and revived the old
right ideology. In a period of flux from 1966 to 1981,
conservatives--bolstered by the addition of former New Dealers turned
neoconservatives, the New Right, and the religious right--articulated
their ideology based in part on the old right's values of an immutable
Constitution, resistance to the administrative state, a highly
decentralized federal system, a conservative coalition in Congress to
check the power of the New Deal presidency and state, and a conservative
judicial activism that between 1890 and 1937 had forestalled the
development of the welfare state. By the 1981-1993 period, conservative
ideology had replaced liberalism as the regnant set of values, policies,
programs, and power bases. Post-Goldwater conservatism under Ronald
Reagan became possible due to the fusion of traditional and libertarian
ideas, newfound religious faith, corporate financing, trust in a
charismatic president, distrust of liberals in Congress, and
market-oriented policies in the guise of privatizing reforms. Conservatism
had become the new ruling ideology, in rhetoric, if not always in
practice.
In twenty-one chapters packed with factual narrative and thought-provoking
insights, Piper walks the reader through post-1933 American political
history. Each of the four major parts includes chapters on values and
policies, liberal and conservative power bases, the liberal theory of
governance, the conservative theory of governance, and the complex
interplay of politics as ideology, power bases, and what can be done.
Piper's footnotes read like a running historiography of the new political
history drawing not only on such well known interpretations by Samuel
Lubell, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and James MacGregor Burns, but also
the more recent, broadened political history of Walter Dean Burnham,
Alonzo Hamby, Steven M. Gillon, Barry Karl, William Leuchtenburg, Allan
J. Matusow, Kim McQuaid, and Nicol C. Rae. Significantly, he also makes
good use of wide reading on the history of modern American conservatism as
found in key works by Gary Dean Best, Sidney Blumenthal, Sara Diamond,
Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, Jerome L. Himmelstein, Sidney Milkis,
George H. Nash, James Patterson, A. James Reichley, Peter Steinfels, James
L. Sundquist, and George Wolfskill. Readers of H-Pol could develop a
useful bibliography of the new political history while familiarizing
themselves with some of the best work among political scientists using the
new institutional approach just by combing through Piper's notes and
bibliography. Use of conservative and liberal commentators' articles and
books as the narrative converges toward the present shows the tremendous
amount of research in secondary and published primary sources that the
author has done for this work.
Much of what Piper has to say is worth reading and thinking about, but
there are serious flaws in organization and style. Piper could have
combined alternating chapters on liberal and conservative ideology in
each of the four chronological parts for a more focused, comparative, and
analytically useful work that would have benefited from some careful
editing. The writing style throughout leaves much to be desired. After
reading the parts on 1933-1945 and 1945-1966, this reader is tired of the
repeated use of terminology that begs for definition, explication, and
analysis that never comes. In the conclusion, Piper suggests that his
research indicates considerable continuity over time on the ideological
position of liberals and conservatives regarding constitutional
interpretation, a federalist polity, and the positive role of the
administrative state while attitudes about presidential-congressional
relations and judicial interpretation changed dramatically. He leaves
the reader wondering if more state-level case studies might clarify how
once conservative, rural-dominated state governments came to become the
"laboratories of democracy" heralded by the New Democrats of the 1990s.
Finally, he suggests that future research might take up historical
comparisons, using Leonard D. White's classic studies as a takeoff point
to consider how Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian and Progressive/New Deal
ideological prescriptions may have been earlier examples of this ongoing
debate, while crossnational studies inspired by the example of Samuel
Beer's work on Great Britain may have a "range of interesting and fruitful
possibilities...even wider than in American history" (p. 404). Toward
the end of this interesting work, Piper leaves the reader with a troubling
comment that has implications worth discussing further in such venues as
H-Pol: As the United States nears the dawn of a new millennium, the
conservative and liberal coalitions that have battled each other during
the major part of the twentieth century are fragmented and more than a
little exhausted by their struggles. Liberalism in particular has shown
signs of possibly terminal illness since the late 1960s, and the end of
the Cold War has recently removed a major source of unity in an
increasingly divided conservative coalition. (p. 391)
Perhaps the most valuable attributes of this work include its broad
historical scope, a large research base of secondary accounts by scholars
as well as political memoirs and journal commentaries by participants and
contemporary observers, and nine tables summarizing congressional roll
call analyses to determine ideological divisions in Congress and how they
changed over time. Piper's inclusion of liberal and conservative
"wordsmiths" writing in _The New Republic_, _The Nation_, _The National
Review_, _Commentary_, _Modern Age_, _The Public Interest_ and some
newspapers suggests that his implicit assumption about the value and
consequence of political ideas goes beyond the heavy number crunching
statistical models of post-World War II American behavioral political
science. In this account, liberalism and conservatism are not presented
as simplistic caricatures but rather as serious, complicated ideologies
involving debates not only between liberals and conservatives but also
among diverse proponents within each camp. Piper appreciates the irony
of unintended consequences over time as well. By the 1980s, Reagan and
Bush conservatives came to favor strong presidential leadership, an
activist anti-Communist foreign policy, and executive branch use of the
administrative state and judicial appointments for their own conservative
ideological ends. During the same period, neo-liberals learned to
appreciate and use congressional power, a principled foreign policy,
increasingly professionalized state governments, and judicial review to
stay in the debate. The parties of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt
had come a long way in just sixty years according to Piper. A reading of
this sophisticated work suggests that political and neo-institutional
history truly has been revived under the leadership of a new generation
of political scientists and historical sociologists such as Theda Skocpol,
while historians are only beginning to catch up.
Notes:
[1]. Key works in the new institutionalism include _Bringing the State
Back In_, eds. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol
(Cambridge, Eng., 1985); William E. Leuchtenburg, "The Pertinence of
Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in
America," _Journal of American History_ 73 (December 1986): 585-600;
Gabriel A. Almond, "The Return to the State," _American Political Science
Review_ 82 (September 1988): 853-874; Alan Brinkley, "The New Deal and the
Idea of the State," in _The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order,
1930-1980_, eds. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, 1989), pp.
85-121; David Brian Robertson, "The Return to History and the New
Institutionalism in American Political Science," _Social Science History_
17 (1993): 1-36.
[2]. Theodore J. Lowi, _The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the
United States_ (New York, 1969, 1979).
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