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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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