LAW AND THE AMERICAN STATE, FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE CIVIL WAR

General

There are few broad comparative studies that would allow us to better understand early American political development from a transnational or global perspective. One valuable overview is Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation States (New York, 1993). One source for a concise account of the British case in the mid-nineteenth century is the chapter titled “The Nature of the State,” in K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid- Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), 91–124. Especially in the United States, social scientists’ interest in the autonomous capacities of the state increased starting in the 1980s. This was evident in the essays collected in Peter Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York, 1985). More recently, theorists have warned against attributing too much coherence and power to formal state organizations: see George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca, 1999) and Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (New York, 2001). A stimulating discussion of the deficiencies of conventional notions of state power may be found in Peter Baldwin, “Beyond Weak and Strong: Rethinking the State in Comparative Policy History,” Journal of Policy History 17 (2005), 12–33.