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Ideology and Public Policy: Antistatism in American Welfare State Transformation

Part of: JPH 30th Anniversary Most Cited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Jill Quadagno  and
Debra Street
Jill Quadagno
Affiliation:
Florida State University State University of New York—Buffalo
Debra Street
Affiliation:
Florida State University State University of New York—Buffalo
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Henry David Thoreau's influential essay “Civil Disobedience,” published in 1849, began with a ringing declaration of opposition to government: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—‘That government is best which governs not at all.’…the character of the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.” Thoreau's statement summarizes a central thesis in political theory, what has become a historical constant in the minds of researchers seeking to explain the development and parameters of the American welfare state. This thesis is that any power given to the government is subtracted from the liberty of the governed, a concept best captured by the term “antistatism.” Thus, Lipset contends that the United States is dominated by an encompassing liberal culture that honors private property, distrusts state authority, and holds individual rights sacred. Similarly, according to Huntington, Americans live by a creed that views government as the most dangerous embodiment of power. For Morone, American government is a “polity suspicious of its own state.” Hartz, too, asserts that the master assumption is that “the power of the state must be limited.”

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 17 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Directions in Policy History , January 2005 , pp. 52 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2005

References

Notes

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