During roughly the half-century straddling the turn of the twentieth century, America’s national government underwent a dramatic transformation. It proceeded on two fronts, politics and administration. At the beginning of the era, politicians were deeply enmeshed in a system of patronage and graft reflecting their indebtedness to the local and state political parties without whose support their careers would have languished. Local party organizations recruited and sponsored candidates, ran election campaigns, and directed subsequent career moves among its cadre of politicians. In return, these politicians used their offices to stoke the party machine with a steady supply of patronage appointments and government contracts. By the end of the era, a variety of state and national reforms had effectively dismantled the patronage system.

Bureaucrats are politicians of a sort, and bureaucracies are organizations of political actors. Bureaucracies gain a measure of autonomy when they are able to successfully practice a politics of legitimacy. When and where they are found, autonomous bureaucrats launch policy innovations that differ materially from the designs of elected authorities. Autonomous bureaucrats build these program innovations slowly, and they try to generate visible efficiency from these innovations. The most successful bureaucrats, however, transcend achievements such as “innovation” and “efficiency.” They get their hands dirty, and they engage in coalition politics. They assemble broadbased alliances behind their new programs, coalitions wrought from the multiple networks in which these unique bureaucrats travel.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the vocabulary and analytical organization of American common law underwent a profound and far-reaching transformation in a process that began in the northern industrial states around 1850. The language and categories of pleading cases, the burdens of proof, and the standards for the adjudication of cases, all were transformed. This was not merely a matter of revision, it was a reconfiguration of the basic reasoning process that defined the logic of the law. The result was the displacement of the inherited English common- law system, which until that time had undergone only minor modifications. In its place, a unified system of specifically American common law emerged, constructed around a model of American public citizenship that replaced private rights with public duties as its lodestone.

The history of the American welfare state is often recounted as a long line of missed opportunities. As the story goes, the absence of a labor party, or American exceptionalism, helped create a weak welfare state. Initially, some political scientists, labor economists, and historians attributed American exceptionalism to the pure and simple unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In the 1990s, however, a number of political scientists and legal historians revised their understanding of American exceptionalism. Given the legal bias within the common law that benefited individuals rather than groups, conservative state and federal court judges pursued peremptory legal strategies, like the labor injunction, that shaped the course of the American labor movement. It was repressive state action, the revisionists argue, that explains why organized labor, and the unions that came to dominate the movement, pursued a less expansive vision of trade unionism and the American state.

Every ten years, the United States “constructs” itself politically. On a decennial basis, U.S. Congressional districts are quite literally drawn, physically constructing political representation in the House of Representatives on the basis of where one lives. Why does the United States do it this way? What justifies domicile as the sole criteria of constituency construction? These are the questions raised in this article.

Contrary to many contemporary understandings of representation at the founding, I argue that there were no principled reasons for using domicile as the method of organizing for political representation. Even in 1787, the Congressional district was expected to be far too large to map onto existing communities of interest. Instead, territory should be understood as forming a habit of mind for the founders, even while it was necessary to achieve other democratic aims of representative government.

The right to bear arms is one of the most controversial issues in United States history; it has always been so, though not for the reasons usually cited by contemporaries. It has been customary since at least the late nineteenth century to view military organizations as an extension of the legitimate authority of the state (except in case of unsanctioned resistance). The American experience, however, gives lie to the assumption that there is a clean analytical divide between state and civil society when it comes to military matters.