Louis Hartz summed up the mission of his historical generation when he wrote, as part of the rationale for The Liberal Tradition in 1955, that “the way to fully refute a man is to ignore him … and the only way you can do this is to substitute new fundamental categories for his own, so that you are simply pursuing a different path.” Hartz was referring to the influence of Charles Beard and what Hartz called the “frustration that the persistence of the Progressive analysis of America has inspired.” He was arguing that his generation had to stop honoring the progressives by contending with them; the key to destroying their interpretation of American history was the reinvention of American history by means of new conceptual tools.

How, if at all, can studies of the city help us understand the distinctive qualities of the American regime? In “The Burdens of Urban History,” which refines and elaborates his earlier paper “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History,” Terrence McDonald, a historian who has written on urban fiscal policy and conflict, argues that students of the city have focused their work too narrowly on bosses and machines, patronage and pluralism. In so doing, they have obscured other bases of politics and conflict, and, trapped by liberal categories of analysis, they have perpetuated a self-satisfied, even celebratory, portrait of American politics and society. This unfortunate directionality to urban research in some measure has been unwitting because historians and social scientists have been unreflective about the genealogies, and mutual borrowings, of their disciplines. Even recent critical scholarship in the new social history and in the social sciences under the banner of “bringing the state back in” suffers from these defects. As a result, these treatments of state and society relationships, and of the themes that appear under the rubric of American “exceptionalism,” are characterized by an epistemological mish-mash, a contraction of analytical vision, and an unintended acquiescence in the self-satisfied cheerleading of the academy that began in the postwar years.

Professor Katznelson's essay deserves a lengthy reply, but space limitations require me to keep my response brief. I strongly disagree with the way that he has characterized the thrust of my essay, the point of my other work, and the implications of recent work by other urban historians. But rather than hash over these misinterpretations, I will focus instead on the issue between us that I think has the most relevance for future work on the role of urban politics in American political development: the utility of a focus on the urban political machine.

In 1982 a panel of the Western Political Science Association meeting in San Diego took stock of postwar developments in the study of public law among American political scientists. The Western Political Quarterly has published the papers as a symposium intended to “revive a dialogue” among political scientists about the future of public law. The participants in this symposium generally take for granted the decline among political scientists, academic lawyers, and legal philosophers of the belief that judicial decision can be or even ought to be free of “political” considerations. All seem to agree about the justified triumph of something called “political jurisprudence.” Yet no consensus unites the symposium participants regarding all that political jurisprudence is or ought to be. The participants agree that political jurisprudence should be more than simply teaching and research that confines itself to the legal categories and research methods that dominate lawyers' legal briefs and judicial opinions. They also agree on the need for inquiry into the social-psychological factors of judicial choice, impact studies, alternative methods of conflict resolution, and the like. But the symposium reveals conflicting views regarding the philosophic questions of moral value that enter into legal judgments. Two views in particular stand out.

Nowhere in political science was the “behavioral revolution” of the fifties more pervasive than in public law. Normative debates on constitutional issues were left largely to lawyers or to the dwindling number of scholars in American political thought. Recently, as Professor Sotirios Barber observes, normative inquiries have undergone a resurgence in this section of the discipline, a resurgence within which the bulk of my ongoing work rests (quite impenitently). This resurgence has many sources, one of which is a wider recognition in contemporary political science that ideas can shape political conduct and that empirical inquiries find their ultimate justification in their contributions to normative reflection.

At Professional meetings of political scientists and in journals there have occurred discussions of the future of studies in the field of political science traditionally labeled public law. Now we have the further comments by Rogers Smith in the American Political Science Review and Sotirios Barber in this volume of Studies. The editors of Studies have asked me to join in the Smith-Barber dialogue.

Why write about the Wagner Act again? There is no shortage of commentary, yet disagreement persists on basic questions: Why did the measure pass? Did the Wagner Act make any difference. If so, how?

Here I argue that the Wagner Act was passed by Progressive liberals inside and outside the government, in alliance with a mass labor movement. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) played a major positive role in the emergence of new industrial unions.

The human services have come to occupy a vital position in the modern welfare state, penetrating nearly all its activities and institutions. Beyond providing a minimum level of support, these services seek to restructure the behavior of their clients so they can better cope with the demands and challenges of modern life. To realize this goal social personnel employ an approach that can most accurately be defined as therapeutic: the situation of the client is viewed as a condition that must be diagnosed; the caseworker establishes a helping relationship; a suitable treatment plan is designed and implemented. Although the middle class voluntarily avails itself of therapeutic services, public intervention by social personnel has a distinctly lower-class bias and an authoritarian character. The middle class purchases therapeutic services from private providers. The state focuses on marginal populations and its subjects usually have no choice about assuming a client status.

The continuing repression by jurists and scholars of the role of Dred Scott in our constitutional history has given that case a pervasive influence that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged. The following discussion will abstract from the moral embarrassment of Dred Scott in order to treat its jurisprudence as the missing link that connects the underlying framework of Marshallian constitutionalism with later struggles over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Without such a link the Civil War is left as a constitutional silence, perhaps a second American Revolution, separating two discontinuous systems of government. That silence can be filled only by acknowledging the fundamental continuities between our present conceptions of constitutional equality and the system of government that could permit the existence of slavery.

Much has been written about the “new technology” of U.S. elections: computerized letters, data banks of potential contributors, advanced video advertising techniques, speedy transportation and communication, and instant analysis of polling data. If one examines these discussions for a sense of how the growing use of these new technologies has changed the politics of elections, one finds several themes. Many scholars and journalists have described, for example, the high dollar costs of technology-dependent campaigns, the consequent influence of political action committees, how presidential candidates in particular are “marketed,” via the media, like toothpaste or breakfast cereal, and the prevalence in campaigns of superficial image rather than issues. We argue here that these changes in the way elections are conducted are associated with a deeper change in the conception of elections. The core of this argument is that changes in election technology have made possible the conduct of campaigns in which “strategy” has taken on a new meaning, and that leaders and the public share a view of elections that has progressively less to do with education, public discourse, or participation.

I seek to counter a view commonly held by scholars that the Burger Court is pragmatic in its constitutional choices in contrast to the Warren Court, which is viewed as ideological. I propose a methodology to study the effects of process values and rights values held by members of the Burger Court on their decision making. To view its decision making as pragmatic, without awareness of underlying values of process and rights, results in an oversimplified view and leads to the unwarranted conclusion that the Burger Court is case-specific in making constitutional choices. I limit my discussion to separation of church and state cases, primarily in the area of aid to parochial education, because traditionally scholars have emphasized the pragmatic nature of Burger Court choices in this area. A finding of consistency of values in justices' orientations in this area suggests that the methodology reported here might have general utility in the study of Supreme Court decision making.