As conventional thinking once had it, Vormärz Prussia and the antebellum United States mapped out opposite ends of a “strong-state, weak-state” spectrum. But several decades of research have rendered both images increasingly untenable. Revisions began on the American side in the 1940s when a group of scholars set out to re-evaluate the state governments' role in antebellum American industrialization. These studies of state legislation and political rhetoric—the first to take federalism seriously, one might say—collectively laid to rest the myth of laissez-faire during the antebellum period. Since then scholars of the antebellum political economy have examined the American state from another angle, shifting attention to the role of the state and federal courts in economic growth. Others, mean-while, have taken a closer look at the federal government's role before the Civil War and discerned interventionist tendencies in the federal legislature and executive as well. The cumulative effect is clear: it has become impossible to speak of laissez-faire in the antebellum American context. On the Prussian side, too, historians have begun to rethink the state's role in industrialization as mounting evidence has undermined the conventional image. Initially, few historians questioned the extent of the state's involvement in economic activity during the first half of the 19th century; instead, they debated its consequences—beneficial or not, intended or not. On balance the first round of revisions judged Vormdrz Prussian policies to have been rather contradictory in nature, some encouraging industrialization but others either hampering economic change or proving irrelevant.5 Historian Clive Trebilcock has gone a step further, however, debunking what he labels “myths of the directed economy” in nineteenth-century Germany.

Comparative research on the origins of modern welfare states typically asks why certain European nations, including Great Britain, enacted pensions and social insurance between the 1880s and the 1920s, while the United States “lagged behind,” that is did not establish such policies for the entire nation until the Social Security Act of 1935. To put the question this way overlooks the social policies that were distinctive to the early twentieth-century United States. During the period when major European nations, including Britain, were launching paternalist versions of the modern welfare state, the United States was tentatively experimenting with what might be called a maternalist welfare state. In Britain, male bureaucrats and party leaders designed policies “for the good” of male wage-workers and their dependents. Meanwhile, in the United States, early social policies were championed by elite and middle-class women “for the good” of less privileged women. Adult American women were helped as mothers, or as working women who deserved special protection because they were potential mothers.

The judicial role in the construction of the twentieth-century state was decisively structured by the interaction of developments in jurisprudence and by changes in the organization of the regulation of economic activity. Individual judges brought their backgrounds and political predispositions to the task as well, and we will gain a full understanding of the judicial role in structuring the state only by integrating biography, jurisprudence, and political economy. This article examines the work of Justice Thurgood Marshall in constructing the post-New Deal settlement of the relations among people in their capacity as consumers, people in their capacity as workers, and capital. That settlement was expressed in legal forms that departed from the common law doctrines that had for two centuries provided one of the legitimating ideologies of social relations. With the construction of the administrative state came the need to reconstitute not only the legal structures that supported the agencies of government, but also the ideological structures that explained the legitimacy of these innovations. While legal academics articulated carefully thought out defenses of the administrative state, judges provided the citizenry with less developed but, perhaps, more easily understood ideologies. Justice Marshall's work in areas of labor law and civil procedure provides insight into the dimensions of the legal legitimation of the administrative state, while his unique experience as a lawyer and his place within the Court illuminate the importance of biographical factors in a full explanation of the construction of the legal structures of the administrative state.

Twenty years after Louis Galambos published “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis,” the organizational strand of revisionist history has become a mainstay of scholarly interpretation. One hallmark of its maturity is that today the organizational synthesis is itself a subject undergoing revision by charter members and critics alike. High priests like Galambos have underscored the wealth of scholarship spawned by the organizational approach and have discerned broad new trends and tensions in that scholarship. Galambos recently blessed three denominations that have embellished and elaborated upon the founders' abiding faith in the forces of modernization to reshape state-society relations: technology, as mediated through large-scale corporate development; the administrative state, as it has developed over the twentieth century to embrace a new, corporatist form of liberalism; and the pervasive professionalization of society. Yet many leading historians remain outside of the organizational flock. Alan Brinkley, one of the agnostics, has criticized organizational historians for pushing “vast segments of society to the periphery of historical analysis.” Michael McGerr, an outright heretic, has questioned the whole endeavor, doubting whether there “really was an ‘organizational society’ in the early twentieth century (or even now)” and charging the historians who in-vented that society with the sin of “presentism.”