A Government Out of Sight
The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America

A Government Out of Sight revises our understanding of the ways in which Americans turned to the national government throughout the nineteenth century.

Brian Balogh (Author)

9780521820974, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 April 2009

430 pages
22.9 x 15.5 x 2.8 cm, 0.68 kg

'In this pathbreaking book, Brian Balogh brings into sight the hidden wellsprings of national political authority in America's supposedly stateless nineteenth century. Combining revealing new historical research with a deft grasp of both historical and political science scholarship, Balogh not only untangles the mystery of how a national government so putatively weak could govern so powerfully in advance of modern bureaucracy. He also offers an extraordinary historical vista on the governing challenges of our own era.' Jacob S. Hacker, University of California, Berkeley

While it is obvious that America's state and local governments were consistently active during the nineteenth century, a period dominated by laissez-faire, political historians of twentieth-century America have assumed that the national government did very little during this period. A Government Out of Sight challenges this premise, chronicling the ways in which the national government intervened powerfully in the lives of nineteenth-century Americans through the law, subsidies, and the use of third parties (including state and local governments), while avoiding bureaucracy. Americans have always turned to the national government - especially for economic development and expansion - and in the nineteenth century even those who argued for a small, nonintrusive central government demanded that the national government expand its authority to meet the nation's challenges. In revising our understanding of the ways in which Americans turned to the national government throughout this period, this study fundamentally alters our perspective on American political development in the twentieth century, shedding light on contemporary debates between progressives and conservatives about the proper size of government and government programs and subsidies that even today remain 'out of sight'.

1. Introduction: why look back?
2. How Americans lost sight of the state: adapting Republican virtue to Liberal self interest
3. Between revolutions: the promise of the 'developmental vision'
4. 'To strengthen and perpetuate that union': Republican political economy
5. Outside the boundaries: 'powers and energies in the extreme parts'
6. The uncontested state: letters, law, localities
7. Restoring 'spontaneous action and self-regulation': civil war and civil society
8. Judicial exceptions to Gilded Age laissez-faire
9. 'A special form of associative action': new liberalism and the national integration of public and private
10. Conclusion: sighting the twentieth-century state.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]