The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal
The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism

The story of the breakdown of limited government in America and the rise of the federal state.

Paul D. Moreno (Author)

9781107032958, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 June 2013

366 pages
24 x 16.1 x 2.3 cm, 0.67 kg

'This study's emphasis on ideas in American political development sets it apart from many similar historical works. Yet the careful research on policy and jurisprudence adds a detailed narrative of the nuts and bolts of American politics that is sometimes lacking in works of political theory. Moreno's book is an ambitious, meticulously researched, and thoughtful study strongly rooted in primary sources. It should be required reading for anyone interested in constitutionalism and jurisprudence, political thought, and American political development.' Jason R. Jividen, The Journal of American History

This book tells the story of constitutional government in America during the period of the 'social question'. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, and before the 'second Reconstruction' and cultural revolution of the 1960s, Americans dealt with the challenges of the urban and industrial revolutions. In the crises of the American Revolution and the Civil War, the American founders - and then Lincoln and the Republicans - returned to a long tradition of Anglo-American constitutional principles. During the Industrial Revolution, American political thinkers and actors gradually abandoned those principles for a set of modern ideas, initially called progressivism. The social crisis, culminating in the Great Depression, did not produce a Lincoln to return to the founders' principles, but rather a series of leaders who repudiated them. Since the New Deal, Americans have lived in a constitutional twilight, not having completely abandoned the natural-rights constitutionalism of the founders, nor embraced the entitlement-based welfare state of modern liberalism.

1. The post-war Constitution
2. The judiciary and private rights
3. Crisis of 1890s
4. The new jurisprudence
5. The due process dialectic
6. Federal police power
7. Rooseveltian progressivism
8. The Lochner incident
9. Court and Constitution in crisis
10. Taft and the Republican crack-up
11. Wilsonian progressivism
12. The new freedom
13. The new Wilson
14. The Great War
15. The return of the regular republicans
16. The Taft court
17. The last progressive
18. The New Deal
19. To the brink
20. The Second New Deal
21. The court fight
22. The abortive Third New Deal
23. The New Deal court.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]