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This paper addresses a paradox. Bureaucracy, I argue, can be viewed as an ideological construct mobilised in both in the anti-statist rhetoric of neoliberalism, and in discourses of the 'progressive' left. But it is also integral to a range of contemporary calls for the regulation of corporate power, public action and personal conduct. Does left/progressive politics, then, mean rescuing bureaucracy in a reimagined polity capable of protecting citizens from harm and restoring notions of the state as a guarantor of public rights and justice? Or are left-inclined movements right to critique bureaucratic institutions and search for alternative organisational forms more capable of engaging or even 'empowering' citizens? The paper traces the slips and slides between negative representations of bureaucracy, regulation and the state itself, and asks how far emerging work can offer counter-narratives that serve to reimagine or reclaim them for 'progressive' purposes.

The commons have emerged as a key notion and underlying experience of many efforts around the world to promote justice and democracy. A central question for political theories of the commons is whether the visions of social order and regimes of political economy they propose are complementary or opposed to public goods that are backed up by governmental coordination and compulsion. This essay argues that the post-Marxist view, which posits an inherent opposition between the commons as a sphere of inappropriable usage and statist public infrastructure, is mistaken, because justice and democracy are not necessarily furthered by the institution of inappropriability. I articulate an alternative pluralist view based on James Tully’s work, which discloses the dynamic interplay between public and common modes of provision and enjoyment, and their civil and civic orientations respectively. Finally, the essay points to the Janus-faced character of the commons and stresses the co-constitutive role of public goods and social services for just and orderly social life while remaining attentive to the dialectic of empowerment and tutelage that marks provision by government.

War--or the threat of war--usually strengthens states as governments tax, draft soldiers, exert control over industrial production, and dampen internal dissent in order to build military might. The United States, however, was founded on the suspicion of state power, a suspicion that continued to gird its institutional architecture and inform the sentiments of many of its politicians and citizens through the twentieth century. In this comprehensive rethinking of postwar political history, Aaron Friedberg convincingly argues that such anti-statist inclinations prevented Cold War anxieties from transforming the United States into the garrison state it might have become in their absence. Drawing on an array of primary and secondary sources, including newly available archival materials, Friedberg concludes that the \"weakness\" of the American state served as a profound source of national strength that allowed the United States to outperform and outlast its supremely centralized and statist rival: the Soviet Union. Friedberg's analysis of the U. S. government's approach to taxation, conscription, industrial planning, scientific research and development, and armaments manufacturing reveals that the American state did expand during the early Cold War period. But domestic constraints on its expansion--including those stemming from mean self-interest as well as those guided by a principled belief in the virtues of limiting federal power--protected economic vitality, technological superiority, and public support for Cold War activities. The strategic synthesis that emerged by the early 1960s was functional as well as stable, enabling the United States to deter, contain, and ultimately outlive the Soviet Union precisely because the American state did not limit unduly the political, personal, and economic freedom of its citizens. Political scientists, historians, and general readers interested in Cold War history will value this thoroughly researched volume. Friedberg's insightful scholarship will also inspire future policy by contributing to our understanding of how liberal democracy's inherent qualities nurture its survival and spread.

This paper seeks to indicate how and why public bureaucracy has been and remains a cornerstone of the modern state and of representative democratic governmental regimes. It does so by highlighting both the constitutive role bureaucratic practices and ethics play in securing civil peace and security, and individual and collective rights and freedoms, for example, and how attempts to transcend, negate, or otherwise 'disappear' bureaucracy can have profound political consequences. The paper begins with a brief exploration of some of the tropes of 'bureau-critique' and their historical and contemporary association with key elements of anti-statist thought. It then proceeds, in section two, to chart how attempts to detach an understanding of bureaucracy from its imbrication in critical polemic and political partisanship can be best pursued by revisiting the work of Max Weber. Weber's great achievement, it will be argued, was to provide a definitive analysis of both the 'technical' and ethico-cultural attributes of public bureaucracy without falling into pejorative critique. In so doing, Weber's work provides a useful resource for exploring the limits and pitfalls of 'bureau-critique' historically and contemporaneously. The problems identified with politically partisan and critique- oriented understandings of public bureaucracy identified in the first two sections of the paper are then illustrated in section three with direct reference to specific episodes in German, US, and British political history. The paper concludes by re-emphasising the enduring significance and political positivity of the ethos of bureaucratic office-holding, not least in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about \"American exceptionalism\" is untenable. Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar. Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.

In this article, the author argues that the Progressives can be as much characterized as the antistatists of the nineteenth century as the statists of the twentieth century because their overriding goal was the destruction of the party state and not, directly, the creation of the bureaucratic state. They found in Anti-Federalist political thought a general antistatist template that they used to articulate their specific objection to the nineteenth-century party state. This template comprised a mutual commitment to simple government, the common good as a preinstitutional reality, democracy, direct and responsive government, fear of elite rule, civic education, and cultural homogeneity.

Within this discourse, a focus on the state may be the means of pulling the conversation back to matters of power, or it may be just another \"conceptual variable,\" no different in weight from religion or ethnicity, and thus more fodder for the mill of cultural analysts.2 A third argument pits those who study electoral politics--voter behavior, party formation, correlations between legislative outcomes--against those who stress the importance of administration. At its extreme, such an approach could lead to absurd claims as Herbert Baxter Adams's theory that American democracy originated in the sixth-century institutions of the Teutonic forest.5 What has intervened since that first wave of institutionalism is almost a century of intellectual and cultural history, during which historians have increasingly regarded the state as an implementer of cultural or political programs, not as an autonomous Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Uncivil Disobedienceexamines the roles violence and terrorism have played in the exercise of democratic ideals in America. Jennet Kirkpatrick explores how crowds, rallying behind the principle of popular sovereignty and desiring to make law conform to justice, can disdain law and engage in violence. She exposes the hazards of democracy that arise when citizens seek to control government directly, and demonstrates the importance of laws and institutions as limitations on the will of the people. Kirkpatrick looks at some of the most explosive instances of uncivil disobedience in American history: the contemporary militia movement, Southern lynch mobs, frontier vigilantism, and militant abolitionism. She argues that the groups behind these violent episodes are often motivated by admirable democratic ideas of popular power and autonomy. Kirkpatrick shows how, in this respect, they are not so unlike the much-admired adherents of nonviolent civil disobedience, yet she reveals how those who engage in violent disobedience use these admirable democratic principles as a justification for terrorism and killing. She uses a \"bottom-up\" analysis of events to explain how this transformation takes place, paying close attention to what members of these groups do and how they think about the relationship between citizens and the law. Uncivil Disobediencecalls for a new vision of liberal democracy where the rule of the people and the rule of law are recognized as fundamental ideals, and where neither is triumphant or transcendent.

Political scientist Allen B. McBride tells us that the Tea Party erupted on the political scene virtually overnight in the immediate aftermath of the election of America's first black president. Despite its northern origins, McBride cites the anti-statist ideology of the Tea Party as the main reason for its strong support in Dixie. The chapter argues that the Tea Party may be better described as a movement than an actual party and is actually the latest incarnation of populism in America. More important, perhaps, through the use of polling data and the monitoring of social media, this chapter concludes that, like the Populist Party of the 1890s, preliminary data suggests that today's Tea Party is not distinctively southern nor may it be expressly racist. McBride provides important caveats to both points: stressing that these conclusions are based on preliminary data; that the South may be in the process of losing its regional distinctiveness; and that public opinion survey data has long been known to underestimate attitudes and behaviors that fall outside of the political mainstream.

This chapter examines the question of Tolkien's modernity in relation to nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century literature and culture. The first half of the chapter argues that Tolkien's early work follows in the romantic tradition of William Morris and W. B. Yeats in both formal and thematic terms, and has some affinities with the Symbolist and Celtic Revival projects, alongside its better‐known connections to Victorian philological mythopoesis and the supernatural and adventure romance. The second half of the chapter turns from literature to politics to consider how Tolkien's mature work gives expression to romantic anti‐statism and Little Englandism, exemplified by such authors as G. K. Chesterton and George Orwell, and participates in interwar constructions and critiques of national character and suburbanization. The chapter concludes by examining Tolkien's practice in relation to war and modernism.