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  • A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America
  • Mark R. Wilson
A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. By Brian Balogh (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009) 414 pp. $85.00 cloth $23.99 paper

In this synthetic work, Balogh works to dismiss, once and for all, the myth that the early United States was ungoverned. He specifically highlights [End Page 157] the activities of the national state, which until recently was widely assumed to have been particularly impotent. Balogh contends that the state was actually influential, though its activities, contrary to the wishes of such statist founders as Alexander Hamilton, were often indirect, inexpensive, or otherwise "out of sight."

A Government Out of Sight makes two important contributions, both of which will be most valuable to historians of American government in the twentieth century, the author's primary intended audience for this book. First, it summarizes many of the most innovative recent studies of law and government in the United States between the Revolution and the Progressive Era. Second, it challenges traditional long-run narratives of American history, which too often have provided facile accounts of a linear rise of the modern state. Particularly valuable is Balogh's observation that the 1880s, a time of unusually low levels of state regulation and public enterprise, should be understood "as an exceptional moment in American history that many twentieth-century scholars have mistaken for all of nineteenth-century political development" (5).

Although these contributions should be useful to many readers, the book is also disappointing. Although most of its errors are minor typographical ones, a few others—including the bizarre statement that Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense (1776), "served multiple terms as governor of Virginia" (24)—are significant enough to place the author's command of his subject in some doubt. More understandable are the problems that come from trying to create a coherent book by surveying a large, interdisciplinary body of literature. Because Balogh relies so heavily on recent monographs and articles from a variety of subfields, the narrative is necessarily disjointed. The first section of the book, on the early republic, concentrates on the ideas of national political leaders like Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. The middle section, on the antebellum and Civil War years, describes the work of the state in the fields of local regulation, communications, transport, land policy, and military operations. Finally, the book's treatment of the late nineteenth century focuses on intellectuals and the federal courts. All of this material adds up to a rich and interesting survey, but it does little to track the long-run development of any one subject.

The book is further limited by a mismatch between its evidence and some of its major contentions. The descriptive element of Balogh's argument, that the operations of the national state were "hidden in plain sight" (4), seems reasonable enough. Raising revenue through customs was relatively unobtrusive; governance by law was cheap and subtle; the seat of national government was removed from major centers of commerce and population; the military was concentrated on the frontier; and even the giant postal system operated via contractors and offices in commercial buildings. Less well substantiated, however, are Balogh's claims that this hidden leviathan was the one preferred by the American people, as well as a mode of governance more effective than the heavy-handed modern administrative state. The book offers little evidence of [End Page 158] any kind about popular understandings of government, or the relative efficacy of different forms of statecraft. Nor does it have much to say about the history of Reconstruction, which offers an important illustration of how indirect and cheap forms of state power may fail to achieve important public purposes.

Balogh ends his book by holding up the obscurantist nineteenth-century state as a model for effective, enlightened government in our day: "I urge progressives to embrace this historical tendency, rather than fight it" (397). More than he acknowledges, this move has already occurred, albeit not always consciously and enthusiastically. As progressives and others continue to debate Balogh's concluding challenge, they would...

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