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  • Ruling Passions:Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America
  • Richard R. John (bio)

In recent years, the Journal of Policy History has emerged as a major venue for scholarship on American policy history in the period after 1900. Indeed, it is for this reason that it is often praised as the leading outlet for scholarship on American political history in the world. Only occasionally, however, has it featured essays on the early republic, the Civil War, or the post–Civil War era. And when it has, the essays have often focused on partisan electioneering rather than on governmental institutions.1 The rationale for this special issue of the Journal of Policy History is to expand the intellectual agenda of policy history backward in time so as to embrace more fully the history of governmental institutions in the period before 1900. The six essays that follow contain much that will be new even for specialists in nineteenth-century American policy history, yet they are written in a style that is intended to be accessible to college undergraduates and historians unfamiliar with the period.

The paucity of scholarship on nineteenth-century policy history can be explained in part by the relative novelty of the field. The first meeting of a group of historians to talk self-consciously about policy history did not take place until 1978, when political historians Thomas K. McCraw and Morton Keller convened a conference on this topic at Harvard University.2

A further impediment to the study of nineteenth-century policy history has been the implicit presumption of many twentieth-century policy historians that nineteenth-century policy history is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. In the nineteenth century, or so it is often assumed, party leaders driven by a "partisan imperative" dominated the policy process.3 The conflation of nineteenth-century public policy with [End Page 1] partisan electioneering would have puzzled nineteenth-century lawmakers—since they devoted enormous energies to the drafting of legislation, the structuring of institutions, and the regulation of markets. Yet it follows plausibly from a central tenet of the present-day historiography of the United States: namely, the assumption that governmental institutions are ultimately the product of antecedent social circumstances. Each essay in this special issue challenges this assumption. Although none treat governmental institutions as altogether independent of the wider society, they share the premise that, to a significant degree, governmental institutions were autonomous—and, thus, potential agents of change.

A major theme of this special issue is the extent to which public policy in the pre-1900 period was not only a prelude to what came later, or a promise that has been lost, but a project with a more-or-less coherent design that grew out of the institutional arrangements established by the founders of the republic. No one would have envisioned how the project would play out. Yet this was not the point. The key was the presumption that governmental institutions could shape the future of American society. Indeed, perhaps the most basic claim that these essays advance is the idea that there did in fact exist in the nineteenth-century United States a regulatory regime, as opposed to a constellation of discrete and often unrelated public policies. The federal Constitution—and, more broadly, the European Enlightenment out of which the Constitution emerged—cast a long shadow in the subsequent history of public policy in the United States.4 The project was a ruling passion in a dual sense. Nineteenth-century lawmakers were passionate believers in the centrality of political economy to moral philosophy: the idea that political economy and morality might somehow be divorced would have struck them as bizarre.5 In addition, lawmakers were preoccupied with the constructive channeling of the passions of self-interested individuals—such as greed, envy, complacency, and laziness. Toward this end, they designed various regulatory mechanisms to discipline the market and unleash human creativity. These mechanisms were so pervasive that the political economy of nineteenth-century America is best characterized not as a market economy but as a regulatory regime.6 In this dual sense, then, "ruling passions" is an appropriate title for a collection of essays that explores the history of political...

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