A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Long a neglected topic, the early American state has lately attracted increasing attention. The once common notions that the federal government played no role in the nation’s development before the Civil War and that the early republic was a “stateless” society have become increasingly untenable. This interpretative shift is due to a series of important books on early American government that have appeared over the last decade or so. Peter Onuf and David Hendrickson have written on federalism, John Larson on internal improvements, Richard John on the Post Office, and William Novak on economic and moral regulation at the state and local level. Brian Balogh draws on these works to provide a rich synthesis of the American central government in the period between the adoption of the Constitution and the turn of the nineteenth century. Yet his interest is not primarily historical. Rather, he turns to the past to offer a crucial lesson to citizens and political leaders in the twenty-first century.

Balogh’s book aims at both progressives, who favor statist solutions, and conservatives, who champion a reduction in government. The former will learn that the twentieth-century state they celebrate as a new beginning in fact built on the nineteenth-century associational state —a polity where the federal government acted in partnership with local and state governments, voluntary organizations, the professions, interest groups, and even private corporations. The conservatives will learn that the American associational state did not spring out of the progressive movement but was present from the nation’s founding. No matter how much they would like to, conservatives cannot return their nation to a “stateless” laissez-faire society for the simple reason that no such society ever existed in America. To Balogh, progressives and conservatives have both failed to grasp the role of the state in American history in large part because they have mistakenly assumed the Gilded Age as representative of the American past when in fact no period was less so.

During the Civil War, Balogh says, markets, corporations, and communication networks grew to become national in scope and thereby outgrew the governmental arrangements that maintained and regulated them at the state and local level. Whereas voluntary and professional organizations also became national in the wake of the war, the conflict did not give rise to a national regulatory government. To the contrary, the federal government responded with deregulation, attempting to shape a national market according to laissez-faire principles and to draw a sharp line between the private and the public sphere. This policy constituted a sharp break with “the ‘commonwealth’ mingling of public and private interests” that had dominated government–society relations in the first half of the nineteenth century (14). When the reaction to laissez-faire politics came after the crisis of 1893, it did not take the form of an endorsement of statist solutions, however. Instead, the “new liberals” returned to the nineteenth-century associational state by “nationalizing” the “commonwealth” tradition of American government. Direct administrative rule by the federal government was only one of many means to achieve nationwide political results. “Far more often . . . new liberals stressed other forms of cooperative action: state and local intervention rather than intervention by the national government; action by voluntary and private organizations compelled by the force of public opinion to do the right thing; and most significantly, delegating national authority to private and voluntary groups so that they, rather than the national government directly, could compel individuals to comply with polices that served the greater good of the country” (353).

Balogh’s argument takes him back to the period before the Civil War, to which two-thirds of A Government Out of Sight is devoted, to demonstrate first that the Gilded Age falls outside the American tradition of government and second that the present-day associational state has deep roots in the nation’s past. He hopes that...