The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century by Brian Balogh (review)

This volume assembles half a dozen essays published over the past generation by historian Brian Balogh limning the evolution of the field of American Political Development. Political historians have, in Balogh's nomenclature, moved away from an older "Progressive synthesis," which cast American politics as a function of "activist government" versus "limited government" antagonisms, toward a new "associational" synthesis, in which scholarly attention focuses on exploration of the state itself as a potent and interested actor in policy matters.

Attempts to understand the development of the American state, asserts Balogh, must reckon with the fact that American abhorrence of powerful central government is matched by American demand for energetic public policymaking. The key task confronting students, thus, is to explore the partnerships—among the federal government, market actors, organized interest groups, and the professions—that make possible a response to this apparently self-contradictory desire for activist, inconspicuous, governance.

Balogh argues that the associational state pattern, far from being new, is firmly rooted in the nineteenth century. The American state consistently has expanded through "a series of compromises brokered between central authority and local administration . . . a host of private and voluntary partners that blur the line between public and private spheres." (40) Twentieth-century associational state development was simply a continuation, one that "accelerated a long-standing American tradition forged over the course of the nineteenth century." (32)

Associational state patterns are not only venerable; they are persistent. Balogh challenges the notion that the associational state met its demise with the Supreme Court's 1935 rejection of the National Recovery Administration. Despite that failure, "the New Deal state dramatically expanded its reach into the political economy . . . through a mechanism that blended state, local, and private associations." (155) Similarly, Balogh disputes the view that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society destroyed pluralism, the central mechanism of the associational state, by drowning the concept of shared national interest in seas of individual rights. Although the Great Society did indeed "democratize" politics, "new entrants into the policy sweepstakes" nevertheless "had to play by pluralist rules." (198)

Several of these essays explore particular processes of associational state expansion. One avenue of growth has been provided by state actors' partnerships with market forces, as Balogh shows with his reinterpretation of Gifford Pinchot's turn-of-the-century successes at the U.S. Forest Service. In place of the standard telling, that Pinchot "sought to interpose administrative discretion in place of the market" (65) Balogh argues that Pinchot succeeded because he was able to merge state goals and market means, "framing his programs in the rhetoric of the market." (65)

Growth of the central state has proceeded through elaboration of the relationship between the state and organized interest groups. As illustrated by Herbert Hoover's 1928 presidential campaign's special reliance on women's organizations, state actors' partnerships with interest groups "laid the groundwork for crafting public policies that expanded the scope of government to serve select (and powerful) constituencies while avoiding the always dangerous charge in America of contributing to the growth of big government." (68)

The American central state also expanded via "the coevolution of federal institutions and the experts who eventually staffed them." (91) World war and Cold War "expanded administrative capacity and pushed professionals into these new positions on a national scale." (123) The federal government which emerged "not only responded to well-organized interest groups, it now had the capacity to create them . . . and to define the research agendas of a host of professional disciplines." (91)

Balogh writes with an agenda. He would like to see scholarship's associational state framework displace the stale "activist state versus limited government" paradigm that still structures American public discourse and, in his view, is responsible for much of our present policy paralysis. The attention of citizens should be as focused, as is that of scholars, on "how groups organize, how they gain access to the resources necessary to organize." (138) "The battle over how these intermediary institutions...