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From
Warfare State to Welfare State World War I, Compensatory State-Building, and
the Limits of the Modern Order Marc Allen Eisner
May 2000| 6 x 9 inches
American Politics
Hardback: $74.00 SH
ISBN: 978-0-271-01995-6
Paperback: $24.00 SH
ISBN: 978-0-271-01996-3
When
American history is divided into discrete eras, the New Deal stands,
along with the Civil War, as one of those distinctive events that
forever change the trajectory of the nation's development. The story
of the New Deal provides a convenient tool of periodization and a
means of interpreting U.S. history and the significance of contemporary
political cleavages. Eisner's careful examination of the historical
record, however, leads one to the conclusion that there was precious
little "new" in the New Deal. If one wishes to find an event
that was clearly transformative, the author argues, one must go back
to World War I.
From Warfare to Welfare State reveals that the federal government
lagged far behind the private sector in institutional development
in the early twentieth century. In order to cope with the crisis of
war, government leaders opted to pursue a path of “compensatory
state-building” by seeking out alliances with private-sector
associations. But these associations pursued their own interests in
a way that imposed severe constraints on the government’s autonomy
and effectiveness in dealing with the country’s problems—a
handicap that accounts for many of the shortcomings of government
today.
Marc
Allen Eisner is Professor of Government at Wesleyan University
and the author of Antitrust and the Triumph of Economics (North
Carolina, 1991), Regulatory Politics in Transition (Johns Hopkins,
1993), and The State in the American Economy (Prentice-Hall,
1995).
