A Society without a ‘State’? Political Organization, Social Conflict, and Welfare Provision in the United States

Americans lack a sense of the state for many understandable historical reasons. Yet the specific organizational forms that state activities have taken in the United States from the time of the Constitution to the present have profoundly affected the social cleavages that have gained political expression and influenced the sorts of public policies that governments have – and have not – implemented. As an alternative or supplement to theoretical perspectives emphasizing the causal primacy of industrialization, national values, or class politics, this state-society perspective can illuminate patterns of American social policy, from distributive social benefits in the nineteenth century to bifurcations between social insurance and public assistance since the New Deal. These American policy patterns are contrasted with the more comprehensive and nationally uniform policies characteristic of certain Western European welfare states.