The State before the State: A Critique of New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State, by William J Novak

Abstract

Abstract This essay is a critical appraisal of William Novak’s New Democracy, published in March 2022. A sequel to The People’s Welfare, published in 1996, New Democracy continues Novak’s revisionist account of American state building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, the book draws attention to the years between the American Civil War and the onset of the Great Depression as the formative period of the American administrative–regulatory state, assailing a historiography that has credited the epoch of the New Deal as the definitive creative moment of the modern American state. Assessing New Democracy’s evidence and arguments, the essay finds that Novak’s book makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of state advocacy, but fails to offer definitive empirical measures for its central claim that the New Deal origin of the modern American state is a myth. Examining the philosophy of history that lies beneath New Democracy’s arguments, the essay holds that Novak’s claim that history is irreversibly linear markedly constricts the interpretive possibilities open to him and to those who may follow his lead.