On April 23, 2010, the Republican governor of Arizona signed SB 1070, a new immigration law empowering state law enforcement officers to require any individual they arrest to produce identity papers verifying their legal immigration status. Recognized as a challenge to federal powers of anti-illegal immigration enforcement—and criticized by President Barack Obama—the law is currently winding its way to the Supreme Court. It has been held unconstitutional in a federal court because of the probability that officers would wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens, a judgment facilitated by the Justice Department's supporting brief. Critics fear it profiles unfairly Latinos in America.
Aside from the partisan politics of Arizona's law, the measure illustrates the enduring controversy of membership in the US polity and how to shape that membership. The law was followed some months later by a call from Florida's Senator James Lindsay to end the birthright entitlement to US citizenship enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants the right to citizenship to anyone born in the US, a measure designed to entitle children of former slaves to citizenship, and now challenged by some associated with the Tea Party; and by a renewed advocacy of English-language requirements in some states, including amendments to state constitutions to make it mandatory. These measures all focus upon the current immigrant population, overwhelmingly Latino and most especially on Mexicans. As invective against a particular group—Spanish speaking immigrants, undocumented or legal, and the children of immigrants—the laws and statements echo the sentiments advanced by the late Samuel Huntington in his last book, Who Are We?, in which the fear of immigrants' unassimilabilty once reflected in the national origins quota of the Johnson-Reed law of 1924 is reworked for modern times.
There is a deeper issue here, however. For both sides in the debate concerning the Arizona law paradoxically share an assumption concerning one of the central purposes of public authority in the United States: the need regularly to employ state power to “standardize” as a condition of state building and political membership. For the supporters of the Arizona law, the emphasis is on a standardized set of citizen characteristics, especially ethnic and linguistic ones. For its opponents, the emphasis is on maintaining a standaradized experience for all demographic groups in the United States, despite their differences in background and social composition. A commitment to standardization through state power is shared both by those who would limit the rights of undocumented workers and by those who would recognize and extend those rights
Nor is this a new phenomenon. Despite an extensive rhetoric of plurality and individualism, the history of American state-building has been punctuated with periods of intense government activity to “standardize” citizens and potential citizens. Wartime Americanization drives, such as those in the 1910s, are a prominent instance of using assimilation as a tool of standardization: advocates set out English-language requirements and in early-twentieth-century versions rejected the cultural plurality of diverse immigrants' ethnic background, urging that they embrace a common standard of identity and patriotism. But this punitive use of standardization—versions of which recurred during the Second World War, during the Cold War years (notably under the McCarthy anti-communist hearings,) and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks—has been joined by a more positive version of American government standardization efforts. This is the value of citizenship: the expectation that a common standard demands that all Americans should enjoy equal entitlements—such as democratic rights of voting or equality before the law—on a demonstrably standardized basis across the nation. Crucially, the guarantee of standardized liberal rights thus necessitates an equally engaged and aggressive use of national state capacity of exactly the sort that Huntington and other defenders of a robust assimilation policy toward immigrants promoted.
Such examples demonstrate that standardization has long been present in otherwise quite distinct conceptions of American state action. Scholars grappling to understand the American state must appreciate both this ubiquity and duality. In what follows, we go even further than such an understanding. We develop the concept of standardization as a framework to advance analysis of the American state. Early scholarship on the American state concluded that efforts to locate comparative indicators of Weberian-like state-ness proved difficult in the US context. There have been several responses to this approach over the years, some more successful than others. Here, we contend that if political scientists refocus their attention on the dynamics to standardize, then key aspects of US state activity and policy are revealed in a range of areas where they have previously been overlooked, including regulatory measures, civil rights, citizenship, funding allocation, and nationhood building.
Our argument is not that standardization exhausts understanding of the American state. As with other states, the American state is also characterized by its efforts to monopolize coercive force, just as Weber would have predicted, and by the development and expansion of bureaucratic capacity. Nonetheless, we do aim to demonstrate that the long-term development toward increased standardization in the US is integral to the creation and shape of its state. Without the drive to standardize, in other words, the US state would not take the form that it does. Standardization is part of what the US state is.
We further argue that this standardization is a function of certain key impulses in the history of the United States, including both powerful fiscal dynamicsFootnote 1 and liberal and democratic ones.Footnote 2 We show how these necessary features of the state have been constantly challenged by contrasting attitudes to race, the attractions of localism, and an electoral populism celebratory of an often deeply conservative communitarianism. Finally, we explore the duality of all efforts at state standardization, showing how the same essential process has been responsible for both the most egregious of exclusions and the most progressive of inclusions in the history of the United States. In other words, both successes and failures in state standardization have been extraordinarily costly for the citizens of the United States.
To understand this standardization dynamic we draw on work beyond American political development. We need to learn from political and social theory and comparative politics to appreciate what constitutes “stateness” in general and what makes the US state take the particular form that it does. We begin with a discussion of the presence and the absence of the state in much American political science and American political culture, noting the confusion that prevails in both. We then explain how the standardization framework offers a distinct approach in contrast to established positions in American political development and in social and political theory and science. We next identify the principal impulses toward standardization in the United States: the reasons why standardization takes the form that it does in the case of the American state. This is followed by our discussion of the particular sites and instruments of standardization in the American context. We end with implications for empirical research. We present not just a descriptive account of the nature of the American state but an analytic approach to American politics that will enable new explanations of age-old problems in the republic's political development to emerge.
The State of the State
The dominant emphasis in the political culture of the United States is a strong nation with a weak state. The citizenry of the US, it has long been charged, prize decentralization and localism; that is, they celebrate a political system that is less centralized and less interventionist than that found in comparable advanced democracies, including those with strong federal systems such as Australia or Germany.Footnote 3 To outsiders, however, this perception is odd. It certainly seems to contrast with the global dominance of the United States since the middle of the twentieth century and with the fierce representation of the state of the United States to those who interact with it beyond its boundaries. Furthermore, recent work has underlined the limitations of seeing the American state in classic Weberian terms, that is, focusing on a centralized, stable, and expanding bureaucracy.Footnote 4 The American state does indeed manifest features drawn from comparative state analysis such as a monopoly of the use of legitimate force within its territory and the provision of a range of public goods. But other features are distinct. These include an extensive set of public-private institutional arrangements for program deliveryFootnote 5 and an elaborate set of regulatory agencies, originating in progressivism and developing ever since, which work in ways distinct from their Western European counterparts.Footnote 6
Building on these observations, recent scholars have made notable efforts to analyze the American state as a state in its own terms, rather than as an aberration from some common, Weberian comparative standard.Footnote 7 This switch retains the comparative insight that states are institutional sites and resource sets, but how these processes operate is nationally specific. The recent work can usefully be categorized into three chronological developments.
First, scholars have identified the hidden state in the nineteenth-century United States. The historian Brian Balogh has thus powerfully argued that even during the age of apparent laissez faire, although the United states “governed differently from other industrialized contemporaries … [it] did not necessarily govern less.”Footnote 8
Second, scholars following the path-breaking work of Stephen Skowronek have drawn attention to the emergence of an administrative state by demonstrating multiple and complex ways in which the national administrative framework of the United States more openly expanded from 1880 through to the New Deal. Kimberley Johnson has thus shown how the US Congress inserted a range of controls and directive instruments in federal-state legislation in the Progressive era, with Congress devising and implementing dozens of policy initiatives that expanded national power into the states, tied to coalitions of interest groups, local actors, bureaucrats, and members of Congress. In this perspective, scholars have also identified the hidden or, in Suzanne Mettler's terms, the “submerged state” in activities such as tax expenditures traditionally overlooked in commonplace senses of the federal government's responsibilities.Footnote 9 For instance, tax expenditures such as deduction of mortgage-interest on primary residences, deduction of non-business state and local taxes, exclusion of employers' paid health care from taxable income, and capital gains tax total an estimated trillion dollars annually.Footnote 10
Third, scholars have also elucidated the rise of the emergency state.Footnote 11 The scale of the American mobilization during the Second World War gave birth to a host of new agencies and federal coordination, also acting as an exogenous shock to state building in other areas. Daniel Kryder, for instance, examines the effect of war mobilization on the demands of civil rights reformers.Footnote 12
Despite their chronological differences, tone feature unites these various perspectives on the American state with earlier conceptions. That concerns the strict separation between state and the broader society to which it relates. That is, in each of these three categories, the state is approached as an identifiable organization, or possibly a set of organizations, that is set apart from the social structures and patterns of the United States. The state, accordingly, is characterized as much by this separateness of institutional form and agency, as it is by how it behaves or what it tries to do. According to this understanding, whether “small” or “large,” “strong” or “weak,” “administrative” or “emergency,” the state must at the very least be seen as a distinct structure. It is an empirically identifiable entity that exists independent of the society it attempts to govern and that is clearly detectable by a whole range of indicators, stretching from the balance sheets of government expenditure to the badges, symbols, and assorted paraphernalia that distinguish the “public” from the “private.”Footnote 13
There are, however, difficulties with this largely unquestioned approach. Those difficulties come into sharp relief against the vexed question of the relationship between the American state and race. For generations, scholars of American politics presented the deep racial prejudices and exclusions that have blighted the United States as the result of a complex of social or socio-economic causes rather than as the result of state action. The overcoming of those prejudices, on the other hand, especially in the civil rights era, has often been attributed to the bold action of state officials as they set about overcoming these illiberal social forms.Footnote 14 More recent scholarship, though, has begun to challenge this interpretation. Both state and society have been implicated in the imposition of racial orders across the history of the United States, with the federal government imposing segregation as far-reaching and extensive as that propagated by state agencies and non-governmental organs.Footnote 15
The example of racial segregation demonstrates, then, that a fuller account of the nature of the American state must be able to account for both the development of a distinct set of state apparatuses and institutions and for the deep interconnections between state and society, public and private, in this domain of the American experience. In each distinctive moment of racial standardization, a peculiar combination of formal and informal mechanisms was required to regulate and enforce the standard. To give an example, Frank Dobbin has examined how the threat of anti-discrimination litigation—captured in the phrase “the strength of a weak state”—induced a transformation in corporate America employment practices to embrace affirmative action (later called diversity) programs.Footnote 16 In the absence of clear federal guidelines, personnel officers in large corporations found themselves devising such criteria to help their employers avoid litigation, and these new corporate compliance standards were themselves embraced by federal agencies.Footnote 17 Congress left enforcement of equality of employment vague in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the meaning of this standard took more than a decade to emerge and to be enforced.
This vagueness about standards and enforcement in anti-employment discrimination becomes for Sean Farhang the basis for a distinctive characterization of the American state as “the litigation state.”Footnote 18 Farhang argues that Congress purposefully underspecified official remedies to discrimination to make private litigation in job discrimination the primary structure for standard setting and determination. This option for private litigation contrasts with a bureaucracy-centered enforcement regime, Farhang finds, practiced in respect, for instance, to workers' rights in the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. In bureaucracy-based remedial regimes, it is civil servants who receive complaints, collect evidence, hold hearings, and determine the outcome. In his study Farhang valuably draws attention to how private litigation enforcement is one “form of deliberate and effective state intervention” of importance, and in our language, is another means of American state standardization.Footnote 19 In this instance, private litigation is a policy instrument that serves as an “indirect pathway of regulatory control,” a control requisite to standard setting. Farhang usefully expands the idea of American state power with the example of private litigation characterizing it as “state power exercised through society.”Footnote 20
To grasp these complex machinations entails a detailed examination of individual instances. But we also need a fuller understanding of the idea of standardization itself.
Standardization and the Making of the American State
Throughout the history of the republic, the US state has been identifiable through its efforts to standardize key aspects of the American experience, and to the extent it succeeds in this respect, so the practice and image of a strong state increases. A standard, therefore, is a publicly-stated expectation of uniform and equal experience that is blind to the contingencies and particularities of individual cases, and that both private citizens and public officials seek to guarantee in all like cases. Wherever one looks, the American state can be recognized by efforts to impose such standards on the American social and political experience: to forge a particular kind of uniformity out of diversity.
Positive law is one obvious example of such standard setting and enforcement. The law about the age of alcohol consumption, with twenty one years the minimum for legal imbibing, is a standard stipulated in national policy and imposed on all Americans no matter where within the US they reside (though Puerto Rico's status has always complicated this ambition).Footnote 21 Constitutionally-guaranteed rights have been another form of legal standard key to the state experience in the US. Enforced both by the federal agencies and by state level actions, and potentially backed up by the force of executive action, Constitutional rights enjoy their special status amongst Americans primarily through their status as universal standards against which all particular cases should be judged alike.
The sorts of standards that characterize the American state stretch beyond those formal rules that can be backed up by coercion. To put it simply, standardization does not require or necessitate a standardized set of instruments to pursue it. It can be achieved, directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously, in a variety of ways. Standards are thus far more than the laws that are sometimes used to enforce them. It is therefore wrong to think of the state's standards as emanating solely from an autonomous entity that is straightforwardly distinguishable from society and that always imposes itself on the beliefs, actions, and practices of the broader citizenry through the threat of coercive force. Standards can emanate from other sources and find ballast in their widespread normative adoption by citizens rather than in their reliance on the potential for coercive imposition.
Once seen in this way, it is clear that far more ambiguous senses of social entitlement can also count as state standards, especially those that are often rhetorically endorsed by public officials. President George W. Bush's remorse about the farrago of “persistent poverty” in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and about the exclusion of “generations from the opportunity of America” suggests that ideas about standardized entitlements can be found in the most unlikely of places, as even a conservative Republican was led to insist that African American citizens in New Orleans should not be subject to egregious standards of living just because they live in a neglected area; a national state implies some uniformity of standards across the nation. The same is true of expectations of citizen behavior and character. Even though the Constitution might formally limit the imposition of moral doctrines on the American citizenry, the American state has nonetheless constantly tried to standardize the beliefs and practices of its members, and not always in ways that rely on the threat of coercive force. Such efforts at “standardizing character” thus encompass initiatives as diverse as the “100% Americanism” campaigns of the early twentieth century, the “Red Scares” of the two post-war periods, the drafting of a pledge of allegiance, the continually demonstrative church-going of federal and state leaders, and the immediate interference enabled by the Arizona law with which we began.
Our emphasis on standards as a crucial characteristic of the state, and especially on the role of means other than coercive law to enforce them, owes a debt to French theorist Michel Foucault's idea of “governmentality.” For Foucault and his followers, the technique of “standard setting” is central to the modern exercise of power. If a standard is established and citizens are enticed, encouraged, or persuaded to be guided by it, putting aside their personal particularities and contingencies of circumstances as they do so, then power is exercised even without the threat or the use of coercive force. Since the end of the sixteenth century, Foucault explained, this has been the primary way in which order is maintained and government exercised in the developed world.Footnote 22
With this much, we agree. Foucauldians generally also insist, though, that this sort of standardization is far from unique to the state.Footnote 23 It has, they argue, been the primary approach of a host of institutions and disciplines, adopted by “the head of a family, the superior of a convent, the teacher or tutor of a child or pupil” such that the “state is only one particular mode” of standard setting and enforcement. Indeed, Foucault himself insisted that the ubiquity of standardization in modern societies entails that a concentration on the state as the central agency of power is a mistake; he contended that the state's “importance is a lot more limited than many of us think.”Footnote 24
With this, we disagree. Acknowledging that efforts to standardize can be seen across different elements of the social scene, and that a variety of mechanisms are deployed to pursue standardization, there are nonetheless particular standards that are distinctive to states in general and to the American state in particular. There are, that is, peculiar sets of impulses and sites of, and obstacles to, standardization that mark out the contours of the American state and that distinguish the state from other sorts of standardizing entities, including the family and the firm. It is not the mechanisms which delimit the scope of the state, then, but the source of a particular kind of standardization. That source we call the “impulses to standardization” and it is to those we now turn.
Impulses toward Standardization
Scholars are familiar with at least three forms of standardization in the history of the American state. First, they are aware that measurement for standardization came with the beginnings of the republic; various tasks of measuring land, devising monetary measures, and instituting census-counting exercises realized these aims. Second, they acknowledge the assumption of regulatory roles by the federal government from the late nineteenth century, expressed for instance in defining and monitoring public health, food preparation, and pharmaceutical products. Third, they recognize the effort to give fundamental meaning to membership of the republic, including explicit definitions of assimilability with respect to immigrants, including some Europeans, Chinese, and Japanese at various times and most profoundly to African Americans.
Absent is a theory that can explain why standardization is so important in the history of the American state. To offer such a theory means describing the two key kinds of impulses that lie behind standardization, the first of which is characteristic of all modern democratic states, and the second of which is distinctive to the American experience.
The Impulse to a Market Order
An impulse is a reason to standardize that is either self-evident in a given social situation or that impels a particular group of people or set of institutions to act as a result of some other deep commitment that they have. The crucial impulse to standardize which results in basic state-making in all situations is the need for a degree of agreement on core elements of life without which it will be impossible to maintain even a semblance of social order in any given territory. This has been the central assumption of all state theory since Thomas Hobbes' observations in the mid-seventeenth century, at the beginning of the formation of the modern ideal of the state.
Hobbes suggested that guaranteed standards in certain crucial areas of life are self-evidently essential to any human community because they provide the only way to secure a minimum of peace and stability. As Phillip Pettit's discussion of Hobbes' theory has it, “the constitutive role” of the state thus lies in “establishing terms with common meanings, thereby giving people new categories by which to orient themselves.”Footnote 25 The state is crucial in this regard because “there is no measure given in nature.”Footnote 26 Hobbes thus invoked the need for a standardized account of “what is to be called right, what good, what virtue, what much, what little, what meum and tuum, what a pound, what a quart,” for without such an account “every man is his own judge, and differeth from other concerning the names and appellations of things, and from those differences arise quarrels, and breach of peace.”Footnote 27 Among modern writers, this passage leads directly to the arguments in James Scott's Seeing Like a State and to the “realism” of political theorists of the state such as Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss.Footnote 28
Although Hobbes' account stretches too far in requiring a single agency potentially to standardize all aspects of social life, the core elements of his account remain central to our understanding of the state in the twenty-first century.
The first reason why the state standardizes, therefore, is that some common standards are essential to the maintenance of order and it is improbable that these common standards will simply arise of and by themselves, especially in a society as culturally diverse and geographically spread-out as the United States in contrast, say, to an isolated and insular society that may need no formal governing at all. As J.P. Nettl once observed, “the very process” of state action is thus “concerned not with the implantation of … established norms but with the business of establishing norms in the first place.”Footnote 29
This does not mean, of course, that such efforts at peace-making standards setting are always successful nor that they always be backed up by coercion. The mechanisms of standardization need not be of a standard form themselves. Even for Hobbes, it was more important that citizens accept a range of core standards through voluntary suasion than that they be imposed on them by a concretely identifiable single agent possessed of violent force. It is the belief that there are such common standards that really mattersFootnote 30 since this facilitates social order. But it is crucial to recognize that state standards of this sort are not just ideas that arise, as if by nature, in the minds of citizens. They are the products of organized efforts—coercive and otherwise—by a range of actors to impose order on an otherwise chaotic social reality and that do so uniformly across the entirety of the territory concerned. It is vital that there be a uniformity of purpose amongst the various agencies that seek to impose such standards, even if there is not unity of institutional form. It is, indeed, such uniformity across a particular political territory that first marks out the state and distinguishes it from essentially “private” forms of standardization such as those at work, within the family, or the firm.
In addition to the general “ordering” impulses to the setting of standards, the United States' market economy also provides an impulse towards standardization. Despite market ideologists' emphasis on innovation, competition, and flexibility, a successful market order also depends on the use of standardized instruments in economic life (as even Louis Hartz conceded in his early scholarship in economic history).Footnote 31 This has been true across the history of capitalism, stretching from contract law and weights and measures legislation in the early nineteenth century through workers' compensation and health and safety in the early twentieth century to debates about the health care duties of employers and employees at the beginning of the twenty-first. Business seeks a legible society, with a degree of security of expectations, as any economic planners do. It must have predictability and infrastructure, methods of understanding the terms of exchange, enforcement of contract, and managing of labor if it is to function in anything like a stable way. The state must, in Brian Balogh's words, “make the market more predictable—more uniform” across the territory it governs.Footnote 32
This relationship between state standards and market economics has been frequently missed, either intentionally or unintentionally, by those who celebrate the free market as a “spontaneous order,” and who take the indisputable place of capitalism within American political economy as a definitive sign of a “small” or “weak” state.Footnote 33 There is, of course, truth to the claim that markets and state action of certain sorts are inimical. Markets thrive on flexibility, as well as on private ownership, and these are not served well by direct governmental regulation or control. But as mentioned above, state standards do not always require such classically Weberian techniques nor are they always best enforced by apparatuses of coercion. The standards by which markets thrive do occasionally require such mechanisms—as in the case of the enforcement of contract law and of the protection of private property from the infringement of non-property holders—but they also involve less directly enforceable expectations that the state might seek to entrench in a wide variety of ways.
The content of those standardized expectations has shifted continuously across the history of the United States. They have always included, though, standards that meet the preconditions of capitalist exchange: preconditions which Jens Beckert labels those of value, competition, and cooperation.Footnote 34 That is, without established standards capitalists are unable to fix the value of goods and commodities, to engage in sustainable competitive practices, or smoothly to cooperate with providers and customers over time. For Beckert, these preconditions can only be met “if market actors are able to form stable expectations with regard to the actions of other market actions and future events relevant for their decisions.”Footnote 35 That, therefore, provides the impulse towards market standardization that the American state has met, largely successfully, since the founding. The requirements of a stable, peaceful, and economically prosperous market society thus provide the first impulses for standardization in the United States, and it is out of those the American state, like any kind of modern capitalist state, first begins to emerge.
The Ideological Impulses
Insofar as they have been noted previously, critics of the state have tended to concentrate solely on this first set of impulses. For some scholars, indeed, the whole process of “modern statecraft” is best understood as “a project of internal colonization,” that seeks to standardize the social world in order to serve the interests of those who prosper in the prevailing market order by creating uniform “state spaces, suitably modified for the context of a market economy.”Footnote 36 But it is not as simple as that. For beyond the impulse of order and market building, standards are also important to the attainment of a distinctive set of contentious ideological commitments.
As Rogers Smith and colleagues demonstrate, three distinctive ideological traditions—a liberal, republican, and racially ascriptive tradition—have shaped the politics of the United States since the founding. Despite their powerful differences, each of these three traditions pursued a standardizing agenda of varying sorts and, as such, each has provided a key impulse to the standard-setting role of the American state.Footnote 37
Of these three, the ascriptive impulse to standardization is the easiest to track. Throughout the history of the United States, some have made considerable efforts to standardize the character of American citizens by delimiting the racial characteristics formally and informally associated with citizenship.Footnote 38 Such measures span a wide range of particular instances, including racially standardized immigration policies, racially restrictive franchise rights, and, most fundamentally of all, the policy of what might be called “standardized segregation,” which can be seen in the establishment of Jim Crow laws, and in the federal government's complicity with such laws. All of these efforts paradoxically depended on a form of standardization, while at the same time promoting horrific inequalities. The standards that were set, that is, were coterminous with ascriptive characteristics that were said to be related to race. These were, in other words, attempts to standardize inequality, by fixing racial interactions in predictable and orderly ways, while not permitting equality of treatment to different racial groups.
The republican tradition does not share its rivals' emphasis on racial purity or historical destiny, but it does share an emphasis on standards, both of behaviour and of institutional design. Key to republicanism, of course, is the idea of popular participation in political decision-making. Republicans have thus long demanded that the American polity, unlike any that preceded it, should be fully responsive to the needs, wants, and desires of the citizenship itself. The influence of this kind of republicanism entails that an impulse to a market order is conjoined in the United States with an impulse to responsiveness.Footnote 39 Guaranteeing such responsiveness and ensuring that it works in the requisite way, that is, requires a standardizing process of its own, especially in a polity characterized both by federalism and by horizontal separation of powers. It requires formal standards—including electoral laws, districting processes, the regulation of campaigning—and informal standards—including a willingness on the part of all citizens to accept the outcomes of electoral processes, a broad acceptance of other established democratic practices, and even particular dispositions of character that might be required for discursive political engagement.Footnote 40
As with the other impulses to standardization, so the American state's specific actions to pursue republican responsiveness has shifted through history. It began initially, of course, with the complex forms of representation designed by the founders and described so expertly in the Federalist Papers. It then stretched through the expansion of direct democracy in the later nineteenth century, the regulation of political parties, the expansion of the franchise, the assault on electoral corruption in the Progressive era, and the struggle for race-blind standards of political engagement in the 1950s and 1960s. It continues now with arguments about standards for campaign finance as the twenty first century unfolds. Whatever the difference of content, though, the centrality of the impulse to responsiveness has been unquestionable as the democratic mechanisms of American politics have been reshaped.
If the ascriptive and republican impulses are both easy to discern, the liberal pursuit of standards is more difficult fully to appreciate. It is, even, paradoxical. Liberalism, after all, is largely understood as an ideology of freedom, diversity, and thus of non-interventionism.Footnote 41 The impulse to standardization has been a constant in American liberalism, though. Such an impulse is a direct result of liberalism's commitment to social equality and equality before the law, a commitment that has been central to American liberalism since the founding.Footnote 42 Reaching liberal standards requires enforcing a framework capable to upholding them. A clearer imposition of standards, then, follows from liberals' insistence on the need to measure the social experience of diverse citizens and ensure that no-one in the area of egalitarian concern stands below or above a given line in any crucial area of social and political life. As Gary Gerstle shows, in addition to concerns over peace and the market, then, a liberal impulse to a certain sort of equality has also led to the generation of state standards throughout the history of the United States.Footnote 43
This was, of course, Tocqueville's key observation about life in the early republic and it is the one that remains most telling today. It was the emphasis given to the value of political and social equality, Tocqueville argued, that generated a shared emphasis on maintaining a set of acceptable standards in America, and that in turn forged a kind of moral uniformity. It was precisely because a widespread egalitarianism insisted that no white, male American citizen could be granted a higher or a lower degree of political status, that a strict set of standards had continually to be applied.Footnote 44 Within the American context, therefore, a tendency to standardize in pursuit of a particular kind of equality was central to the development of the state. It is in this regard that the liberal tradition has asserted its greatest influence in the United States.
What Tocqueville did not notice, of course, is that these egalitarian standards are often also, and paradoxically, exclusionary standards. Acting “in the name of equality,” public and private officials have thus denigrated particular ways of being that were said not to meet the requisite standards, including ways of being that were associated with whole races or genders.Footnote 45 It was a particular kind of standardized “equality of expectations” that was thus used to excuse the literacy tests that disenfranchised African Americans, which excused the imposition of unjust work requirements of benefit recipients, and which were even deployed to legitimize segregated facilities under the banner of “separate but equal.” As James Scott puts it, it is precisely in this way that many of the great “political tragedies have flown under the banner of progress, emancipation, and reform.”Footnote 46
It is here that we return to the paradoxical nature of standardization in the American context. Since the founding, the American state has been shaped by a series of impulses to standardization. Those impulses include straightforward demands to ensure social order and to guarantee the stability and clarity required for a successful market economy. They also include the more partial, contested, and distinctive demands of the three major American ideological traditions: ascriptivism, republicanism, and liberalism. Such impulses have generated demands for a wide-range of sometimes contrasting, sometimes even contradictory, efforts at standardization.
To understand those efforts and to fully appreciate the state that those efforts help to shape, we need to appreciate not only the impulses themselves but the way in which the impulses interact with each other and with the demands of the social and political contexts in which they take form.
Sites of Standardization
Multiple sites of social experience exist which the state aspires to standardize and it employs multiple instruments as it seeks to do so. Of all of the aspects of state standardization, it is these instruments that have garnered the most scholarly attention. Such instruments include both a general set of technologies by which state agencies have sought to detect standardized patterns in an otherwise unruly reality—including the widespread use of statistics, mapping, evaluations, charts, surveys, military modelsFootnote 47—and the precise mechanisms by which state agencies have sought to enforce the standards to which they aspire, replacing the messiness and contingency of experience with the sorts of uniformity required by order, the market, egalitarianism, and responsiveness.Footnote 48
Insofar as standards have been discussed, these two—the instruments of standardized detection and the instruments of standard enforcement—are frequently presented as two aspects of the same phenomenon, with the method of standard discovery shaping the mechanism of standardization itself. As James Scott contends,
the modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess and manage. The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observation.Footnote 49
This focus on the instruments of standardized detection and enforcement is compelling, of course. It has, though, been misleading. It is so primarily because the mechanisms of standardization that the American state has employed since the founding have not been as uniform as analyses of the state such as Scott's imply. The state has not always sought to standardize with a common set of technologies. To think that it is somehow compelled to do so is to confuse the process with the outcome, a frequent error amongst those who discuss standardizing processes in politics and society. Instead, the American state has drawn on a vast array of techniques of standardization as the impulses sketched above have differentially propelled it into a wide variety of domains of social experience. These domains are the “sites of standardization.”
The sites of standardization are crucial for three reasons. First, examining the areas of life and experience that the American state has sought to standardize enables us to begin to appreciate the scope of the American state's activities. Focusing on sites of standardization, that is, directs us to the crucial questions in American political development as well as or arguably better than do traditional examinations of sites of policy intervention, or administrative regulation, or military control. Second, an exploration of the ways in which the state standardizes in these sites enables us to appreciate the way in which formal institutional mechanisms interact with societal forces to assist in the standardizing process. Looking at specific sites of standardization, therefore, enables us to draw together the formal and the informal, the federal and the local, the public and the private instruments that are all employed in the standardizing process. Third, examining the goals that standardization is targeted towards in any particular site enables us to detect the roles played by the different impulses toward standardization and their underlying causes. Careful examination of any particular site of standardization is likely, then, to reveal the potentially crucial yet contradictory influences of the various impulses, and as it does so, that should help provide powerful new explanations for previously misunderstood dynamics in American politics.
We develop these arguments in the example of American character.
Standardizing the American Character
It has long been thought paradoxical that the United States, which is celebrated for its liberal tradition and for its hostility to direct state involvement in the life of citizens, should have witnessed so many official initiatives to shape the morals, values, and characteristics of its own citizens. At least since Louis Hartz's Liberal Tradition in America, scholars have puzzled as to how a nation so apparently committed to individual independence from governmental control was also subject to what Hartz himself described as the “American absolutism”: a set of standardized expectations of citizen character that together constituted a “deep and unwritten tyrannical compulsion” designed to ensure that a particular set of ethics—individualist, free-marketeering, family-centric—was accepted as an unquestioned norm across the country.Footnote 50
The forces behind this standardization were, once again, diverse in themselves, sometimes drawing on the coercive mechanisms of the traditional Weberian state and other times not. At one extreme, they included the rhetoric of social expectation. These expectations are detectable in the unstated assumptions that lie behind an official political philosophy of rights and independence. These assumptions, as historian Joyce Appleby has so persuasively argued, essentially “devalued the cohesion of ethnicity, class, and commitment,” rendering the American state as ill-disposed to the experiences of those members of the American community who placed emphasis on solidaristic bonds.Footnote 51 At the other extreme, the various waves of federally-sponsored “Americanization” endeavours entrenched these norms, beginning in the early twentieth century as a response to immigration from Southern Europe and in the much-discussed “Red Scares” that followed each of the two World Wars.Footnote 52
The generic impulse to order and the republican impulse to responsiveness do much to make sense of this apparent paradox. Both require the American state to standardize the character of its citizens but to do so in a way that does not undermine the impulse's central purpose. Order provides the most obvious example of this dual tendency. To maintain order in a vast and culturally diverse nation such as the United States means a standard set of expectations as to how citizens will behave: what will be considered the bounds of acceptable behaviour and what will be considered ideal practice. There also, however, must be scope for difference and diversity. A state that sought to impose too strict a cordon around the behaviour of individuals or groups would soon find its position unsustainable as it would be threatened by the resistance of disgruntled sections of society, seeking acceptance and recognition for ways of life that mattered to them but which was considered outside of those bounds.
This explanation in itself is not unique to the United States. In fact, Hobbes sketched a similar position in Leviathan long before the Republic had been founded.Footnote 53 The republican impulse to responsiveness, however, provides a more distinctive (if not entirely “exceptional”) explanation for the United States' idiosyncratic take on the standardization of American character. As with order, the impulse to responsiveness paradoxically led the state both to refrain from direct interference in the life-choices of citizens and to intervene directly to rule in, and out, specific character traits and behavioural choices.
This paradoxical position was witnessed most tellingly in efforts to generate a single “American way” or “American creed” in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. As formulated at the time by the Rockefeller Foundation, part of the emphasis of democracy was to give “freedom to the individual and lease so much to his powers of judgment and self-discipline.” That, after all, was how the United States sought to differentiate itself from its Cold War rivals. But precisely because such individual leeway had to be provided, it was also crucial to note that successful democratic government requires agreement “on an unspoken atmosphere and on the willing allegiance of most of its citizens to certain moral principles.” In any society, “where democratic government can be reasonably safe,” therefore, “certain attitudes will be deeply ingrained and certain ideals will be widely shared.”Footnote 54 The central task of this key period, therefore, was to combine a withdrawn state—a “free” state—with a state that standardized core aspects of citizen behaviour, so as to create a sustainable democratic social order, capable of withstanding the demands of a seemingly endless standoff against the Communist foe.Footnote 55
When seen this way we can also begin to appreciate how this double-sided approach helped shape the form of the instruments by which this standardization was to be pursued. Crucially, although there was a coercive element to character standardization of the sort encapsulated in Senator McCarthy's campaign and in the other instruments of “Red Scare,” most of the immediate post-War efforts were not explicitly backed up by the threat of force nor did they emanate directly from the Federal bureaucracy. Instead, the task of instilling the necessary standards of citizen behaviour was invested in organisations like the Advertising Council of America. The Council began life as an executive agency in wartime but later became officially a “private” and voluntary organization composed of executives from the leading advertising corporations in the United States. Polling evidence tells us that most US citizens were unclear whether the Council should be understood to be a “public” or a “private” body, but they were clear that it was taken to “represent the national consensus” tasked to standardize attitudes and behaviour in line with the values attributed to the ideal democratic order to which both the ideological left and right aspire.Footnote 56
Standardization and the American State: The Way Forward
What such an example demonstrates, then, is that a single site of standardization has been inflected with different ideological variants and has spurred action by a broad range of actors. Attention to such a particular site enables a fresh understanding of standardization's opponents. In this case, efforts at the standardization of American character at the onset of the Cold War provoked a new political movement intently hostile to the homogeneity and exclusiveness of this vision and attached to revealing the close relationship between formal institutional actors and less formal social ones. Those critics took clear form in the so-called “New Left” who openly rejected standardization, refuting its justifications and insisting that the cosy relationship between bureaucrats, public relations officials, and corporate interests demonstrated both how powerful and dangerous this particular effort at standardization really was.Footnote 57 They have emerged again in almost mirror opposite form in the Tea Party Movement. The Movement rejects attempts to standardize a more “liberal” American character, tied to welfare generosity and racial diversity, while advancing a decentralizing agenda that would, in turn, have its own standardizing dynamics.Footnote 58
Character is not the only site of standardization that has been controversial, of course. In fact, critics of standardization have pervaded the American experience, some insisting that state standards are always incompatible with freedom, creativity and diversity itself. Recently strong variants of multiculturalism have been of this sort, as have traditional libertarian extremes of both major Parties. Both kinds of critique of standardization are seen clearly in many current debates, such as those surrounding No Child Left Behind. Some dislike NCLB because it empowers the federal bureaucracy; others dislike it because it is said to preclude experimentation by individual schools or school districts.
Even when standardizers successfully struggle to overcome these political opponents, the task of standardization in the United States also, of course, encounters powerful institutional and social obstacles, including, most obviously, those of federalism and of ethnic diversity. The impact of these institutional and social features is not as straightforward as it is often believed to be, though. Federalism, it should be especially noted, is a particular challenge to forms of standardization that require uniform law or public provision across the whole territory of the United States.Footnote 59 The liberal egalitarian standardization pursued by the advocates of civil rights for African Americans in the mid-twentieth century brought this obstacle dramatically to the fore. But it may be less of an obstacle to forms of standardization that do not require a directly coercive or bureaucratic response from the federal government. As Louis Hartz noted, efforts to standardize American character in the latter part of the nineteenth century flourished, despite—perhaps even because of—the limitations on the formal power of central governing institutions.Footnote 60 Once again, only detailed attention to the particular impulses and sites of standardization themselves could help us make sense of these apparent paradoxes.
Appreciating the importance of obstacles and opponents to standardization does not undermine the value of studying standardization in the way we argue. Indeed, it underscores the complex dynamics associated with standardization as a political process. Focusing on the conflicts that take place on each site of standardization illustrates advantages of the framework that we are seeking to develop. First, they explain how apparently paradoxical policy outcomes are rooted in the contrasting impulses towards standardization that have shaped the state in the United States throughout its history, in connection with prevailing socio-economic circumstances and ideological arguments,. Second, they demonstrate that the boundaries of that state have rarely been contiguous with those of the federal bureaucracy or the other “official” institutions of the classically Weberian state machine.
Herein lie the potential gains of our approach. Most analyses of the American state still preserve what Timothy Mitchell called the “image of unity.” On these accounts, “the state stands apart from society as a set of original intentions or preferences, just as persons are thought of as units of autonomous consciousness and desire distinct from the material or social world.”Footnote 61 The American state is partly of this mould. However seeing the state in solely this way misses crucial aspects of its development. Instead, the state should also be approached as a particular effort to standardize, driven by a distinctive set of impulses and employing an identifiable yet varied set of instruments. When the state responds to these impulses, it does so partly through coercion, the work of officialdom, and partly through other, less clearly “public” agencies, including the ideas and expectations on civil society.
Seeing things this way allows us to appreciate that personnel of the state and, say, the market are never entirely distinct, as the way policy making in response to the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated. It thus alerts us to dynamics that we might otherwise miss or misunderstand. To take one recent example, a blurring of this distinction would permit us a far better understanding of the relationship of key personnel in financial regulation. Looking at the way in which the American state seeks to standardize, rather than looking at the state as a pre-determined group of actors or institutions, would allow us to describe “the relations between major corporate banking groups, semi-public central banks or reserve systems, government treasuries, deposit insurance agencies and export-import banks, and multinational bodies such as the World Bank.” We could then see how these relationships “represent interlocking networks of financial power,” entailing that “no simple line could divide this network into a private realm and a public one, or into state and society.”Footnote 62
This dual perspective breaks not only with orthodox accounts of the American state. It also contrasts with the more critical take of Foucauldians. They argue that the state should no longer be taken as an actor at all or insist that it is an actor essentially indistinguishable from others. The perspective we propose is, though, already implicit in some of the very best work on the state. The major research on food and drug regulation by Daniel Carpenter is a case in point.Footnote 63 Carpenter reveals how a federal agency—the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized to implement the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938—charged with determining acceptable standards in key pharmaceuticals and food products made available for public consumption had to define its legitimacy and core mission around a capacity to standardize authoritatively. By cultivating a reputation for specialist competence and monitoring companies' adherence to these FDA-specified standards, the agency's power expanded, and it found enduring public opinion approval despite being embedded in a political culture that is anti-bureaucratic and that in the decades from Ronald Reagan's election to the White House in 1980 electorally endorsed an anti-regulatory platform. For Carpenter, these achievements rest on the FDA's reputation (defined as “a set of symbolic beliefs about an organization, beliefs embedded in multiple audiences”) for competence and associated standard-setting in the global pharmaceutical industry.Footnote 64 The achievement, in other words, is rooted in the way the FDA shapes its interactions with other formal public actors and with broader society: “the empowering agent for FDA behavior has been less the public or a fictional ‘median voter’ aware of the failings of therapeutic markets than a networked congeries of audiences—pivotal professional and scientific networks, congressional committees, consumer representatives, and media organizations.”Footnote 65
A sophisticated study with numerous insights germane to the American state's actions, Carpenter's focused case study on the FDA locates its standard setting activities in three dimensions: as a directive arm of the American state determining behavior of products' sellers and manufacturers; as a gatekeeper of agendas and debates about issues within the agency's wide remit; and as a shaper of conceptual frameworks about pharmaceuticals.Footnote 66 Each dimension of the FDA's activity affects the content and breadth of standards. The conceptual dimension—“the ability to shape the content and structure of human cognition itself” manifest in the various realms of professionalism, therapeutics, science, and global business—is significant as a distinctive feature of the American state compared with other states both domestically and as a global influence. Carpenter's case study therefore illuminates precisely the sorts of intellectual payoffs from privileging standardization in the theoretical study of the American state.
A second example takes a wider approach to the American state in contrast to Carpenter's micro case study-focused discussion. In their sweeping account of the development of executive government in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule convincingly argue that the conventional legislative oversight and judicial checks assumed to limit presidential power have dissolved into chimeras.Footnote 67 They write that “we live in a regime of executive-centered government, in an age after the separation of powers, and the legally constrained executive is now a historical curiosity.”Footnote 68 The executive is constrained by elections and assessments of the politically possible not by the conventional tenets of separated powers. Therefore, “the executive governs, in the sense that it drives the policy agenda even where the cooperation of other branches is needed for political reasons.”Footnote 69
Posner and Vermeule's argument is directly dependent on the crucial importance of standardization. It is, they show, the executive's capacity to set agendas for standardization that has driven its ability to gain an institutional advantage. In the mid-twentieth century, the executive took the lead in the standardization of civil and voting rights. More recently, it the executive has secured its position by standardizing education provision nationwide under the No Child Left Behind framework. Posner and Vermeule have demonstrated, then, how the executive responds to, employs, and even redefines the American impulses to standardization, and as has both seized authority and had much power delegated to it as it has done so. Without the rich and deep resources held in the American state, rooted in the logic of standardizing and available to the executive, this decisive shift to executive centered governance would not have occurred. The demands of standardization—from wartime mobilization to civil rights maintenance to resolving economic crisis—helps explain in significant part the growth of executive power.
Conclusion
We can return to where we began. The logic of standardization helps understand the continuing debate about immigration in all its dimensions—the border struggle to prevent potential immigrants entering the US; the controversial laws permitting profiling in Arizona; the seemingly-irresolvable policy makers' conflict between those wishing to criminalize illegal immigrants and those keen on establishing a road to naturalization after some conditions have been satisfied; and the enduring celebration in different re-workings of the US's origin and renewal as a “nation of immigrants.” These multiple and complex divisions turn on conflicting views about how American state standardization should operate for illegal immigrants and what instruments are most appropriate to pursue alternative strategies. Advocates of the relentless criminalization of undocumented aliens take American standardization to be plain—there is legal and illegal status, a dichotomy that determines policy. Advocates of a long-term naturalization solution call upon the same activity of American state standardization as necessary but locate the content of those standards in a complicated social context that emphasizes how that policy of standardization necessarily embodies more than an irrevocable legal-illegal dichotomy.
The American state has long perplexed both scholars and the politically-engaged public. It is, indisputably, a paradoxical state. It is strong and weak, centralized and decentralized, democratic and elitist, liberal and exclusive. Scholars have struggled to make sense of these paradoxes over the years, developing ever more subtle and detailed accounts of the mechanisms of bureaucratic expansion and the exercise of political power. Our call here is not in any way to dismiss those accounts. It is, instead, to supplement them. If we approach the American state as an effort to standardize that is prompted by a diverse set of impulses and that employs a varied range of instruments in response to the particular demands of the sites in which its efforts are focused, then we will begin to appreciate the complexity and confusions of the American state in ways that have so far escaped us. That is our proposal. The test of our suggestion's worth will lie in future empirical work that develops analyses of individual cases, focusing on particular impulses to standardize, in particular sites, at particular times. It is our contention that such work will enable us better to understand precise moments of American political development and also help us to further appreciate both the complexities and the undisputable power of the American state.
