In many ways, the dawn of the twenty-first century has turned out to be a central juncture for political history. The collective book The Democratic Experiment, edited by Meg Jacobs, Julian Zelizer, and Peter Novak, has been a good example among many others of the current revitalization of American political history.Footnote ¹ Since the 1990s, many articles advocating a “new” political history have been published and the idea is now widespread in the profession not only in the United States but also in Europe and in France.Footnote ² Every period of American history is concerned with such a renewal: from the Early Republic to the end of the twentieth century, books, articles, and discussions on the Internet have tried to promote a new political history.Footnote ³ In France too, theoretical discussions and collective books have revitalized many fields of political history, from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Third Republic or the Vichy regime.Footnote ⁴ This concern, however, raises a question on the very nature of political history to be written in the future—to what extent does it fit with other disciplines in the field of history? To put it differently, is it possible to reconcile the tendencies among many American historians that seem to focus entirely on race, class, and gender with the study of ordinary politics associated with the political system of elections, legislation, and administration?

Today, many historians complain that ordinary politics is part of the given and does not need to be explained. In a recent book on the new political history in the field of the early Republic, William G. Shade cannot help but note that it would be better “not to send a student to this book to find out about the Whiskey Rebellion (not mentioned in the index) nor the Alien and Sedition Acts (treated briefly in several sentences in the introduction) or Hamilton’s economic policy.”Footnote ⁵ Indeed, many hope to qualify the symbolic and professional domination of social historians, who have paid little attention to the short time of elections, presidential orders, and political cycles. It is no coincidence that those new calls for a new dynamic among political historians should occur in a time of crisis of epistemological models both in Europe and in the United States.Footnote ⁶ To go beyond the current crisis in history, some scholars contend that social historians and political historians should stop walking on different tracks. In 1999, in her fresh comment at a roundtable for the Journal of American History, Paula Baker argued that political history had entered a midlife crisis, that “political historians seem arthritic and slow.”Footnote ⁷ Facing the challenge of social history, political history appeared as an old-fashioned way of writing the history of the American past. As Baker advocates, “A reassessment of how new work on gender, class, race and consumption might reshape what has become traditional political history is therefore welcome.”Footnote ⁸ A closer look at French and American political history proves that Paula Baker is right: political historians cannot avoid facing the challenge of social history. But, and that is the purpose of this article, a true revitalization should come more from a dialogue with other social scientists, including political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and economists, than from an attempt to integrate ipso facto the main concepts of social history. One of the most important legacies of social historians has been their ability to use other social sciences to produce a rich and vivid account of the past.Footnote ⁹ As far as political historians are concerned in France and in the United States, they mainly tap on political science to shed new light on current historical debates. Indeed, a real attempt to reintegrate social history should move ahead in tandem with other social sciences, including sociology, demography, and anthropology. Eventually, this new concern should allow the current call for a new political history to become something other than a new episode of an old debate between political and social historians. In this article, I begin by briefly showing the stakes of the current debates between political and social history. I then single out the attempt of French and American political historians to revitalize political history in the past in order to extract a methodology of investigation. I close by proposing some directions, namely, a social history of the state, a focus on professions and their politicization process and a closer look at the demographic dynamic for the future. With such a new emphasis on both the social and political worlds, it is possible to reintegrate all social sciences with a strong methodology.

A FEELING OF DÈJÀ VU

It is noteworthy that the ongoing debate about a “new” political history brings an actual feeling of déjà vu for historians familiar with the very history of the discipline. Ignaccio Olabarri has well documented to which extent the “new” new history is a longue durée structure.Footnote ¹⁰ The origins of the debate are to be found in the similarity between the two sisters disciplines—history and political science. At the end of the nineteenth century, while historians wanted to separate history from its religious background and turn it into a historical science along the German model, the central figures in the movement to professionalize history, however, historians such as Andrew Dickson White, John W. Burgess, and Herbert Baxter Adams, believed that history and political science were part of the same broad field.Footnote ¹¹ In 1897, John W. Burgess contended that both disciplines were intertwined. According to him, “Political science must be studied historically and history must be studied politically, in order to have a correct comprehension of either. Separate them, and the one becomes a cripple, if not a corpse, the other a will-o’-the-wisp.”Footnote ¹² In France, the École libre des sciences politiques became the main place to write political history; in the meantime, professional historians in universities were more interested with social history and the history of “mentalités” advocated by Les Annales.Footnote ¹³

Indeed, more and more historians became aware of the economic and social upheavals around them and of the new social science disciplines competing for academic space such as sociology, economics, or anthropology.Footnote ¹⁴ In different ways, they opened their field outward and laid the groundwork for a “new” history. For instance, Adams’s students, among them Frederick Jackson Turner, brought social and economic analysis to their work. At Columbia University, the interdisciplinary environment Burgess established was the seedbed for James Harvey Robinson’s announcement of a “new history” and for Charles Beard’s fresh economic interpretation of history. This new history began to separate “modern” historians from “traditional” political historians. In many countries, many political historians discovered an unexpected trend: the more history developed as a discipline, the more political history was left on the margins of the profession, even though it kept the prestigious positions inside history departments. Nevertheless, in the first decades of the twentieth century, political historians remained powerful in the profession and kept important positions among historical circles. In the 1960s, because of the growing interest in social issues, they had to face a challenge both methodological and professional.

It is therefore no coincidence that in 1968, a year of political turmoil in both countries, French and American historians would ponder the methodology of political history. In the United States at that time, Allan Bogue coined the term “new political history.”Footnote ¹⁵ The strong criticism addressed in 1948 to the “presidential synthesis’ school” by Thomas Cochran became a sort of manifesto for these angry young historians.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, Samuel Hays blamed “conventional political history” for being “so preoccupied with the outward and the formal, the episodic, the unique and the individual, that it has failed to draw attention to some of the most significant developments of our political past.”Footnote ¹⁷ A common will to use other social sciences also cemented those “new” political historians. Rather than a “political historian,” Allan Bogue preferred to be called a “behavioral historian.”Footnote ¹⁸

In France, the gap between political and social history grew wider because many historians became more receptive to new fields of history, focusing on ordinary people and advocating a longue durée framework, which tended to marginalize political history. Social structural approaches, whether Marxist or advocated by Les Annales, achieved undeniable prominence from the 1950s through the 1970s. Many political historians were seen as part of the old establishment that precisely new social historians wanted to get rid of. Political history and foreign policy were seen as two strongholds of the old establishment. Therefore, political history was soon displaced from its position at the top of the discipline’s hierarchy. Moved by progressives and racial and gender sympathies, social historians often valorized their subjects’ resistance to oppression and sturdy survival or, conversely, their victimization by oppressors. The battle on campus also involved new methodological tools. What seduced many students was the capacity of social historians to bring into their narrative tools from other social sciences.

Indeed, the integration of new social sciences proved to be very effective and offered a strong impulse to the new social history. In the United States, however, some political historians tried to apply tools of analysis from political science, sociology, and psychology to historical studies of political behavior. Until the mid-1950s, under the influence of Paul Lazarsfeld, Lee Benson also embraced the social sciences, a rather unusual practice in the profession. Often he lectured historians on the need for better research designs and more systematic analysis.Footnote ¹⁹ He turned from economic history to the study of voting behavior and explored ways in which historians could study elections to understand past public opinion. This ambitious work led to the iconoclastic book, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case, which provided the model for much of the new political history.Footnote ²⁰

In spite of the ambition of this group of historians, this project of revitalization failed because of the growing interest for social history and its new and vivid reconstruction of the American past. Indeed, the attempt of a revitalization using social sciences led to a growing divide between political historians and political scientists who were more cautious of multivariate analysis and the integration of new concepts from other disciplines.Footnote ²¹ The two disciplines went their separate ways—political science became less historical and historians became less interested in politics. Broad, complex historical problems seemed less appealing to them given that such issues were usually multifaceted and did not lend themselves to the type of precision that political scientists craved.

Therefore, in the 1980s, political history became a rather marginalized field in comparison to the booming research of social historians both in Europe and in the United States. As William Leuchtenburg argued in 1984, political historians were not part of the family anymore. This symbolic domination of social victory, however, created problems of its own and led many historians to question a social history without a political framework. In many ways, the victory of social historians turned out to be a Pyrrhic one. The field of social history has become an overspecialized one under the categories of race, class, and gender.Footnote ²² If social historians wanted to include more social groups inside the historical circle, what got lost was the sense of history bringing together people into a single framework. As French historian Jacques Revel notes in a multiauthor book, the success of the Annales and its use of the explanatory forces of social structures contained the seeds of its own downfall. As he argues, there is “no longer any implicit consensus on which to base the unity of the social, identified with the real.”Footnote ²³ The call for a more encompassing synthesis of the twentieth century and its politics became widespread in the profession. However, the only syntheses published during the 1990s either described high politics in a microscopic fashion or dissolved it into a general canvas. Because racial, ethnic, class, and gender identities crosscut one another, sometimes supporting and sometimes contradicting other identities, historians have been pushed to an increasingly atomized level of analysis. Indeed, in the world of social historians, one may be surprised by the lack of attention paid to ordinary politics. For instance, Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal, probably one of the best social history books of the 1990s, pays almost no attention to local political institutions despite its setting as the symbol of machine politics in the United States—Chicago.Footnote ²⁴ Even in the best history books, the gap between political history and social history becomes a sort of ideological barrier. This strong opposition between social historians and political historians has led historians on both sides to ponder the crisis of the profession. At the end of the day, historians were still embedded in strong debates within historical circles and seemed to be unable to offer a rich and vivid analysis to the general reader. In many ways, political history was decentered in the field of history. Paradoxically, the new political historians of the 1960s and 1970s who did so much to generate interest in electoral dynamics and its fascinating politics left political historians on the defense in proving the importance of their topic.

IS POLITICAL SCIENCE THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN?

In 2000, in a paper presented at the Organization of American Historians, Paula Baker asked a rather provocative question: “Is there an audience for history with the facts left in?”Footnote ²⁵ Baker pointed out the fact that since the early 1960s, many political historians have taken deadly aim against another older belief—that there was an especially progressive direction to American development. In the 1970s and 1980s, few scholars any longer saw linear—or cyclical—global progression in twentieth-century life: each direction relied on specific experiences.

However, both French and American historiography witnessed a return to the political in the 1990s, which has paved the way for some interesting methodological innovations. The challenge to the classic social approach coincided not only with the decline of Marxism but also with epistemological and methodological shifts within French and American history. Over the last twenty years, many historians tried to reconcile history with political science, following the path of Theda Skocpol and her call for bringing “the State back in.”Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, the institutional approach has produced an impressive body of new scholarship. Many countries have found common ground to produce a new narrative of national histories. In many ways, such a merger has revealed the complex settings within which elites operated and broadened the historical canvas beyond presidencies. In the United States, such studies have embraced a wide range of topics from welfare and taxation to consumption.Footnote ²⁷ In France, the concept of “political culture” has been used to revitalize political history and to rethink the traditional history of political parties.Footnote ²⁸ The idea of “generation,” a demographic group cemented by the same values, has also been used to understand the political and social motivation of ordinary citizens, soldiers, or militants.Footnote ²⁹ In the United States, the field of American Political Development (APD) has been seen as a precious ally to help revitalize the field. In looking at institutional settings, American Political Development’s scholars portray state-builders as having their own agendas and interests and easily find common fields of investigation with political historians.Footnote ³⁰ In France too, political scientists and historians have tried to work together to present the complexity of the political word. This “interdisciplinary fabric,” to use French historian Henry Rousso and French sociologist Michel Offerlé’s own words, has given a better understanding of the sociology of politicians and militants.Footnote ³¹

The ongoing rapprochement has produced some interesting work on decision making and complexity of institutional mechanisms. But it risks driving historians along a narrow field, leading them to see the social world through strictly institutional grids. Modeling systematic political scientists is also poorly suited to the thickness of history. Among political historians today, there is still an underlying fear of “being soft on methodology.” That can explain why they tend to look at political science as a “hard” discipline that would enable them to solidify the foundation of the discipline. When they focus on the design of public policy, most historians tend to dismiss personal factors to emphasize more structural explanations, using political science models and theories. For instance, within the historical and sociological literature dealing with civil servants and experts, they are portrayed as collective and abstract figures, rarely men and women of flesh and blood. Julian Zelizer’s study of Wilbur Mills and Edward Berkowitz’s analysis of Wilbur Cohen or Robert Ball are good examples of attempts to write a social history of the modern American state.Footnote ³² Indeed, if political history needs to solidify an alliance with its sister discipline, political science, one should not forget other social sciences. To put it differently, it seems worth trying to write a social history of politics, institutions, and the state as some French and American historians have already tried.Footnote ³³

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF POLITICS

When turning to social sciences, historians should not limit themselves to political science. When writing political history, other fields can help us move beyond the presidential synthesis or alternative narratives that have focused on social movements. A dialogue with other social sciences could lead to the writing of a social history of American and European politics over the twentieth century. It is not necessarily relevant to study on a different level the political sphere and the social sphere because people do not live in one sphere or another. It is therefore appropriate to link the diversity of social attitudes and cultural and demographic factors with political history. Those attempts to write a social history are well suited with the new directions of social history, which tries to pay more attention to networks, norms, and local permutations of agency rather than social structures, geographic patterns, or occupational categories.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, it is possible to focus on “political practices” of individuals, associations, and organizations rather than speeches and discourses.Footnote ³⁵ A study of practice implies some research about social affiliation, networks, and political activities. Therefore, it brings dynamism, complexity, and a degree of unpredictability to political history, which is often depicted in a teleological way. Historians of political culture and of the public sphere have frequently assumed that modern politics involved above all a contest about speech and sociability to define citizenship. By the way, they tend to forget the different practices on a day-to-day basis, which also shape political experiments.

Over the last few years in the United States, many historians have also tried to produce social accounts of political movements. Work on American conservatism has been a good example of that attempt to reconcile political and social history. In an article published in 1994, the historian Alan Brinkley noted that American conservatism had been “something of an orphan in historical leadership.”Footnote ³⁶ For many historians, conservatism was alien to American political culture and was therefore dismissed as a “paranoid style,” “political pathology,” or “status anxiety.”Footnote ³⁷ The psychological paradigm then in vogue did nothing to encourage scholars to take conservatism seriously. Since the mid-1990s, journalists, sociologists, and historians have produced a significant number of books that analyze the rise of conservatism, its intellectual components and diversity, its political strategy and its views on foreign policy. More interestingly, some scholars have studied conservatism at the grassroots level, especially in southern and some western states.Footnote ³⁸ These books tell the story of white ethnics, men and women, who have played an important role in bringing conservatives to power at the national level. Indeed, these studies have enlarged our understanding of grassroots conservatism.Footnote ³⁹ It helps us understand the social fabric that generates their politics and also enlightens the ways in which individuals and communities have managed to mobilize politically around conservative issues. Recent studies have focused on their preconditions within the shadowy domain of everyday life. Building on the work of the political anthropologist James Scott, it is possible to argue that they have excavated the realm of “infrapolitics”: the forms of consciousness, languages, experiences, and strategies of contestation that allow individuals and groups to develop shared sensibilities about politics and shared feelings of cultural solidarity in their struggle.

Such studies have explored the process of political mobilization, the interaction between grassroots leaders and the rank and file, and the broader ideological waters in which they swim. They explore a political movement first and foremost as a social movement. Locally, mobilization also involved regional business elites who offered resources and institutional support. At the national level, it involved the formation of an intellectual leadership that sought to give cohesion to the ideas underpinning the movement, as well as a political leadership that offered direction to channel conservative sentiment. The interplay between what was happening on the local and national levels is central to their arguments and crucial to our understanding of politics.

Moreover, these historians have tried to avoid the trap of a static use of the concept of political culture. No one will refute the idea that a study of political culture is especially useful because it can address historically shifting relationships between the national polity and specific groups.Footnote ⁴⁰ But like many previous explanatory schemes, there is a risk that political culture remains a static concept, describing the worldview of a specific group, disconnected from the rest of the population.Footnote ⁴¹ Hence, what those new historians have tried to reveal is the way such a specific political culture has been transformed and reinforced by political practices at the local level. Their books deal more with “cultural politics,” which are the ways in which political processes merge on the cultural terrain, than with political culture. It helps us understand how political ideas are imposed, negotiated, and resisted. Indeed, it tells us that it is not possible to disconnect political ideas from the social world that created them.

Indeed, to counterbalance and complement the interesting work on political ideology and political discourse, one has to articulate politics to the social world. I detect today three broad patterns within recent literature by political historians to open up a dialogue with other social sciences: a social history of the state, a political history of the professions, and, eventually, a closer interest in a demographic dynamic. This social history of politics is based on the idea that politics is produced not only through intellectual experience but also through social experience. If one wants to understand how people read their world, one has to take into account the contours of their lives. A sociocultural portrait not only should describe occupation, wealth, and family status but also depict education, religious attitudes, and forms of exposure to political ideas.

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE STATE AND ANTISTATISM

In many countries, a new history of the state and institutions has tried to advocate for a social approach to political institutions.Footnote ⁴² In this new narrative, the state is seen in a more flexible way as a place of negotiation over power, resources, and relationships, rather than simply as a coercive entity separate from society. Over the last few years, scholars have demonstrated that the American state was far more powerful than one has expected.Footnote ⁴³ Their historical record suggests today that the American state has never been as “exceptional” as it has often been suggested; it also implies that on the whole Americans had supported the federal government more than scholars used to admit.Footnote ⁴⁴

In France, often seen as the symbol of a statist regime, many historians have tried to develop a more complex portrait of how the Government worked outside Paris and have focused mainly on the intersection between state and society. Fresh studies have tried to bring “flesh and blood” to the French administration.Footnote ⁴⁵ At the local level, new studies have shown how the government was perceived through local civil servants such as postmen and tax collectors.Footnote ⁴⁶ As historians of the Middle Ages and modern times have shown, the state is not only composed of civil servants and politicians, but also a living body with its own ritual.Footnote ⁴⁷ Recent works have shown the value of dealing with the relationship between the state and its citizens. This new school is not only trying to “bring the state back in” as a policymaking entity independent of society, but rather to ask how a new dynamic of state-citizen transformed the very of nature of politics. My own work on expertise in the field of poverty has shown the way less powerful people could interact with civil servants. During the Poor People’s March in 1968, civil servants and poor people met on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and tried to understand the failure of the welfare system in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the case of poverty, where special interests are not part of the decision process, historians have to use other explanations to explain the bureaucratic and institutional battles inside the federal government. Indeed, experts studying the federal government claimed to work for a sense of ethic or religious values. The economist Robert Lampman, a key member of the Council of Economic Advisers, which launched the official War on Poverty, justified his scientific work with a sense of solidarity to the poorest people, while Ida Merriam, who was head of the Bureau of Research and Statistics of the Social Security Administration, advocated religious and moral values, as her mentor Richard Titmuss did in England.Footnote ⁴⁹

The recent scholarship on the nexus between state and society emphasizes its complexity in ways that could be productive for historians of many fields.Footnote ⁵⁰ This approach to the state stresses reciprocal interactions between institutions and various social groups. Many recent books have tried to focus on the state-citizen relationships with a closer attention to how citizens shaped the state from the ground level. Meg Jacobs’s study of pocketbook politics offers new angles to understand the politics of purchasing power.Footnote ⁵¹ Over the twentieth century, the political ritual has strongly evolved. In one simulating book, French sociologist Nicolas Mariot has focused on presidential travels to analyze in a fresh way the behavior of the crowd and to understand the links between ordinary citizens and their politicians.Footnote ⁵² Rather than posing causal questions or overarching structures of interpretation, Mariot seeks to create a new reading of crowd gatherings. Contrary to many political historians who presume the enthusiasm of the crowd, Mariot concentrates instead on the sociocultural background of people and marshals evidence from hundreds of secondary works to reveal forms of resistance and negotiations. It seems also crucial to understand how new institutions transformed access to power for both men and women and contributed to redefining social relationship and political participation. In her book In Pursuit of Equity, Alice Kessler-Harris cleverly presents detailed and fascinating evidence from the historical record that provides powerful insights into past and current struggles over the legal and social architectures relevant to such topics as Social Security, old-age pensions, and unemployment insurance.Footnote ⁵³ This new focus on actors’ motives in a contextual way, and the interaction between citizens and institutions, could provide a new understanding of the federal government in the contemporary era. Brian Balogh’s current work on the government, which he labels “out-of-sight,” is a good example of the result such an approach could produce. As Balogh rightly argues, over the nineteenth century the United States governed differently than other industrialized contemporaries, but it did not necessarily govern less.Footnote ⁵⁴ What Balogh demonstrates in his book is the fact that relationships between state and citizens had evolved and took in the past other forms that a strict twentieth-century reading could make obscure.

This new history of government policy also includes resistance to the state from various social groups. In France, many studies have tried to understand the opposition of various groups over different periods.Footnote ⁵⁵ Since the early days of the colonial era, many Americans have had an ambivalent attitude toward the federal government. This distrust has been the product of diverse and, at times, contradictory impulses in the American polity and culture. The very term “antistatism” has been used to describe varying degrees of opposition to state power: at one extreme, it is synonymous with anarchism, while at another it applies to groups whose opposition goes no further than checking the expansion of federal bureaucracy. Antistatism derives its strength because it has taken on so many forms. Indeed some Americans indeed were, or are, antistatist because they believed, or believe, in locally based institutions. Antistatism provides others with a versatile means of constructing race and coping with geographical, cultural, or social mobility in the context of a rapidly changing world. Others still are devoted to rigid constitutionalism and value political patronage rather than bureaucratic administration. And many still see antistatism as a way to preserve the exceptionalism of the American democratic experiment. It is obvious that antistatism has been constructed over the years—there is no such thing in the country as a sort of antistatist strain encoded in its political DNA.Footnote ⁵⁶ At times, their reasons to fight against the government had to do with social positions and class pretensions; at other times, antistatism provided citizens with a sense of self they longed for. The notion of antistatism that resulted was at one and the same time radical and conservative, full of reordering possibility. Efforts to sustain antistatism had their own radical thrust that went to the heart of ordinary Americans. Antistatist policies gained acceptance because they were built on grassroots participation. Only political scientists and sociologists have used the notion of antistatism to explain the development and parameters of the American state.Footnote ⁵⁷ Why academic historians have (almost without exception) never shared their fellow Americans’ interest in antistatism remains open to interpretation. I see it as a by-product of the decline of political history in the United States.Footnote ⁵⁸ And it is no coincidence that a new concern should appear in a time of revitalization of American political history. Another explanation is to be found in the way American historians have analyzed conservatism.Footnote ⁵⁹ That specific neglect has led them to view antistatism as a backward fight, propelled by irrational forces. Yet more recently, scholars have tried to take conservatism seriously but have mainly focused on cultural and social issues and neglected political concerns.Footnote ⁶⁰ New studies of antistatism should be focused on different social groups, which have helped construct such a myth that is often described as part of the American mind. For instance, businessmen and lawyers have tried to construct legal and political forms of antistatism in the country over the twentieth century. Through their professional associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers or the local Chambers of Commerce, businessmen sought to limit the expansion of the government imposed by New Dealers.Footnote ⁶¹ Moreover, some have tried, such as the former public relations’ vice president of AT&T, Arthur W. Page, to shape the national mood about statism, considered as evil, and antistatism viewed as an essential character of the American democracy. Therefore, Page tried after 1945 to influence the selection of books in history departments, to help create the magazine American Heritage, and to find the money necessary to create a Center for the Study of the History of Liberty at Harvard University at the end of the 1950s.Footnote ⁶² Lawyers also played a crucial role in the codification of the right to oppose or limit the expansion of government in the fiscal, economic, and social fields. Through their local associations such as the American Bar Association or their professional networks, they have tried to reverse the symbolic domination of legal realism.Footnote ⁶³ It is no coincidence that a lawyer such as James Beck should publish in 1932 a book titled Our Wonderland of Bureaucracy: A Study of the Growth of Bureaucracy in the Federal Government. More research is needed to understand the professional and academic construction of a law that legitimizes the dismantling of the Welfare State. The current work of two labor historians, Joseph McCartin and Jean-Christian Vinel, focusing on the conservative lawyer Sylvester Pietro, should shed new light on that incremental process. The rise in academic circles of the “law and economics” movement is also an important step in redefining antistatism and laissez-faire policy.Footnote ⁶⁴

Indeed, the integration of political history into the social world could enable historians to reconfigure the traditional approach to accommodate more study of practices, institutions, the state, and the ever-amorphous social world. For instance, such a genre as political biography, denounced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as a form of “historical illusion,” is witnessing a resurgence among professional historians. Individual or collective biographies offer a compelling means of capturing both the social and political world. In this mode of narrative, it is possible to go beyond older structural concerns and to take methodological inspiration from microhistory.Footnote ⁶⁵

THE SOCIOLOGY OF PROFESSIONS AND FORMS OF MILITANCY

Historians should also pay more attention to the sociology of militants and the very reasons of militancy. This day-to-day study of reaction to political events could help us understand the patterns of sociability that politicize individuals. In a stimulating book, in spite of its limited sample, sociologist Rebecca Klatch has tried to understand the dynamics of militancy of both the Young Americans for Freedom and Students for a Democratic Society.Footnote ⁶⁶ Her lively presentation gives us a clear understanding of a day-to-day militancy and its professional and family aspects. This sociology of militants should be carried on together with the sociology of professions.Footnote ⁶⁷ If many books have been written about the militancy of workers, more books need to focus on white-collar professions such as teachers, social workers, lawyers, psychologists, and librarians. The history of professions has mainly focused on those—lawyers, psychologists, or economists—that have adopted a clear strategy to use the expansion of the federal government as part of their own development. Other professions, however, have played a major role in the politicization of the social world through their own professional and social networks. Such a focus could open a vivid dialogue with labor historians and sociologists.

For instance, the incremental politicization of social workers, teachers, and librarians should be analyzed.Footnote ⁶⁸ This process includes resistance or negotiations with the very locus of power, either political parties or national institutions. Some local studies of specific professions could help us understand both the political and professional process of politicization. After World War I, the profession of social workers had been strongly reorganized. In 1921, the American Association of Social Workers was founded with more than 4,600 members. Some social workers also belonged to other associations such as the American Hospital Association of Social Workers, founded in 1919, the American Association of School Social Workers, founded in the same year, and the American Association of Psychiatric Social Workers, founded in 1926. That reorganization did not change the gender composition of the profession—in 1930, 79 percent of workers were women. After the war, many social workers questioned the development of the federal government and pondered the very methods that the profession used. A book such as Social Diagnosis (1917) by Mary Richmond, who has long served as a reference, appears to be outdated. Richmond used to argue for a formal relationship of individuals and their environment in order to truly help the poor.Footnote ⁶⁹ A new generation of social workers was all the more interesting with a larger spectrum of political and social intervention without advocating the expansion of the federal government.Footnote ⁷⁰ Teachers and librarians also took an important role in the process of political mobilization during the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, teachers became a more organized profession.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1917, the National Education Association (NEA) was reorganized to better mobilize and represent teachers and educational staff. The rate of increase in membership was constant under the chairmanship of James Crabtree—from 8,466 members in 1917 to 220,149 in 1931. the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) also played a major part in that process, which relied on the strong democratization of education. In 1910, for example, only 9 percent of the population had a high school diploma; in 1935, the rate was 40 percent.Footnote ⁷² The heart of this movement of democratization lies in the Midwest, the so-called education belt. Supported by associations for the promotion of education, including the American Council on Education, experiments were carried out to recruit the best students with a strong emphasis on intellectual capacity. A professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, E. F. Lindquist, organized a competition in 1929 among whiz kids entitled the Iowa Academic Meeting, quickly dubbed the “Brain Derby.”Footnote ⁷³ In high schools, however, teachers were not the only professionals to petition for new forms of politicization. During the Progressive Era, librarians had been at the forefront of social mobilization for new immigrants coming from Europe. Yet in the 1920s, the profession faced a profound crisis, in many ways similar to that of the social workers: the project was criticized as too moralistic since it sought to impose American values on the immigrants. During the 1930s, with the rise in international tensions, librarians abandoned their old creed and became the main advocates of democracy against the threat of fascism. In the 1930s, Amelia Munson, a librarian at the New York Public Library, contended that “as supporters of democracy, we can not tolerate slavery.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For political considerations, there was a growing recognition of the psychology of the individual. At a meeting of the Library Association of Iowa, one librarian recalled the importance of psychology in emancipating the poor. Indeed, that mobilization of profession, which happened outside the traditional networks of the polity, helps us understand the transformation of American politics in the 1930s. Thus, the victory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt does not appear as an exceptional victory but rather as the product of structural forces, one of them being the increased politicization among some professions.

If professions played a major role in the victory of liberal ideas, they also engendered the demise of its political order. In 1970, in a widely acclaimed book, Albert Hirschman used the concept of “exit,” “voice,” and “loyalty” to explain organizational decline.Footnote ⁷⁵ At the same time, some liberals decided to leave the political order they belonged to. This end of loyalty could be seen as a way to voice their dissatisfaction. Among historians and political scientists, two social groups, workers and intellectuals, epitomize such a process.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the case of workers, scholars have focused on racial issues to explain the political shift; in the case of intellectuals, it has been argued that some became uncomfortable with the federal government’s social agenda. Eventually, political scientists and sociologists also analyzed the backlash of the middle class, who refused to pay taxes and to accept busing and affirmative action in their backyards. A closer study of professional dissatisfactions could help us delineate the end of the liberal order. When did the process of loyalty begin to fall apart? When did organizations such as unions, political clubs, and professional organizations fail to guarantee the loyalty of their members? For instance, in the 1960s, many social workers also called into question the political order. If the profession has benefited greatly from the federal expansion, it went through a growing dissatisfaction toward liberal elites. The debate arises in a very simple way: Should social work be used to help the most disadvantaged to integrate into society or to help them fight against the very institutions that guarantee the payment of their welfare checks? The issue is all the more exacerbated since African Americans have often accused social workers of being racist and arrogant. During the Poor People’s Campaign, many poor people complained about the social workers’ lack of esteem and politeness toward them. At the National Conference on Social Welfare, held in San Francisco in 1968, critics emerged and mocked the psychological concepts then in vogue in the profession: “the main problem,” some activists claimed, “is the racism of white people.” The following year, tensions increased. Henry Miller compared social work in the ghettos to “philanthropic colonialism.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Women also expressed their disappointment. In a profession that owes so much to the Progressive Era, how is it possible to explain the domination of men inside the profession? Between 1874 and 1974, only nineteen of the more than one hundred presidents of the National Conference on Social Welfare were women. To give new priorities and political significance to the profession, many social workers engaged in violent actions against the authorities. In Detroit, they helped poor people take action against local authorities; in New York, they came into conflict with the Department of Welfare.Footnote ⁷⁸ Another pillar of the liberal order, psychologists were experiencing similar tensions. In 1969, women founded the Association for Women Psychologists to protest against the macho behavior in the profession. The same year, during the Congress of the American Psychological Association, demonstrations were organized by left-wing organizations such as Psychologists for Social Action, Psychologists for a Democratic Society, the Association of Black Psychologists, and the Association of Black Psychology Students.Footnote ⁷⁹ Such a study of professional mobilization should also be made for conservatives at the local level.

Indeed, a closer focus on the professional dimension of militancy could help us understand the very nature of the political mobilization both in liberal and conservative spheres over the twentieth century.

DEMOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE FOR POLITICAL HISTORIANS

In a special issue of the French journal Vingtième siècle, historian Paul-André Rosenthal describes the importance of demographic factors in the analysis of historical and political phenomena, what he calls the “demographic argument.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Often, the full impact of demographic factors is limited to policy and academic analyses that focus on the short term of family policy and demographic figures. In many history books, especially in local studies, demographic factors are covered in two or three pages. A focus on those factors, however, could enable us to integrate the political dimension of demography and immigration into the course of American politics.Footnote ⁸¹

At the beginning of the twentieth century, most immigrants were more concerned with problems of day-to-day survival than with political debates. Nevertheless, it is possible to investigate the extent to which the children and grandchildren of those immigrants played a decisive role in the transformation of American politics. In most cities, immigrants have a higher fertility rate, particularly those from Southern and Eastern Europe. In Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, immigrants have a fertility rate two to three times higher than traditional American families.Footnote ⁸² This fertility rate should be correlated with the differential use of the school system and the religious factor. As the sociologist Gilbert Robinson argued in 1936, Catholics in Chicago had a birth rate higher than any other social or ethnic group. The political impact of this demographic dynamic has never been fully explored. In 1928, the seeds of the 1932 Roosevelt coalition were established when Al Smith attracted the immigrant urban vote to the Democratic Party.Footnote ⁸³ From 1920 to 1930, there was an increase in the number of first- and second-generation southern and eastern European immigrants from 8 to 11 million, or from 13 percent to 15 percent of the voting-age population.Footnote ⁸⁴ It was a significant shift all the more since immigrants concentrated in the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest. This demographic dynamic propelled the expansion of the liberal coalition until World War II. After the war, Malthusian behaviors of liberal families raised the anxiety among many people. In his best-seller, No Down Payment (1958), John McPartland features a couple of modern liberals, John and David Martin, who live in suburban middle-class San Francisco.Footnote ⁸⁵ Quite disturbed, the heroine wonders about the virility of her husband, which she compares to a man similar to the one who appears in the Ladies Homes Journal. Indeed, the demographic dynamic among liberals shows some signs of weakness. Thanks to the civil rights movement and the end of the poll tax in the South, such difficulties were postponed at the local level because a massive number of voters had been integrated. Yet in 1960, only 9 percent of the voting-age population was of foreign birth. And unlike their immigrant parents, all of the second generation were citizens by birth and were eligible to vote. It is probably no coincidence, however, that many liberals should try to re-create a new demographic dynamic. John F. Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, opened the debate with his book A Nation of Immigrants (1958).Footnote ⁸⁶ Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 immigration law was part of an attempt to revitalize the demographic dynamic, even though some liberals such as Senator Edward Kennedy pretended that “the level of immigration will remain the same.”Footnote ⁸⁷ This new policy entailed massive resistance in the population and accelerated the process of backlash in white ethnic communities.Footnote ⁸⁸

It is also interesting to focus on the policy of liberals toward family issues such day-care centers and family allowances.Footnote ⁸⁹ Many studies have demonstrated the strength of a “hidden” Welfare State over the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹⁰ It would be relevant to analyze the fiscal, social, and political dimensions of this invisible state in terms of demographic policy. From the 1930s to the 1970s, liberals adopted a rather Malthusian policy when they held the reins of power. Discussions, however, occurred in many liberal circles about the necessity to adopt a more active policy in terms of family policy. During the 1972 presidential election, the adoption of the European family allowances’ system was discussed by the staff of democrat candidate George McGovern, even though it was finally refused and replaced by the idea of the so-called demogrant for the American people, advocated by economist James Tobin.Footnote ⁹¹ This attempt, failure, or refusal to transform the demographic behavior of citizens is also a way to better understand the state-citizens relationship.

One also has to ponder the demographic dynamic of the conservative movement. Many works on the rise of the conservative movement imply that immigration, especially in the South, and family values have played a major role.Footnote ⁹² With a sense of humor, Phillip Longman explains the victory of conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s by a simple demographic comparison: in Seattle, there are nearly 45 percent more children than in Salt Lake City, where there are nearly 19 percent more children than dogs.Footnote ⁹³ Throughout the twentieth century, attitudes toward fertility and family evolved. Many militants from the New Left decided not to have children.Footnote ⁹⁴ Nearly 20 percent of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having children. On the other side of the political spectrum, conservatives tend to have a higher fertility rate. In the 1990s, Utah has the highest fertility rate in the nation: 92 children are born each year for every 1,000 women; by contrast, Vermont has the lowest, with 51 children per 1,000 women.

Indeed, a full exploration of demographic factors could help us understand the process of political mobilization throughout the twentieth century both in the ranks of liberals and conservatives.