How is a fiscal state crafted? What is fiscal citizenship? It is with these fundamental questions that this fascinating, well-written, thoroughly researched, and convincing book wrestles. This book is not only for those dedicated to the history of taxation; readers with an interest in the history of economics, the rise of professionalism and expertise (particularly of the legal and economic varieties), politics, populism, and propaganda will also find Mehrotra's book thought provoking.

Economic forces were truly transforming society in the period covered by this book—1877–1929. It was a time characterized by rapid industrialization, urbanization, labor unrest, immigration, and income inequality. The demand for more government services at the local, state, and federal levels highlighted the inadequacy of the old system of government finance tariffs; alcohol, tobacco, and other excise taxes at the federal level; and property taxes at the state level. Corruption and blatant avoidance undermined these tax regimes as did assertions about incidence: who ultimately paid the taxes. The late nineteenth century tax system was seen as unfair: heavy and inescapable for the poor, eminently avoidable for the rich.

For Mehrotra, one word describes the infrastructure for the fiscal state and for fiscal citizenship: learning. The newly minted social science of economics provided new platforms for learning and teaching about taxation and its effects. One of the real strengths of this book is that it brings the full range of taxation into view: state, local, and federal. The progressive economists thought of progressive taxation as promoting equal sacrifice in a world in which there were also regressive taxes. They were practical men building on institutional capacity at various governmental levels. For lawyers, service in government learning about the implementation of new progressive taxes enabled both teaching fellow lawyers about this emerging area of law, and profiting from government service.

As to the success of progressive tax reformers in creating a notion of fiscal citizenship, the record is more mixed. As economist E.R.A. Seligman wrote, the future success of progressive taxation in America rested not on economic theories but on social consciousness and feeling of obligation. “[W]e pay taxes not because the state protects us, or because we get any benefits from the state, but simply because the state is a part of us” (113, citing Edwin R.A. Seligman, Essays in Taxation, 9th ed. 1923, at 73). The most stunning (and, to me, persuasive) critique of those who constructed progressive taxation is Mehrotra's own: “In the process of attacking the benefits theory and exalting the ability-to-pay rationale, these influential thinkers severed the theoretical link between state spending and revenue generation” (16). Their focus on equal sacrifice rather than redistribution leaves undecided questions about the size and activism of the state—of makers and takers—to be resolved in our time.

How could the progressive economists sell their ideas of equal sacrifice, competent administration, and professionalism over time without promises of corresponding benefit? A contemporary competitor to progressive income taxation had considerable support. Autodidact Henry George's single tax had millions of believers and was based on socializing only land rent. Single tax colonies were formed and the game of Monopoly (then called the Landlord's Game) was developed to teach Georgian principles. The benefits of the single tax described in George's Progress and Poverty included parks, auditoria, and natatoria.

In some ways, circumstances intervened to provide a benefit connection. Mehrotra writes about World War I's Creel Committee, “Four Minute Men help Pershing take the flag to the front by taking your income tax to the Collector of Internal Revenue” (323). Later World War II's government income tax publicity efforts often linked dollars paid in tax to bullets, or other weaponry.

After the victory in World War I, a variety of groups from labor to chambers of commerce, to religious organizations imagined social reconstruction: the benefit coming from victory. For example, Richard Ely, who had retreated from outright support for the single tax, wrote, in his own contribution to a symposium volume on social reconstruction in 1920, of the evils of a “wide separation between the class of land owners and the class of tenants. This particularly applies to our South, where the tenants are often negroes.” He recommended “progressive taxation [of land] to work toward a maximum of one thousand acres of first-class land in the United States.” He also supported a “wide distribution of the increment of land values and a sharing of them both by individuals and society collectively.” (Richard T. Ely, “An American Land Policy,” in America and the New Era: A Symposium of Social Reconstruction [1920] at 135–39.)

Almost none of this excited planning came to be. As historian Donald Meyer has written, “Out of the enthusiasm here emerged Warren Harding” (The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919–1941 [1988], 7). Although the progressive income tax has remained as a foundation for American governments throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Americans seem less convinced of the state's knowledge and competence, and less possessed of a feeling of solidarity or fiscal citizenship. Notions about the benefits of taxation are common beliefs for those (of a certain age) paying for Social Security and Medicare: a notion of paid-for entitlement based on myth. To address the problems of the fiscal state going forward, citizens and experts alike will benefit from this nuanced, thoughtful, and well-written narrative.