The State and Practice of American Political History at the Millennium: The Nineteenth Century as a Test Case

Abstract

These are very hard times for students of American political history. Not so long ago they were a peppy and optimistic bunch and believed that they had every reason to be. For those scholars who focused their attention on nineteenth-century politics in particular, the avalanche of revisionist work from the quantitatively and behaviorally oriented “new” political historians, beginning in the late 1950s, as well as the constant outpouring of more traditional work in the genre, had expanded the reach, and deepened the understanding, of American political life after 1800. Much the same was true for politics in other chronological eras as well. The energy and example displayed by the generation of political historians active into the 1980s underscored their major, even dominant role in the study of American history. And there were few signs that anything would check the impressive growth and increasing sophistication of their contributions to historical knowledge.

Current Historiographic Trends in the Study of the Twentieth-Century Congress

“…But it is also, I believe, a reasonable assessment of a lamentable general condition, as well as one about the study of Congress in the twentieth century specifically. I have offered arguments, here and elsewhere, for a return by historians to the study of ordinary politics, limits, warts and all (Silbey 1999). The conclusion to those arguments seems clear and worth reemphasizing-that is, that any study of America's past that ignores the formal political dimension, Congress and the rest, will be incomplete, probably misleading, and certainly insufficient to explain either individual moments or the whole range of America's past dynamics.…”

“…Such work also influenced other areas of politics: for one, it helped reinvigorate scholarly interest in political parties. But such rigorously empirical and theoretical studies have become increasingly invisible, even more so than political history more generally, reflecting the profession's changing values, ebbing commitments, and the consequent failed ambitions of political historians (Leuchtenburg 1986;Silbey 1999).…”

“…6 From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s there was a series of scholarly meetings and conferences to try to encourage further congressional research and to bring together what we knew in a more systematic way, particularly by developing a multiauthored history of Congress. For a variety of reasons, the latter hope did not fully mature, but out of the efforts to do so emerged two projects: The Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System (Silbey 1994) and The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress (Bacon et al 1995).…”

Une histoire pragmatique du politique

“…Samuel Moyn regrette le manque relatif de réception des travaux de Pierre Rosanvallon aux États-Unis, du moins en comparaison avec ceux de François Furet, par exemple, en notant qu'une « théorie générale de la démocratie sur la base d'une histoire nationale... intéresse aujourd'hui de moins en moins de monde 4 ». Aux États-Unis, Joel Silbey n'est pas le seul à qualifier de « temps difficiles » « l'état et la pratique » de l'histoire politique « à l'aube du millénaire » : « Tous les historiens politiques, quels que soient leur sujet, leur approche ou leur axe chronologique, sont aujourd'hui confrontés à une grave crise épistémologique en raison du flot de critiques qu'ils ont reçues, symptômes du manque croissant d'acceptation de leurs pairs pour le travail qu'ils accomplissent 5 . » Ou comme le constate Yves Déloye : « L'écriture de l'histoire du politique… se situe d'emblée au coeur d'une série de controverses 6 .…”

Diplomatic History and Policy History: Finding Common Ground

“…Those tradition-bound subjects seemed somehow tainted in the eyes of social and cultural historians committed to recapturing the lived experiences of ordinary folklittle more than a "celebratory and exclusionary" exercise, in Joel Silbey's apt description. 16 The parallels with diplomatic history's precipitous fall from professional grace and fashion could hardly be closer. In each case, a field that traditionally pivoted on the exploration of elites and the state had come under attack, in large measure because of the core subjects that had long formed its raison d'être.…”