In 1997, Ira Katznelson contributed to the ongoing discussion among
social scientists and historians about how to analyze class formation and the
development of the American state. He was particularly interested in tying this
research to the history of liberalism in an effort to both historicize the
generalizations of Louis Hartz and address the question of American
exceptionalism. Evaluating the body of research, Katznelson argued that authors
had too frequently abstracted the state from its context and then used it to
explain the very phenomena that helped define the state's character in the
first place. In part to imbed the state more concretely in its environment, he
suggested “a shift in angle of vision away from the state as such to the
character of the rules and institutions that govern the transactions between the
state and civil society.” This shift would also contribute to the study of
America's prevailing liberalism, which has shaped the environment of the
working class and the state, even while its own particular character has been
the subject of some of the most profound divisions in American public life.
Using J. David Greenstone's work, Katznelson defined liberalism as a
“boundary condition,” that is, “‘a set of relatively
permanent features of a particular context that affect causal relationships
within it' even as it remains subject to dispute.” In times of
crisis, conflicts over liberalism's “grammar of rules,” or
it's “bundle of institutions and norms,” spill across the line
between state and civil society, because they involve redefining the relation
between the two.Ira Katznelson,
“Working-Class Formation and American Exceptionalism, Yet Again,” in
American Exceptionalism? US Working-Class Formation in an International
Context, ed. Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1997), 36–55, quotations on 40 and 42.
