On 1 June 1779, Thomas Jefferson became the second governor of the state of Virginia. Shortly thereafter, he was elected to the Board of Visitors of the College of William and Mary where he pursued a series of educational innovations that he had unsuccessfully promoted earlier while engaged in his mammoth revision of the laws of Viriginia. The goal of Jefferson's proposed educational reforms was the creation of an educational system which would be a training ground for republican citizenship. It is therefore of interest that among the innovations he pressed on the College of William and Mary was the establishment of the first chair of law in North America—indeed the first chair anywhere after the Vinerian chair at Oxford. What is of greater interest, however, is that the chair that Jefferson pioneered was not a chair of law, as such, but a chair of “Law and Police.”

The “tions” came to the United States in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: industrialization, urbanization, immigration, centralization, and bureaucratization. As befits such an impersonal suffix, these developments have been analyzed as parts of a systematic reorganization of society. Processes, not persons, have figured as the sources of motivation in the story of America's transformation from a rural society of loosely connected communities to an industrial nation integrated by corporations, communications, and the regulations of a government trying to catch up with the pace of change.

Joyce Appleby's very constructive commentary rightly locates my article philosophically and historiographically amid the intellectual eddies of the postindustrialist sensibility. At the same time she is sensitive, I think, to my ambition to tell more than a relativist's tale. If that ambition has led me to splash my colors too indiscriminately across Jefferson's broad canvas, however, Appleby is right to chide me for it. Thus, for example, while I would not accept that energetic government and police are conceptually synonymous, they are certainly related. As Appleby implies, many of Jefferson's political opponents from Hamilton on down were far more enthusiastic in their advocacy of energetic government—once granted control of the agenda—than was Jefferson.

Individualism is a powerful symbol of American life. We treasure individual rights to speak our minds, choose our values, seek our goals, and achieve self-fulfillment. We believe individual self-interest is the foundation of economic growth and prosperity. We treat individual suffrage as the definitive characteristic of democratic government. In a sense, individualism is the lifeblood of an American dream that flows to our children, circulates among immigrants, and courses through the rhetoric of public policy. American historians record its genealogy and sociologists diagnose its effects while business leaders prescribe more of it and politicians praise it. Even critics are obsessed with it. They tell us that individualism has infected the habits of our hearts and forced the closing of our minds.

After the Civil War, a new wave of workers' protest swept the country as trade lunions, third parties, eight-hour leagues, and a host of other reform associations sprang up in many cities and towns. For the three decades following the war, no one organization was hegemonic. Instead, there was a proliferation of associations, often advocating quite different programs of labor reform. Accounts of the more prominent organizations such as the Knights of Labor (KOL,) Populists, and American Federation of Labor (AFL) are well known. These institutions, however, represented only the tip of the iceberg and were surrounded by more obscure associations such as the Workingmen's Union, the Workingmen's Assembly, the Workingmen's Convention, the Union Labor party, and the United Labor party, to name only a few. Several attempts were made to unite these disparate associations into a single front, but the efforts were largely unsuccessful and often had difficulty surviving for more than a year. The Junior Sons of '76, the National Labor Union, and the United Labor party each disbanded as participants failed to agree on a common platform of postwar reform.

In 1884, a committee of dissenting bondholders for the Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway entered a federal district court in Illinois to complain that St. Louis Federal Judge David Brewer had, at the request of the notorious robber baron, Jay Gould, thrown the road into receivership prior to default. Judge Walter Gresham (whom the Populists would try to recruit for their 1892 presidential candidate) listened sympathetically and put the eastern division of the road into a separate receivership. For the time being, a key link, in Gould's national system was broken in two. Soon, however, the courts and bondholders capitulated, and Gould succeeded, at the expense of the sanctity of property and contract, in revolutionizing the corporate doctrine of receiverships to assimilate huge national systems.

The story of American political thought has been told in many different ways. Three genres stand out. The first is written within the larger framework of intellectual history and takes the form of anthology and narrative summary. Among its most prominent features are an eclecticism of sources (from Roger Williams to Walt Whitman to Erich Fromm) and a heavy emphasis on the period from the first New England settlements through the victory of Jeffersonian democracy. A second form is constitutionalist. Charting the major struggles over legal and institutional relationships through time, this perspective gives prominence to landmark court decisions and articulations of major constitutional issues by party and political leaders. As articulated in the late nineteenth century, it examines the major forms of constitutionalist thinking that lie behind these constitutional and institutional struggles. The third genre, I label populist-progressive. Here, the story of American political thought is Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Southwestern Political Science Association annual meeting, March 23–26, 1988, Houston, Texas, and at the American Politics Group meeting in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, January 4–6, 1988.

Rather than studying only what appellate courts do, scholars of law and society have been pointing out that the interpretation of law is an enterprise many engage in—e.g., lawyers, administrative officials, and the lay public, as well as courts. Recent scholarship has broadened the analysis of constitutional law in a way that is not Supreme Court centered. Scholars have focused on constitutionalism as the idea that words written down limit and shape political practice. For example, Michael Kammen's work shows the continuing and repetitive celebrations of the Constitution in American life, celebrations that have taken the federal constitution as “a machine that would go of itself” and as a sacred text, often forgetting how much it has been remade through reinterpretation. This focus on constitutionalism rather than on appellate court decisions leads to a broader understanding of constitutions in a polity, so that scholars analyze rights claims in addition to examining the rights that courts have said people have. This effort emphasizes the meaningful elements of law, since the definition of constitutionalism focuses on what people think they should do, or on what they have a right to do. It leads to scholarship that points out the penetration of legal language, particularly claims of rights, into American culture. With this approach, one reason to analyze elite statements of law is that they state rights in ways that become part of general political consciousness.

Although the political presence of business in the economic development of American cities has been richly documented, there has been much less attention to how and why urban business politics has changed in the course of our history. Indeed, the political circumstances and problems of the early Republic's merchant entrepreneurs in the towns seem remote from those of urban business leaders of postindustrial America, with its giant cities and megacorporations. The challenge remains of identifying forces of continuity and change that have shaped relations between business and city governments in urban economic development.

Recently historians have ventured a multifaceted critique of boss rule, suggesting that the very existence of the political machine has been exaggerated, that machines did not materially affect patterns of political mobilization, had only a limited role in the making of public policy, and (contrary to pluralist theory) did little to improve the welfare of the ethnic working class. For these revisionists the boss was really a bit player in the era when he allegedly held center stage. As Terrence McDonald argued the case in the last installment of this annual, “ethnicity, patronage, and the machine” represent unduly narrow ways of viewing urban political development. According to Jon Teaford and David Thelan, urban political history needs to replace the party boss and his ethnic clientele with interest groups—business, labor, taxpayers, and consumers of municipal services—and their impact on local policies concerning economic development, taxation, and service delivery. In their view, the study of public policy making must take precedence over the allocation of party patronage.