Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were convinced that their meeting represented the last great chance to save the Union from dismemberment.See, for example, the following observations by George Washington, Elbridge Gerry, and Edmund Randolph, respectively:That something is necessary, none will deny; for the situation of the general government, if it can be called a government, is shaken to its foundation, and liable to be overturned by every blast. In a word, it is at an end; and, unless a remedy is soon applied, anarchy and confusion, will inevitably ensue. (Letter of George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, May 30, 1787, repr. in Max Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, rev. ed., 4 vols. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937] 3:31)The object of this Meeting is very important in my Mind unless a System of Government is adopted by Compact, Force I expect will plant the Standard: for such an anarchy as now exists cannot last long. (Letter of Elbridge Gerry to James Monroe, June 11, 1787, ibid., 45)Are we not on the eve of war, which is only prevented by the hopes from this convention. (Opening remarks of Edmund Randolph as recorded by James McHenry of Maryland, May 29, 1787, ibid., 1:26. By the same token, they recognized that the constitution they were to draft would determine the fate of the states composing the Union. In a letter to Edmund Randolph in advance of the Convention, James Madison highlighted the dichotomous nature of the task confronting the delegates intent on strengthening the national government without eliminating the states as political entities.

No administrative agency figures more prominently in American political development than the Post Office Department (POD). In peacetime (and frequently enough in wartime), the Post Office has employed far more Americans than any other agency of state. Indeed, at several junctures in American history, the department employed more Americans than any other organization, public or private. As Richard John's landmark analysis in Spreading the News shows, the patronage system and the very integrity of the nineteenth-century party system would have been inconceivable without the size and expansive reach of the Post Office. Nor would nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political life so fueled by the widespread distribution and consumption of newspapers, petitions, and pamphlets have been imaginable in the absence of the national postal network. So too, the deepest challenges of political reform at the turn of the century eliminating patronage, reducing administrative corruption, and challenging monopolies in telegraph and railroads all centrally involved the POD. Over two centuries, the Post Office has “spread the news”; operated banks; built roads; experimented in air transport; shuffled military supplies; waged campaigns against pornography, consumer fraud, and sedition; and managed a national telegraph system during world war.1. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

In the decade following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a spate of significant advancements in civil rights provided new hope and opportunity for African Americans. On December 5, 1946, in an unprecedented move, President Harry Truman created a civil rights committee “to study and report on the problem of federally secured civil rights, with a view to making recommendations to Congress.” In little less than a year, the committee drafted and submitted a report more sweeping than Truman had likely expected. Entitled To Secure These Rights, the report called for no less than an outright “elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life.” To achieve this goal, the committee stressed that the federal government would have to assume much greater responsibility in the protection of civil rights. It recommended both an ever more vigilant Justice Department and the enactment of comprehensive national legislation. On February 2, 1948, the president called on the Congress to endorse his ten-point civil rights program in order to “correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy.”Truman's 1947 State of the Union address, January 6, 1947, Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1947 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1962), 9; The President's Committee on Civil Rights, (PCCR) To Secure These Rights (New York: Simon and Schuster, October 26, 1947), 166; Truman's Special Message to the Congress on Civil Rights, February 2, 1948, Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1948 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1964), 126. On July 26, 1948, acting alone, Truman issued two executive orders; one designed to end racial discrimination in federal employment, the other barring segregation in the armed forces.

It is no longer newsworthy to say that the American Founding Fathers were implicated deeply in the institution of slavery as slaveowners, slave traders, or just silent collaborators.1. For modern historiography, the foundational text is Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), which answers Dr. Samuel Johnson's famous question: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?” See also Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Norton, 1968). For forceful recent statements, Paul Finkelman, “Jefferson and Slavery: ÔTreason Against the Hopes of the World',” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 181–221; Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For forceful older statements, Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia, 2d ed. (1964; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Richard R. Beeman, The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1788–1801 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972). Sympathy endures, especially for Jefferson, as in the dismissal of Finkelman's essay as “the prosecution's case” in Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 259 n.74. The fact that this could have seemed to be news in the 1970s and 1980s is, of course, a testament to the power of racism in American society for three centuries. The fact that Thomas Jefferson's DNA test could have shock value in the late-1990s may be even worse.2. See, e.g., the cover story, Barbra Murray, et al., “Jefferson's Secret Life,” with accompanying articles including Lynn Rosellini, “Cutting the Great Man Down to Size,” U.S. News and World Report, Nov. 9, 1998. Now that the intellectual task of reducing the iconic status of slaveholding “fathers” has been largely accomplished, however, serious questions remain about the meaning of slavery at the founding. There is more to it than the hypocrisy of whites or even the oppression of blacks. Social historians have described both the sufferings and the heroic self-defense strategies of Africans and African Americans in this period, both slave and free, in detail.3. The historiography of slavery has moved back from the previously dominant antebellum era. For earlier works, esp. Peter H. Wood Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983). More recently, Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: the End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: the Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Scholars no longer can pretend that “Americans,” much less “plebeian” Americans, were all white at the outbreak of the Revolution, whether they were assembled in the Boston streets or South Carolina lowcountry.4. For a recent argument to this effect, Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). Yet a substantive consideration of the meaning of these facts for the nation-state that was built in the Revolution is still missing. What was the impact of slavery on the political institutions whose creation was the triumph of the “fathers” of the founding generation? Aspects of the answer are well known: the removal of Jefferson's pathetic slavery clause (blaming Britain for American slavery) from the Declaration of Independence, the compromises that placed the three-fifths clause into the Constitution along with the fugitive slave and slave trade abolition clauses, the checkered career of the Northwest Ordinance as a ban on slavery in the territories, and the Haitian Revolution's reality-check on the libertarian enthusiasms of white Southerners.5. On these issues, in the order cited in the text, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997); Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Vintage, 1996); Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 (1986): 343–70, and Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: the Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (1989): 21–51; Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), and Michael Zuckerman, “The Power of Blackness: Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution in St. Domingue,” in Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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.

In 1933, the U.S. Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). A cornerstone of the New Deal, the AAA offered government payment to farmers who cut production of basic crops such as wheat, cotton, and corn. Originally designed to lift agriculture out of the depths of the Great Depression, government farm programs evolved over the next several decades into a complex policy regime of price supports, acreage controls, and government loans.

Many perceive the clash between those advocating rational choice theory and their critics to be the dominant cleavage in contemporary political science. At least as fundamental, if much less widely discussed, is the divide over the role of historical analysis (or the investigation of temporal processes). Most social scientists take a “snapshot” view of political life. How does the distribution of public opinion affect policy outcomes? How do individual social characteristics influence propensities to vote? How do electoral rules affect the structure of party systems? Disputes among competing theories center on which factors (“variables”) in the current environment generate important political outcomes. Variable-centered analy- ses are based, however, on some questionable assump- tions about how the social world works.For useful discussions see Andrew Abbott, “Transcending General Linear Reality,” Sociological Theory 6 (1988): 169–86; John C. Harsanyi, “Explanation and Comparative Dynamics in the Social Sciences,” Behavioral Science 5 (1960): 136–45; and Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). The significance of such variables is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. There is often a strong case to be made for shifting from snapshots to moving pictures. Placing politics in time systematically situating particular moments (including the present) in a temporal sequence of events and processes can greatly enrich our understanding of complex social dynamics.

In 1908, the Supreme Court struck down Section 10 of the Erdman Act of 1898 in the notorious case of Adair v. United States.1 Section 10 made it a misdemeanor for employers in the railroad industry to blacklist members of railroad unions or to require employees to sign “yellow-dog” contracts, that is, contracts promising that the employee would not join a labor union. The Court ruled that Section 10 was unconstitutional because it interfered with the “liberty of contract” allegedly protected by the United States Constitution.

Political science is notoriously divided into subfields. In parallel, most journals are restricted to one or another part of the discipline and most faculty teach only within their specializations and have little time to read outside of it. We then tend to lose sight of the fact that all of us are studying politics of one form or another and so perspectives that span the divisions are particularly valuable.

In 1978, organized labor formally abandoned its longstanding commitment to public-sector solutions to achieve universal health care. Over the following fifteen years, it embraced private-sector solutions premised on a government mandate that would require employers to pay a portion of their employees health insurance premiums. In many respects, this about-face on the part of organized labor is neither remarkable nor puzzling. After all, labor's prior commitment to national health insurance1. The term national health insurance has many meanings. As used here, it refers to health-care reform proposals modeled on the Canadian experience in which the government replaces private insurance with its own public insurance system, thus eliminating the commercial health insurers. Commonly referred to as “single-payer” plans today, proposals for national health insurance can vary enormously on important details like financing, budgeting, taxation, and the role of individual states. had coexisted with its deep and abiding attachment to the private welfare state of job-based benefits dating back to the 1940s.2. Donna Allen, Fringe Benefits: Wages or Social Obligation? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964); Joseph W. Garbarino, Health Plans and Collective Bargaining (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Raymond Munts, Bargaining for Health: Labor Unions, Health Insurance, and Medical Care (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); Beth Stevens, “Labor Unions, Employee Benefits, and the Privatization of the American Welfare State,” Journal of Policy History 2 (1990): 233–60; and David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, “Hospitals, Insurance, and the American Labor Movement: The Case of New York in the Postwar Decades,” Journal of Policy History 9 (1997): 74–95. American labor unionists have tended to be strident pragmatists compared to their European counterparts, who have been more consistently animated by a larger social democratic vision. Furthermore, American unions have a long history of deferring to the Democratic party.3. Indeed, some analysts characterize labor's relationship with the Democratic party as a “barren marriage” or “abusive relationship.” Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), 52; and Joel Rogers, “The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: Labor and Independent Politics,” in Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of America, ed. Steven Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman (Boston: Mariner, 1997), 255. Arguably, labor's support for national health insurance had been primarily rhetorical since the early 1950s, when the industrial unions began to rely on collective bargaining to achieve health-care security for their members. Once President Jimmy Carter and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) retreated from national health insurance in the face of the new anti-government, dereg- ulatory, deficit-conscious environment that emerged in the mid-to-late 1970s, one may conclude that labor “naturally” abandoned ship as well.

Paul Pierson's “Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes” is a fitting centerpiece for this symposium. The article takes up themes that have occupied students of comparative politics for some time now and moves the debate decisively forward.For earlier efforts to assess the role of sequencing and timing in politics, see for example, Harsanyi's discussion of “static” and “dynamic” explanation (J. Harsanyi, “Explanation and Comparative Dynamics in Social Science,” Behavioral Science 5 (1960): 136–45); also Verba's early attempts within the context of modernization theory to specify more precisely a “sequential model” that linked outcomes within particular countries to the sequence in which they encountered a set of putatively common challenges (Sidney Verba, “Sequences and Development,” in Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971], 283–316). Tilly has dealt with related issues of temporality and ordering; see Charles Tilly, “Future History,” Theory and Society 17 (1988): 703–12; Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984); and Tilly, “The Time of States,” Social Research 61 (1994): 269–95. Schmitter and Santiso have also addressed these topics (Philippe C. Schmitter and Javier Santiso, “Three Temporal Dimensions to the Consolidation of Democracy,” International Political Science Review 19 (1998): 69–92). And of course, Pierson's agenda picks up on themes long advocated by the editors of this journal to take temporality seriously (Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order: Notes for a ‘New' Institutionalism,” in The Dynamics of American Politics, eds. Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994). Pierson's overall message is that social phenomena are often better captured in “moving pictures” that situate a given outcome within a broader temporal framework than in “snapshots” based on cross-sectional data. He constructs a convincing case for this proposition and along the way he also makes progress in rendering the ubiquitous but vague concept of path dependence more useful.For other treatments of this issue see Stephen D. Krasner, “Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective,” Comparative Political Studies 21 (1988): 66–94; Timur Kuran, “The Tenacious Past: Theories of Personal and Collective Conservatism,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 10 (1988): 143–71; Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and James Mahoney, “Uses of Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,” unpubl. ms., Brown University, 1999.

Paul Pierson has undertaken an important theoretical venture for comparative politics, and for social science more broadly. Recognizing the historical turn in the social sciences, and taken with the theoretical power of path dependence, Pierson hopes to generate “portable” mid-range theoretical constructs to align history and social science more closely. Were we to have an armament of arguable hypotheses about timing, sequence, and “temporal processes” our understanding of politics and political development would be much advanced. This is a tempting prospect.

Taken as a group, the three commentaries reveal many of the difficult challenges, as well as opportunities, that confront social scientists exploring issues of temporality. Although the three authors take quite different stances, each highlights important issues for further work sensitive to historical process. Here I begin with Amy Bridges's more critical commentary before turning to the responses of Jervis and Thelen.