Introduction: The Absence of Education from Narratives of American Statebuilding

Our formative understandings of the nature and trajectory of American political development are rooted in longstanding conventions concerning American exceptionalism. Beginning in the nation's infancy, foreign political observers and thinkers as eminent as Alexis de Tocqueville and Georg Friedrich Hegel fixed on the United States as an oddly “stateless” entity, as measured against the baseline of the purported continental European norm. More recently, however, Stephen Skowronek has influentially argued that this characterization of the United States as stateless was not quite right, even at the time that Tocqueville and Hegel were writing. The United States, Skowronek contended, has long been possessed of a “state.” Only its form was distinctive. The American state prior to the crucial statebuilding era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was best characterized as a “state of courts and parties,” a unique institutional order, that set the United States apart from the European model.

Continental European states remained the point of comparison as the process of “building a new American state” began in earnest in late-nineteenth-century America. That baseline, though, proved to be a moving target, as European states around the same time, under the influence of leaders such as Germany's Prince Otto von Bismarck and Great Britain's Benjamin Disraeli, responded to many of the same political-economic transformations and social pressures that were affecting the United States and began to assume new dimensions as modern social welfare states.