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Winner of the James P. Hanlan Book Award Winner of the J. David
Greenstone Book Prize Winner of the S. M. Lipset Best Book Award
This pioneering work of political history recovers the central and
largely forgotten role that petitioning played in the formative
years of North American democracy. Known as the age of democracy,
the nineteenth century witnessed the extension of the franchise and
the rise of party politics. As Daniel Carpenter shows, however,
democracy in America emerged not merely through elections and
parties, but through the transformation of an ancient political
tool: the petition. A statement of grievance accompanied by a list
of signatures, the petition afforded women and men excluded from
formal politics the chance to make their voices heard and to
reshape the landscape of political possibility. Democracy by
Petition traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across
the North American continent. Indigenous tribes in Canada, free
Blacks from Boston to the British West Indies, Irish canal workers
in Indiana, and Hispanic settlers in territorial New Mexico all
used petitions to make claims on those in power. Petitions
facilitated the extension of suffrage, the decline of feudal land
tenure, and advances in liberty for women, African Americans, and
Indigenous peoples. Even where petitioners failed in their
immediate aims, their campaigns advanced democracy by setting
agendas, recruiting people into political causes, and fostering
aspirations of equality. Far more than periodic elections,
petitions provided an everyday current of communication between
officeholders and the people. The coming of democracy in America
owes much to the unprecedented energy with which the petition was
employed in the antebellum period. By uncovering this neglected yet
vital strand of nineteenth-century life, Democracy by Petition will
forever change how we understand our political history.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the most powerful
regulatory agency in the world. How did the FDA become so
influential? And how exactly does it wield its extraordinary power?
"Reputation and Power" traces the history of FDA regulation of
pharmaceuticals, revealing how the agency's organizational
reputation has been the primary source of its power, yet also one
of its ultimate constraints.
Daniel Carpenter describes how the FDA cultivated a reputation
for competence and vigilance throughout the last century, and how
this organizational image has enabled the agency to regulate an
industry as powerful as American pharmaceuticals while resisting
efforts to curb its own authority. Carpenter explains how the FDA's
reputation and power have played out among committees in Congress,
and with drug companies, advocacy groups, the media, research
hospitals and universities, and governments in Europe and India. He
shows how FDA regulatory power has influenced the way that
business, medicine, and science are conducted in the United States
and worldwide. Along the way, Carpenter offers new insights into
the therapeutic revolution of the 1940s and 1950s; the 1980s AIDS
crisis; the advent of oral contraceptives and cancer chemotherapy;
the rise of antiregulatory conservatism; and the FDA's waning
influence in drug regulation today.
"Reputation and Power" demonstrates how reputation shapes the
power and behavior of government agencies, and sheds new light on
how that power is used and contested.
Barack Obama's galvanizing victory in 2008, coming amid the
greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, opened the door to major
reforms. But the president quickly faced skepticism from supporters
and fierce opposition from Republicans, who scored sweeping wins in
the 2010 midterm election. Here, noted political scientist Theda
Skocpol surveys the political landscape and explores its most
consequential questions: What happened to Obama's "new New Deal"?
Why have his achievements enraged opponents more than they have
satisfied supporters? How has the Tea Party's ascendance reshaped
American politics? Skocpol's compelling account rises above
conventional wisdom and overwrought rhetoric. The Obama
administration's response to the recession produced bold
initiatives-health care reform, changes in college loans, financial
regulation-that promise security and opportunity. But these reforms
are complex and will take years to implement. Potential
beneficiaries do not readily understand them, yet the reforms alarm
powerful interests and political enemies, creating the volatile mix
of confusion and fear from which Tea Party forces erupted. Skocpol
dissects the popular and elite components of the Tea Party reaction
that has boosted the Republican Party while pushing it far to the
right at a critical juncture for U.S. politics and governance.
Skocpol's analysis is accompanied by contributions from two fellow
scholars and a former congressman. At this moment of economic
uncertainty and extreme polarization, as voters prepare to render
another verdict on Obama's historic presidency, Skocpol and her
respondents help us to understand its triumphs and setbacks and see
where we might be headed next.
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The Abolitionist Imagination (Hardcover)
Andrew Delbanco; Foreword by Daniel Carpenter; Contributions by John Stauffer, Manisha Sinha, Wilfred M McClay
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R915
Discovery Miles 9 150
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The abolitionists of the mid-nineteenth century have long been
painted in extremes--vilified as reckless zealots who provoked the
catastrophic bloodletting of the Civil War, or praised as daring
and courageous reformers who hastened the end of slavery. But
Andrew Delbanco sees abolitionists in a different light, as the
embodiment of a driving force in American history: the recurrent
impulse of an adamant minority to rid the world of outrageous evil.
Delbanco imparts to the reader a sense of what it meant to be a
thoughtful citizen in nineteenth-century America, appalled by
slavery yet aware of the fragility of the republic and the high
cost of radical action. In this light, we can better understand why
the fiery vision of the "abolitionist imagination" alarmed such
contemporary witnesses as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne
even as they sympathized with the cause. The story of the
abolitionists thus becomes both a stirring tale of moral fervor and
a cautionary tale of ideological certitude. And it raises the
question of when the demand for purifying action is cogent and
honorable, and when it is fanatic and irresponsible. Delbanco's
work is placed in conversation with responses from literary
scholars and historians. These provocative essays bring the past
into urgent dialogue with the present, dissecting the power and
legacies of a determined movement to bring America's reality into
conformity with American ideals.
""The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy" is a major work sure to
influence future understandings of progressivism, state-building,
and American political development. Carpenter delves into the
highly variable world of bureaucratic entrepreneurship and
innovation in organization to explain the emergence of scattered
pockets of administrative autonomy within the executive branch of
American government. His carefully crafted analysis of the
conditions under which administrators have gained control over the
political authorities that ostensibly control them presents a
formidable challenge to the assumptions of political scientists,
and it should prompt some equally careful rethinking of the
operations of American democracy more generally."--Stephen
Skowronek, Yale University
"Although we tend to discuss the strength, or weakness, of state
autonomy as though it were the same for every agency, the fact of
the matter is that autonomy varies considerably from agency to
agency. In this excellent book, Daniel Carpenter is among the first
to make this observation and explore its implications."--Graham K.
Wilson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Whether we regard the modern state as fair as Athena, stepping
fully formed from the brow of Zeus, or as foul as Frankenstein,
sutured on a scientist's table, there had to be a time of
quickening when the limbs began to twitch and the brain began to
spark. In a splendid reinterpretation of the classic period of
American state formation, Dan Carpenter demonstrates that a
self-conscious mentality emerged because career bureaucratic
officials created overlapping networks between their agencies and
forged public reputations that secured support from thecitizenry.
Thus freed them from the influence of political parties, these
officials then turned on the very politicians who had created
them."--Richard Bensel, Cornell University
When regulations (or lack thereof) seem to detract from the common
good, critics often point to regulatory capture as a culprit. In
some academic and policy circles it seems to have assumed the
status of an immutable law. Yet for all the ink spilled describing
and decrying capture, the concept remains difficult to nail down in
practice. Is capture truly as powerful and unpreventable as the
informed consensus seems to suggest? This edited volume brings
together seventeen scholars from across the social sciences to
address this question. Their work shows that capture is often
misdiagnosed and may in fact be preventable and manageable.
Focusing on the goal of prevention, the volume advances a more
rigorous and empirical standard for diagnosing and measuring
capture, paving the way for new lines of academic inquiry and more
precise and nuanced reform.
When regulations (or lack thereof) seem to detract from the common
good, critics often point to regulatory capture as a culprit. In
some academic and policy circles it seems to have assumed the
status of an immutable law. Yet for all the ink spilled describing
and decrying capture, the concept remains difficult to nail down in
practice. Is capture truly as powerful and unpreventable as the
informed consensus seems to suggest? This edited volume brings
together seventeen scholars from across the social sciences to
address this question. Their work shows that capture is often
misdiagnosed and may in fact be preventable and manageable.
Focusing on the goal of prevention, the volume advances a more
rigorous and empirical standard for diagnosing and measuring
capture, paving the way for new lines of academic inquiry and more
precise and nuanced reform.
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