Between Continuity and Contingency

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Between Continuity and Contingency
• Samuel Zipp (bio)

Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams, eds., Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. viii + 396 pp. Contributors and index. $38.00. Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern. New York: Verso, 2021. 378 pp. Notes and index. $19.99.

What are historians for? This is the question I sensed lurking just beneath the surface of Shaped by the State. What might first appear as a rather by-the-numbers undertaking, a standard attempt to tote up the accomplishments and agendas of political history, hints here and there at something else altogether. The editors—and now and then the contributors—appear concerned that historians of twentieth-century U.S. politics are missing something much more profound about the country and its history, some set of underlying or persistent dynamics that have so far eluded work that has been mostly about tracking the rise and fall of governing regimes. This worry leads them toward a series of questions about historical thinking, questions that sometimes hover just in view, and other times move imperceptibly in the murky depths. Ultimately, Shaped by the State allows us to see how some older, somewhat neglected questions about the balance between contingency and continuity in historical writing are with us again, opening up a Pandora’s box of dilemmas last sighted a generation or so ago, when the paradigms that political history displaced—the cultural turn and the postmodern—still stalked the land.

In introducing the volume, Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason Williams suggest that the overall success of political history over the last two decades or so has left the field in disarray. Having made itself into the dominant tendency in the profession, political history finds itself somehow without fitting tools to account for its subject. The problem, they argue, is a fundamental failure to develop the proper understanding of “politics and historical time” (p. 4). Historians of U.S. politics, by this account, return again and again to a predictable set of stories and periodizing conventions, all of which are shaped by the concept of “crisis.” They focus on “why seemingly stable political orders crack up, and how American politics gets reconstructed in the aftermath of those [End Page 391] crack-ups” (p. 4). Stuck rerunning “established paradigms,” particularly the “rise and fall of the New Deal order” and the consolidation of modern conservatism out of the conflicts of the 1960s and 70s, they have obscured more profound “continuities” and “deeper forms of consensus” (p. 6).

“Continuity” emerges as the keyword for this volume. This is despite the title, which might make one think of attempts to “bring the state back in” or to register fuller accounts of the relations between social movements and the state—both markers of political history’s rise to dominance in U.S. history departments in the years since the turn of the millennium. The title is ostensibly meant to convey affinity with work by historians of political development who have argued for the longstanding (and thus “continuous”) importance of state power in a supposedly decentralized nation. But the editors—and some of the contributors—seem most concerned to show that there are overarching structural phenomena that shape the state, as it were. The real energy in the introduction goes toward arguing that forces like global capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and sexuality, American exceptionalism, U.S. military and imperial power, legal or property regimes, metropolitan, urban, and rural spatial divisions, the carceral state, migration, consumption, and any number of other “social, cultural, spatial, and economic factors” map uneasily on conventional stories of political crisis.

The editors admire what they call “unofficial political historians” (p. 7). Books by Margot Canaday, N.D.B. Connolly, and Mae Ngai show us “how the American state and its regnant ideologies and parties have been structured by normative values and assumptions,” and “have in turn embedded… those same deeply rooted values through governance” (p. 7).¹ With their investigations of sexuality and the state, race and property markets, and immigration and citizenship, these works avoid the usual “red...