Abstract
Julian E. Zelizer, Governing America: The Revival of Political History, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2012; ix + 416 pp.; US$35.00/£24.95 hbk; ISBN 9780691150734.
This important work by Julian Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, is a collection of articles and essays he has published since 1997. In the introduction, Zelizer argues that the study of political history has experienced a renaissance in recent times, and the pieces contained in this volume clearly demonstrate that he has been at the vanguard of this renaissance.
Zelizer engages with a broad range of topics in order to make his case about the current good health of US political history. He covers domestic politics, including taxation, social security, health, campaign finance, as well as the influence of foreign affairs in domestic political life – there are essays on troop withdrawals from Vietnam and the politics of detente in the 1970s – to do so. The variety of journals in which he has published also gives a flavour of the range of his study: the Journal of Policy History; the Journal of Health, Politics, and Law; and Diplomatic History, to name but three. It is, therefore, extremely useful to have these essays in one place.
This breadth of coverage might, however, also be considered as something of a weakness. While Zelizer does an excellent job of bringing the essays together in a brief introduction on the recent fortunes of scholarship on political history, and the first section, ‘Thinking about the Field’, follows on neatly from this, later parts cover some slightly more arcane topics, the details of which may be of more interest to scholars with specific interests. Some readers may therefore not engage with the book as a whole, even if they follow some of its main arguments. The book would also have benefited from a conclusion to re-emphasize the themes brought out in the introduction.
Moreover, the collection could have been better edited. There is some considerable repetition because essays have been reproduced wholesale (see, for example, passages in separate chapters on pages 333 and 336 that are virtually identical. There are other similar examples). Moreover, because some of the pieces deal with what were current events when they were written, they now feel dated. In an article originally published in 2001, for example, when discussing President Clinton’s approach to Medicare, Zelizer asserts that ‘Clinton’s plan … is also Al Gore’s plan’ (186). Finally, different essays have a different referencing style, depending on where they were originally published.
The individual essays are, however, brilliant and fascinating. The depth of Professor Zelizer’s research on such a broad range of topics, and the clarity of his writing make the book a pleasure to read. The author is always provocative and speaks to central concerns of the discipline, such as the perennial debates over the balance of power between the branches of government and the recent polarization of US politics. Zelizer’s assertions and conclusions are also bound to provoke and stimulate. For instance, in an essay from 2010 reproduced in the first part of this collection, he makes a compelling case that liberalism is ‘the elephant in the room’ when it comes to discussions of US conservatism because most scholarship refuses to acknowledge ‘how conservatism unfolded in a dialectical fashion with liberalism rather than as a replacement of liberalism’ (87–8). He uses President Reagan’s transition from hawk to dove on nuclear issues over the course of this presidency as one illustration of this. Moreover, in later essays he complements such ideas with discussions of conservatives embracing the extension of presidential power, despite their traditional suspicion of ‘big government’ and attempts by members of Congress to assert their own authority over the executive branch.
Professor Zelizer also agitates for other scholars to develop new lines of enquiry in their work. In one particularly fascinating essay, he argues that political historians have largely ignored the growing importance of scandals in US politics since the 1970s, and that, even though scandal has always been a feature of political life in the United States of America, changing institutional structures and the development of a mass media have allowed it to be utilized for party political purposes much more effectively in recent times (232–58). Elsewhere, the author’s focus on the domestic politics of foreign policy shows that his work intersects nicely with a growing numbers of scholars of international and diplomatic history who emphasize the interface between domestic politics and foreign affairs in their own writings.
Overall, therefore, this book will be of enormous benefit to those attempting to understand political history in the USA, as well as its links to other sub-disciplines. By bringing together his writing on a diverse range of topics, Professor Zelizer demonstrates the ambition of his work, as well as its contribution. While Governing America doesn’t work perfectly as a collection, the strengths of the individual chapters make it a very valuable addition to the field.