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Tocqueville versus Weber

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2010

Extract

Ajay Mehrotra has afforded us an opportunity to better appreciate and understand the development of state capacity in modern U.S. history. With detailed research findings and a well-organized narrative, he focuses on the elaboration of revenue generation and management systems appropriate and adequate to the growing responsibilities and commitments of the national government in the early twentieth century. It is the burden of Mehrotra's argument that “bureaucratic professionals” were as important a part of the “fiscal revolution” in modern U.S. politics as were changing governmental structures and evolving events and contingencies. Using World War I as his case study, Mehrotra seeks to refine and extend the narrative of organizational change and the rise of the modern state in the United States.

Type
Forum: Comment
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2010

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References

1. See Wright, Gavin, “The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879–1940,” American Economic Review 80 (September 1990), 651–68Google Scholar; Lebergott, Stanley, Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record Since 1800 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964)Google Scholar; and Engerman, Stanley L. and Gallman, Robert E., eds., Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. See Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), chap. 2Google Scholar.

3. See Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Henderson, A. M. and Parsons, T. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 115Google Scholar.