American Political Development

This paper searches for the source of presidential power and finds it in the contributions of a finite number of " magnificent presidencies. " What makes presidents great is not the specific contributions they make when holding office but whether or not their efforts to empower the

Conflicting cultural and religious values pose challenges-challenges that are too often ignored-to efforts to comprehend and to solve tough social problems. Value-conflict challenges call for much more thoughtful attention both by analysts seeking to understand the sources of problems, and by advocates for particular solutions. This contribution to the ARNOVA Policy Brief series draws on a wide range of historical and social research to advance its argument for recognizing value conflicts.

A timely analysis of the power and limits of political parties—and the lessons of the Civil War and the New Deal in the Age of Trump.

American voters have long been familiar with the phenomenon of the presidential frontrunner. In 2008, it was Hillary Clinton. In 1844, it was Martin Van Buren. And in neither election did the prominent Democrat win the party's nomination. Insurgent candidates went on to win the nomination and the presidency, plunging the two-party system into disarray over the years that followed.

In this book, Cedric de Leon analyzes two pivotal crises in the American two-party system: the first resulting in the demise of the Whig party and secession of eleven southern states in 1861, and the present crisis splintering the Democratic and Republican parties and leading to the election of Donald Trump. Recasting these stories through the actions of political parties, de Leon draws unsettling parallels in the political maneuvering that ultimately causes once-dominant political parties to lose the people's consent to rule.

Crisis! takes us beyond the common explanations of social determinants to illuminate how political parties actively shape national stability and breakdown. The secession crisis and the election of Donald Trump suggest that politicians and voters abandon the political establishment not only because people are suffering, but also because the party system itself is unable to absorb an existential challenge to its power. Just as the U.S. Civil War meant the difference between the survival of a slaveholding republic and the birth of liberal democracy, what political elites and civil society organizations do today can mean the difference between fascism and democracy.

This article revisits Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency in the age of Trump, discussing the debates to which it originally responded, its core thesis and empirical evidence, as well as its impact on political science in the last three decades. The article’s second half turns to a recent critique of Tulis’s thesis by Ann C. Pluta, which manifests many of the misunderstandings that have persisted since The Rhetorical Presidency’s original publication. Habits of thought revealed in Pluta’s misunderstandings, I argue, are emblematic of the political culture that is amenable to the simplistic yet politically effective appeals characteristic of rhetorical presidents like Donald Trump. Elements of the broader political-science world that are on display in Pluta’s article are symptomatic of political pathologies sustained and aggravated by the culture of the polity that political scientists inhabit and purport to study—the culture of the rhetorical presidency.

Crippled Justice, the first comprehensive intellectual history of disability policy in the workplace from World War II to the present, explains why American employers and judges, despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, have been so resistant to accommodating the disabled in the workplace. Ruth O'Brien traces the origins of this resistance to the postwar disability policies inspired by physicians and psychoanalysts that were based on the notion that disabled people should accommodate society rather than having society accommodate them.

O'Brien shows how the remnants of postwar cultural values bogged down the rights-oriented policy in the 1970s and how they continue to permeate judicial interpretations of provisions under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In effect, O'Brien argues, these decisions have created a lose/lose situation for the very people the act was meant to protect. Covering developments up to the present, Crippled Justice is an eye-opening story of government officials and influential experts, and how our legislative and judicial institutions have responded to them.

The cases of Snowden and Manning have contributed to the re-opening of the public and academic debate about national security, individual freedom and democracy. This debate began after 9/11 when the war on terror renewed the state-building process that had begun after World War II. Although historians have reconstructed the historical making of the national security state, the essay sheds new light on the debate culminating in the National Security Act by analyzing the writings of the social scientist that first urged upon Americans the perils of a “garrison state”: Harold D. Lasswell. His scientific essays and public speeches recognized the international role of the United States and the related necessities of national security, but suggested adjustments that—in his mind—would avoid the rise of a garrison state. What emerges was the question of the political legitimation of the national security state, a legitimation that Lasswell based upon the consensus of the American middle class.

With some exceptions, efforts to systematically apply a historical-institutionalist framework to the study of federalism have been few and far between. This paper argues, however, that historical institutionalism lends itself particularly well for addressing two important research questions in the field of comparative federalism: the origins of federal systems and their dynamics. It is suggested that a historical-institutionalist framework can significantly contribute to encourage theoretical cross-fertilization within the field of comparative federalism.

Throughout U.S. history, the two major political parties have switched positions many times on a variety of issues, including whether the United States should intervene more or less in foreign affairs. Are these changes simply the product of historical contingency, or are there structural factors at work that can help explain these developments? To improve our understanding of American party ideologies, this paper applies a historical institutional approach to the question of party ideology development, and shows how party control of government institutions influences the evolution of party ideologies. Specifically, this paper finds that changes in party control of the presidency can help explain changes in party ideologies with respect to foreign policy.

Prior to the Civil War, racial exploitation was at the heart of the Anglo-American strategy of political and economic development. Put simply, the Anglo-American state successfully redistributed wealth from Native Americans and African Americans to white males and their families. Native American land was expropriated and sold at low prices or given to Anglo-American settlers fueling the agrarian economies of both the North and South. Chattel slavery deprived African Americans of both the fruits of their labor and their basic human rights. But it also underpinned the rise of cotton production in the South, a major driver of American economic growth in the antebellum period. These developments were not an accidental product of white racism, but the result of a political economy strategy, which created a dual American state: a contract state, premised on the rule of law, that promoted the growth of a prosperous, liberal democratic society of Anglo-Americans, and a predatory
state that financed white liberal society through its ruthless exploitation of Indian lands and African American labor.

Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) and United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936) have long been considered landmark cases on presidential power. Yet despite being decided within 1 year of each other, they appear contradictory. Humphrey’s Executor limits presidential authority, while Curtiss-Wright expands it. This article argues that we can understand these seemingly inconsistent outcomes by examining the constitutional thought of the man who wrote both of them, Justice George Sutherland. Examining Sutherland’s thought throughout his career, we see that his conception of executive power was highly contextual. Based on his understanding of the origins of the Union and the Constitution, he drew a distinction between domestic and foreign policy. This has major implications for his views on executive power and presidential authority, allowing the president much more discretion in foreign affairs, while circumscribing the executive’s control of domestic administration, effectively enshrining the “two presidencies” thesis into constitutional law.

The discipline of political science in the United States evolved in tandem with the development of democratic education and the modern university system. Since the early years of the twentieth century, political science has been an academic discipline housed in universities and colleges, and most political scientists earn their living as university or college teachers. And yet as individual academics or as a discipline, we rarely stand back from our institutional environment and ask hard questions about what is happening with higher education and what this means for the practice of political science. Suzanne Mettler does precisely this in Degrees of Inequality: How Higher Education Politics Sabotaged the American Dream. And so we have invited a range of political science scholars, many with extensive experience as university leaders, to comment on her book and its implications for the future of political science.

What is the use and purpose of American political development (APD) in the era of Black Lives Matter? This article clarifies the APD's role in analyzing the institutions to which the Movement for Black Lives primarily responds – racialized surveillance, policing, and incarceration. In particular, I spotlight what the discipline can offer, given the challenges of the current Trump era. The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency and the concurrent popularization of white populist nationalism in mainstream American politics present unique challenges. I argue that today, as scholars strive to understand how we arrived, or arrived again, in an era of overt white supremacist rhetoric, American political development's focus on historical institutional change offers necessary grounding. In an era of Charlottesville and chants of " Build the wall! " , our collective focus is easily drawn to the spectacular and away from the long-standing and institutional, but black and brown lives also depend on our collective attention to the quieter routines of institutionalized racial violence that developed in post-civil rights era – even, and perhaps especially, in the absence of overt racial demagoguery.

Throughout U.S. history, the two major political parties have switched positions many times on a variety of issues, including how powerful the national government should be and how much it should regulate and guide the American economy. Are these changes simply the product of historical contingency, or are there structural factors at work that can help explain these developments? This paper finds that changes in party control of government can help explain changes in party ideologies with respect to economic policy. Parties in long-term control of unified government tend to change their ideology in ways that call for more economic intervention, while parties in opposition tend to change their ideology in ways that call for less.

Since 1968 a racially-defined conservative populism – what Richard Nixon called the " Silent Majority " – has been a durable part of Republican political identity. Yet across this era the GOP has continued to move away from protecting the rights and livelihoods of the very middle and working-class whites through which they built the modern party. For decades these whites have been experiencing falling or stagnant wages, the deterioration of collective bargaining, and the largest wealth gap in US history – an economic reality that was made worse by the Great Recession of 2008. Today the Silent Majority that made the rise of modern conservatism possible over the last half century is no longer a reliable element of national Republicanism. A combination of downward economic pressure, demographic changes, and political abandonment by GOP elites has created deep rifts that have destabilized the Republican Party and left its future uncertain.

There are few advanced democracies that simultaneously make voting as easy and as difficult as the US. This essay outlines some of the recent changes in voting rights and election law, with a particular attention to the causes and consequences of restrictive changes. I argue that both historically and today this pattern has been driven by strategic partisan calculation, which in the American context almost necessarily results in patterns of access and exclusion that fall sharply on lines of race, class, and civic status. The recent skirmishes in the " voting wars " are a continuation of this historical dynamic, enabled by the unique institutional context in which American elections take place, in which parties retain control over the parameters and administration of a highly fragmented electoral system. So long as this remains the case, and so long as there are relatively few institutions capable of checking the incentive to engage in partisan manipulation, the " voting wars " will continue and are likely even to intensify.

This groundbreaking book challenges the dominant view of ideology held by both political scientists and political commentators. Rather than viewing ideological constructs like liberalism and conservatism as static concepts with fixed and enduring content, Professor Verlan Lewis explains how the very meanings of liberalism and conservatism frequently change along with the ideologies of the two major parties in American politics. Testing a new theory to help explain why party ideologies evolve the way that they do, this book traces the history of American political parties from the Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans of the 1790s to the liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans of today. Ideas of Power shows us how changing party control of government institutions, such as Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, influences how party ideologies develop.

The American Democratic Party, as it exists today, is a far cry from the democratic liberalism of John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. JFK was no ‘liberal’ by today’s standards. Rather, his was a Lockean philosophy founded on ideas of liberty and equality, combined with the principles of economic responsibility. The young president was an ardent proponent of stimulating the private sector and consumer demand through tax-cuts, and slashing tariffs and regulations that restricted free trade. The present Democratic Party, the institution of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama, would consider JFK a minority-wing outsider at best. Clinton, who promises to continue the Obama legacy, would presumably add to the $20 trillion debt accumulated under the Obama administration. There are many analysts who argue that the politics of the Democratic Party are moving the United States to the radical left fringes. The Party of European Socialists drafted a Declaration of Principles on November 2011 summarizing their agenda. A comparison with the goals of European socialists and the statements and legislative initiatives of the Democratic Party are nearly identical.

Tony Kushner's two-part epic, set during the turn of the millennium, the Reagan era, the height of the AIDS crisis and the historical tipping point for LGBT rights, has suddenly regained relevancy and new major productions are opening internationally. The essay explores the most apparent reason: the central dynamic figure of Roy Cohn does not only speak to our times, he was in fact the political and legal mentor to Donald Trump-- and his tactics to keep his enemies in disarray, from the McCArthy hearings, the Rosenberg treason trial and in the Reagan era as well, are being employed again. The essay examines the way Kushner captured this astonishing modus operandi back in the 1990s. But the play also brings together characters from both poles in the so-called culture wars: and it incorporates elements of the Judeo-Christian religious traditions which undergird American culture. The plays (Parts I and II) deconstruct, morph and revitalize this foundation of the culture in quite extraordinary ways.  The essay culminates in an examination of these startling elements of the play: angels, a revealed book, a prophet, a new setting for Heaven, Mormonism as an archetypal American religion of revelation, and scenes drawn from the Torah. Despite a delightful irony in the way these things are employed, they are not at all frivolous. They are fundamental to a work for stage that really dances with powerful impulses in American culture. The quest for "the blessing," heralds a new existential awareness, perhaps a new spiritual sensibility,  emanating from the old ones.

Much of the political theory literature on Thoreau is divided, with one camp focusing on resistance and civil disobedience, while the second concentrates on withdrawal. This bifurcation is not borne out in Thoreau’s texts, and it can lead to a mischaracterization of Thoreau as an essentially instrumental thinker and an idiosyncratic political actor. In this article I argue against this bifurcation of withdrawal and resistance, maintaining that Thoreau’s exit was simultaneously a mode of resistance. His “resistant exit” has double political significance because it was instrumental and expressive. In addition to the change that it can produce in the individual, Thoreau’s resistant exit is consequential because the action itself symbolizes opposition.

This contribution shows the influence of early agrarian movements on state institutional capacity building in the US, revealing how the two forces of state intervention and social movement pressure converged to produce a dynamic relationship between the transition to agrarian capitalism and industrialization or agro-industrialization. It will be shown how this protracted agro-industrial development fueled both social movements and state building responses that furthered capitalist development. By highlighting four specific categories of state building– land policy, infrastructure development, agricultural technology and agro-industrial development – this research reveals how the agro-industrial project developed out of rural class struggle spurred economic development and created unique capacities as the US state sought to quell and integrate this rural class struggle into capitalist development.

The dissertation examines the meaning of the public or common good considered as an end or purpose of government in the public debate over the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Federalists and Anti-Federalists assert that the purpose of government is to both promote the public good and protect individual rights. What did they mean by the “public good” and related phrases? An extended commentary and textual analysis of the published writings of five Federalists (John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, Noah Webster, Tench Coxe, and James Wilson) and five Anti-Federalists (Agrippa, Centinel, Federal Farmer, Impartial Examiner,and Brutus), the dissertation examines the way in which the notion of the public good played a significant part within the larger themes of federalism, representation, liberty versus licentiousness, and union during the ratification period.

Neither side’s understanding of the protection of individual rights as the purpose of government completely forecloses the notion of the promotion of the public good. The uniquely federal nature of the Constitution obscures the deeper understanding of the public good of Anti-Federalists and Federalists alike, but both sides—especially the Federalists—provide plenty of evidence. The Anti-Federalist view of representation emphasizes that the public good must be truly public without making clear how the public good differs from majority will; the Federalists emphasize the public good must be truly good, the product of sound deliberation. The Federalist argument includes the explicit claim that liberty is not license, but tied to a common notion of virtue, or what is truly good for all. The Federalists argue that there is a public good for all the states combined and thus the federal government must have supreme power over matters relating to commerce—and commerce is spoken of as intrinsically connected to morality and virtue—for the sake of this national public good. Although the Federalist notion of the public good is severely limited in scope, remaining in some way open as to the final purpose of human beings or the ultimate questions about what is truly good, it is nonetheless much more than the notion of an interdependent collection of private goods.

While scholars of African American political thought have done a remarkable job centering focus on black thinkers, they still largely frame their endeavor in reference to the geo-political boundaries of the U.S. nation-state, thereby ignoring the transnational and diasporic dynamics of black politics.  The consequence is that alternative traditions of thought in the Americas – e.g. Caribbean traditions – are cast as irrelevant to questions of racial oppression in U.S. political thinking.  This article seeks to correct nation-centric perspectives on U.S. political thought and development by demonstrating the utility of the “transnational turn.”  Drawing on the framework developed in CLR James’ The Black Jacobins, it traces how an influential cohort of abolitionists in the antebellum U.S. looked to the Haitian Revolution as a model for the overthrow of slavery.  Engaging the writings and speeches of David Walker, James Theodore Holly, and Frederick Douglass, it then argues that radical abolitionists operated in the same ideological problem-space as Haitian revolutionaries and adopted a specific model of revolution as much indebted to Haitian political thought as Anglo-American models of anti-colonial revolt.  By implication, racially egalitarian movements and moments in U.S. political development cannot be adequately understood with exclusive reference to national traditions of thought.

In this chapter I analyze the reinterpretation of the concept of sovereignty by today’s sovereigntists. For my analysis I use two cases—Trumpism and Putinism—in which the sovereigntist ideology was well articulated and had a strong impact on foreign and domestic policies. In my analysis I try to answer the question, what is new and what is borrowed in the sovereigntist understanding of sovereignty, a core ideologeme of this movement? In the course of the analysis I will test my hypothesis that the sovereigntist inter- pretation of sovereignty is only partially a political reaction to the widespread practice of sovereignty that balances human rights and state supremacy; what is more important, sovereigntism offers a new worldview that not only denies rights and liberties to the indi- vidual but also promotes a new conservative understanding of world, state, government, people, human person, and their hierar- chy .

The dominant schema in IR accords little importance to the domestic ideational base of the state to explain the pattern of foreign policy. Revolutionary states are ignored as “irrational” actors that would soon perish under the structural pressure of anarchy. Thus, the American liberal tradition is categorized as an “idealistic” thinking. In contrast, this paper examines how America’s transformative identity was constituted against the European “Other” in the Founding Era, and demonstrates that the singular American self is important to describe America’s exceptional understanding of its interest and the trajectory of US diplomacy. After investigating republicanism, I will argue that the American Revolution was triggered by this social imaginary, which tried to distance the American ego from “degenerate” European alterity. Then, the Federalist vs. the anti-Federalist debate will be redefined as a contentious politics of identity/difference between the two contrasting understandings of historical others that produced the post-Westphalian identity of America. Last, I will reconfigure the landscape of the controversy between Jefferson and Hamilton during the French Revolution in the context of emulation pressure from international structure and show how the Jeffersonian principles articulated an initial vision of liberal internationalism that pursued the transformation of the modern international society.

This article analyzes an alternative perspective on the relationship between the USA and the concept of empire. We should note that another rich vein of policy dissent, the anti-imperial tradition, has long existed in American history. A republican tension between ‘empire’ and ‘republic’ has formed the core problematique of American political thought from the beginning. Furthermore, this enigma has haunted US politics along its trajectory, even though James Madison tried to invent a federalist solution to the ancient dilemma of liberty and power. Therefore, I will explore the lineage of the American tradition of anti-imperialism and its foreign policy manifestations, stretching back from the founding era to the contemporary world by re-reading American political development through the lens of republican security theory. I hope that such exercise will shed light on the future direction of US grand strategy in our age of the American hegemonic decline.

It is telling that the winners of [Daniel] Ernst’s history are not the hardened legal realists whom we generally think of as building, and justifying, the New Deal state. Rather, Ernst turns the spotlight on reform-minded corporate lawyers, such as Charles Evans Hughes and John Lord O’Brian, who stepped back from the edge of realism. While accepting the necessity of the administrative state for managing a modern economy, they fought to imbue that state with a legalistic conception of “fair play” and a distinctively lawyerly form of expertise. These political and intellectual moderates would have agreed with Sunstein and Vermeule when they write that “[a] dose of legal realism . . . has its place, but . . . respect for the governing rules is not optional.” Just as for Sunstein and Vermeule, the APA evacuated administrative law of “any kind of ideological valence,” for Ernst, the “rule of lawyers” insulated the administrative state from becoming a weapon in the hands of any particular social or economic group.

It apparently goes without saying — neither Ernst nor his protagonists say it — that the impartiality of the “rule of lawyers” admits one important exception. Under a “rule of lawyers,” the administrative state will persistently favor one socioeconomic bloc: lawyers and the interests they serve. From this perspective, Tocqueville’s Nightmare can be read as a narrative of regulatory capture: the capture of the administrative state by lawyers themselves. But while regulatory capture is generally understood as a threat to administrative legitimacy, Ernst suggests that lawyerly capture is its condition precedent. If he is right, important new questions come to the fore: how did lawyers win the struggle to equate administrative legitimacy with their control of the administrative state, and what exactly did they win by defining administrative legitimacy in this way? Ernst’s ingenious history not only forces us to ask these questions, but also helps us answer them.

This study extends W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of abolition democracy by exploring the political thought of Black women in and around the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between 1850 and 1880. As the historical site of the nation’s founding, the U.S. abolitionist movement, and the largest concentration of Blacks in the United States at the end of the 19th
century, Philadelphia is central to the American democratic imaginary, yet Black women’s contributions to the city, the nation, and that imaginary, even by those exploring black political thought, remain largely unexplored. By returning to how Sarah Mapps Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Gertrude Bustill Mossell negotiated and transgressed the newly drawn boundaries of the expanding city, the “splendid failure of Reconstruction” that Du Bois documented in Black Reconstruction takes on gendered and urban dimensions. Attending to these Black women
as they adapted to global trends of enclosure, industrialization, and urbanization, I find that the political concept of fugitivity that spurned the democratic movement for the abolition of slavery retains theoretical significance beyond the antebellum period. Having a history in Black political thought, fugitivity is a paradigm through which people in their everyday practices escape the capitalist impulse to confine, detain, and commodify their existence as both capital and labor. Black women as political thinkers complicate the spatialized reality and romantic idea of “home” that underpinned both the hunting and freeing of fugitives in
the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War. Their work raises the following question: what does democracy mean when the nation is built from and by those deemed “homeless”?

During the Civil War, Roscoe Conkling used party and government connections to discreetly make a small fortune by speculating in cotton. This pivotal episode in the future Gilded Age political boss's career deserves attention because it sheds light on the role of private wealth accumulation in political factionalism during the nineteenth century, and the way in which savvy Republican officeholders benefited from the cotton policies established during the Lincoln Administration.

Most histories of American policing ignore the institutional problems posed by administrative and police discretion, especially as a result of the American federalist system. Such problems were strikingly apparent in the Freedom Rides of May 1961, which prompted numerous institutional conflicts between local, state, and federal entities, who appealed to divergent conceptions of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., called “the whole problem of federalism, the location of the police power.” During the Freedom Rides, the United States government—the STATE—failed to behave as a unitary actor due to competing conceptions of the police power. Examining the Freedom Rides through the lens of the police power shatters the reified "state" in the history of American policing. This kaleidoscopic view of "state" power problematizes the classic Weberian formulation of the state monopoly on violence. Such a view exposes the "state's" intrinsic nature and internal anxieties, which impact its responses to external stimuli. To shatter the reified "state" is to restore the faces and identities of its constituents, and to reintroduce contingency to its history. Only then can we hope to understand the nature of the "state"—and policing—in all its irreducible complexity, messiness, and humanity.

This article examines the rhetorical phenomenon of collective apology. Specifically, collective
apologies issued by American President Bill Clinton, Australian Prime Minister
Kevin Rudd, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper were analyzed inductively
to determine the purposes and strategies that make up these speeches. This inductive
approach reveals that the purpose of collective apologies is to repair relationships
damaged by historical wrongdoing. Moreover, it is found that rhetors use the rhetorical
strategies of remembrance, mortification, and corrective action. Ultimately, this research
lays the groundwork for collective apology to be considered a distinct rhetorical genre.

Since the 1990s, globalization theorists have published a neverending litany of books and articles about the crisis of the nationstate, the eclipse of the state, the retreat of the state, and even the end of the nation-state. Globalization theory has, on a regular basis, dismissed the nation-state as irrelevant to understanding contemporary political and economic development. However, this paper reexamines the relationship between globalization theory and state theory to argue that nation-states are the principal agents of globalization, as well as the guarantors of the political and material conditions necessary for global capital accumulation. Globalization theorists have constructed a false antinomy that rests largely on having misconstrued international relations (IR) theory, while ignoring significant developments in neo-Marxist state theory.

This essay examines how political leaders apologize for historical injustices.
Specifically, we analyze Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology for
the head tax imposed upon Chinese immigrants. The prime minister’s apology was
historic in that it marked the first time a Canadian Prime Minister formally
apologized for the head tax. We argue that Harper used a combination of the
frontier myth and collective apology rhetoric in his expression of remorse toward
the Chinese-Canadian community. While controversial, this rhetoric created a
discursive space for a constructive and strengthened relationship between the
Chinese-Canadian community and the Canadian government.

We have recently lived through the turmoil of a global financial crisis that originated in the United States and, despite the platitudes of neo-liberal ideology, nation-states were deeply involved in managing this crisis. If “the state” is again a preeminent actor in the global economy, then state theory and the problem of the state should also return to the forefront of political theory. Toward a Critical Theory of States is an intensive analysis of the 1970s debate between state theorists Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas, including its wider impact on Marxist theories of the state in subsequent decades. Clyde W. Barrow makes unique arguments and contributions to this continuing discussion in state theory and lays the foundation for more theoretically informed empirical and historical research on the state in the age of globalization. He argues that by merely moving past the Poulantzas-Miliband debate, as some have recommended, scholars have abandoned much that is valuable in understanding the state, particularly the need to comprehend the contemporary transformation of the state form and the state apparatuses as part of the new conditions of globalization and transnational capital accumulation. Building upon themes of state restructuring found in Poulantzas and Miliband, Barrow establishes the outlines of an approach that integrates the thought of both to propose a synthetic understanding of the new imperialism.