A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America

Balogh echoes Richard Bensel's claim that public, wartime institutions disappeared as the emergence of a national marketplace and a national belief in the inviolability of the market generated harsh criticism of governmental 'intrusion' into private life As with the story of the frontier, Balogh's interpretation of constitutional law in the late nineteenth century points to the dynamic of an active government constructing institutions, while those institutions are obscured by anti-statist ideology. As the national judiciary erected the foundations of a national law of corporations and transactions, the way it did so obscured the constitutive role of government.

All of this brings us within sight of "the Twentieth-Century State. First, Americans have always looked to government to solve their problems, but the government they look to is simultaneously flexible, public, private, local, and national, rather than monolithic, "visible, [and] centralized. Third, national taxes are a dangerous "third rail" of national government. Finally, political development is almost always based in legal development and the action of courts.

Taken together, these patterns mean that in America, national government functions "largely out of sight" Some will find Balogh's conclusion too schematic in tone—a stark departure from the careful, almost thick description of policy and governance that precedes it. This shift in tone occurs periodically throughout the book, almost invariably when Balogh attempts to grab the attention of policymakers and political scientists. This is one of a few minor problems that deserve mention.

Americans love a government out of sight | FifteenEightyFour | Cambridge University Press

Balogh relies quite self-consciously on secondary sources, which in itself is not problematic. Rather, one senses that he has occasional difficulty managing the sheer number of historiographical threads from legal, business, Western, and political history that appear throughout A Government Out of Sight. The result is that subsections of chapters appear superfluous or forced, such as the discussion of lighthouses as an "uncontested national program" during the early republic Digressions of that nature make earlier chapters look far weightier than the brief treatments of the Civil War and Progressive Era, leaving the altogether ironic impression that Balogh—a historian of the twentieth-century U.

For Balogh, Hamilton desired a state that was leviathan-like and thus preeminently visible to the citizenry. The future Secretary of the Treasury denigrated what he called "a government continually at a distance and out of sight" 3. I'm not so sure Hamilton failed to anticipate this at all.

Brian Balogh

Hamilton uses Federalist No. He believed that governments that rule solely by force ultimately fail. Thus the federal government must, upon its formation, insert itself into localities. In this way, Hamilton's federal government would be 'visible,' or 'in sight'—at least at first. But this government, once planted, would quietly take root. As Hamilton himself wrote, "the more the operations of the national authority are intermingled in the ordinary exercise of government, the more the citizens are accustomed to meet with it in the common occurrences of their political life, the more it is familiarized in their sight and to their feelings … the greater will be the probability that it will conciliate the respect and attachment of the community.

Isaac Kramnick [New York: Penguin Classics, ], In short, as the federal government became more naturalized, and blended or "intermingled" into people's lives, the less it would be a source of popular discontent.

Journal of Policy History

Is this so different from Balogh's federal state, "hidden in plain sight"? Balogh's reading of Hamilton's Federalist essay does not change very much about his overall argument. For them, morning in America shines brightest when the sun illuminates a society organized by the principles of laissez-faire. Oddly, both conservatives and progressives agree that nineteenth-century Americans embraced the free market.

But what if the basic historical premise upon which this debate has been waged is fundamentally flawed? What if modern-day progressives understood that the national government often proved to be most influential when it was least visible? And what if conservatives acknowledged the crucial role that the national government played in shaping both the market and the legal status of corporations that emerged as the key players in that market during the height of laissez-faire?

What if the Gilded Age was exceptional? What if it was anomalous precisely because some public officials sought to achieve something that had never been accomplished before — draw a hard and fast line between public and private activity?

Most significantly, what if our understanding of the nineteenth century allowed for the possibility that the United States governed differently from other industrialized contemporaries, but did not necessarily govern less? Existing rules, routines, and structures of power were always in place in nineteenth-century America — even at the national level. And those rules mattered. Don't have an account? American Political Science Association members Sign in via society site. Sign in via your Institution Sign in. Purchase Subscription prices and ordering Short-term Access To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above.

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Americans love a government out of sight

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