William J Novak
Biographic Data
| ID | 412251 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William J Novak |
| GIVEN NAMES | William J |
| FAMILY NAME | Novak |
| SIGNATURE | NOVAK W J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 59 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Some Realism About Originalism
A review of Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation. By Jack M. Balkin
Legislation, Regulation, and Administration in the American Revolution
This article continues a long-term investigation into the nature of legislation, regulation, and administration across United States history. In contrast to persistent myths about an original American legal and political inheritance dedicated primarily to private rights, limited government, and laissez-faire economics, this article explores the earliest roots of American public rights, popular lawmaking, and regulatory policymaking. In the very f…
Une histoire pragmatique du politique
Cet article propose quelques éléments pour penser une histoire pragmatique du politique en ouvrant un dialogue entre des interrogations propres à la pratique de l’histoire politique des deux côtés de l’Atlantique, principalement aux États-Unis et en France. Nous cherchons en particulier à souligner l’apport de l’histoire du droit (legal history) tel qu’il est pratiqué aux États-Unis dans le champ du legal realism pour nourrir notre réflexion sur …
Possibilidades De Uma História Pragmática Do Político / Possibilities of a Pragmatic History of the Political
Este ensaio consiste em uma tentativa inicial de propor um método que vem lentamente ganhando forma em nossas investigações individuais e colaborativas acerca da história da democracia nos Estados Unidos e na França. Nossa abordagem como um todo se baseia em diversas influências metodológicas, mas, neste ensaio em particular, destacamos apenas dois dos precedentes mais influentes do nosso trabalho: primeiro, a abordagem pragmático-hermenêutica ex…
The American Law of Overruling Necessity
Epilogue
Democratic critiques of neoliberalism have been comparatively rare, and positive democratic rejoinders to the social and political ruins of neoliberalism have been rarer. The question thus presents itself – what would an overtly democratic critique of neoliberalism look like and, beyond critique, what would a constructive democratic response to neoliberalism entail
William J. N ovak , Stephen W. S awyer , and James T. S parrow Social Freedom, Democracy and the Political
Axel Honneth’s Idea of Socialism is an important clarion call for an urgent rethinking of the possibilities of a socialism for the twenty-first century. One of the most surprising and satisfying aspects of Axel Honneth’s timely new book is its recovery of the continued vitality of John Dewey’s pragmatic democratic philosophy. These reflections on Honneth’s use of John Dewey for democratizing social freedom, take stock of and explore the political…
Institutional Economics and the Progressive Movement for the Social Control of American Business
This article investigates the history of the Progressive Era effort to develop new techniques and technologies of control over American business and corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A revolution in Progressive economic regulation was rooted in the intellectual work of the so-called institutional economists—particularly in the context of what economists and lawyers like Richard Ely, John Commons, and Walton Hamilt…
Corporations and American Democracy
Corporations and American Democracy
Recent Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked disagreement about the role of corporations in American democracy. Bringing together scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides essential grounding for today’s policy debates.
Beyond Stateless Democracy
Pierre Bourdieu began his posthumously published lectures “On the State” by highlighting the three dominant traditions that have framed most thinking about the state in Western social science and modern social theory. On the one hand, he highlighted what he termed the “initial definition” of the state as a “neutral site” designed to regulate conflict and “serve the common good.” Bourdieu traced this essentially classical liberal conception of the…
Beyond Max Weber
Beyond Max Weber:The need for a democratic (not aristocratic) theory of the modern state William J. Novak (bio) “The State must always be rediscovered.” John Dewey I – Introduction: The problem of the state The State is a difficult concept. Listen to two of the foremost social theorists of our age articulate its historic elusiveness. The further I advance in my own work on the state, the more convinced I am that, if we have a particular difficult…
Toward a political history of democratic state
This collection of articles is the product of two symposia on the history of the French and American states held in Paris in 2007 and 2011. The first symposium, held at the EHESS, provided the opportunity to open a dialogue on this question. Since that event, many of us continued to work in this question. Since that event, many of us continued to work in the area and to discuss the comparative histories of the American and French states
Toward a history of the democratic state
Toward a history of the democratic state William J. Novak (bio), Stephen W. Sawyer (bio), and James T. Sparrow (bio) Over the past generation, the history of the state has been experiencing a much-noted renaissance, especially in France and the United States. In the United States as late as 1986, Morton Keller complained to William Leuchtenburg in the Journal of American History: “To say that ‘there is much still to be learned about the nature of…
Legal realism and human rights
This essay uses Schmitt's work to cast new light on the relevance of the American legal tradition known as ‘legal realism’ for the history and analysis of human rights. It does so by exploring several of Schmitt's most famous criticisms of international law and human rights, and then suggests how they might correspond with a widespread critical legal tradition in the 1920s and 1930s. This essay describes in detail two fundamental features of this…
Long Live the Myth of the Weak State? A Response to Adams, Gerstle, and Witt
The Democratic Experiment
Zelizer 1 CHAPTER TWO Explaining the Unexplainable: The Cultural Context of the Sedition Act by Joanne B. Freeman 20 CHAPTER THREE Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party by Richard R. John 50 CHAPTER FOUR The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America by William J. Novak 85 CHAPTER FIVE Bringing the Constitution Back In: Amendment, Innovation, and Popular D…
A State of Legislatures
The Myth of the “Weak” American State
THE AMERICAN PRESENT IS AT ODDS with representations of the American past. The American present witnesses the steady aggrandizement of executive, administrative, emergency, penal, military, and war powers as contemporary commentators such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Agamben contemplate the contours of American hegemony and superpower in a new era of empire.1 The global impact of present American politics, political economy, and f…
The Not-So-Strange Birth of the Modern American State
James Henretta's “Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America” takes up one of the most interesting and important interpretive questions in the history of American political economy. What explains the dramatic transformation in liberal ideology and governance between 1877 and 1937 that carried the United States from laissez-faire constitutionalism to New Deal statism, from classical liberalism to democratic social-welfarism? Tha…
The American Law of Association
The legal-political status and power of associations in American society is an age-old historical question. As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed
Law, Capitalism, and the Liberal State
Two legacies vie to take the measure of the work of Willard Hurst. The first understands Hurst primarily in his formal role as the “founding father” of an academic sub-specialty known as “American legal history”—the author of a canonical text Law and the Conditions of Freedom , and the coiner of interpretive phrases like “legal instrumentalism” and “the release of energy” that established the boundaries of disciplinary debate for two generations …
Commodity and Properity
Journal Article Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776–1970. By Gregory S. Alexander. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. x, 486 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-226-01353-7.) Get access William J. Novak William J. Novak University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 2, September 2000, Pages 623…
The People's Welfare
The People's Welfare
The Democratic Experiment
Zelizer 1 CHAPTER TWO Explaining the Unexplainable: The Cultural Context of the Sedition Act by Joanne B. Freeman 20 CHAPTER THREE Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party by Richard R. John 50 CHAPTER FOUR The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America by William J. Novak 85 CHAPTER FIVE Bringing the Constitution Back In: Amendment, Innovation, and Popular D…
The American Law of Association
The legal-political status and power of associations in American society is an age-old historical question. As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed
Beyond Max Weber
Beyond Max Weber:The need for a democratic (not aristocratic) theory of the modern state William J. Novak (bio) “The State must always be rediscovered.” John Dewey I – Introduction: The problem of the state The State is a difficult concept. Listen to two of the foremost social theorists of our age articulate its historic elusiveness. The further I advance in my own work on the state, the more convinced I am that, if we have a particular difficult…
Under Fire
In this candid book, Oliver North, the man who has been at the centre of the Iran-Contra controversy tells the story of his life. He reveals the inside story behind the headlines and stresses the importance of his family and his enduring faith, which have seen him through the toughest times
Beyond Stateless Democracy
Pierre Bourdieu began his posthumously published lectures “On the State” by highlighting the three dominant traditions that have framed most thinking about the state in Western social science and modern social theory. On the one hand, he highlighted what he termed the “initial definition” of the state as a “neutral site” designed to regulate conflict and “serve the common good.” Bourdieu traced this essentially classical liberal conception of the…
Law, Capitalism, and the Liberal State
Two legacies vie to take the measure of the work of Willard Hurst. The first understands Hurst primarily in his formal role as the “founding father” of an academic sub-specialty known as “American legal history”—the author of a canonical text Law and the Conditions of Freedom , and the coiner of interpretive phrases like “legal instrumentalism” and “the release of energy” that established the boundaries of disciplinary debate for two generations …
Toward a history of the democratic state
Toward a history of the democratic state William J. Novak (bio), Stephen W. Sawyer (bio), and James T. Sparrow (bio) Over the past generation, the history of the state has been experiencing a much-noted renaissance, especially in France and the United States. In the United States as late as 1986, Morton Keller complained to William Leuchtenburg in the Journal of American History: “To say that ‘there is much still to be learned about the nature of…
A State of Legislatures
The Not-So-Strange Birth of the Modern American State
James Henretta's “Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America” takes up one of the most interesting and important interpretive questions in the history of American political economy. What explains the dramatic transformation in liberal ideology and governance between 1877 and 1937 that carried the United States from laissez-faire constitutionalism to New Deal statism, from classical liberalism to democratic social-welfarism? Tha…
Institutional Economics and the Progressive Movement for the Social Control of American Business
This article investigates the history of the Progressive Era effort to develop new techniques and technologies of control over American business and corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A revolution in Progressive economic regulation was rooted in the intellectual work of the so-called institutional economists—particularly in the context of what economists and lawyers like Richard Ely, John Commons, and Walton Hamilt…
Public Economy and The Well-ordered Market
This essay is an attempt to uncover and reconstruct 19th-century legal notions of “public economy” and the “well-ordered market.” Through an analysis of 19th-century product and inspection laws, licensing cases and regulations, and public controls on the urban marketplace, the author argues that economic regulation was deeply rooted in American life and law throughout the pre-Civil War era. The pervasiveness of these regulations and accompanying …
Liberty, Property, and Government
Journal Article Liberty, Property, and Government: Constitutional Interpretation Before the New Deal Get access Paul Ellen Frankel Dickman Howard, eds., Liberty, Property, and Government: Constitutional Interpretation Before the New Deal. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. vii, 303 pp. $57.50. William J. Novak William J. Novak Brandeis University, Institute for Legal Studies Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…
Enterprise and American Law, 1836-1937
Journal Article Enterprise and American Law, 1836–1937. By Herbert Hovenkamp. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. xii + 443 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-25748-0.) Get access William J. Novak William J. Novak University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 2, September 1992, Pages 658–659, https://doi.org/10.2307/2080097 Published: 01 September 1992
Judicial Power and Reform Politics
Under Fire
In this candid book, Oliver North, the man who has been at the centre of the Iran-Contra controversy tells the story of his life. He reveals the inside story behind the headlines and stresses the importance of his family and his enduring faith, which have seen him through the toughest times
Public Economy and the Well-Ordered Market
This essay is an attempt to uncover and reconstruct 19th-century legal notions of “public economy” and the “well-ordered market.” Through an analysis of 19th-century product and inspection laws, licensing cases and regulations, and public controls on the urban marketplace, the author argues that economic regulation was deeply rooted in American life and law throughout the pre-Civil War era. The pervasiveness of these regulations and accompanying …
Public Economy and The Well-ordered Market
This essay is an attempt to uncover and reconstruct 19th-century legal notions of “public economy” and the “well-ordered market.” Through an analysis of 19th-century product and inspection laws, licensing cases and regulations, and public controls on the urban marketplace, the author argues that economic regulation was deeply rooted in American life and law throughout the pre-Civil War era. The pervasiveness of these regulations and accompanying …
Common Law and Liberal Theory
Journal Article Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism. By James R. Stoner, Jr. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. viii + 287 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-7006-0532-0.) Get access William J. Novak William J. Novak University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 2, September 1993, Pages…
Fair Trial
The people's welfare
The People's Welfare
The People's Welfare
Law, Capitalism, and the Liberal State
Two legacies vie to take the measure of the work of Willard Hurst. The first understands Hurst primarily in his formal role as the “founding father” of an academic sub-specialty known as “American legal history”—the author of a canonical text Law and the Conditions of Freedom , and the coiner of interpretive phrases like “legal instrumentalism” and “the release of energy” that established the boundaries of disciplinary debate for two generations …
Commodity and Properity
Journal Article Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776–1970. By Gregory S. Alexander. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. x, 486 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-226-01353-7.) Get access William J. Novak William J. Novak University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 2, September 2000, Pages 623…
The American Law of Association
The legal-political status and power of associations in American society is an age-old historical question. As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed
The Not-So-Strange Birth of the Modern American State
James Henretta's “Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America” takes up one of the most interesting and important interpretive questions in the history of American political economy. What explains the dramatic transformation in liberal ideology and governance between 1877 and 1937 that carried the United States from laissez-faire constitutionalism to New Deal statism, from classical liberalism to democratic social-welfarism? Tha…
A State of Legislatures
The Myth of the “Weak” American State
THE AMERICAN PRESENT IS AT ODDS with representations of the American past. The American present witnesses the steady aggrandizement of executive, administrative, emergency, penal, military, and war powers as contemporary commentators such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Agamben contemplate the contours of American hegemony and superpower in a new era of empire.1 The global impact of present American politics, political economy, and f…
The Democratic Experiment
Zelizer 1 CHAPTER TWO Explaining the Unexplainable: The Cultural Context of the Sedition Act by Joanne B. Freeman 20 CHAPTER THREE Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party by Richard R. John 50 CHAPTER FOUR The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America by William J. Novak 85 CHAPTER FIVE Bringing the Constitution Back In: Amendment, Innovation, and Popular D…
Long Live the Myth of the Weak State? A Response to Adams, Gerstle, and Witt
Legal realism and human rights
This essay uses Schmitt's work to cast new light on the relevance of the American legal tradition known as ‘legal realism’ for the history and analysis of human rights. It does so by exploring several of Schmitt's most famous criticisms of international law and human rights, and then suggests how they might correspond with a widespread critical legal tradition in the 1920s and 1930s. This essay describes in detail two fundamental features of this…
Toward a political history of democratic state
This collection of articles is the product of two symposia on the history of the French and American states held in Paris in 2007 and 2011. The first symposium, held at the EHESS, provided the opportunity to open a dialogue on this question. Since that event, many of us continued to work in this question. Since that event, many of us continued to work in the area and to discuss the comparative histories of the American and French states
Toward a history of the democratic state
Toward a history of the democratic state William J. Novak (bio), Stephen W. Sawyer (bio), and James T. Sparrow (bio) Over the past generation, the history of the state has been experiencing a much-noted renaissance, especially in France and the United States. In the United States as late as 1986, Morton Keller complained to William Leuchtenburg in the Journal of American History: “To say that ‘there is much still to be learned about the nature of…
Beyond Stateless Democracy
Pierre Bourdieu began his posthumously published lectures “On the State” by highlighting the three dominant traditions that have framed most thinking about the state in Western social science and modern social theory. On the one hand, he highlighted what he termed the “initial definition” of the state as a “neutral site” designed to regulate conflict and “serve the common good.” Bourdieu traced this essentially classical liberal conception of the…
Beyond Max Weber
Beyond Max Weber:The need for a democratic (not aristocratic) theory of the modern state William J. Novak (bio) “The State must always be rediscovered.” John Dewey I – Introduction: The problem of the state The State is a difficult concept. Listen to two of the foremost social theorists of our age articulate its historic elusiveness. The further I advance in my own work on the state, the more convinced I am that, if we have a particular difficult…
Corporations and American Democracy
Political science (29 works) · Law (28 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Democracy (10 works) · History (9 works) · State (computer science (9 works)