Liberty and Coercion

Fearful of government tyranny, the framers of the U.S. Constitution imposed extreme constraints on the central state it created, checked and balanced within itself. If the liberalism (in the classical sense) of the U.S. Constitution is much celebrated, few have noted how many powers the individual states retained. Unlike the federal government, they remained “miniature Leviathans,” endowed with “broad, capacious, and vaguely defined” police powers and “a staggering freedom of action” (pp. 2, 61, 57). “America,” Gary Gerstle observes in his outstanding new book, “was neither liberal nor illiberal. Instead—and paradoxically—it was both” (p. 86). How did a handicapped central government nonetheless conquer a continent, abolish slavery, create a welfare state, dismantle Jim Crow, and eventually beat back these miniature Leviathans? The Constitution's constraints, enforced by the Supreme Court, pushed the federal government to a set of ad-hoc improvisational strategies to accomplish its objectives—but at substantial cost. Grounded in legal and political history, Liberty and Coercion emphasizes continuities over ruptures. The Civil War was a turning point, but it mattered less than often believed. “The radically centralizing energies unleashed by the Civil War were contained” after Reconstruction, and “classically liberal limits” on government power “were reaffirmed” (p. 92). Indeed, the Fourteenth Amendment's most enduring legacy was to unshackle restraints on corporate power. Individual states, meanwhile, retained their robust police powers

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