From the Well-Regulated Society to the Modern American State

It is a privilege to be a part of this roundtable on William Novak’s The People’s Welfare. In developing my own research agenda, no piece of scholarship was as important to me as The People’s Welfare, and no one has been more warm and welcoming to me than Novak as I have entered the territory that he, very shortly, will revise anew. This comment focuses on the importance of The People’s Welfare to historians studying the twentieth-century version of the American state. Even this phrasing—“twentieth-century version”—reveals Novak’s influence. The People’s Welfare showed a generation of historians the fallacy of the American statelessness myth. It also encouraged us to think differently about what the state is. The state, Novak explained, is at bottom “constitutive public conduct.” Inseparable from society itself, the state has gained its shape and logic from the iterative actions of people with official authority as they navigated the perceived problems of the day.1

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