"The State that Anti-Statism Built: Infrastructural Power in Postwar American Political Development"

Sociology Colloquium Talk

"The State that Anti-Statism Built: Infrastructural Power in Postwar American Political Development"
Presented by Dr. Elisabeth S. Clemens, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

Wars make states, but the conclusion of conflict is critical for the trajectory of state-building that follows. As both conservatives and progressives in the United States recognized, the legacies of the Second World War included both the introduction of mass taxation and the expansion of regulatory intervention. As in the wake of the First World War, entrenched traditions of anti-statism in American politics resurfaced only to encounter threats of a nuclear-capable Soviet Union in a newly-named Cold War. This conjuncture reoriented trajectories of state development, ushering in the creation of a powerful and insulated national security state deeply marked by anti-statist politics and new forms of infrastructural power. The open architecture of governance that had enabled the development of voluntarism as a feature of governance provided an opening for a profound transformation of the relations of politics and markets as well as a rethinking of theories of state-building.

Lunch to follow. Please RSVP.