An American (State) in Paris
The American Developmental State: The Origins of American Capitalism in Comparative Perspective (May 25-26, 2023)
As those of you who follow my (non-ironic) food instagram (@gautham_cooks) will know well by now, I was in France in late May of this year. But contrary to what it may have looked like from the pics of food, wine, and more food and wine, I was actually there on business—important business, in fact. I was very fortunate to be included on a star-studded program of scholars who converged in Paris to investigate “the American developmental state,” and more specifically, the historical dimensions of the American state’s role in economic and financial development. Conference organizers—themselves rock-stars in the field—Noam Maggor, Sofia Valeonti, Ariel Ron, and Nicolas Barreyre put on one hell of a show that included a keynote panel, “Beyond Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Role of the State in a New Global Age,” featuring Felicia Wong, Thomas Piketty, and Gary Gerstle. It was a fascinating discussion, with Gerstle and Wong noting the unexpectedly ambitious governing agenda of the Biden administration. Piketty was a bit less sanguine about the question of whether this moment itself was transformational, but also noted that the Biden team’s governing vision was a notable departure from the typically received wisdom of austerity-for-almost-all.
The conference program was broken down into thematic panels: infrastructure, banking & money, thinking about development, land, development and power hierarchies, corporations, and finally, “was there an American developmental state?”. A special shoutout, though, goes to Jonah Estess, who was on the banking and money panel, and who’s is one of my doctoral students at American University. Jonah’s paper, ““...by the general consent of mankind”: State Courts, Bank Notes, and the Paradox of Private Monetary Sovereignty in the Antebellum United States,” was awesome, and he delivered his remarks with aplomb. And as always, he navigated the Q&A that followed with a gravitas that I could only have dreamed of (and often did) when I was a graduate student.
I had been asked to be part of the final panel, assessing the papers that had been presented and addressing the overall question about whether there was indeed an American developmental state. My brief comments, which I cribbed from the text below, focused on the importance of keeping in view the question of power relations as we think about the developmental state.
It was a real honor to be part of this remarkable group! And it is heartening to know that the group’s work is just getting started. By the end, there was a clear energy to keep pushing on the foundational questions about seeing the developmental state, rethinking our ideas of development itself—in both comparative and functionalist perspectives—and tracing lineages of the developmental state to the present-day.
“There Was an American Developmental State. Let’s think about it’s Beneficiaries.”
Gautham Rao, May 26, 2023.
This gathering offers persuasive evidence of the existence of the American developmental state, both in terms of its functional parts, but as well as part of its broader structural development. The intellectual understanding of this state comes across too, as seen in what may have been the most cohesive panel featuring the work of Matteo Rossi, Ariel Ron and Sofia Valeonti, and Maria Bach—the organizers call this “Thinking the US Developmental State,” but it may have better titled “Thinking Through the US Developmental State,” since we see thinkers such as Stephen Colwell and Friedrich List attempting to understand this state as a totality, while also pointing us to the processual and incomplete nature of the state.
At times, we have also seen the existence of this developmental state in comparative context, particularly in terms of European state influenced economic development, but also as against the emergence of central state economic activity on the ruins of ancien regime imperial development: Manuel Bautista-Gonzalez’ work on Mexican specie and its surprising importance in the early republic being perhaps the best example. However, Keri Leigh Merritt and Brian Schoen point us toward the problem of the American South and slavery as a kind of empire of a different kind—one in which the organization and exploitation of labor power worked on a fundamentally different register than that of developmental state as more typically understood in these proceedings. Compare Merritt’s argument about “Southern exceptionalism,” for instance, with the final main panel of this conference, with Robert Lee, Ricahrd John, and Elsbeth Heaman offering stirring arguments about land, territoriality, and then development.
It would be impossible to explore the complexities of all of the papers presented over the past two days because each was rich, closely research, cogently argued, and in my view, by and large quite persuasive. So let me highlight a few common areas where I see great possibilities for this project, before pointing to one major area where more attention might be considered.
First, I am heartened to see that the conference has avoided the trap that so often ensnares historical apprehensions of the state. Instead of accepting the institutional categories of the state, participants in this conference have studiously attempted to historicize these categories, institutions, and actors. Rather than “bringing the state back in,” that is, we have heard a great deal about where that state came from, how it was brought anywhere, and what the consequences of that were. Robert Lee’s work is probably the best example of this—Robert is not afraid to see the contemporary concept of the sovereign wealth fund, but he critically examines how this became possible, and why it developed and persisted.
The second thing I want to highlight is federalism. What cuts through the papers presented at this conference is a steadfast refusal to see federalism as a set of boundaries within which development occurs; and which abut one another. Rather, we see stories of the developmental state that cut across jurisdictions, which grapple with problems posed by these movements, and which in turn reshape what exactly it means when we say that there were different spheres of power within municipalities, states, nations, states and empires.
That these papers featured incredible historicity and a complex understanding of federalism in practice illustrates the incredible sophistication of the scholars who have convened here this week. These were outstanding papers, and if they are a harbinger of things to come, this project of understanding the developmental state is going to reshape several interconnected literatures.
What I’d like to see greater attention paid to in the future is: power. Perhaps it speaks to the caution of the scholars who have presented their work here that I detected a hesitancy to identify just who stood to benefit from this developmental state or states; and with the exception of the panel with Merritt, Schoen, and Dael Norwood, the populations who were exploited—as well as the legacies of that exploitation as they unfolded over time.
I’d also urge this group to think more closely about law and administration, and particularly the problem of agency and control. When we talk about institutional development and power, what do we mean when we speak of institutional actors? In todays’ legal world, we have seen the Supreme Court of the United States making a zigzag of decisions concerning executive removal power, the limits of Congressional lawmaking power, executive wartime powers, and quite possibly very soon rethinking the concept of bureaucratic deference and the Chevron doctrine in a case soon to be heard called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The point is not that the Court today’s conservative agenda should be brought front and center, but rather that at any given time, we should not take for granted the brittle and unstable nature of administrative and institutional control. Closer attention to this question of just who was in charge of developmental moves might allow us to focus more clearly on the questions of power and power relations that I mentioned a moment ago.