In Defense of Traditional Stories and Labels

Abstract

Forums are not for the faint of heart. My critics offer a searching analysis of my approach and arguments. William Novak questions the basic assumptions and methods of my article; indeed, he dismisses it out of hand as a well-known “traditional” story told in an equally traditional “narrative” fashion. Somewhat more graciously, Daniel Rodgers contests the validity of some of its arguments; more fundamentally, he disputes the legitimacy—at least for a “normal” political actor such as Charles Evans Hughes—of an ideological frame of reference. Just tell the (traditional) story, he says; come to grips with the man and forget the labels. For his part, William Forbath largely accepts my conceptualization but disputes my contention that the traditional liberal state died in 1937. Rather, he argues, the post–New Deal American state was deeply informed by Hughes's “lawyerly” brand of “transitional” liberalism, which balanced a “progressive” commitment to reform and administrative state-building with a “classical” regard for dual federalism and the primacy of courts and common law. Finally, Risa Goluboff contests my suggestion, via Hilaire Belloc, that the new constitutional order subordinated individual economic rights to the interests of the national state and the elites that control it. The quest for economic rights remained strong, she suggests, until the onset of the Cold War, which limited the reach of the American welfare state, and theBrowndecision, which gave a racial (and, eventual, gender) definition to liberal reform.