Political Culture and the Therapeutic Ideal

Abstract

As political history has become reinvigorated over the last decade, so too has the odd-job term, political culture.' This often casually invoked term has, of late, been richly reworked by historians-mostly non-Americanists. Their sophisticated work is heavily influenced by post-structuralist concerns about how political claims are symbolically structured, by theories of public life and the public sphere, and by contemporary ethnographic debates about the relationship between structure and event.2 French historian Keith Baker, a leading practitioner, nicely sums up this historical school of thought: It sees politics as . . . the activity through which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce the competing claims they make upon one another and upon the whole. culture is, in this sense, the set of discourses or symbolic practices by which these claims are made. Baker goes on to argue that political culture shapes the constitutions and powers of the agencies and procedures by which contestations are resolved, competing claims authoritatively adjudicated and binding decisions enforced.3 culture, as used by sophisticated contemporary historians, refers most generally to the historically contingent practices and beliefs that give legitimacy to political structures and political authority to individuals and interests, and which, in turn, political actors use creatively to affect public policy or, more generally, public life. Ellen Herman enjoins this methodological and theoretical discussion with an animated, multifaceted examination of how psychological understandings and psychologically inclined experts influenced aspects of American politics and public life in the 1940 to 1975 period. Subtitling her book, Political Culture in the Age of Experts, Herman argues, From World War II through the Vietnam era, psychological experts decisively shaped Americans' understandings of what significant public issues were and what should be done about them (p. 6). Herman carefully examines the roles that both psychological approaches and behavioral scientists played in American state