Book Review: Richard M Valelly, Suzanne Mettler and Robert C Lieberman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917718666 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Author | Scott L Greer |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsThe Americas |
672 Political Studies Review 15(4)
Shiffrin’s central argument is that these and
other harmful forms of speech should be regu-
lated, and that freedom of speech should not
always be given priority over other values.
This more moderate and balanced approach,
Shiffrin shows through various examples, is
already widely endorsed outside the United
States. Part II (chapters 8–9) argues that the
First Amendment does not sufficiently protect
dissenting speech and religious minorities. Part
III (chapters 10–11) concludes by illustrating
the historical process through which First
Amendment absolutism has emerged, and by
assessing the scope for future change, which
for Shiffrin is limited.
It is this last section, and especially chap-
ter 10, that contains the most innovative
aspects of the book. Shiffrin challenges the
idea that free speech has always received
(almost) absolute protection in the United
States, and shows how both liberal and con-
servative justices in the Supreme Court only
started to prioritise it over other values in the
1960s, and did so for very different reasons
(including a commitment to civil rights, state
neutrality and equality, in the case of the for-
mer, and the endorsement of originalism and
of traditional values and hierarchies, in the
case of the latter).
Perhaps, the book would have benefitted
from a more robust theoretical framework. It
would have been useful to understand, for
example, whether and how the analysis con-
ducted by Shiffrin could help us to revisit, and
perhaps improve, the major arguments for
freedom of speech (from truth, autonomy and
democracy). Furthermore, the discussion of
religious freedom in chapter 9 could have
been accompanied by a clearer analysis of the
distinction between freedom of religion and
freedom of speech, and of the potential ten-
sions between the two. Regardless of these
minor flaws, however, this is a terrific book
that will have a long-standing impact on the
study of the First Amendment in legal and
political theory.
Matteo Bonotti
(Cardiff University)
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929917720418
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
The Oxford Handbook of American Political
Development by Richard M Valelly, Suzanne
Mettler and Robert C Lieberman (eds).
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 773pp.,
£95.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780199697915
As a subfield, American Political Development
(APD) has long been easy to identify but hard
to pin down – as much a mood as a method or
body of theory. This handbook captures APD
in its various methods, theories and moods.
Some fine essays deal with longstanding APD
preoccupations, above all the development of
the American federal administrative state, the
constitution and impact of racial divides and
social policies. Many of the other chapters
push out into newer areas such as identity, sex-
uality, the carceral state and the family, where
APD can bring empirical scholarship to areas
occupied largely by theorists. Along the way,
the reader will see the development of an APD
canon and the ways in which it has shaped the
field and its debates.
Part I presents the theoretical ideas associ-
ated with APD and its relationship to adjacent
fields such as history and comparative politics.
Part II looks at institutions, an area where APD
has been a valuable corrective and interlocutor
for an often ahistorical and decontextualised
US political science. Part III discusses state–
society relations in areas such as interest
groups, parties and elections. Part IV then looks
at APD insights into topics to do with status and
social regulation.
Notably, it is in Part IV, and not in the parts
concerned with ostensibly harder topics such as
political institutions or interest groups, that we
find the extended discussions of issues such as
the carceral state, the army, Indian removal and
policing. The discussion of these topics in Part
IV sheds new light on APD classics, for exam-
ple, all the writings about the administrative
state that ignore the coercive functions of the
federal government and all the writings about
the federal government that omit the military.
The weakest chapters are those, mostly in
part I, which try to spell out a distinctive set of
APD theories and concepts. They fail to make
the case for APD exceptionalism. Instead, they
tend to look like hazier versions of theories in
comparative politics. APD was born in close
dialogue with comparative politics scholarship.
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