The State that Anti-Statism Built: Exploring the Metapolitics of Postwar Education
Friday, October 14th | 10:30 am - 12:20 pm
The Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center

Abstract: States make war and wars make states through the organization, financial, and cultural legacies of social mobilization for conflict.  But in the wake of the Second World War, this familiar process unfolded in an American political climate that was decidedly anti-statist.  A hot war against Nazism was followed by a Cold War against communism, both discrediting projects of programmatic and bureaucratic expansion.  But new state capacities, notably the agencies of the national security state, and new state programs were established based on governing arrangements that incorporated private organizations – firms and nonprofits of all varieties – in novel ways.  The non-Weberian decoupling of program authorization from funding from organizational capacity profoundly altered important sectors of the economy and society, including education at all levels. What had been a sector characterized by a mix of local, state, and private (both secular and religious) organizations was infused with new federal funding and mandates.  The expansion of the federal presence was met with an intensified mobilization of private efforts, both philanthropic and religious.  Traced through distinctive strategies of archival research, these episodes exemplify the “metapolitics” of political development in which the horizon of the possible is both contested and transformed. 

Bio: Dr. Elisabeth S. Clemens is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago as well as a former Master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division. Her research explores the role of social movements and organizational innovation in political change. Clemens' first book, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925 (Chicago, 1997), received best book awards in both organizational sociology and political sociology. She is also co-editor of Private Action and the Public Good (Yale, 1998), Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology (Duke, 2005), Politics and Partnerships: Voluntary Associations in America's Past and Present (Chicago, 2010). Her recent awards-winning book, Civic Gifts:  Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State (Chicago 2020), traces the tense but powerful entanglements of benevolence and liberalism in American political development.