The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown rapidly in recent decades, but as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. Covering the early nineteenth century to the present, The Unsustainable American State offers an unsettling account of the dysfunctionalities that accelerated the erosion of American state capacity in the post-1970s era: persistent racial division, growing economic inequality, democratic decline, and imperial overreach.

Lawrence Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He also is a professor in the University of Minnesota's Department of Political Science.
Desmond King is the Andrew Mellon Professor of American Government and Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford University and a Fellow of the British Academy.

• Acknowledgements


• List of Contributors


• Part 1. The Strains of Governance


• 1.: The Political Crisis of the American State: The Unsustainable State in a Time of Unraveling by Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King


• 2.: Is Inequality a Threat to Democracy? by John Ferejohn


• Part 2. From Nineteenth CenturyLegacies to Twentieth Century Orthodoxy


• 3.: The Resilient Power of the States Across the Long Nineteenth Century: An Inquiry into a Pattern of American Governance by Gary Gerstle


• 4.: The First New Federalism and the Development of the Modern American State: Patchwork, Reconstitution or Transition? by Kimberley S Johnson


• 5.: The Missing State in Postwar American Political Thought by Desmond King and Marc Stears


• Part 3. The Modern American State


• 6.: No Class War: Economic Inequality and the American Public by Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs


• 7.: Economic Inequality and Political Representation by Larry Bartels


• 8.: Promoting Inequality: The Politics of Higher Education Policy in an Era of Conservative Governance by Suzanne Mettler


• 9.: Moving Feminist Activists Inside the American State: The Rise of a State Movement Intersection and its Effects on State Policy by Lee Ann Banaszak


• 10.: From Kanye West to Barack Obama: Black Youth, the State and Political Alienation by Cathy J. Cohen


• Part 4. The Inherited State Moving Forward


• 11.: American State Building: The Theoretical Challenge by Desmond King and Robert Lieberman.


• 12.: A Historian's Reflection on the Unsustainable American State by Liz Cohen


• 13.: Taking Stock by Stephen Skowronek