LEGACIES OF SLAVERY?:
RACE AND HISTORICAL CAUSATION IN
AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
Robert C. Lieberman
Columbia University
School of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University
420 West 118th Street
New York, NY 10025
(212) 854-4725
Fax: (212) 854-4782
RCL15@COLUMBIA .EDU
Draft
November 2005
LEGACIES OF SLAVERY ?:
RACE AND HISTORICAL CAUSATION IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
William Faulkner (1951, 92)
“Southern conservatism,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal (1944, 441) in the 1940s, “is ‘reactionary’ in
the literal sense of the word. It has preserved an ideological allegiance not only to status quo, but to
status quo ante. The region is still carrying the heritage of slavery.” Myrdal’s immensely influential
interpretation of race in American society and politics illustrates the power that the “legacy of
slavery” idea holds in American life, both as a rhetorical device and as an analytical lens through
which to view racial inequality in the United States. Since Myrdal, it has become commonplace to
observe that race is deeply embedded in American history. Even before the national history of the
United States began, encounters among groups that were (or came to be) defined by racial difference
were central to the development of the nation’s politics, society, and economy. European settlers
arriving on North American shores beginning in the seventeenth century found a continent
inhabited by aboriginal peoples. Within a dozen years of the first permanent European settlement,
the first African slaves arrived in Virginia. Over the subsequent centuries, immigrants from Asia and
Latin America joined Europeans in the United States. What emerged from this history was a society
in which “whiteness” conferred unique status, authority, and privilege. Punctuating this race-based
hierarchy was the forcible migration and enslavement of Africans and their descendants (Morgan
1975; Fields 1982; Holt 1995; Williams 2003).
Four centuries later, the imprint of this history remains. Nearly a century and a half after the
end of the Civil War, the American racial and ethnic hierarchy is largely intact, with whites at the top
and other groups arrayed in varying relations to whiteness either as subordinates or outsiders (Kim
1999; King 2005). Despite the civil rights revolution of the second half of the twentieth century that
outlawed racial discrimination, ended formal state-sponsored segregation, and undermined to some
degree the racism that has long pervaded the American political tradition, the incorporation of
African-Americans into American life remains uneven at best (Smith 1997; Horton 2005;
Hochschild 1999). Although black Americans have made great progress in closing the
socioeconomic and political gaps that have long separated them from whites, profound inequalities
remain across a variety of realms — education, housing, income, wealth, employment, and political
empowerment, to name but a few (Jencks and Phillips 1998; Massey and Denton 1993; Oliver and
Shapiro 1995; Conley 1999; Harris, Sinclair-Chapman, and McKenzie 2006). Moreover, racial
conflict and inequality underscore many of the most pressing debates in contemporary American
politics — the imagery of poor black residents of New Orleans left behind in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina, for instance, or the gathering debate over the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, key
provisions of which are scheduled to expire in 2007.
These apparent continuities between past domination and present inequality have given rise
to commonplace arguments about the legacy of slavery, centered on the claim that the existence of
race-based slavery in the increasingly distant past is a principal barrier to African-American
achievement today. The imagery of slavery’s legacy has a long and distinguished tradition in
Western culture. The memory of slavery and redemption in Egypt is a central theme in Jewish
tradition, and is the subject of frequent liturgical references. In the Haggadah, the core text of the
Passover ritual, the narration of the Exodus begins, “We” — not our ancestors, but we ourselves —
“were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.” Later it invokes the biblical commandment to explain to one’s
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children that we celebrate Passover “because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from
Egypt,” and the Talmud, interpreting this passage, instructs that “every person in every generation
must regard himself as if he himself had gone out of Egypt” (Exod. 13:8; Pesachim 10:5;
Rosenzweig 1953, 319-21; Lieberman 1998, 231-34). This is not, of course, literally true; no Jew
today was actually enslaved in Egypt millennia ago. Moreover, the Israelite sojourn in Egypt was
already in the distant past to the medieval rabbis who compiled the Haggadah. But in Jewish
tradition, the trope of slavery plays a powerful role in defining a historical, political, and theological
tradition. In other traditions as well, the Exodus resonates as a narrative of political and spiritual
liberation — notably in the African-American tradition, in which the rhetoric and imagery of the
escape from bondage and the lure of the Promised Land resonate with particular clarity (Walzer
1985).
Similar rhetorical claims about an unmediated link between past and present appear in
discussions of race in the contemporary United States as well. “As much as anything, being ‘black’
in America bears the mark of slavery,” wrote Andrew Hacker (1992, 14) in the present tense one
hundred twenty-nine years after the Emancipation Proclamation. “And in our own time,” he
continued, “must it be admitted at the close of the twentieth century, that residues of slavery
continue to exist? The answer is obviously yes.” For Derrick Bell (1992, 3, 12), writing in the same
year, the past was equally present in the present, although the legacy of slavery was as much one of
uplift as despair: “The fact of slavery refuses to fade, along with the deeply embedded personal
attitudes and public policy assumptions that supported it for so long.” Nevertheless, “we must see
this country’s history of slavery, not as an insuperable racial barrier to blacks, but as a legacy of
enlightenment from our enslaved forebears reminding us that if they survived the ultimate form of
racism, we . . . can at least view racial oppression in its many contemporary forms without
underestimating its critical importance and likely permanent status in this country.”
But claims about the legacy of slavery come in material as well as metaphorical variants. In
the wake of recent reparations paid by states to those they wronged — by the German government
to survivors of the Holocaust, for example, or by the United States to its own citizens of Japanese
descent who were interned during World War II — the call for reparations to descendants of slaves
based on a notion of historical culpability and the legacy of past oppression has increased in recent
years (Robinson 2000; Balfour 2003; Brooks 2004). As critics of reparations are quick to point out,
however, reparations for slavery would give benefits not to people who were themselves victims of
state-sponsored racial oppression by a previous regime but to their descendants, who may be
systematically disadvantaged within their society but whose disadvantages may (or may not) not stem
from the direct effects of past oppression. This debate directly invokes the question of slavery’s
legacy: to what degree and how is past state-imposed racial domination causally connected to
present-day racial inequality?
Such claims and questions, moreover, about the long causal reach of histories of racial
domination are not restricted to the United States. Parallel arguments about the legacy of
colonialism in Europe are common. “It is none too difficult,” writes the French philosopher
Etienne Balibar (1991, 41-42), “to discover [the] ubiquitous effects” of colonialism, both because
“neo-colonialism is a solid reality which we cannot simply ignore,” and “because the privileged
‘objects’ of present-day racism — the workers and their families who come from former French
colonies — appear as the result of colonization and decolonization and thus succeed in
concentrating upon themselves both the continuation of imperial scorn and the resentment that is
faced by the citizens of a fallen power.” These arguments focus particularly on the effects of
institutions and practices of colonial rule on contemporary patterns of racial and ethnic inequality
and policies to address them. In the case of Britain, for example, this argument usually connects
historical structures of indirect colonial rule, which recognized native groups in the colonies and
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retained and co-opted native leadership, with present-day pluralism and multiculturalism. In the
contrasting case of France, direct colonial rule, in which French administration replaced native elites,
is seen as the precursor to more assimilationist approaches to the modern challenges of ethnic and
racial diversity (Katznelson 1976; Favell 1998; Joppke 1999. For a summary of these arguments, see
Bleich 2005. On parallels between slavery and colonialism as forms of racial rule, see Lieberman
2005). These accounts similarly posit a causal connection between historical patterns of racial rule
and contemporary political arrangements and outcomes. And in both their American and
comparative variants, these arguments commit the same post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: if
configurations of race relations and racial hierarchy resemble one another in the same country at two
distinct historical moments, the earlier pattern must be the cause of the later one.
I begin the remainder of this essay by assessing past attempts both to assert and to refute the
importance of legacy of slavery in American politics, as well as parallel attempts to discern legacies
of other forms of racial rule. Although diametrically opposed in their conclusions, neither the
legacies nor anti-legacies camps offers a convincing account of the causal mechanisms that might
potentially carry forward the legacies of slavery or colonialism to affect later political development.
Legacies arguments generally take the problem of causal mechanisms more seriously, although they
diverge widely in the kinds of mechanisms they adduce in making causal claims. I then offer an
alternative analytical framework for assessing legacy (and anti-legacy) claims, drawing on a
theoretical perspective that emphasizes ways in which racial conflict can be constitutive of political
institutions and coalition-building processes. Using this analytical perspective, I show how
institutionalized legacies of slavery and colonialism shaped the emergent welfare states of the United
States and Great Britain in the early twentieth century, and contrast those cases with that of France,
whose imperial legacy was less influential in shaping early social politics. I conclude with some
observations about the importance of understanding causal mechanisms for arguments about
historical restitution and transitional justice.
LEGACIES AND MECHANISMS
Myrdal’s mechanism for the transmission of slavery’s legacy is essentially psychological.
Slavery, he argued, was supported by an elaborate political and social theory — “the most
uncompromising conservative political philosophy which ever developed in Western civilization
after the Enlightenment,” he called it — in which black slavery was a necessary part of a hierarchical
social order that held whites to be politically, if not socially and economically, equal to each other
(Myrdal 1944, 441. See also Fitzhugh [1857] 1960; Hartz 1955; Morgan 1975). This hierarchical
social theory, in which groups were deemed inherently unequal in social and political status,
persisted after the Civil War and Reconstruction to shape American social beliefs and politics (see
Weber 1946). They persisted in the deep Southern commitment to white supremacy and black
disenfranchisement, the iconography of the Lost Cause, and the traditional historiography of
Reconstruction, which emphasized the atrocities and venality of the Northern occupiers along with
the incapacity of African-Americans (Myrdal 1944, 444-54; Foner 1988, xix-xxiv; Du Bois 1935, 71127).1 For Myrdal, these atavistic beliefs clashed with the universal American Creed of liberty and
equality, producing the peculiar “American dilemma.”
Thus for Myrdal the legacy of slavery resided, above all, in the psychological dissonance
produced by the conflict between egalitarian beliefs on the one hand and racial prejudice and racist
practices on the other. This clash of beliefs afflicted both individual Americans and the collectivity
of American whites who believed both in the American Creed and in the subjugation of AfricanAmericans, a contradiction he believed would eventually be resolved in favor of liberty and equality
(with a little push from social engineers — he was a Swede, after all). The psychological
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interpretation of legacies is not limited to the American case. E. J. B. Rose’s (1969, esp. 3-6, 10-11)
magisterial survey of British race relations, explicitly modeled on Myrdal’s American study, identified
a corresponding “British dilemma” in the tension between liberal ideals and racist practices arising
out of colonial domination (although Rose was quite caustic about the apparent abandonment of the
ideals in the late 1960s).2 Similarly, this tension between ideals and practices, particularly arising out
of the history of colonization, is a common theme of French studies of racism (in keeping with the
common French approach to race, which focuses on “racism” as a cast of mind rather than “race
relations” as a problem of social relations) (Silverman 1992; Bleich 2003).
But while Myrdal’s argument pinpoints the central dilemma of liberal, multiracial societies, it
does not do justice to the multiple traditions that have contributed to definitions of national
membership in all of these societies. As Rogers Smith (1997) has shown, Myrdal obscures the
multiple political traditions that have contended for primacy in those struggles, particularly the
tradition of “ascriptive Americanism,” which seeks to define membership in the American
community in exclusive racial, ethnic, and gendered terms. Rather than representing aberrant
deviations from a dominant American Creed, racially exclusive beliefs and policies have long been
part of the American political tradition, from slavery on forward. Moreover, such essentialist
definitions of national membership are hardly limited to the United States; they have played starring
roles on the British and French stages as well (Birnbaum 1993; Lebovics 1992; Rich 1991; Kidd
1999).
Furthermore, this approach is generally silent on the role of politics, and particularly of the
organization of political power, in perpetuating racial hierarchy. By interpreting political struggles
over the definition of citizenship as symptom rather than cause, the Myrdalian approach obscures
the role that politics as usual can play in keeping racial hierarchy alive. As Jennifer Hochschild
(1984) shows in the American case, the commonplace tools of liberal democratic policymaking —
incrementalism and popular control — actually impeded rather than advancing the cause of school
desegregation, casting severe doubt both on Myrdal’s analysis of the weight of the past and on his
optimistic assessment of the possibilities of liberal democracy to shed that weight (Katznelson 1971,
1972).
Another interpretation of the legacy of slavery is sociological. In his Labor Department
report of 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously described what he saw as the deteriorating
structure of the African-American family, leaving it mired in a “tangle of pathology” (U.S.
Department of Labor 1965). For Moynihan the roots of this sociological phenomenon were directly
traceable to the particular conditions of slavery in the South, such as the nonrecognition of
marriages between slaves and the prospects of family breakup by the sale of spouses and children.
Moynihan’s appropriation of history in advancing this claim is highly dubious. He relies on Frank
Tannenbaum’s (1946) questionable argument about the differences between American and Brazilian
slavery, although he does not cite Tannenbaum directly (and misstates the date of his book, Slave and
Citizen, in his one mention of Tannenbaum in the report). Instead, he quotes extensively from
Nathan Glazer’s gloss on Tannenbaum in Glazer’s introduction to the 1963 edition of Stanley
Elkins’s Slavery (1963, ix-xii). He also relies on Elkins’s research but rather similarly cites Thomas
Pettigrew’s (1964, 13-14) one-paragraph summary of Elkins, in A Profile of the Negro American, rather
than Elkins himself (see also Marx 1998, 48-64; Scott 1997, 150-55). Consequently, it is hard to take
the historical dimensions of Moynihan’s argument seriously, even though his statistical portrait of
the deterioration of African-American family life is genuinely alarming.
An even more extreme version of the sociological approach is Emmanuel Todd’s (1991,
162-73; 1994) highly deterministic argument about the impact of family structure on the prospects
for the assimilation of ethnic and racial minorities in France and elsewhere. European societies such
as Italy, Spain, and Portugal, he argues, share with France a basically bilateral or symmetrical (giving
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equal weight to maternal and paternal lines) and exogamous family structure. Immigrants from
these countries therefore were able to enter French society relatively easily and seamlessly through
intermarriage, leading to assimilation. More recent immigrants from North Africa, where the
dominant family structure is patrilineal and endogamous, find themselves unable to assimilate
because of the clash of family cultures, which inhibited assimilation through intermarriage —
parallel, he suggests, to the process that has produced high levels of black-white segregation in the
United States.3
In the immediate aftermath of the report, Moynihan’s potted history of the black family
came under withering scrutiny, suggesting that the hundred-year link between slavery and the urban
crisis of the 1960s was rather more complex than he supposed. 4 Similarly, Todd’s approach has
been criticized as fundamentally ahistorical, built on a static and essentialist view of French national
identity that does not sufficiently consider how that identity might itself change in the encounter
with others (Noiriel 1996, 39-41).5 Moreover, these versions of the sociological approach are too
quick to take resemblances between slave or colonial social structures and contemporary ones as
evidence of a direct, unbroken link, and hence a causal connection, through time, between past and
present. In so doing, they, like Myrdal’s psychological interpretation, sidestep the role of other
important social forces — economic change, political processes, and public policy, for example — in
creating and reinforcing patterns of racial distinction and inequality (see, for example, Jackson 1985;
Wilson 1987; Sugrue 1996). It is at least arguable, if not probable, that these forces have helped to
construct and maintain minority family structure in these societies, rather than the other way around.
A third interpretation of the legacy of slavery is economic. The sociologist Dalton Conley
(1999) has argued that the most important indicator of racial inequality is not income or
employment or even education, but wealth. Conley shows, in fact, that discrepancies in family assets
and inherited wealth account for much of the inequality between blacks and whites across a wide
range of outcomes, including jobs, earnings, housing, and even family structure and related behavior
such as premarital childbearing. Because family wealth is so closely linked to life chances and
socioeconomic position, the heritability of wealth is a plausible mechanism that might be responsible
for the transmission of the inequalities of slavery forward in time. In the immediate aftermath of the
Civil War, the federal government possessed substantial amounts of land in the South that had been
confiscated from white landholders in the course of the war. In January 1865, General William
Tecumseh Sherman, who oversaw some of this land, issued his Special Field Order 15, which
granted forty acres of land to newly freed black families on the coastal islands of Georgia (Oubre
1978; Foner 1988, 153-70). Sherman’s army also distributed surplus mules, giving rise to the slogan,
“forty acres and a mule,” as an emblem of Reconstruction’s potential to provide opportunity to
nearly four million former slaves. Several months later, the federal government created the Bureau
of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (known as the Freedmen’s Bureau), to take custody
of this land and oversee its distribution to the freed slaves. This ambitious program of land reform
did not happen for a number of reasons, but it is not far-fetched, for example, to imagine that if
Reconstruction had achieved a more thoroughgoing redistribution of land in the South the
contemporary racial landscape in the United States would look very different (see Conley 2002).
More recently, historians studying postemancipation societies have brought political
struggles front and center in accounts of the transition from slavery to freedom, particularly focusing
attention on the role of former slaves themselves in mounting collective action in pursuit of the
rights of citizenship (Foner 1988; Fredrickson 1981, 1995; Marx 1998; Holt 1992; Dubois 2004).
Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott (2000) have documented struggles for
citizenship after emancipation in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, focusing particularly
on labor participation and political activity, ranging from voting and political party activity to
rebellion and revolution. In these studies they emphasize the way political and economic conflicts in
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the immediate wake of emancipation shaped evolving categories of both citizenship and race and the
terms on which former slaves were incorporated into postemancipation societies, and they
demonstrate how different political contexts profoundly shaped postemancipation outcomes. This
more explicitly political and historical approach, while not ignoring the attitudinal and sociological
concerns of earlier studies, goes well beyond them in pointing to concrete mechanisms by which
slavery leaves its mark when former slaves and transforming societies encounter each other.
CONTINUITY OR DISCONTINUITY?: LEGACIES AND INTENTIONALITY
An alternative set of arguments minimizes the causal importance of legacies of slavery,
colonialism, or other forms of racial rule. “Past and present one and the same?,” scoff Stephan and
Abigail Thernstrom (1997, 26, 50-52). “An odd denial of historical change, it seems to us.” They go
on to dismiss legacy arguments as resolutely as others embrace them, arguing instead that the rights
revolution of last half-century has obliterated all but the merest traces of the inequalities of slavery.
Although the Thernstroms recognize that the effects of racial discrimination that carried over from
the slavery era continued to shape racial inequality through much of the twentieth century, they
argue that the events of the 1950s and 1960s — the end of school segregation, the dismantling of
Jim Crow, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts – effectively wiped away those historical effects.
In essence, they posit a historical rupture that separates, roughly speaking, pre-1954 from post-1965
race relations in the United States, as if those two eras overlapped not at all in their social, economic,
or political milieus. But their account of a historical break falsely presumes that end of one element
of the pre-civil rights racial structure — explicit, state-sanctioned segregation — entailed the total
destruction of the prevailing order, preparing the ground for construction of a new one. The
Thernstroms’ argument is an improvement, perhaps, on the ahistorical claims of Hacker and Bell,
but it leaves them at something of a loss to explain the stubborn persistence of racial conflict and
inequality in certain realms of American society and politics (which they attribute to the perverse
effects of affirmative action and other race-conscious policies that followed the putatively colorblind antidiscrimination approach of the Civil Rights Act) (Hochschild 1999; Hirschman 1991;
Brown et al. 2003).
The economist Thomas Sowell (1978, 1994) similarly proposes a historical chasm across
which no causal effects of slavery could leap. For Sowell, the “legacy of slavery” is nothing but a
rhetorical crutch on which African-Americans (particularly those who live in impoverished and
isolated inner cities) and their intellectual apologists lean to excuse all manner of violent, criminal,
and otherwise antisocial behavior, such as dropping out of school and not working steadily.
Although he denies repeatedly and strenuously that the “legacy of slavery” exists as a causal
underpinning of contemporary inequality, he implicitly acknowledges the potential causal weight of
history by contrasting former slaves and their descendants with both free blacks and West Indian
immigrants, who are presumably equally subject to racism based on skin color but who have fared
better in the political economy. He concedes that slavery placed African-Americans at a social and
economic disadvantage, leaving them uneducated and without the stable family and neighborhood
structures that might have been conducive to economic progress. After emancipation, however,
former slaves quickly acquired literacy and developed more stable family structures, severing them
from any potential legacy of slavery and giving them, in effect a clean historical slate. From the
comparison he concludes that African-Americans in the twentieth century developed a group culture
inimical to education and economic achievement and that it is this latter-day self-imposed cultural
deficiency that accounts for poor economic performance. Winston James (2002), however, has
shown that Sowell’s comparative claims, particularly about West Indians, do not sustain this
conclusion because Sowell ignores important differences in the social and economic starting point of
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West Indian immigrants in the early twentieth century. William Julius Wilson (1996), moreover, has
shown that the behavior of urban blacks is an adaptive response to changing structural conditions in
postindustrial cities than a marker of cultural deviance. Most important, like the Thernstroms,
Sowell selectively uses one or two indicators to argue that an entire political, social, and economic
system came to an abrupt and complete end, thereby denying an entire range of plausible
mechanisms of historical causality.
Some arguments about the pre-civil rights era offer similar causal synecdoche, using a single
causal thread to stand in for a whole system of potential causal mechanism. Many scholars have
argued, for example, that race-laden political arrangements affected the Social Security Act of 1935,
providing the political impetus for the exclusion of agricultural workers and domestic servants —
accounting for a majority of the country’s African-American work force — from Social Security and
the radical decentralization of public assistance programs, all but inviting racial discrimination
(Quadagno 1994; Lieberman 1998; Brown 1999; Poole forthcoming). But Gareth Davies and
Martha Derthick (1997) reject such arguments about the influence of past (and even
contemporaneous) racial disadvantage on the grounds that there is no smoking gun in the historical
record — little evidence that the political actors consciously intended to discriminate when they
took those decisions. They argue instead that these racially exclusionary policy instruments had
different causes, particularly worries about the administrative infeasibility of collecting payroll taxes
from farm workers and household employees. Daniel Béland (2005, 88-91, 96) dismisses the
legacies argument on similar grounds, arguing that the political forces aligned with racial domination
in the United States, particularly powerful Southerners in Congress, were not influential in shaping
this particular aspect of the policy.
In refuting the claim about the links between forms of British and French colonialism and
contemporary integration policies, Erik Bleich (2005) offers the most sophisticated version of this
argument. Drawing on arguments by Gary Freeman (1979) and Didier Lapeyronnie (1993), Bleich
clearly and decisively exposes the flaws in the historical accounts at both ends of this story: British
and French colonial practices each involved a mixture of direct and indirect rule, and British and
French policymakers drew on a variety of sources and motives when devising integration policies in
the twentieth century. In revealing these lacunae in the prevailing wisdom, however, Bleich also falls
back on the same evidentiary standard for rejecting the hypothesis of historical influence, the
absence of explicit evidence of intentionality. Taken together, these works hew to a fairly thin
notion of historical causality, in which only a single causal hypothesis is effectively tested. When the
evidence does not sustain the particular hypothesis, these authors then prematurely reject other
specifications of a legacy argument that are motored by different mechanisms. Although they do
not make the historical rupture case as explicitly as the Thernstroms or Sowell, their claims amount
to the same thing: the absence of racial intentions, in effect, indicates that racial policymaking is on a
new footing regardless of past arrangements.
In a particularly tendentious version of the particular claim that race did not influence the
Social Security Act, Larry DeWitt (2004, 42, emphasis added) inadvertently reveals the fallacy of the
intentionality argument and, by extension, of most anti-legacy arguments. “Rather than presuming
racist motives without evidence,” he writes, “it is more plausible, and more in keeping with the
evidence of record, to believe that the members of Congress (of both parties and all regions)
supported these exclusions simply because they saw an opportunity to lessen the political risks to
themselves.”6 DeWitt hits the nail on the head in pointing to the political opportunities available to
policymakers. But he does not say what those political opportunities were, where they came from,
or what risks policymakers might have faced had they not excluded farm workers and servants from
coverage. Such opportunities and risks are a function of political and institutional contexts in which
purposive and strategic political actors pursue their goals. Institutional contexts entail formal rules
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and organizations of governance and from taken-for-granted understandings of the political world
that frame the articulation of interests and influence political behavior (Thelen and Steinmo 1992;
Hall and Taylor 1996; Immergut 1998). If these institutions systematically privilege one group over
another, whether through the allocation of power or shared beliefs, then conscious intentions are
not a necessary condition for political outcomes that reinforce or amplify inequality between groups.
Racial inequality might, in other words, be built into political arrangements.
Anti-legacy arguments tend not to state explicit assumptions about the goals and motivations
that underlie the behavior of policymakers, nor do they take seriously the ways in which institutional
contexts shape the political opportunities available to policymakers to pursue those goals. To the
extent that they make implicit claims about policymakers’ goals, they tend to capture only a small
part of a full account and consequently fail to probe either the nature of the political opportunities
that strategic actors exploit or the political risks they face. DeWitt (2004, 42), for example, suggests
fleetingly that members of Congress were motivated to exclude agricultural and domestic employees
from Social Security because they were reluctant to impose additional taxes on their constituents.
This is certainly a reasonable assumption — no elected official wants to impose visible costs on his
constituents, especially when the benefits associated with those costs are deferred far into the future
— although it does not explain why they were willing to adopt the program, which created a system
of individual taxation more extensive and intrusive than any before it (Arnold 1990). Another
favorite, equally partial assumption of anti-legacy arguments is that policymakers were motivated by
the demands of administrative efficiency in excluding farm and domestic workers, although there is
little evidence to suggest that efficiency has ever been an overriding criterion for policymakers in
constructing government agencies (and there is ample reason to believe that administrative
inefficiency is, in fact, functional for legislators) (Moe 1989; Lewis 2003; Fiorina 1977). Most
important, these arguments tend to ignore the electoral setting of democratic policy, which coexists,
to be sure, with other motivations but remains a paramount underlying goal (the locus classicus is
Mayhew 1974; but see also Fenno 1973; Arnold 1990; Mayhew 2000).
These limitations of the intentionality argument are indicative of a larger fallacy that is
characteristic of the historical rupture claims of anti-legacies argument. This approach tends to
assume, at least implicitly, that political arrangements constitute highly coherent, internally
consistent, stable, and self-reinforcing orders that succeed one another more or less without overlap,
interrupted by moments of sweeping change (Ackerman 1991; Plotke 1996; Baumgartner and Jones
1993). But more recent theorizing about the temporal dimensions of politics and processes of
political development has suggested that political change rarely, if ever, occurs this way. Politics, this
perspective suggests, never happens on a clean slate. Rather, the political moments and outcomes
are situated simultaneously in multiple institutional orders and ideological traditions, each with its
own internal logic and pace (Lieberman 2002; Orren and Skowronek 2004). Thus change in one
institutional or ideological domain is not necessarily linked to change in others and the complete
transformation of political arrangements, in which an old order is thrown overboard and an entirely
new one created, is unlikely. As Tocqueville (1955) pointed out, even the French Revolution did not
accomplish as much. Rather, elements of old patterns tend to mingle with new ones. Consequently,
cross-sectional analyses that draw short time horizons around both causes and outcomes and focus
on contemporaneous factors, such as the presence or absence of racial intentions at the moment of
a policy decision, tend to be biased in favor of “discovering” historical discontinuities because they
ignore longer-term political processes (Pierson 2004, chap. 3). Thus even in a policymaking episode
when racial intentions do not appear as an explicit factor, long-run power arrangements and
ideological routines that systematically affect African-Americans differently from whites (whether to
their advantage or disadvantage) may be at work.
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These considerations suggest that patterns of race policy and racial inequality are, to a large
degree, path-dependent. By “path-dependent,” I mean not just that outcomes tend to repeat
themselves but that outcomes at any one moment depend , at least in part, on self-reinforcing
process and patterns of positive feedback that are themselves the products of earlier events or
decisions. As Paul Pierson (2004, 10-11) and others have shown, path dependence is especially
effective at accounting for what Pierson calls “the powerful inertia or ‘stickiness’ that characterizes
many aspects of political development — for instance, the enduring consequences that often stem
from the emergence of particular institutional arrangements” (see also Thelen 1999, Mahoney 2000).
But as Kathleen Thelen (2004, 25-30) has argued, the notion of path dependence has led to accounts
of institutional change that emphasize historical ruptures of the kind that characterize anti-legacy
arguments because absent such discontinuities or shocks from outside the system, significant change
is hard to explain (Lieberman 2002).
Alternative accounts of political change, however, are emerging that emphasize mechanisms
that do not depend on such radical discontinuity or punctuation. In her study of the evolution of
vocational training policies in four countries, Thelen (2004) highlights two specific alternative
mechanisms of institutional change. One is “layering,” in which new institutions do not replace old
ones but rather are simply piled on top (see also Tulis 1987; Schickler 2001). Another is
“conversion,” in which existing institutions adapt to new circumstances by altering their goals or
incorporating new actors. Building on Thelen’s account, Jacob Hacker (2004, 246-49) adds a third
mechanism of institutional change in the absence of discontinuity, “drift,” in which outcomes
change gradually without corresponding institutional change, often because of changes in the
underlying social or economic context. These mechanisms suggest that change and continuity can
coexist, that change in one component of an institutional “order” does not imply a complete break
with the past. Thus, they suggest a number of ways in which legacies of past racial oppression might
be carried forward even if some elements of the system of racial domination are not visibly present
in the historical record at the moment in question.
FINDING LEGACIES: TWO HYPOTHESES
These alternative theoretical approaches to the question of the causal importance of
historical legacies suggest contrasting empirical implications, although not the implications to which
anti-legacy arguments usually (and mistakenly) point. First, consider the matter of racial intentions
as a causal factor. Davies and Derthick, for example, show that explicit racial intentions are not a
necessary condition for a policy decision or other political event to have deleterious racial
consequences. But it does not follow logically that because racial intentions may have been absent,
any racial effects that follow are merely incidental consequences of some other race-neutral factor.
Nor does it follow that the presence of racial motives necessarily establishes a causal connection
between a past order and future consequences. Depending on the historical circumstances, racial
motives might act to accelerate change or to consolidate developments occurring for other reasons;
they need not always be vestiges of an old order (Marx 1998; Lieberman 2003). Analytically, then,
racial intentions seem to be neither necessary nor sufficient to establish a causal relationship between
past structures of racial inequality and subsequent outcomes. Thus it is unclear how to construct a
testable hypothesis about the relationship between racial motives and racial outcomes. Empirically,
in any event, racial motives are often too mixed and ambiguous to make a clear argument.
But as I have argued, arguments about racial intentions are generally stand-ins for more
comprehensive claims about historical discontinuities between past and present, and these claims are
more readily testable. At the limit, of course, it would be impossible to prove comprehensively a
claim about a complete historical rupture in which no traces of past orders remain, which has in any
10
case probably never occurred. But the question is not whether there are any remnants at all but
whether there are any that might plausibly be causally connected to some present or future outcome.
Constructing hypotheses about such plausible connections requires specifying some underlying
theoretical framework for the event under consideration — in the case of the Social Security Act,
because the event in question is a policy enactment one would need to stipulate a theory (or
theories) of policymaking that mobilizes one or more causal factors to explain policy outcomes. The
question then is whether those factors have changed significantly in ways that would be expected to
induce a change in outcome. If all of these causal elements have undergone significant change, then
it seems reasonable to infer that subsequent events are disconnected from historical legacies and
arise from a new set of causes.
In racial terms, the question is whether the prevailing racial order has changed. By “racial
orders” I mean, following Desmond King and Rogers Smith (2005, 75), political coalitions that bind
together purposive, power-seeking actors and institutions in contexts in which “racial concepts,
commitments, and aims” at least partially structure the political arrangements, norms, and taken-forgranted cultural understandings that “define the range of opportunities available to political actors.”
Thus the historical discontinuity hypothesis is at bottom a claim about racial orders, or racial
regimes: If an old racial order has been supplanted by a new one, changes in racial outcomes should
result. If, conversely, racial outcomes persist under a new racial order, then we must look elsewhere
— presumably either to intentions or happenstance — for the cause. In the case of Social Security,
then, to substantiate the historical discontinuity hypothesis we would have to observe that the
passage of Social Security, with its racially consequential provisions, coincided with or followed a
substantial change in the American racial order.
But because racial orders interact and overlap with other kinds of institutional and
ideological orders, their effects are often hidden from surface view. King and Smith (2005, 84-89)
show, for example, that racial orders had important, if unseen, consequences for a series of
important outcomes in American political development — the rise of bureaucratic autonomy, the
institutional evolution of Congress, and modern immigration policy — that are conventionally
understood in race-neutral terms. In other words, race need not be explicit to be a causal factor in
all manner of outcomes because it might be built into political arrangements in such a way that it
shapes actors’ understanding of their own interests and the political opportunities that they are able
to exploit in the service of those interests.
Racial orders, moreover, are not necessarily coherent and unified complexes of institutions,
ideologies, and actors. Rather, they themselves are composed of parts that do not always necessarily
hang together. These component parts of racial orders change at different paces, according to
different logics. Consequently, as King and Smith show, the “transformative egalitarian” and “white
supremacist” racial orders do not supplant one another in succession but rather coexist and contend
with one another on ever-shifting political terrain, with some elements constantly changing while
others remain stable. Only rarely if ever — and momentarily at that — does one of these
overarching orders dominate politics unambiguously enough that the racial content and motivations
of policymaking can be inferred in a straightforward way. At all other times, the racial content of
policymaking is more likely to be hidden in complex and contradictory forces. This perspective is
particularly amenable to understanding racial outcomes in terms of layering, conversion, or other
models of political change in which new and old elements intermingle to produce outcomes. The
racial orders perspective, then, provides the foundation for a hypothesis that links legacies of racial
domination to racial outcomes even in the absence of explicit discriminatory intent: If elements of
an old racial order persist, then racial outcomes consistent with that order will be more likely to
persist.
11
LEGACIES OF SLAVERY AND COLONIALISM IN WELFARE STATE BUILDING
Empirical studies of welfare-state formation and growth have begun to substantiate the
general claim that ethnic and racial heterogeneity inhibit the development of large and encompassing
welfare states (Wilensky 1975, 50-69; Noble 1997; Alesina and Glaeser 2004, Cutler and Johnson
2004). Here I look at three cases — the United States, Great Britain, and France — at somewhat
closer range, in order to examine the relationship between racial orders, political institutions, and
policy outcomes, particularly the construction of national welfare states in the early twentieth
century. In particular, parallel historical narrative accounts of national policymaking in these three
countries allows for a test of both the historical discontinuity and racial orders hypotheses and so for
a general assessment of arguments about the legacies of slavery and other forms of racial rule.
These three countries share important characteristics that make them suitable for such a
comparison. First, they were all racially heterogeneous societies at the time of the formation of
national welfare states. This is not necessarily an obvious point. While the United States has always
been a multiracial society, Britain and France are generally considered much more homogeneous.
But in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, both Britain and France ruled over large
multiracial empires that raised important questions about the boundaries of membership in British
and French society just as slavery and its aftermath raised questions about whether AfricanAmericans were full members of American society. The same question — who was and was not
entitled to full membership in society and on what terms — animated policy debates about emerging
national welfare states in this period as national political coalitions strove to construct social and
political solidarity across class lines without including suspect others in the benefits of social
protection (Marshall 1964; Baldwin 1990). Each of these countries faced, in some measure, the dual
challenge of appeasing or co-opting working-class political movements without capitulating to
socialism, on the one hand, and of protecting and extending systems of racial rule (whether in the
form of colonial empires or postemancipation structures of white supremacy) to which their
working classes were indifferent if not altogether hostile. These challenges evoked in broad terms
what the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1978, 102) has called “the strategy of the soft embrace,”
programs of meliorative social reform that had varying results depending on the breadth and
composition of the coalitions that were formed to pursue social reform.
Not only did the formative state building experiences of each of these countries occur in a
racially heterogeneous context, race and ethnicity have remained key lines of political division in
each over the course of the twentieth century. Finally, each of these three countries espoused some
version of liberal democratic values that entailed at least a rhetorical commitment to universal norms
of equality and inclusion. Racial minorities in each society were presumptive citizens, at least
nominally entitled to the full array of civil, political, and social rights available to full members of
their societies (although each country deviated from this ideal in significant ways). This stance
differentiated these countries from others that explicitly excluded nonwhites from social benefits in
the early twentieth century, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa (U.S. Social
Security Board 1937, table opposite p. 184).
Thus a crucial question in the politics of early twentieth-century social reform was the
relationship between race and class in the construction of reform coalitions: to what extent did the
imperatives of racial rule affect the class politics of social reform? How was the politics of welfare
state building, the construction of a means of social solidarity at home, connected to the process of
drawing race-based distinctions between those understood as full members of society and racially
defined others, either across or within national boundaries? The critical comparative axis for
assessing the continuities or discontinuities between past racial orders and welfare state building is
the process of coalition formation. Essential, in turn, to processes of coalition formation are
12
structures of national policymaking institutions through which these countries organized the exercise
of political power and consequently the means by which racial minorities came to be connected with
(or disconnected from) national politics and policy.
In each country, national institutional structures interacted with different forms of racial rule
to produce welfare policy outcomes that accommodated past patterns of race relations and
addressed the dual political imperatives of building solidaristic cross-class coalitions and maintaining
politically constructed racial hierarchies. In both the United States and Great Britain, the imperative
of white solidarity helped overcome class-based political conflict and was one of the central axes
around which early social politics revolved. In France, by contrast, the ambiguities of racial rule
helped forestall the formation of an effective coalition for national welfare policy (Marx 1998;
Lieberman 2003, 32). In each case, however, underlying racial patterns inherent in national politics
persisted and mapped directly onto policy developments in ways that support the historical
continuity hypothesis and expose the political mechanism by which legacies of slavery and
colonialism were transmitted through time. These outcomes, conversely, decisively falsify the
discontinuity hypothesis, suggesting by extension that anti-legacy arguments fail to explain the
persistence of racial inequalities in modern welfare states.
In the early twentieth century the three countries enacted different configurations of welfare
policies, constructing different rules for inclusion under the welfare state’s protective umbrella. The
United States in 1935 adopted a fragmented and limited set of national welfare policies: national oldage pensions for a restricted set of industrial and commercial workers, decentralized public
assistance programs for limited categories of poor people who were disconnected from the labor
market, and a hybrid system of unemployment insurance. The effect of these policies was to
severely limit minority access to the benefits and protections of the welfare state. In Britain, by
contrast, a series of enactments in the years before World War I constructed a much more
centralized and inclusionary welfare state: centralized national systems of old-age pensions,
unemployment and sickness insurance, and labor exchanges designed to limit unemployment.
Despite initial limits to the universality of these programs, both the intent and the effect of these
policies was to uproot the centuries-old Poor Law basis of the British welfare state and begin to
replace localized relief with national social rights for all British citizens (as distinct from colonial
subjects). In France, by contrast, the welfare policies that emerged in the early twentieth century
were neither administered nor financed by the national state. Rather, they were an extension of
older patterns of mutual societies organized around occupational, fraternal, religious, or other local
attachments. French social policy thus mirrored neither the broadly inclusive system of solidaristic
social citizenship of Britain nor the fragmented and structurally exclusionary American system. The
early French welfare state was, by contrast, comparatively race neutral.
Behind these divergent patterns of welfare-state inclusion lay national policymaking
processes that were formed around patterns of racial rule. In each case, moreover, key elements of
past racial orders remained in place during the period of critical social reform. In the United States,
the roots of this racial order lie in the aftermath of emancipation. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution made the newly freed slaves presumptive citizens, and
during Reconstruction and even for a decade or more after, African-Americans in the South
exercised their voting rights under the protection of the national Republican Party. Beginning in the
1890s, however, Republicans found that they could win national elections without competing for
Southern votes and they withdrew their support for black voting rights. Once this happened,
Southern whites were able to consolidate their power in the states by adopting new voting
restrictions and segregation laws that ushered in a period of black disenfranchisement and white
supremacy that lasted until the 1960s (Valelly 2004). These changes in Southern politics around the
turn of the twentieth century made the politics of race a crucial element of coalition building in
13
national politics. Southern whites were heavily overrepresented in Congress and the Electoral
College because African-Americans were now counted fully in apportioning seats in the House of
Representatives (a change from the three-fifths bonus they had under the Constitution before the
Civil War). The Solid South dominated the Democratic Party based on sheer numbers, seniority,
and rules such as the two-thirds majority required to get the party’s presidential nomination, while
the Republicans were increasingly indifferent or even hostile to the politically voiceless claims of
African-Americans. During the first third of the twentieth century, then, the politics of race shaped
the operation of the most basic institutions of American politics — the separation of powers,
federalism, the structure of representation, and the party system. Across a wide range of
institutional forums, the possibilities for coalition building were stacked against African-Americans.
With the coming of the New Deal, elements of this racial order began to change, suggesting
at least a partial moment of historical discontinuity that might have severed future racial outcomes
from past arrangements. New Deal relief policies benefited African-Americans more than any
federal policy since Reconstruction, both because black Americans were among the hardest hit by
the Great Depression and because in some instance program administrators actively enforced racial
fairness in relief operations (Sullivan 1996; Amenta 1998). Where they could vote, AfricanAmericans themselves began to shift away from their longstanding allegiance to the Republicans, the
“party of Lincoln,” and toward the Democrats, becoming part of the emergent Democratic coalition
(Weiss 1983). Under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People’s legal department began strategically to challenge segregation in
the courts, which Franklin Roosevelt himself began to remake during his presidency (McMahon
2004). And under the Roosevelt administration, African-Americans probably had more access to
national political actors than they had for generations. But as much as these changes were
significant in their own time and were harbingers of a greater transformation to come, the
fundamental institutional characteristics of the pre-New Deal racial order — the interpenetration of
race with the basic coalition building processes of American policymaking — remained resolutely in
place. As Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson (2005) have pointed out, this persistent racially ordered
coalition underwrote racial exclusions across the range of the New Deal’s most progressive and
protective programs, including labor rights and standards, and race continued to structure the
politics of policymaking within and between the parties and across all three branches of government
(Carmines and Stimson 1989; Katznelson, Geiger, and Kryder 1993; Riley 1999; McMahon 2004).
In Britain, too, the racial order that prevailed at the turn of the century mostly persisted
through the period of social reform that led to the origins of the modern British welfare state.
British imperialism, which depended on a racialized understanding of the difference between British
citizens at home and colonial subjects abroad, was at the center of British politics in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Mehta 1999). The British party system was in considerable
flux in this period. The dominant but fragile Conservative Party was united around support for
imperialism but divided on social reform and trade policy. Opposition to the Conservatives was
splintered between Liberals and the emerging Labour Party, who shared a commitment to social
reform but were divided among themselves on support for imperialism, which was not a popular
cause among Britain’s middle and working classes. This unstable party alignment produced a policy
stalemate for much of the 1890s and early 1900s, which was interrupted by the Boer War. The war
was fought to protect and defend Britain’s colonial domination over South Africa, but its
unexpected length and ferocity exposed for many at home the need for social reform. A postwar
government commission found the decade before the war, more than one-third of British army
recruits had been found physically unfit for service and led to a movement for “national efficiency”
that included a program of social reform for the preservation of the “imperial race.” In this context,
imperialism and social reform came to be politically linked (Semmel 1960). But under the British
14
system of party government, in which the dominant parliamentary party (or coalition) gained more
or less unfettered control over policymaking and cross-party coalitions were rare, this linkage was
not easily translated into policy.
The racial structure of French politics similarly encompassed a commitment to imperialism,
but French imperialism entailed a much more ambiguous relationship between citizens and subjects
than its British variant (Conklin 1997; Wilder 2005). On the one hand, French colonial thought and
practice was based on deeply rooted notions of racial difference and superiority, embodied in the
idea of France’s “civilizing mission” (“la mission civisilatrice”) toward its subjects. On the other
hand, French imperialism was aligned with a broadly universal vision of “Greater France” that
involved incorporating colonial subjects into the French nation. At the same time, this process of
assimilation into “Frenchness” was also focused inward at people who lived at the periphery (both
geographically and culturally) of France itself, particularly through relatively coercive institutions
such as the schools and the army (Weber 1976). This ambiguity interacted with the highly
fragmented parliamentary politics and weak party structure of France’s Third Republic to inhibit the
formation of coalitions for solidaristic social reform.
This brief comparative account of the general persistence of elements of preexisting racial
orders in each case tends to substantiate the continuity hypothesis. In the United States and Britain
especially, race helped to overcome other axes of political conflict, particularly class, in the
formation of social policy coalitions. In Britain in the years before World War I, social reform and
imperial governance were the twin pillars of a coalition that created inclusive national welfare
policies as a means of unifying Britons across class and against a racially defined threat from the
outside. In the United States the coalition behind the creation of the welfare state in the 1930s also
depended on the protection of racial rule, but within the boundaries of the United States proper so
that the imperative of uniting whites behind a program of social reform produced a policy approach
that was necessarily exclusionary and decentralizing rather than inclusionary and national. In
interwar France, by contrast, racial diversity was as much an opportunity as a threat for the
prospects of nation building, and French social reform did not mobilize racial antagonisms to
overcome class divisions in constructing welfare state policies. The result was the perpetuation of
the Third Republic’s preexisting corporatist pattern of social provision, based on civil society
attachments, without a clear racial valence.
The comparative argument describes a common set of layering processes in the three
countries. In each case, new welfare state policies and institutions were introduced atop preexisting
and persistent racial orders. In two cases, the United States and Britain, elements of the racial order
shaped the political opportunities for building coalitions for solidaristic social reform — welfare
policies that would bind citizens together on the basis of common national membership and shared
social risk. In these cases, constructing coalitions even for limited solidaristic social policies required
accommodating a persistent barrier to social solidarity, rendering institutional layering a necessary
strategy in the face of political constructed and institutionally embedded racial difference. Where the
dominant racial order was more ambiguous about the divisive political role of race, as in France,
such accommodations were not necessary for the formation of social policy coalitions. The legacies
of French colonialism, consequently, must be sought elsewhere.
THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST
This comparison reveals an important political mechanism by which legacies of slavery and
other forms of racial rule can influence political outcomes over time. Legacies of slavery,
colonialism, and other patterns of racial domination are not merely rhetorical devices or
metaphorical constructs. Nor are they simply habits of mind, belief, or intention that can be easily
15
observed and almost as easily erased. They are, rather, political processes that exist, like the
institutions of slavery and colonialism themselves, at the intersection of race, power, and state
structure. The particular ways in which racial rule is embedded in political arrangements can shape
subsequent decisions even when the initial racial conditions that gave rise to those arrangements —
such as slavery — have disappeared and when decision making does not appear on the surface to be
about race at all. This need not be the case all the time, as case of French welfare state development
shows. It remains to be more fully understood what kind of historical continuities do and do not
constitute legacies that might have material causal weight in the future. My purpose here has been
simply to demonstrate that racial legacies are plausible and common and that they have been
important to American political development, and to suggest an analytical strategy for discerning
their effects. Further work will be necessary to specify more precisely under what conditions they
are more (and less) likely to appear and operate.
Legacies of slavery and colonialism shaped the development of the American and British
welfare state particularly through the layering of new policies over older patterns of race relations
and racialized political arrangements. The consequences of these layered arrangements, however,
were often neither anticipated nor intended, as new policies interacted with old structures in
unexpected ways. In each case, large-scale migration of racial minorities — from South to North in
the United States and from former colonies to Britain and France — reshaped the racial and political
geography of each country. These patterns of migration brought nonwhite citizens en masse from
the periphery to the center of each society and placed parallel strains on mechanisms of inclusion in
(and exclusion from) the welfare state. In this context, alternative mechanisms of change took over,
particularly processes of conversion, in which existing and fundamentally stable policies took on
new directions as a result of changes in the political environment. American Social Security, for
example, which began as a racially exclusionary program quickly toward color-blind inclusion and
British social benefits became an important source of support for nonwhite immigrants who came
to Great Britain after decolonization in the wake of World War II. In France, by contrast, the
incorporation of racial minorities into late twentieth-century social provision has followed a more
ambiguous course than its initial race-neutral character might have led us to suspect (Lieberman
2005). But unintended though these outcomes may have been, they were not incidental. Rather,
they, too, reflect legacies of past racial arrangements, now refracted through new configurations of
race, state, and power.
But even once we have established how it is that histories of racial oppression can shape
national destinies, hard questions remain. As time passes and the history of direct oppression
recedes, where do legacies lie (Cowen 2006)? The analysis here suggests that we can never be rid
of the residue of history, but this does not mean that we must always be in thrall to it. At what point
do gradual changes in the racial order cumulate into something entirely new so that the present is
effectively dissociated from the past? Just as we cannot assume that the past is dead, we should not
presume that its ghosts are always haunting present-day politics in the same way. Rather, we must
find an analytical means to distinguish the real ghosts from the false ones, to find the mechanisms
that account for the persistent presence of the past, in order to uncover its effects.
Understanding the mechanisms connecting past and present cannot, in the end, answer the urgent
questions of justice or culpability that many societies face today: what moral or political obligations
do present-day regimes face to redress the harms that followed from the actions of their
predecessors? My primary purpose here has been to develop a causal argument about the
connection between past and present and not to assess either moral claims about historical
restitution or political arguments about their efficacy (see Barkan 2001; Elster 2006; Torpey 2006).
But the moral and political judgments that are necessary to answer such questions and to devise
16
sensible and humane policies of transitional justice depend critically on such causal claims, so it
seems worth the effort to get them right.
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NOTES
1
Myrdal also emphasizes that this view of Reconstruction was not restricted to the South
but served the North as well because it served to rationalize the compromise of 1876 that signaled
the beginning of the end of Reconstruction.
2
In his foreword to the book, Philip Mason, the director of the Institute of Race Relations,
which commissioned the study, wrote that the hope was to find “a Myrdal for Britain while there is
still time” (Rose 1969, xix).
3
Perhaps without realizing it, and certainly without citing it, Todd (1994, 82-92) recapitulates
Moynihan’s argument about the legacy of slavery evident in the “social pathologies” of the AfricanAmerican family.
4
A number of critiques, as well as defenses, of Moynihan are compiled in Rainwater and
Yancey 1967; see also Gutman 1976.
5
Noiriel’s particular target here is LeBras and Todd 1981, but the critique applies equally to
Todd’s later work.
6
Béland (2005, 89) cites the passage approvingly. DeWitt fundamentally mischaracterizes
the arguments he criticizes, which rely less centrally on the direct racial intentions of policymakers
than he asserts, although Mary Poole (forthcoming) offers ample evidence that explicit racial
motives were much more on display in the Social Security debate than previously thought.