Although scholars until recently have emphasized the comparative weakness of the American state, the federal government was hardly weak between 1860 and 1876. The classic work here is Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan,
Richard Bensel,
James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), 13.
Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, is a recent and brilliant reinterpretation, but it still embodies much of Wiebes and Chandlers interpretation.
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), 181.
Chandler, Visible Hand, 6-12, 87, 289.
Charles Perrow, Complex Organizations, 117.
For a sampling of this literature, see Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, for a powerful state at the beginning, not the end, of Wiebes period. For the modernity of antimonopolism, see Charles Postel, The Populist Vision.