caa a22 4500 386365555 CHVBK 20180307111931.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1989 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0898588X00000559 doi S0898588X00000559 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0898588X00000559 Katznelson Ira New School for Social Research "The Burdens of Urban History”: Comment [Elektronische Daten] [Ira Katznelson] How, if at all, can studies of the city help us understand the distinctive qualities of the American regime? In "The Burdens of Urban History,” which refines and elaborates his earlier paper "The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History,” Terrence McDonald, a historian who has written on urban fiscal policy and conflict, argues that students of the city have focused their work too narrowly on bosses and machines, patronage and pluralism. In so doing, they have obscured other bases of politics and conflict, and, trapped by liberal categories of analysis, they have perpetuated a self-satisfied, even celebratory, portrait of American politics and society. This unfortunate directionality to urban research in some measure has been unwitting because historians and social scientists have been unreflective about the genealogies, and mutual borrowings, of their disciplines. Even recent critical scholarship in the new social history and in the social sciences under the banner of "bringing the state back in” suffers from these defects. As a result, these treatments of state and society relationships, and of the themes that appear under the rubric of American "exceptionalism,” are characterized by an epistemological mish-mash, a contraction of analytical vision, and an unintended acquiescence in the self-satisfied cheerleading of the academy that began in the postwar years. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 Studies in American Political Development Cambridge University Press 3(1989), 30-51 0898-588X 3<30 1989 3 SAP https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X00000559 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X00000559 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Katznelson Ira New School for Social Research NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Studies in American Political Development Cambridge University Press 3(1989), 30-51 0898-588X 3<30 1989 3 SAP CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge