Tocqueville's discovery of a muscular, participatory citizenship in the United States is well known, as is his argument that such citizenship is vital to the success of democracy. This has been a source of both self-congratulation and anxiety among Americans, the anxiety stemming from worries...

Several recent works, such as Brian Balogh's Government Out of Sight and Sheldon Pollack's War, Revenues, and State Building, have attacked the “weak state” trope in the American political development literature. My paper intends to assess this revisionist literature. The argument is the...