William Novak: Americans, when they think about the state, have tended to be drawn to two alternative models: the German and the English models. The English model sees the state simply as some kind of higher level organization of discrete individuals. It features a pluralistic and individualistic conception of the state in which a sense of so-called “statelessness” predominates. This is the source of the ubiquitous but wrong-headed idea that the U.S. is a “weak” state, a laissez-faire state, in which individualism and less government is usually the rule. In my work, I suggest that that conceptualization is in fact a complete mythology. When you start looking closely at the American state, especially below the level of the central government, you see a web of almost constant activity, of statecraft, of regulatory action by the state on all levels of social and economic life.
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