Liberty and coercion The paradox of American government from the founding to the present

In this clear, wide-ranging work of political history, Gerstle (American history, Univ. of Cambridge, UK) undertakes two separate projects. The first lands the book squarely in the subfield of American political development, showing that the federal government was not built just through major transformations in response to crises, as previous scholars have argued. Instead, those seeking to expand federal power often had to work around constitutional limits through what Gerstle calls strategies of "improvisation," such as the privatization of infrastructure. A second project suggests that contemporary confusion over the proper scope of government derives in part from the founders' approval of a limited federal government coexisting with coercive powers at the state level. This latter idea, though intriguing, probably needs more attention than Gerstle provides here. Only one of ten chapters is devoted to this argument. Still, he develops considerable evidence for improvisational state building and draws out the problematic implications of relying on strategies that effectively expand federal power without the accompanying constitutional authority. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Richard J. Meagher, Randolph-Macon College