Carr

Abstract: Court-ordered redistricting in the 1960s radically altered representation in the United States. Through a series of important cases, beginning with Baker v. Carr in 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court established a criterion of strict equality of state legislative and U.S. House district populations. Prior to judicial intervention, unequal representation was the norm in U.S. legislatures, and in some states districts had extremely unequal populations. In 1960, the state legislative districts in only two states, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, approximated the one-person, onevote standard in both chambers (David and Eisenberg 1961). At the other extreme was the California state senate, with the smallest counties having 400 times as much representation as Los Angeles, the largest county in the state. Less than a decade after Baker v. Carr, every state in the country reshaped its legislative districts to comply with the Court’s rulings. Baker revolutionized representation and, we argue, fundamentally transformed the politics of public finance in the American states. Legal and legislative battles ended unequal representation in the state legislatures and the U.S. House by the close of the 1960s. We examine how political representation affected the distribution of state funds to counties in the United States from the 1950s through the 1980s. Our interest in the consequences of Baker v. Carr derives from three broad problems for contemporary democracy. First, there is a persistent and nagging question for political scientists: Does representation matter? Do people benefit materially from having formal legislative representation? Some economists argue that

Abstract: Abstract What is history, and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian’s craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E. H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of postmodernist claims that we can’t know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.

Abstract: The world has now experienced what could be regarded as 20 years of Institutional Liberalism: the dominance of the view that cooperation in world politics can be enhanced through the construction and support of multilateral institutions based on liberal principles. E. H. Carr was famously skeptical of liberalism as he understood that tradition. This essay, prepared originally as the E. H. Carr Lecture at Aberystwyth University, interrogates Institutional Liberalism through a lens provided by Carr’s most famous book on international relations, The Twenty Years’ Crisis. It points out three trends since the 1990s that may be associated with Institutional Liberalism: increasing legalization; trends toward more legalism and moralism; and a decline in the coherence of some international regimes. Reviewing these trends in light of Realist critiques of liberalism, the essay rejects Realism as a good moral or practical guide to world politics, but reaffirms the value of the Realist view that institutions depend on...

Abstract: The two most enduring contemporaneous accounts of the inter-war period are E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. The perspectives from which the two authors wrote could barely have differed more. Carr is best remembered today for pulverizing the idealist foundations of liberal internationalism, and thereby preparing the ground for the postwar ascendancy of realist discourse in the academic study of international relations. Polanyi;s intellectual pedigree and legacy are more complex. He delivered a searing indictment of the social destructiveness of unregulated market forces and the moral mutilation he attributed to market rationality. For these views, Polanyi was later adopted by the New Left. However, he anchored his critique in an organic conception of society that was, in point of fact, deeply conservative in the traditionalist sense of that term.