How do proto-state organizations achieve an initial accumulation of power, such that they are in a position to grow (or shrink) as an organization, maintain their prestige (or lose it), and be viewed, by elite and populace, as something real and consequential that can be argued about, supported, or attacked? This article argues that state-formation has a performative dimension, in which the publicity of acts of violence, coercion, and negotiation made by agents of the proto-state, and the variable interpretation of these acts, are paramount to the state’s success (or failure) and developing character. In the model developed here, agents of a would-be state act in response to emergencies, and when public interpretations of those actions assign their character and effectiveness to “the state,” the state is performed into being. In particular, public performance solves, in part, agency problems obtaining between state rulers and their staff and elite allies. The formation of the federal government in the early American republic (1783 to 1801), whose success is insufficiently accounted for by extant theory, provides an opportunity to develop a model of the performative dimension of state-formation.

References

Abbott, Andrew . 2001 . Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago : University of Chicago Press .

Google Scholar

Ackerman, Bruce . 2005 . The Failure of the Founding Fathers. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Adams, Julia . 1996 . “ Principals and Agents, Colonialists and Company Men: The Decay of Colonial Control in the Dutch East Indies .” American Sociological Review 61(1): 12 – 28 .

Google Scholar Crossref | ISI

Adams, Julia . 1999 . “ Culture in Rational-Choice Theories of State-Formation .” Pp. 98 – 112 in State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn, edited by Steinmetz, G . Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press .

Google Scholar

Adams, Julia . 2005 a. The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press .

Google Scholar

Adams, Julia . 2005 b. “ The Rule of the Father: Patriarchy and Patrimonialism in Early Modern Europe .” Pp. 237–66 in Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion, edited by Camic, C., Trubek, D. M., Gorski, P. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press .

Google Scholar

Adams, Julia . 2010 . “ The Unknown James Coleman: Culture and History in Foundations of Social Theory .” Contemporary Sociology 39(3):253–8.

Google Scholar SAGE Journals

Adams, Julia . 2011 . “ 1-800-How-Am-I-Driving?” Social Science History 35(1): 1 – 17 .

Google Scholar

Adut, Ari . 2008 . On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar

Adut, Ari . 2018 . Reign of Appearances: The Misery and Splendor of the Public Sphere. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004 . “ Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy .” Sociological Theory 22(4):527–73.

Google Scholar SAGE Journals

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2010 . The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power. Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Anderson, Benedict . [ 1983 ] 2006 . Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York : Verso Books .

Google Scholar

Anderson, Fred, Cayton, Andrew. 2005 . The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000. New York : Penguin .

Google Scholar

Austin, John L. 1975 . How to Do Things with Words. Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Baker, Pamela . 2002 . “ The Washington National Road Bill and the Struggle to Adopt a Federal System of Internal Improvement .” Journal of the Early Republic 22(3):437–64.

Google Scholar Crossref | Medline

Balogh, Brian . 2009 . A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Barksdale, Kevin T. 2003 . “ Our Rebellious Neighbors: Virginia’s Border Counties during Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion .” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 111(1): 5 – 32 .

Google Scholar

Bentham, Jeremy . 1864 . Theory of Legislation. Translated from the French of Etienne Dumont by Hildreth, Richard . London, UK : Tribner and Co .

Google Scholar

Berkin, Carol . 2017 . A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism. London, UK : Hachette .

Google Scholar

Best, George E. 2015 . “ American Identity Crisis, 1780–1815: Foreign Affairs and the Formation of American National Identity .” Masters of Arts Thesis, James Madison University , Harrisonburg, VA .

Google Scholar

Bourdieu, Pierre . 1991 . Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Google Scholar

Bourdieu, Pierre . 1994 . “ Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field .” Sociological Theory 12(1): 1 – 18 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Bourdieu, Pierre . 2014 . On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992, edited by Champagne, P.. Cambridge, UK : Polity .

Google Scholar

Bouton, Terry . 2007 . Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press .

Google Scholar

Brackenridge, Henry Marie . 1859 . The Western Insurrection: Commonly Called the Whiskey Insurrection. Pittsburgh, PA : W. S. Haven .

Google Scholar

Brackenridge, Hugh Henry . [ 1795 ] 1972 . Incidents of the Insurrection. Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield .

Google Scholar

Brewer, John . 1990 . The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Google Scholar

Buc, Philippe . 2009 . The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Google Scholar

Butler, Jon . 2001 . Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Google Scholar

Butler, Judith . [ 1990 ] 1999 . Gender Trouble. New York : Routledge .

Google Scholar

Butler, Judith . 1999 . “ Performativity’s Social Magic” Pp. 113–28 in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, edited by Shusterman, R . Oxford, UK : Blackwell Publishers .

Google Scholar

Butler, Judith . 2010 . “ Performative Agency .” Journal of Cultural Economy 3(2):147–61.

Google Scholar Crossref

Callon, Michel . 2010 . “ Performativity, Misfires and Politics .” Journal of Cultural Economy 3(2):163–9.

Google Scholar Crossref

Callon, Michel, Latour, Bruno. 1981 . “ Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So .” Pp. 277 – 303 in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro-and Macro-Sociologies, edited by Cicourel, A., Cetina, K. K. New York : Routledge .

Google Scholar

Calloway, Colin G. 2014 . The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army. Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press .

Google Scholar

Carroll, Patrick . 2006 . Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation. Berkeley : University of California Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Cayton, Andrew R. L. 1990 . “ Land, Power, and Reputation: The Cultural Dimension of Politics in the Ohio Country .” The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History and Culture 47(2):266–86.

Google Scholar

Cayton, Andrew R. L. 1992 . “ ‘Separate Interests’ and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West .” Journal of American History 79(1): 39 – 67 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Chwe, Michael Suk-Young . [ 2001 ] 2013 . Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Google Scholar

Clark, Murtie June . 1990 . American Militia in the Frontier Wars, 1790–1796. Baltimore, MD : Genealogical Publishing Co .

Google Scholar

Coakley, Robert W. 1996 . The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1789–1878. Collingdale, PA : Diane Publishing .

Google Scholar

Coleman, James S. 1994 . Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Google Scholar

Condon, Sean . 2015 . Shays’s Rebellion: Authority and Distress in Post-Revolutionary America. Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press .

Google Scholar

Cornell, Saul . 2015 . “ To Assemble Together for Their Common Good: History, Ethnography, and the Original Meanings of the Rights of Assembly and Speech .” Fordham Law Review 84(3):915–34.

Google Scholar

Cress, Lawrence Delbert . 1982 . Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press .

Google Scholar

Davis, Jeffrey A. 2000 . “ Guarding the Republican Interest: The Western Pennsylvania Democratic Societies and the Excise Tax .” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 67(1): 43 – 62 .

Google Scholar

Dayan, Daniel, Katz, Elihu. 1994 . Media Events. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Google Scholar

De Leon, Cedric . 2010 . “ Vicarious Revolutionaries: Martial Discourse and the Origins of Mass Party Competition in the United States, 1789–1848 .” Studies in American Political Development 24(1):121–41.

Google Scholar Crossref

Downing, Brian . 1993 . The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Google Scholar

Du Bois, W.E.B. [ 1906 ] 2006 . “ The Negro Question in the United States .” Translated by Fracchia, Joseph . CR: The New Centennial Review 6(3):241–90.

Google Scholar

Dunn, Susan . 2004 . Jefferson’s Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism. New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt .

Google Scholar

Edling, Max . 2014 . A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867. Chicago : University of Chicago Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Endelman, Jonathan . 2015 . “ Displaying the State: Visual Signs and Colonial Construction in Jordan .” Theory and Society 44(3): 199 – 218 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Ericson, David F. 2017 . “ The United States Military, State Development, and Slavery in the Early Republic .” Studies in American Political Development 31(1):130–48.

Google Scholar Crossref

Ermakoff, Ivan . 2008 . Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications. Durham, NC : Duke University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Ermakoff, Ivan . 2011 . “ Patrimony and Collective Capacity: An Analytical Outline .” ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 636(1): 182 – 203 .

Google Scholar SAGE Journals

Ermakoff, Ivan . 2013 . “ Rational Choice May Take Over .” Pp. 89 – 107 in Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, edited by Gorski, P. S . Durham, NC : Duke University Press .

Google Scholar

Ermakoff, Ivan . 2015 . “ The Structure of Contingency .” American Journal of Sociology 121(1): 64 – 125 .

Google Scholar Crossref | ISI

Ertman, Thomas . 1997 . Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Feaver, Peter . 2009 . Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Google Scholar

Ferris, Ezra . 1897 . The Early Settlement of the Miami Country. Indianapolis, IN : Bowen-Merrill .

Google Scholar

Foucault, Michel . [ 1975 ] 2012 . Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York : Vintage .

Google Scholar

Foucault, Michel . 1991 . “ Governmentality .” Pp. 87 – 104 in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Burchell, G., Gordon, C., Miller, P. Chicago : University of Chicago Press .

Google Scholar

Freehling, W. W. 1994 . The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War. Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press on Demand .

Google Scholar

Freeman, Joanne B. 2002 . Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press .

Google Scholar

Friedland, Paul . 2002 . Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press .

Google Scholar

Gadamer, Hans-Georg . 1989 . Truth and Method. New York : Continuum Publishers .

Google Scholar

Gaff, Alan D. 2004 . Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne’s Legion in the Old Northwest. Norman : University of Oklahoma Press .

Google Scholar

Garland, David . 1986 . “ Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: An Exposition and Critique .” Law & Social Inquiry 11(4):847–80.

Google Scholar Crossref

Geertz, Clifford . 1980 . Negara: The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Google Scholar

Geertz, Clifford . 2000 . “ Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight .” Pp. 435–74 in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York : Basic Books .

Google Scholar

Gellner, Ernest . 2008 . Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press .

Google Scholar

Gerstle, Gary . 2017 . Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Giesen, Bernhard . 1998 . Intellectuals and the Nation: Collective Identity in a German Axial Age. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar

Giesen, Bernhard . 2005 . “ Performing Transcendence in Politics: Sovereignty, Deviance, and the Void of Meaning .” Sociological Theory 23(3):275–85.

Google Scholar SAGE Journals

Giesen, Bernhard . 2006 . “ Performing the Sacred: A Durkheimian Perspective on the Performative Turn in the Social Sciences .” Pp. 325–67 in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, edited by Alexander, J. C., Giesen, B., Mast, J. L. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Giesen, Bernhard . 2011 . “ Ritual, Power, and Style: The Implications of Negara for the Sociology of Power .” Pp. 167–77 in Interpreting Clifford Geertz, edited by Alexander, J. C., Smith, P. New York : Palgrave Macmillan .

Google Scholar Crossref

Glaeser, Andreas . 2011 . Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism. Chicago : University of Chicago Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Goffman, Erving . [ 1956 ] 1978 . The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York : Penguin .

Google Scholar

Goffman, Erving . 1983 . “ Felicity’s Condition .” American Journal of Sociology 89(1): 1 – 53 .

Google Scholar Crossref | ISI

Gorski, Philip . 1995 . “ The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Bureaucracy .” American Sociological Review 60(5):783–86.

Google Scholar Crossref

Gorski, Philip . 2003 . The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago : University of Chicago Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Gould, Roger . 1996 . “ Patron-Client Ties, State Centralization, and the Whiskey Rebellion .” American Journal of Sociology 102(2): 400 – 429 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Gould, Roger . 1998 . “ Political Networks and the Local/National Boundary in the Whiskey Rebellion .” Pp. 36 – 53 in Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Contentious Politics, edited by Hanagan, M. P., Moch, L. P., te Brake, W. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press .

Google Scholar

Greif, Avner . 2006 . Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Griffin, Patrick . 2007 . American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier. New York : Macmillan .

Google Scholar

Griffin, Patrick, Ingram, Robert G., Onuf, Peter S., Schoen, Brian, eds. 2015 . Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press .

Google Scholar

Griswold, Wendy . 1993 . “ Recent Moves in the Sociology of Literature .” Annual Review of Sociology 19(1):455–67.

Google Scholar Crossref

Hall, John R. 2015 . “ Patrimonialism in America: The Public Domain in the Making of Modernity: From Colonial Times to the Late Nineteenth Century .” Pp. 7 – 41 in Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 28, Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire, edited by Charrad, M. M., Adams, J. Bingley, UK : Emerald Publishing .

Google Scholar

Hammond, Bray . 1967 . Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Google Scholar

Hechter, Michael . 2013 . Alien Rule. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Heiskala, Risto . 2009 . “ Modernity and the Articulation of the Gender System: Order, Conflict, and Chaos .” Semiotica 173:215–31.

Google Scholar

Herrera, Ricardo A. 2015 . For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775–1861. New York : New York University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Higginbotham, Don . 1998 . “ The Federalized Militia Debate: A Neglected Aspect of Second Amendment Scholarship .” The William and Mary Quarterly 55(1): 39 – 58 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Hinderaker, Eric . 1999 . Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar

Hogeland, William . 2010 . The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty. New York : Simon and Schuster .

Google Scholar

Houpt, David William . 2015 . “ ‘To Organize the Sovereign People’: Political Mobilization in Pennsylvania, 1783–1808 .” PhD dissertation, City University of New York .

Google Scholar

Ikegami, Eiko . 1995 . The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Google Scholar

James, C. L. R. 2001 . The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London, UK : Penguin .

Google Scholar

John, Richard . 1997 . “ Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835 .” Studies in American Political Development 11(2):347–80.

Google Scholar Crossref

Kantorowicz, Ernst . [ 1957 ] 2016 . The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Google Scholar

Katznelson, Ira . 2002 . “ Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding .” Pp. 82 – 110 in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, edited by Katznelson, I., Sheffer, M. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Google Scholar

Kentor, Jeffrey D. 2014 . Capital and Coercion: The Economic and Military Processes That Have Shaped the World Economy, 1800–1990. New York : Routledge .

Google Scholar

Kestnbaum, Meyer . 2000 . “ Citizenship and Compulsory Military Service: The Revolutionary Origins of Conscription in the United States .” Armed Forces and Society 27(1): 7 – 36 .

Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI

Kiser, Edgar . 1994 . “ Markets and Hierarchies in Early Modern Tax Systems: A Principal-Agent Analysis .” Politics & Society 22(3): 284 – 315 .

Google Scholar

Kiser, Edgar . 1999 . “ Comparing Varieties of Agency Theory in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology: An Illustration from State Policy Implementation .” Sociological Theory 17(2):146–70.

Google Scholar SAGE Journals

Kiser, Edgar, Kane, Danielle C. 2007 . “ The Perils of Privatization: How the Character of Principals Affected Tax Farming in the Roman Republic and Empire .” Social Science History 31(2): 191 – 212 .

Google Scholar ISI

Kiser, Edgar, Linton, April. 2002 . “ The Hinges of History: State-Making and Revolt in Early Modern France .” American Sociological Review 67(6): 889 – 910 .

Google Scholar Crossref | ISI

Kiser, Edgar, Schneider, Joachim. 1994 . “ Bureaucracy and Efficiency: An Analysis of Taxation in Early Modern Prussia .” American Sociological Review 59(2): 187 – 204 .

Google Scholar Crossref | ISI

Kiser, Edgar, Schneider, Joachim. 1995 . “ Rational Choice versus Cultural Explanations of the Efficiency of the Prussian Tax System .” American Sociological Review 60(5):787–91.

Google Scholar Crossref

Knopf, Richard C. , ed. 1960 . Anthony Wayne: A Name in Arms. Pittsburgh, PA : University of Pittsburgh Press .

Google Scholar

Kohn, Richard H. 1975 . Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802. New York : Free Press .

Google Scholar

Lachmann, Richard . 1989 . “ Elite Conflict and State Formation in 16th- and 17th-Century England and France .” American Sociological Review 54(2):141–62.

Google Scholar Crossref | Medline

Lachmann, Richard . 2013 . “ Mercenary, Citizen, Victim: The Rise and Fall of Conscription in the West .” Pp. 44 – 70 in Nationalism and War, edited by Hall, J. A., Malešević, S. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Lachmann, Richard, Stivers, Abby. 2016 . “ The Culture of Sacrifice in Conscript and Volunteer Militaries: The US Medal of Honor from the Civil War to Iraq, 1861–2014 .” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 4(3):323–58.

Google Scholar Crossref

Latour, Bruno . 2005 . Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York : Oxford University Press .

Google Scholar

Laver, Harry S. 2002 . “ Rethinking the Social Role of the Militia: Community-Building in Antebellum Kentucky .” The Journal of Southern History 68(4): 777 – 816 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Lomazoff, Eric . 2012 . “ Turning (Into) ‘The Great Regulating Wheel’: The Conversion of the Bank of the United States, 1791–1811 .” Studies in American Political Development 26(1): 1 – 23 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Loveman, Mara . 2005 . “ The Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power .” American Journal of Sociology 110(6):1651–83.

Google Scholar Crossref

Loveman, Mara . 2014 . National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America. New York : Oxford University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

MacKenzie, Donald, Millo, Yuval. 2003 . “ Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange .” American Journal of Sociology 109(1):107–45.

Google Scholar Crossref

Mahon, John K. 1960 . The American Militia: Decade of Decision, 1789–1800. Gainesville : University of Florida Monographs .

Google Scholar

Mahoney, James . 2000 . “ Path Dependence in Historical Sociology .” Theory and Society 29(4):507–48.

Google Scholar Crossref

Mann, Michael . 2005 . The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar

Mann, Michael . 2012 . Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation States, 1760–1914. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar

Markoff, John . 1995 . “ Violence, Emancipation, and Democracy: The Countryside and the French Revolution .” American Historical Review 100(2):360–86.

Google Scholar Crossref

Markoff, John . 2010 . The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. Philadelphia : Pennsylvania State University Press .

Google Scholar

Marvin, Carolyn, Ingle, David W. 1999 . Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar

Mead, George Herbert . [ 1932 ] 2002 . The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago : Open Court Publishing Co .

Google Scholar

Merton, Robert K. 1948 . “ The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy .” The Antioch Review 8(2): 193 – 210 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Millett, Allan R., Maslowski, Peter, Fries, William B. 2012 . For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012, 3rd ed. New York : Free Press .

Google Scholar

Monaghan, E. Jennifer . 2005 . Learning to Read and Write in Colonial Society. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press .

Google Scholar

Mukerji, Chandra . 1997 . Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar

Mukerji, Chandra . 2009 . Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Google Scholar

Neem, Johann . 2003 . “ Freedom of Association in the Early Republic: The Republican Party, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Philadelphia and New York Cordwainers’ Cases .” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 127(3):259–90.

Google Scholar

Neem, Johann . 2011 . “ Civil Society and American Nationalism, 1776–1865 .” Pp. 29 – 53 in Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present, edited by Clemens, E., Guthrie, D. Chicago : University of Chicago Press .

Google Scholar

Neem, Johann N. 2017 . Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America. Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press .

Google Scholar

Nelson, Paul David . 1982 . “ Anthony Wayne: Soldier as Politician .” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 106(4):463–81.

Google Scholar Medline

Nelson, Paul David . 1986 . “ General Charles Scott, the Kentucky Mounted Volunteers, and the Northwest Indian Wars, 1784–1794 .” Journal of the Early Republic 6(3):219–51.

Google Scholar Crossref

Newman, Paul Douglas . 2012 . Fries’s Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press .

Google Scholar

Newman, Simon Peter . 1997 . Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Norton, Matthew . 2014 a. “ Classification and Coercion: The Destruction of Piracy in the English Maritime System .” American Journal of Sociology 119(6):1537–75.

Google Scholar Crossref

Norton, Matthew . 2014 b. “ Temporality, Isolation, and Violence in the Early Modern English Maritime World .” Eighteenth-Century Studies 48(1): 37 – 66 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Norton, Matthew . 2015 . “ Principal Agent Relations and the Decline of the Royal African Company .” Pp. 45 – 76 in Chartering Capitalism: Organizing Markets, States, and Publics, Vol. 29, Political Power and Social Theory, edited by Erikson, E . Bingley, UK : Emerald Group Publishing .

Google Scholar Crossref

Novak, William . 2008 . “ The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State .” American Historical Review 113(3):752–72.

Google Scholar Crossref

Opal, J. M. 2013 . “ General Jackson’s Passports: Natural Rights and Sovereign Citizens in the Political Thought of Andrew Jackson, 1780s–1820s .” Studies in American Political Development 27(2): 69 – 85 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Owen, Kenneth . 2015 . “ Violence and the Limits of the Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania .” Pp. 165–86 in Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era, edited by Griffin, P., Ingram, R., Schoen, B., Onuf, P. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press .

Google Scholar

Parkinson, Robert G. 2016 . The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Pasley, Jeffrey L. 2001 . “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press .

Google Scholar

Pasley, Jeffrey L. 2015 . “ Whiskey Chaser: Democracy and Violence in the Debate over the Democratic-Republican Societies in the Whiskey Rebellion .” Pp. 187 – 215 in Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era, edited by Griffin, P., Ingram, R., Schoen, B., Onuf, P. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press .

Google Scholar

Perrin, Andrew J., Wagner-Pacifici, Robin E., Hirschfeld, Lindsay, Wilker, Susan. 2006 . “ Contest Time: Time, Territory, and Representation in the Postmodern Electoral Crisis .” Theory and Society 35(3):351–91.

Google Scholar Crossref

Reed, Isaac Ariail . 2013 a. “ Power: Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions .” Sociological Theory 31(3): 193 – 218 .

Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI

Reed, Isaac Ariail . 2013 b. “ Charismatic Performance: A Study of Bacon’s Rebellion .” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1(2):254–87.

Google Scholar Crossref

Reed, Isaac Ariail . 2015 . “ Can There Be a Bourdieusian Theory of Crisis? On Historical Change and Social Theory .” History and Theory 54(2):269–76.

Google Scholar Crossref

Reed, Isaac Ariail . 2016 . “ Between Structural Breakdown and Crisis Action: Interpretation in the Whiskey Rebellion and the Salem Witch Trials .” Critical Historical Studies 3(1): 27 – 64 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Reed, Isaac Ariail . 2017 . “ Chains of Power and Their Representation .” Sociological Theory 35(2): 87 – 117 .

Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI

Remer, Rosalind . 1996 . Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press .

Google Scholar

Richardson, Seth . 2012 . “ Early Mesopotamia: The Presumptive State .” Past & Present 215(1): 3 – 49 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Rogin, M. P. 1979 . “ The King’s Two Bodies: Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon, and Presidential Self-Sacrifice .” The Massachusetts Review 20(3):553–73.

Google Scholar

Santana-Acuña, Alvaro Agustín . 2014 . “ The Making of a National Cadastre (1763–1807): State Uniformization, Nature Valuation, and Organizational Change in France .” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA .

Google Scholar

Sapiro, Gisèle . 2013 . “ Structural History and Crisis Analysis .” Pp. 266–85 in Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, edited by Gorski, P. S . Durham, NC : Duke University Press .

Google Scholar

Scott, James . 2006 . Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press .

Google Scholar

Sewell, Jr., William H . 1996 . “ Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille .” Theory and Society 25(6):841–81.

Google Scholar

Sewell, Jr., William H . 2005 . Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago : University of Chicago Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Seymour, Joseph . 2008 . First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry. Chicago : Arcadia Publishing .

Google Scholar

Shapiro, Susan P. 2005 . “ Agency Theory .” Annual Review of Sociology 31:263–84.

Google Scholar Crossref

Sharp, James Roger . 1993 . American Politics in the Early Republic. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press .

Google Scholar

Sioli, Marco . 1998 . “ Where Did the Whiskey Rebels Go?” Pp . 23 – 32 in When the Shooting Is Over: The Order and the Memory, edited by Valtz Mannucci, L . Quaderno 4. Milan, Italy : Milan Group in Early United States History .

Google Scholar

Sisson, Dan. 2014 . The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction—and What This Means Today. Oakland, CA : Berrett-Koehler Publishers .

Google Scholar

Skocpol, Theda, Ganz, Marshall, Munson, Ziad. 2000 . “ A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civil Voluntarism in the United States .” American Political Science Review 94(3):527–46.

Google Scholar Crossref

Skowronek, Stephen . 1982 . Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Skowronek, Stephen . 2018 . “ Present at the Creation: The State in Early American Political History .” Journal of the Early Republic 38(1): 95 – 103 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Slaughter, Thomas . 1986 . The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press .

Google Scholar

Smith, Michael J. 1987 . Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Steinmetz, George . 1999 . State/Culture: State-Formation After the Cultural Turn. Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press .

Google Scholar

Steinmetz, George . 2008 . “ The Colonial State as a Social Field: Ethnographic Capital and Native Policy in the German Overseas Empire before 1914 .” American Sociological Review 73(4): 589 – 612 .

Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI

Stockwell, Mary . 2018 . Unlikely General: “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press .

Google Scholar

Strayer, Joseph . 2005 . On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Stuart Brundage, Jonah . 2017 . “ The Pacification of Elite Lifestyles: State Formation, Elite Reproduction, and the Practice of Hunting in Early Modern England .” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59(4): 786 – 817 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Tarrow, Sidney G. 2008 . “ Debating War, States, and Rights with Charles Tilly: A Contentious Conversation .” Presented at “Contention, Change and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly,” New York, Columbia University , .

Google Scholar

Tarrow, Sidney G. 2011 . Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Taylor, Alan . 2013 . The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. New York : W.W. Norton & Company .

Google Scholar

Tepora, Tuomas . 2007 . “ Redirecting Violence: The Finnish Flag as a Sacrificial Symbol, 1917–1945 .” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 7(3):153–70.

Google Scholar Crossref

Tilly, Charles . 1964 . The Vendee. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Google Scholar

Tilly, Charles . 1985 . “ War Making and State Making as Organized Crime .” Pp. 169–86 in Bringing the State Back In, edited by Evans, P. B., Rueschemeyer, D., Skocpol, T. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Tilly, Charles . 1992 . Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992. Oxford, UK : Blackwell .

Google Scholar

Tilly, Charles . 2005 . Trust and Rule. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Turner, Victor Witter . 1982 . From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York : Paj Publications .

Google Scholar

Tyson, Scott . 2018 . “ The Agency Problem Underlying Repression .” Journal of Politics 80(4):1297–310.

Google Scholar Crossref

U.S. Bureau of the Census . 1965 . The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. Stamford, CT : Fairfield Publishers .

Google Scholar

Wagner-Pacifici, Robin . 1986 . The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama. Chicago : University of Chicago Press .

Google Scholar

Wagner-Pacifici, Robin . 2000 . Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action. New York : Cambridge University Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Wagner-Pacifici, Robin . 2005 . The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict’s End. Chicago : University of Chicago Press .

Google Scholar

Wagner-Pacifici, Robin . 2010 . “ Theorizing the Restlessness of Events .” American Journal of Sociology 115(5):1351–86.

Google Scholar Crossref

Wagner-Pacifici, Robin . 2017 . What Is an Event? Chicago : University of Chicago Press .

Google Scholar Crossref

Waldstreicher, David . 1997 . In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press .

Google Scholar

Waldstreicher, David, Pasley, Jeffery L., Robertson, Andrew W. 2009 . “ Introduction: Beyond the Founders.” Pp . 1 – 30 in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, edited by Pasley, J. L., Robertson, A. W., Waldstreicher, D. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press .

Google Scholar

Warner, Michael . 1990 . The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Google Scholar

Weber, Cynthia . 1998 . “ Performative States .” Millennium 27(1): 77 – 95 .

Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI

Weber, Max . 1978 . Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Oakland : University of California Press .

Google Scholar

Weigley, Russell . 1984 . History of the United States Army. Bloomington : Indiana University Press .

Google Scholar

West, Candace, Zimmerman, Don H. 1987 . “ Doing Gender .” Gender & Society 1(2):125–51.

Google Scholar SAGE Journals

Wilentz, Sean . 2006 . The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York : W.W. Norton & Co .

Google Scholar

Wilson, Nicholas . 2015 . “ From Reflection to Refraction: Extractive Administration in British India, circa 1770–1855 .” American Journal of Sociology 116(5):1437–77.

Google Scholar Crossref

Wilson, Nicholas . 2018 . “ The Fixation of (Moral) Belief: Making Imperial Administration Modern .” European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie 59(1): 13 – 38 .

Google Scholar Crossref

Wood, Gordon S. 2009 . Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815. Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press .

Google Scholar