ABSTRACT
Among the large nation-states of the 20th century, the United States is the oldest constitutional republic and has the youngest consolidated national government. The modern, positive national state in the United States is a product of the years since 1933. Our institutions of government are still adapting themselves to their new functions and new relationships. Even the vocabulary of analysis has been adjusting itself to the state and related concepts, which had once been rejected as too abstract, formalistic, legalistic, and European to have any precision or utility in the American context. Once we were unique as a large nation where government was almost a matter of politics. In the 1960s and 1970s, government became the central presence and politics a peripheral, occasionally significant, collection of activities oriented toward influencing the government-i.e., the apparatus of the state.
