Richard Bensel

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Richard Franklin Bensel (born 1949) is a professor of American politics at Cornell University. Bensel has attempted to bridge the gap between American economic and political history, with an eye toward comparative implications. Bensel is best known as a scholar of political economy. His most recent work, Passions and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic National Convention (Cambridge University Press, 2008), attempts to bring American political development into a conversation with rational choice theory.

Cornell University private university in Ithaca (New York, US)

Cornell University is a private and statutory Ivy League research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell's founding principle, a popular 1868 Ezra Cornell quotation: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."

Economy of the United States National economy

The economy of the United States is a highly developed mixed economy. It is the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and the second-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). It also has the world's seventh-highest per capita GDP (nominal) and the eleventh-highest per capita GDP (PPP) in 2016. The US has a highly diversified, world-leading industrial sector. It is also a high-technology innovator with the second-largest industrial output in the world. The U.S. dollar is the currency most used in international transactions and is the world's foremost reserve currency, backed by its science and technology, its military, the full faith of the U.S. government to reimburse its debts, its central role in a range of international institutions since World War II, and the petrodollar system. Several countries use it as their official currency, and in many others, it is the de facto currency. Its largest trading partners are China, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Germany, South Korea, United Kingdom, France, India, and Taiwan.

Political economy study of production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government

Political economy is the study of production and trade and their relations with law, custom and government; and with the distribution of national income and wealth. As a discipline, political economy originated in moral philosophy, in the 18th century, to explore the administration of states' wealth, with "political" signifying the Greek word polity and "economy" signifying the Greek word "okonomie". The earliest works of political economy are usually attributed to the British scholars Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, although they were preceded by the work of the French physiocrats, such as François Quesnay (1694–1774) and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781).

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American political development

Along with Stephen Skowronek, Theda Skocpol and others, Bensel is among the founders of the academic study of American political development (APD), a sub-specialty within the discipline of political science. [1] Beginning during the 1970s and 80s as an attempt to "bring the state back in" to the study of American Politics, APD soon emerged as a competitor to the prevailing rational choice and survey research modes of studying American politics. In an important 2003 exchange published in Studies in American Political Development, John Gerring, Stephen Skowronek, Rogers Smith, and Bensel offered their thoughts on the state of APD as a subfield. Bensel controversially defined APD as "an insurgency." Its goal, he argued, "should be to destroy disciplinary boundaries, to sabotage reifying conventions, to identify and support intellectual rebellions wherever they appear, and to do our best to make sense of whatever space we may have cleared and claimed for ourselves." [2]

Stephen Skowronek is an American political scientist, noted for his research on American national institutions and the U.S. presidency, and for helping to stimulate the study of American political development.

Theda Skocpol American sociologist

Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. An influential figure in both disciplines, Skocpol is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory." She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences.

American political development is a subfield of political science that studies the historical development of politics in the United States. In American political science departments, it is considered a subfield within American politics and is closely linked to historical institutionalism.

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References

  1. ↑ Orren and Skowronek. The Search for American Political Development ; Daniel P. Carpenter. The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy
  2. ↑ Bensel, "The Tension Between American Political Development as a Research Community and as a Disciplinary Subfield," Studies in American Political Development Spring 2003.
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