- Richard Bensel
Richard Franklin Bensel (b. 1949) is a professor of
American politics atCornell University . Beginning with "Sectionalism and American Political Development", 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 ofpolitical 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 withrational choice theory .American political development
Along with
Stephen Skowronek ,Theda Skocpol and others, Bensel is regardedweal as one of the founders of the academic study ofAmerican political development , a sub-specialty within the discipline ofpolitical science . 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 prevailingrational choice andsurvey research modes of studying American politics. In an important 2003 exchange published inStudies 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 revellions wherever they appear, and to do our best to make sense of whatever space we may have cleared and claimed for ourselves." [Bensel, "The Tension Between American Political Development as a Research Community and as a Disciplinary Subfield," "Studies in American Political Development" Spring 2003. ]Books
* "Sectionalism and American Political Development" (1984)
* "Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877" (1991)
* "The Political Economy of American Industrialization" (2000)
* "The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century" (2004)
* "Passions and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic National Convention" (2008)References
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