James L. Nolan, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Williams College and editor of The American Culture
Wars: Current Contests and Future Prospects.
Summary
The United States has always been profoundly conflicted about the role and utility of its government. Simmering
just beneath the surface of heated public discussions over the appropriate scope and size of government are foundational
questions about the very purpose of the state, and the basis of its authority. America's changing and diversifying
cultural climate makes common agreement about the government's raison d'être all the more difficult.
In The Therapeutic State, James Nolan shows us how these unresolved dilemmas have coalesced at century's end. Today
the American state, faced with a steady decline in public confidence, has embraced a therapeutic code of moral
understanding to legitimize its very existence.
By ranging widely across education, criminal justice, welfare, political rhetoric, and civil law, Nolan convincingly
illustrates how the state increasingly turns to the therapeutic ethos as a justification for its programs and policies,
a development that will profoundly influence the relationship between government and citizenry. In a tone refreshingly
free of polemic, Nolan charts the dialectic relationship between culture and politics and, against the backdrop
of striking historical contrasts, gives example after example of the emergence of therapeutic sensibilities in
the processes of the American state.
