Ajay K. Mehrotra

The intellectual foundations
of the modern American ½scal state

At the turn of the twentieth century,

美国. system of public ½nance under-
went a dramatic structural transforma-
的. The late-nineteenth-century sys-
tem of indirect national taxes–associ-
ated mainly with the highly partisan
tariff and regressive excise taxes on al-
cohol and tobacco–was eclipsed in the
early twentieth century by a profession-
ally administered, graduated income tax
that soon accounted for more than half
of all federal tax revenue. This seismic
shift toward direct and progressive tax-
ation marked the emergence of a new
½scal polity, one guided not simply by
the functional need for revenue, but by
social concerns about justice, 公平,
and the equitable distribution of ½scal
obligations.

The intellectual debates and politi-
cal struggles that took place a centu-
ry ago inform our current discussions
about “fundamental” tax reform. 在
最近几年, American scholars, 政策
分析师, and lawmakers have decried
the failings of the present U.S. tax sys-
TEM. 同时, commentators
have identi½ed how the recent rise in
inequality has signaled the arrival of
a new Gilded Age in the United States.
In an attempt to confront this increas-

ing concentration of wealth and pow-
是, some present-day reformers have
vowed to make profound changes to
our existing progressive income and
wealth-transfer taxes. A century ago,
during a similar period of rising in-
平等, serious structural reform was
not only envisioned but also achieved,
and we would do well to recall the so-
cial and economic conditions, 还有
as the political will, that made that fun-
damental ½scal reform possible.

In the early twentieth century, 这
modern American ½scal state turned
to direct and graduated taxes to reallo-
cate the economic responsibilities of
½nancing an emerging regulatory and
administrative, social-welfare state.
But the reformers who sought to usher
in a new ½scal order intended to use
tax laws and policies for much more:
to rede½ne the meaning of modern cit-
主权; to facilitate a fundamental
change in existing political arrange-
评论; 和, perhaps most important,
to help underwrite the expansion of
the American liberal state. To do all
of this, tax activists understood that
they needed to lay an intellectual foun-
dation in support of direct and progres-
sive taxation.

Among the critical reformers, a partic-
ular group of academic experts played a

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Ajay K.
Mehrotra

pivotal role in recon½guring the mean-
ing and implications of taxation. 在一个
subtle, though signi½cant, 移动, 这些
economic and political theorists helped
to supplant the prevailing “bene½ts the-
ory” of taxation, and its attendant vi-
sion of the state as a passive protector
of private property, with a more equita-
ble principle of taxation based on one’s
“faculty” or “ability to pay,” which de-
manded a more active role of the posi-
tive state. Led by the likes of Richard T.
Ely, Henry Carter Adams, and Edwin
右. A. Seligman, these German-trained,
professional political economists helped
dismantle the nineteenth-century ortho-
dox theories of laissez-faire and promot-
ed the adoption of new, more effective
and egalitarian forms of taxation and
state action.

The thinkers who led the move-

ment for direct and graduated taxation
emerged from similar backgrounds and
经历. Many were reared in the
deeply religious environment of North-
eastern evangelical Protestantism, 和
even those who distanced themselves
from organized religion channeled their
theological and ethical inclinations into
their academic work and public advo-
cacy.1 German training and experience,
而且, bolstered their moral orien-
站. 他们, like many other aspiring
American scholars, turned to German
universities and mentors for their pro-
fessional training in the social sciences,
learning ½rsthand from some of the
leading ½gures of the German historical
school of economics about how histori-
cal and institutional development affect-
ed the so-called “natural” laws of politi-
cal economy. And as part of their educa-
tion outside the classroom, they learned
about the promise and perils of the mod-
ern European social-welfare state.2

These scholars returned to the United

States troubled by the excesses of late-

nineteenth-century American industri-
al capitalism. The labor unrest and class
conflict that resulted from the modern
forces of mass migration, rapid industri-
alization, and uneven economic growth
forti½ed the economists’ reformist ten-
dencies. Although they realized that they
could not graft European social democ-
racy onto American political culture, 这
progressive political economists sought
to link the highbrow theories of the
academy with the material world of the
working masses.3 They did this, 部分地,
by challenging the prevailing system of
political and economic thought and pro-
viding a new conceptual foundation for
new forms of taxation. Eschewing time-
less universalisms, these academic theo-
rists believed that economic relations
were embedded in a larger social and in-
stitutional matrix, one constituted main-
ly by law and legal processes. Thus many
of the leading progressive political econ-
omists were eager to use law and legal
institutions to exercise the “ethical agen-
cy” of state power. 这样, many of
these thinkers were part of what legal
historians have identi½ed as the “First
Great Law & Economics Movement.”4
The intellectual movement for progres-

sive taxation, guided by the new gener-
ation of professional economists, 曾是
part of a much larger transformation
in American social thought at the turn
of the century, often referred to as a
“revolt against formalism.” Shifting
the justi½cation for taxation from the
bene½ts theory to the ability-to-pay
principle delegitimized past standards
of rigid economic thought and facilitat-
ed new ways of thinking about the so-
cial processes of modern life. This con-
sequential transition profoundly affect-
ed the development of American liber-
救世主, turning it away from its classical
emphasis on negative individual liber-

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ties and toward a new focus on collec-
主动的, positive rights.5

For many of the progressive politi-
cal economists, bene½ts theory and
the ability-to-pay principle were con-
tending doctrines with fundamental-
ly different underlying social and po-
litical theories. The bene½ts doctrine
stood for the outmoded proposition,
in the progressives’ view, that taxation
was justi½ed as a price paid for goods
and services provided by government
in exchange for tax payments. 在下面
the bene½ts theory, individuals paid
taxes to ensure that the neutral and lim-
ited state could provide citizens with
physical and ½nancial security, 不是
only from each other, but from the pub-
lic powers of the state. The Michigan
jurist and treatise writer, 托马斯·M.
Cooley, typi½ed this line of thought.
“The citizen and the property owner
owes to the government the duty to
pay taxes,” Cooley proclaimed, 所以
“that the government may be enabled
to perform its functions, and he is sup-
posed to receive his proper and full
compensation in the protection which
the government affords to his life, 库-
erty and property, and in the increase
to the value of his possessions by the
use to which the money contributed is
applied.”6 Citizens, 本质上, traded
tax payments solely for the bene½ts
that they received from the state.

The bene½ts theory equated taxes
with commercial transactions. Mem-
bers of a polity had no social obliga-
tions or civic duties beyond the quid
pro quo of paying taxes and receiving
governmental protection. If taxation
was one of the most commonly and
consistently experienced relationships
between Americans and their govern-
蒙特, bene½t theory appeared to limit
that important relationship–and the
civic identity that emerged from it–

to the cash nexus. Fiscal citizenship it-
self was reduced to a commodity.

In criticizing the bene½ts principle,
the progressive political economists em-
phasized its anachronistic implications.
Challenging Cooley directly, Richard Ely
claimed that taxes could not be justi½ed
based on “the old ½ction of reciprocity.”
Ely was careful in explaining that taxes
were “not exchanges” or “payments”
for public goods and services. “The sov-
ereign power demands contributions
from citizens regardless of the value of
any services which it may perform for
the citizen,” wrote Ely in his 1888 tax
treatise.7

As students of the German historical
school of economics, progressive think-
ers like Ely applied a thoroughgoing his-
toricism to their analysis of contempo-
rary American political economy and
tax policy. 因此, Henry Carter Adams
boldly derided classical bene½ts theory
for ignoring how “the modern State . . .
assumes duties far beyond the primitive
functions of protection to life and prop-
erty.” Although such a “quid pro quo
theory of taxation may have served fairly
well under conceptions of governmental
activity held in the early part of the cen-
图里,” Adams argued in 1898, “it must be
regarded at present as somewhat anti-
quated.”8

Edwin Seligman, the leading authority
on progressive taxation, condemned the
social theory underpinning the bene½ts
principle in even starker terms. Like Ely
and Adams, Seligman maintained that
the bene½ts doctrine was based, at its
核, on an obsolete conception of citi-
禅宗:

It is now generally agreed that we pay
taxes not because the state protects us,
or because we get any bene½ts from the
状态, but simply because the state is a
part of us. . . . In a civilized society the

The intellec-
tual founda-
tions of the
modern
美国人
½scal state

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代达罗斯之泉 2009

Ajay K.
Mehrotra

state is as necessary to the individual as
the air he breathes; unless he reverts to
stateless savagery and anarchy he can-
not live beyond its con½nes. . . . To say
that he supports the state only because it
bene½ts him is a narrow and sel½sh doc-
trine. We pay taxes not because we get
bene½ts from the state, but because it
is as much our duty to support the state
as to support ourselves or our family;
因为, in short, the state is an integral
part of us.9

简单的说, the progressive economists
used taxation as a means to renegotiate
the social contract between citizens
and their state. Instead of relying on ab-
stract economic relations based on mar-
ket transactions to justify taxation, 他们
turned to social relations and the inter-
dependent reality of modern social and
political life to explain the need for di-
rect and graduated taxes.

The progressive theorists’ uni½ed dis-

dain for the bene½ts principle did not
translate, 然而, into a single univer-
sal vision of the ability-to-pay doctrine.
Adams, who believed in distinguishing
between the theoretical justi½cation
for taxation and the “lawyer’s point of
看法,” relied on what he referred to as a
“contributory theory of a tax.” Progres-
sive taxation was justi½ed under such
a theory because it embodied the ethi-
cal duty of social unity that citizens of
a polity owed to each other and to the
larger commonwealth. Unlike the pre-
vailing “purchase theory” or bene½t
theory of tax, which emphasized a sol-
itary, atomistic, and consumerist rela-
tionship between the citizen-taxpayer
and the state, Adams argued that a con-
tributory theory was based on “solidar-
ity of social interest.” For him, a “sense
of organic unity and of interdependence,
and consciousness of common rights

and common duties, go along with the
idea of contribution.”10

Ely pushed further in emphasizing the
link between social solidarity and taxa-
的. Quoting approvingly from a Mas-
sachusetts Tax Commission report, 他
写了: “All the enjoyments which a man
can receive from his property come from
his connection with society. Cut off from
all social relations a man’s wealth would
be useless to him. 实际上, there could be
no such thing as wealth without socie-
ty.”11 Seligman took a slightly different
方法. Although he agreed that the
social interdependence occasioned by
modern industrialism had displaced the
logic of autonomous individualism, 他
maintained that the triumph of the abili-
ty-to-pay principle was the culmination
of a long and gradual historical process
driven mainly by class dynamics. “Amid
the clashing of divergent interests and
the endeavor of each social class to roll
off the burden of taxation on some other
班级, we discern the slow and laborious
growth of standards of justice in taxa-
的, and the attempt on the part of the
community as a whole to realize this jus-
泰斯,” proclaimed Seligman. “The histo-
ry of ½nance, 换句话说, shows the
evolution of the principle of faculty or
ability to pay–the principle that each in-
dividual should be held to help the state
in proportion to his ability to help him-
self.”12

为了确定, the practical application of

the ability-to-pay principle had its lim-
它是. Accurately measuring a citizen’s abil-
ity to pay taxes was a controversial issue
that remained rather elusive–then and
now.13 But the progressive economists
contended that their primary, pragmatic
tax reform objective was not to recom-
mend an unassailable ½scal system based
on the principle of ability to pay. 相当,
they aimed to demonstrate the theoreti-
cal limitations inherent in the bene½ts

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原则. That is not to say that they
thought the bene½ts principle had no
place in tax-policy discussions; 他们的
goal instead was to make more explic-
it the political and social theory im-
plicit in the dueling tax notions and,
正在进行中, create support for a re-
form movement. 在这个意义上, the po-
litical economists, like other progres-
sive activists, used the language of eth-
ical duties and the idiom of social soli-
darity “less to clarify a political philos-
ophy than to build a political constitu-
ency.”14
Creating a social and political move-

ment for tax reform also meant reach-
ing an audience beyond the academy.
The progressive economists thus real-
ized that the power of their ideas alone
was often not enough to change the
laws and institutions that undergirded
the American ½scal system. They need-
ed to take a more active role in the po-
litical and policy-making process by
participating as consultants and part-
time tax commissioners, and by cap-
turing the attention of lawmakers.
Just as the economists and other
social scientists were promoting their
ideas, the American political system it-
self was undergoing a profound trans-
形成. The nineteenth-century po-
litical structure of “courts and parties”
was giving way to a more fractured
and pluralistic system of American
statecraft. The rise of a more competi-
tive political process and greater reli-
ance on expert administration chal-
lenged the traditional control of party
politics and patronage.15 By linking a
graduated income tax to tariff reform,
tax activists were able to help move
½scal policy away from party politics
and toward administrative expertise.
With this shift, reform-minded eco-
nomic experts joined organizations

like the National Tax Association, 这
leading professional association of
public ½nance experts, and other civic
groups to provide an outlet for their
ideas.

To make their ideas palatable for
the public, the progressive economists
needed to navigate between the two pre-
vailing political positions on taxation.
In leading the conceptual campaign for
progressive tax reform, they needed to
defend their ideas against economic
and political conservatives who wanted
to maintain the status quo, and against
the seemingly radical populist calls for
a more dramatically redistributive ½s-
cal system.

Political conservatives, wedded to a
classical, night-watchman view of the
状态, equated the move to graduated
income and wealth-transfer taxes with
creeping socialism. The conservative
critic David A. 韦尔斯, 例如, 骗局-
tended that, except in the case of war
½nancing, there was no place in a free
republic for any form of graduated tax-
es based on the ability to pay. 虽然
韦尔斯, the former commissioner of In-
ternal Revenue during the Civil War,
was well aware of the importance of
using taxes to fund an army and build
a nation, 他, like many old-guard com-
mentators, opposed progressive taxa-
tion adamantly. “Any government,
whatever name it may assume, is a des-
potism, and commits acts of flagrant
spoliation,” declared Wells, “if it grants
exemptions or exacts a greater or lesser
rate of tax from one man than from an-
other.” Arguing that graduated taxes
of any sort were a form of emasculating
charity, Wells concluded that “equality
and manhood, 所以, demand and
require uniformity of burden in whatev-
er is the subject of taxation.”16 The pro-
gressive economists observed ½rsthand,
often to their personal and professional

The intellec-
tual founda-
tions of the
modern
美国人
½scal state

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代达罗斯之泉 2009

Ajay K.
Mehrotra

detriment, the overwhelming power that
critics like Wells held, particularly in de-
lineating the bounds of academic free-
多姆.

Conservative hostility to progressive
tax reform, 然而, spread beyond so-
cial commentators and the academy
and into legal institutions of power.
美国. 最高法院, in a rather
surprising decision for contemporaries,
struck down as unconstitutional the 1894
income tax, the ½rst peace-time mea-
sure of its kind. In his concurring opin-
离子, Justice Stephen J. Field illustrated
the anxiety with which elites viewed
the progressive tax movement. “这
present assault on capital is but the be-
ginning,” wrote Field. “It will be but
the stepping-stone to others, larger
and more sweeping, till our political
contests will become a war of the poor
against the rich; a war constantly grow-
ing in intensity and bitterness.”17

Addressing these conservative op-
ponents, the progressive economists
sought to demonstrate that support
for graduated taxes could be compat-
ible with traditional American notions
of equality and fairness. This required
½rst showing that critics had erroneous-
ly assumed that “progressive taxation
necessarily implies socialism and con-
½scation.” Citing David Wells’s writ-
ings explicitly, Seligman claimed, “[我]t
is quite possible to repudiate absolute-
ly the socialistic theory of taxation and
yet at the same time advocate progres-
sion.”18

这样做, Seligman and his like-mind-

ed colleagues turned to marginal util-
ity analysis, an increasingly popular
economic concept in the European and
American academy at the time. A vari-
ant of neoclassical economics, margin-
alism held that the value of a commod-
ity was based upon the subjective worth,
or utility, a consumer ascribed to it. 这

价值, 反过来, depended upon how
much of the commodity the consum-
er already had. Each additional, or mar-
ginal, unit of a commodity, 包括
钱, was believed to be of lesser val-
ue than the previous unit.19 The pro-
gressive tax theorists used the notion
of the diminishing marginal utility of
money to contend that progressive taxa-
的, 实际上, entailed an equality of sac-
ri½ce among taxpayers. “Strict equality
of sacri½ce in the sense of relatively pro-
portional diminution of burden,” wrote
Seligman, “thus involves progressive
taxation.”20
The use of marginalism to decouple

graduated taxation from state socialism
may have persuaded some critics. 但
the reform-minded economists faced
a more amorphous, though equally for-
midable, kind of opposition from the po-
litical left, where the populist attraction
to Henry George’s single-tax theory dis-
tracted important constituencies away
from the progressive tax reform move-
蒙特. In defusing this opposition, 这
tax theorists attempted to debunk the
amateur economic analysis conducted
by George and his disciples and to un-
mask the “ultra conservative” social
theory that underpinned George’s call
for a single-tax on land.

In his enormously popular 1879 书,

Progress and Poverty, and in other writ-
英格斯, Henry George advocated for a
levy only on increases in land value–
a single-tax on what George referred
to as the “unearned increment” of ap-
preciated land. George’s idea quickly
captured the imagination of contempo-
rary social movements. As early as 1885,
Richard Ely observed that “tens of thou-
sands of laborers have read Progress and
Poverty, who have never before looked
between the two covers of an economic
book.”21

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Henry George and the single-tax ap-
pealed to a variety of grassroots, populist
groups as an attack on land speculators
and monopolists. Yet as the progressive
economists noted, the single-tax in par-
ticular and George’s political philosophy
in general were premised on a conserva-
主动的, if not reactionary, view of individ-
ualism. George argued that the fruits
of individual labor belonged to the indi-
vidual and the state had very little role
to play in economic or social matters
beyond levying a single-tax on land. 在
its core, George’s single-tax appeared
to be a narrow application of the bene-
½ts principle: landowners owed a duty
to the state because it was the state that
protected the private property rights of
landowners.

The tax experts not only ridiculed
George as an “unscienti½c” amateur,
they also denounced the single-tax as
an infeasible solution to the many ills
of modern industrialism. 在 1890
American Social Science Association’s
conference dedicated to the single-tax,
Seligman joined other professional po-
litical economists in berating George’s
“schemes” as “repugnant to our moral
sense and repellant to our logic.” Simi-
larly, Ely depicted George as “an ultra
conservative, for he does not believe in
taxes at all, but holds them to be rob-
bery. . . . 事实是, there is in modern
society no such individual production
as Mr. George assumes. What have I
produced alone and unaided? Noth-
ing.”22 In sum, nearly all professional
tax experts loathed George’s single-tax
as a hopelessly reactionary panacea.

If the progressive economists did not
take George’s analysis of taxation seri-
乌斯, they were compelled to contend
with other forces on the political left ad-
vocating for a more radically redistribu-
tive ½scal system. American socialists,
pointing to the experience of European

nations, called for steeply graduated
taxes on income and wealth as a means
to confront the growing disparity of
wealth and opportunity that accompa-
nied industrial capitalism. The progres-
sive tax reformers responded that Amer-
ican political culture posed serious insti-
tutional constraints on the adoption of
European-style social democracy in the
美国. Even Seligman, who dis-
credited bene½ts theory because it elided
the social connections between citizens
and their state, recoiled at the implica-
tions of radically redistributive tax laws
and policies:

From the principle that the state may
modify its strict ½scal policy by consid-
erations of general utility, to the princi-
ple that it is the duty of the state to re-
dress all inequalities of fortune among
its private citizens, is a long and danger-
ous step. It would land us not only in so-
cialism, but practically in communism.23
By operating between the two oppos-

ing political camps–between the con-
servative critics who equated graduated
taxes with socialism and the populist re-
formers who advanced a seemingly more
radical form of taxation–tax reformers
sought to demonstrate that progressive
taxation was, 实际上, an assault on privi-
lege and concentrations of wealth that
did not amount to a move toward state
socialism. This was no easy task. It re-
quired the progressive tax theorists to
stake out a fragile intermediary position
that subsequently afforded lawmakers
and policy analysts an opportunity to
make the existing system of public ½-
nance more transparent and fair, 和-
out threatening the fundamental pre-
rogatives of American political culture.

The Supreme Court’s decision striking
down the 1894 tax law gave reformers an
opportunity to forge their intermediary

The intellec-
tual founda-
tions of the
modern
美国人
½scal state

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代达罗斯之泉 2009

Ajay K.
Mehrotra

位置. Although the decision was a
formidable institutional obstacle, it did
not mark the end of the progressive tax
reform movement; 反而, it galvan-
ized tax activists to seek a constitution-
al amendment nullifying the Court’s
holding. Rati½cation of the Sixteenth
Amendment was a long and arduous
过程, and the progressive econo-
mists played a key role in convincing
state legislators of the amendment’s
popular appeal. 在 1913, soon after the
amendment’s ½nal rati½cation, the fed-
eral government adopted the country’s
½rst permanent progressive income
tax. With relatively high exemption
levels and moderately graduated rates,
this tax law initially affected only a
small fraction of the U.S. 人口
and raised little revenue. But the law
led the way in the rise of a new ½scal
order.24

最终, the moderate theoretical
and political position taken by the pro-
gressive tax experts influenced lawmak-
呃. As Congressman Cordell Hull (D-
Tennessee), one of the chief architects
的 1913 法律, 解释了: “I have no
disposition to tax wealth unnecessar-
ily or unjustly, but I do believe that the
wealth of the country should bear its
just share of the burden of taxation and
that it should not be permitted to shirk
that duty.”25 For reformers and lawmak-
呃, 然后, progressive taxation implied
that wealth in an industrial society was
a social product, and that the distribu-
tion of social obligations ought to bear
some resemblance to the distribution
of social rewards.

Despite modest beginnings, the fed-
eral government soon vigorously em-
ployed its newfound ½scal powers. 在
response to World War I, the govern-
ment established a series of revenue
laws that dramatically expanded the
scale and scope of the national tax

系统. The sheer demand for war-
time revenue was certainly an impor-
tant determinant of this ½scal revolu-
的, but the progressive theorists’ con-
cerns about social justice and the dis-
tributional impact of American tax
laws were equally signi½cant. 建筑
on the progressive economists’ concep-
tual foundation, 我们. Treasury Depart-
ment of½cials, many of whom were
律师, sought to highlight the impor-
tance of ½scal citizenship to the ½nanc-
ing of the war. These lawyers-turned-
government administrators attempted
to ensure that the physical sacri½ces
made by those who fought the war were
matched by ½scal sacri½ces from the af-
fluent, who often bene½ted from the ro-
bust war economy. The astronomically
high marginal and effective income tax
费率, and the enactment of an inheri-
tance tax and innovative levies on war-
time business pro½ts, illustrated that a
new “soak-the-rich” form of taxation
已初具规模. 的确, by the end of
the war levies on income and pro½ts had
come to dominate federal revenues.26
Although the World War I tax system

was scaled back as part of the general
retrenchment of the 1920s, the Progres-
sive Era foundation of the graduated in-
come tax remained remarkably resilient,
and thus provided subsequent reform-
ers with a conceptual base upon which
to build. Another world war would trig-
ger the second major transformation in
twentieth-century American tax policy,
replacing the existing “class tax” with a
“mass tax” that reached a broad swath of
middle-class wage earners.27 But by the
end of the 1920s, the intellectual, emo-
的, and cultural spade work had been
accomplished; the foundations of a new
½scal polity were ½rmly established.

The new ½scal order that emerged at
the turn of the century was by no means
a radical system of wealth redistribution,

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nor was it merely a conservative bul-
wark against more dramatic reform.
反而, the modern American ½scal
state that emerged in the early twen-
tieth century dramatically altered the
distribution of ½scal burdens along
the lines of both class and region. 在
the process, this new polity fundamen-
tally reconstituted the meaning of mod-
ern citizenship, the existing regime of

American statecraft, and the range of
possibilities for robust government ac-
的. This transformation was, ultimate-
莱, a quali½ed success. Although it did
not go as far as some social democratic
reformers had envisioned, this new ½s-
cal polity laid the foundation for and
held the promise of a new, more pro-
gressive American state.

The intellec-
tual founda-
tions of the
modern
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½scal state

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尾注
1 Mary O. Furner, Advocacy & Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social
科学, 1865–1905 (列克星敦: University Press of Kentucky, 1975); 托马斯·L. Haskell,
The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the
Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (厄巴纳: 伊利诺伊大学出版社, 1977); Dorothy
Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (剑桥: 剑桥大学出版社, 1991).
2 On the links between German historicism and American economic thought, see Joseph
Dorfman, “The Role of German Historical School in American Economic Thought,” Amer-
ican Economic Review 45 (1955): 17–28; Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in Ameri-
can Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture (伊萨卡岛: 康奈尔大学出版社, 1965);
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (剑桥, 大量的。:
贝尔纳普出版社, 1998).
3 Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (剑桥,
大量的。: 哈佛大学出版社, 1997).
4 Herbert Hovenkamp, “The First Great Law & Economics Movement,” Stanford Law Review
42 (1990): 993–1058; Barbara H. 油炸, The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire: Robert Hale
and the First Law & Economics Movement (剑桥, 大量的。: 哈佛大学出版社,
1998).
5 Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (纽约: Viking,
1949); Edward A. Purcell, 小。, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scienti½c Naturalism & 这
Problem of Value (列克星敦: University Press of Kentucky, 1973); Louis Menand, The Meta-
physical Club (纽约: 法拉尔, 施特劳斯, and Giroux, 2001). On the transatlantic aspects of
this new form of liberalism, see James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy
and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (牛津: 牛津大学
按, 1986); Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings.
6 托马斯·M. Cooley, A Treatise on the Law of Taxation (芝加哥: Callaghan, 1876), 2.
7 Richard T. Ely, Taxation in American States and Cities (纽约: 时间. 是. Crowell, 1888), 14, 7.
8 Henry C. Adams, Science of Finance: An Investigation of Public Expenditures and Public Rev-
enues (纽约: H. Holt and Co., 1898), 300.
9 Edwin R. A. Seligman, Essays in Taxation (New York and London: Macmillan, 1895), 72.
10 Adams, Science of Finance, 293, 301.
11 Ely, Taxation in American States, 14.
12 Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Income Tax: A Study of the History, 理论, and Practice of Income

Taxation at Home and Abroad, 2ND版. (纽约: Macmillan, 1914), 4.

代达罗斯之泉 2009

Ajay K.
Mehrotra

13 For a recent philosophical reassessment of the theories underlying American progressive
taxation, see Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice
(牛津: 牛津大学出版社, 2002).

14 Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 4 (1982): 122.
15 Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative
Capacities, 1877–1920 (剑桥: 剑桥大学出版社, 1982); 理查德·L. 麦克-
Cormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the
Progressive Era (纽约: 牛津大学出版社, 1986).

16 赋予生命. 韦尔斯, “The Communism of a Discriminating Income Tax,” North American Re-
看法 130 (1880): 328–329, 260. 讽刺地, while Wells was linking tax equality and unifor-
mity with masculinity, early suffragettes were already using their status as taxpayers to
½ght for full citizenship. See Carolyn Jones, “Dollars and Selves: Women’s Tax Criticism
and Resistance in the 1870s,” 伊利诺伊大学法律评论, 1994: 265–310; Linda Kerber,
No Constitutional Right To Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (纽约:
Hill and Wang, 1998).

17 Pollock v. Farners’ Loan & Trust Co., 157 我们. 429, 607 (1895).
18 Seligman, Theory of Progressive Taxation, 222.
19 On the rise of marginalism, see “Symposium, Papers on the Marginal Revolution in Eco-
经济学,” History of Political Economy 4 (1972); Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect
(剑桥: 剑桥大学出版社, 1997).

20 Seligman, Theory of Progressive Taxation, 239.
21 Quoted in Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (纽约:

International Publishers, 1947), 120.

22 Edwin R. A. Seligman, “Single Tax Debate,” Journal of Social Science 27 (1890): 4, 35, 44;

Ely, Taxation in American States and Cities, 16–17.

23 Seligman, Theory of Progressive Taxation, 222.
24 瓦. Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A Short History, 2ND版. (剑桥: 凸轮-
桥大学出版社, 2004); John D. Buenker, The Income Tax and the Progressive Era
(纽约: Garland, 1985); Sidney Ratner, Taxation and Democracy in America (纽约:
威利, 1967).

25 Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (纽约: Macmillan, 1948); Harold B. 欣顿,
Cordell Hull: A Biography (Garden City, 纽约: 双日, Doran & 公司。, 1942), 151–152.
26 大卫·M. 肯尼迪, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (牛津: 牛津

大学出版社, 2004).

27 Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America, 96–97.

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