Mehrotra has posted the Introduction and Conclusion on SSRN. CUP helps with the rest:
The TOC and blurbs by Brian Balogh, Richard Bensel, Michael A. Bernstein, -Andrea Louise Campbell, and Lawrence M. Friedman appear after the jump.Making the Modern American Fiscal State chronicles the rise of the U.S. system of direct and progressive taxation. Ajay K. Mehrotra provides historical perspective on the intellectual, legal, and administrative foundations of the current U.S. tax regime. In doing so, he uncovers the contested roots and paradoxical consequences of a fundamental transformation in American tax law and policy that took place at the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that the move toward a regime of direct and graduated taxation marked the emergence of a new fiscal polity – a new form of statecraft guided not only by the functional need for greater revenue, but also by broader social concerns about equity, fiscal citizenship, bureaucratic authority, and economic justice. This book explores what tax reformers at the turn of the twentieth century were able to accomplish and how their limited achievements were contested at nearly every turn.
Introduction
Part I. The Old Fiscal Order:
1. The growing social antagonism: partisan taxation and the early resistance to fiscal reform
2. The gradual demise: modern forces, new concepts, and economic crisis
Part II. The Rise of the Modern Fiscal State:
3. The response to Polluck: navigating an intellectual middle ground
4. The factories of fiscal innovation: institutional reform at the state and local level
5. Controlling corporations and changing the constitution: the legal foundations of the fiscal state
Part III. Consolidating the New Fiscal Order:
6. Lawyers, guns, and public monies: the United States Treasury, World War I, and the administration of the modern fiscal state
7. The paradox of retrenchment: post-war Republican ascendancy and the resiliency of the modern fiscal state
Epilogue
Here are the blurbs:
“Mehrotra has crafted a narrative that is fundamental to understanding the modern American state. By unearthing the intellectual, economic, political, and emotional spade work required to lay the groundwork for a major conceptual change in public policy, he shows how a highly decentralized, politicized, and indirect method of taxation was transformed into a centralized, neutrally administered, direct method of taxation with great potential to achieve redistributive ends.” --Brian Balogh, University of Virginia
“An important contribution to the intellectual, economic, legal, and political history of the American system of taxation; a much needed exploration of the way in which the progressive income tax replaced an earlier system of tariffs and miscellaneous imposts. Because taxes are the fuel that keeps the machinery of government going and that, in large measure, determine how much government can actually do, a rigorous and comprehensive exploration of how the system developed helps us understand our present situation and where, perhaps, we might be heading.” --Lawrence M. Friedman, Stanford Law School
“A fascinating, nuanced account of the intellectual and legal roots of modern progressive taxation in the United States, which established a new form of fiscal citizenship, a newly muscular administrative apparatus, and a new set of revenues that would fuel the American century, but also foreclosed other options. A must-read for those interested in the formation of the American state and the origins of contemporary tax politics.” --Andrea Louise Campbell, MIT
“In this panoramic interpretation of taxation, Mehrotra convincingly demonstrates that the modern state owes its very existence to a reconceptualization of communal responsibility in which the ‘ability to pay’ became a moral obligation and, thus, a policy principle.” --Richard Bensel, Cornell University
“Mehrotra’s book refines and extends the historical narrative on the rise of modern American statecraft. The development of the new tax systems this book cogently documents not only allowed a relatively young and newly emergent nation to participate meaningfully in world affairs, but also firmly established modes of governance that would ultimately define the reformist political economy of the mid-twentieth-century United States.” --Michael A. Bernstein, Tulane University
