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Michael Cox, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy. By Aaron L. Friedberg. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xiv, 362 pp. Cloth, $69.50, isbn 0-691-07865-3. Paper, $21.95, isbn 0-691-04890-8.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Page 1151, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700528
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If war and the mobilization for war have been central to the construction of the modern state, then how and why is the United States different? This conundrum lies at the heart of Aaron L. Friedberg's wideranging study on the American experience in the Cold War. As in all things, the United States proved to be the exception to the historical rule, and, according to Friedberg at least, rather than the Cold War leading to the creation of a powerful, centralized state, the opposite happened—or, more precisely, the tendencies toward centralization that were inherent in the process of mobilizing for Cold War were counterbalanced by equally strong antistatist influences that were deeply rooted in the circumstances of the nation's founding . This had two major consequences, both positive. It prevented the formation of what Harold Lasswell once termed the garrison state. And it helped determine who, in the end, triumphed in the Cold War.
