by John Marini
CHAPTER 11: ROOSEVELT’S OR REAGAN’S AMERICA? A TIME FOR CHOOSING
1 Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944 State of the Union Address, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16518.
2 Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
3 Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43130.
4 Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1938), 782.
5 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Campaign Address on Progressive Government at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California,” September 23, 1932. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=88391.
6 Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing,” October 27, 1964, Los Angeles, California, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganatimeforchoosing.htm.
CHAPTER 12: THEORIES OF THE LEGISLATURE: THE CHANGING CHARACTER OF THE AMERICAN CONGRESS
1 See John L. Jackley, “U.S. Congress: A Sick Body Getting Sicker,” The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 1991.
2 Roger Davidson, “The Two Congresses and How They Are Changing,” in The Role of the Legislature in Western Democracies, ed. Norman J. Ornstein (Washington: American Enterprise Institute Symposium, 1981), 3–4.
3 See Richard Fenno, “If, As Ralph Nader Says, Congress Is ‘the Broken Branch,’ How Come We Love Our Congressmen So Much?” Congress in Change, ed. Norman Ornstein (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975), 277–78.
4 Morris Fiorina, “Congressional Control of the Bureaucracy: A Mismatch of Incentives and Capabilities,” in Congress Reconsidered, ed. Lawrence Dodd and Bruce Oppenheimer, 2nd ed. (Washington: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1981), 345.
5 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 91.
6 John Wettergreen, “Bureaucracy in America,” presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, 1983, 5.
7 John Wettergreen, “Constitutional Problems of American Bureaucracy in I.N.S. v. Chada.” A paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1985, 13.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 14.
10 Ibid., 31.
11 Ibid., 5.
12 Harold Seidman and Robert Gilmour, Politics, Position, and Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 136–37.
13 Ibid., 312.
14 Ibid., 313.
15 Wettergreen, “Constitutional Problems of American Bureaucracy,” 22–23.
16 Seidman and Gilmour, Politics, Position, and Power, 278.
17 Wettergreen, “Constitutional Problems of American Bureaucracy,” 5.
18 Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (New York: Mentor Books, 1955), 44.
19 Wettergreen, “Constitutional Problems of American Bureaucracy,” 44.
20 Ibid., 44–45.
21 Ibid., 45.
22 Ibid., 26.
23 Ibid., 25.
24 Randall B. Ripley and Grace A. Franklin, Congress, the Bureaucracy, and Public Policy (Chicago: The Dorsey Press, 1987), 78–79.
25 Harvey C. Mansfield, “The Constitution and Modern Social Science,” The Center Magazine 19 (September/October 1986): 52.
26 Wettergreen, “Constitutional Problems of American Bureaucracy,” 26.
27 Ibid., 32.
28 Fiorina, “Congressional Control of the Bureaucracy,” 343.
29 Seidman and Gilmore, Politics, Position, and Power, 340.
30 Cited in Lester M. Salamon, “Federal Regulation: A New Arena for Presidential Power?” in The Illusion of Presidential Government, ed. Hugh Heclo and Lester Salamon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), 157.
31 Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., “Republicanizing the Executive,” in Saving the Revolution, ed. Charles R. Kesler (New York: Free Press, 1987).
32 Ibid., 9.
33 Edward S. Corwin, “The Impact of the Idea of Evolution on the American Political and Constitutional Tradition,” in Corwin on the Constitution, vol. 1, ed. Richard Loss (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 191–92.
34 Paul Eidelberg, The Philosophy of the American Constitution (New York: Free Press, 1968), 231.
35 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), 48.
36 Ibid., 49.
37 Ibid., 24.
38 Ibid., 23.
39 Harry McPherson, A Political Education (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1972), 301–2.
40 James W. Ceaser, “The Theory of Governance of the Reagan Administration,” in The Reagan Presidency and the Governing of America, ed. Lester M. Salamon and Michael S. Lund (Washington: Urban Institute Press, 1984), 70.
41 Theodore Lowi, “Ronald Reagan—Revolutionary,” in The Reagan Presidency and the Governing of America, 51.
42 “380 of 393 House members (97%), 27 of 29 senators (93%) won another term.” Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, “Incumbent Reelection Rates Higher Than Average in Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball,” December 15, 2016, http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/incumbent-reelection-rates-higher-than-average-in-2016/.
43 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, bk 12, para. 144.
44 Ibid., bk 13, para. 151.
45 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 42–43.
46 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, bk 12, 12.
47 Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 43.
48 Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: Colonial Press, 1900), 154.
49 Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 45.
50 Ibid., 42.
51 Federalist, no. 51 (Madison).
52 Ibid.
53 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 157.
54 Ibid., 156.
55 Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 41.
56 Ibid., 49–50.
57 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 161–62.
CHAPTER 13: PROGRESSIVISM, THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, AND THE RATIONAL STATE
1 This chapter was originally published in Bradley C. S. Watson, ed., Progressive Challenges to the American Constitution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
2 Wilson believed that the Founders’ political science had been based on a misunderstanding of man and nature. He thought that the laws of politics, though dependent on the laws of science, are historical laws, derived from the evolution of organic life, not natural laws of physics. He insisted: “In our own day, whenever we discuss the structure or development of a thing, whether in nature or in society, we consciously follow Mr. Darwin; but before Mr. Darwin they followed Newton.” Thus, Wilson criticized the Federalist writings because “they are full of the theory of checks and balances.… Politics is turned into mechanics under his touch. The theory of gravitation is supreme.” Wilson contended that “the trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” The New Freedom (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913), 41. Wilson accepted the Kantian view that natural laws are scientific laws and cannot be the foundation of the moral law. In short, he either rejected, or was unaware of, the view that theoretical metaphysics, or philosophical ethics (natural right), could have established the foundations of the Founders’ political science.
3 Wilson is surely wrong in his assumption that the American Founders derived their moral and political understanding from theoretical foundations provided by Newtonian physics. The Founders did not deny that Newton’s theories are an accurate description of the natural or physical universe. However, their political science and their principles were thought to be derived from theoret
ical or metaphysical reason. And they believed practical politics must be understood from the perspective of practical reason or prudence. Madison, in Federalist 37, made very clear the lack of an exact science and the dependence of political science on prudence. In terms of political science, he notes: “when we pass from the works of nature, in which all the delineations are perfectly accurate, and appear to be otherwise only from the imperfection of the eye which surveys them, to the institutions of man, in which the obscurity arises as well from the object itself as from the organ by which it is contemplated, we must perceive the necessity of moderating still further our expectations and hopes from the efforts of human sagacity.” The institutional structure of constitutional government (separation of powers) is not based on mechanical laws, but on prudential necessity derived from an understanding of human nature. As Madison notes: “experience has instructed us that no skill in the science of government has yet been able to discriminate and define, with sufficient certainty, its three great provinces—the legislative, executive, and judiciary.” “Questions daily occur in the course of practice, which prove the obscurity which reigns in these subjects, and which puzzle the greatest adepts in political science” (Federalist 37). Madison’s understanding of prudence in his political science is a far cry from a mechanical political science based on the theory of the universe of “graviton” or a “machine,” as Wilson suggested.
4 In bringing government into conformity with the proper science, Wilson suggested that it was necessary to unify what the Founders had divided. “The object of constitutional government,” Wilson observed, “is to bring the active, planning will of each part of the government into accord with the prevailing popular will, thought and need, and thus make it an impartial instrument of symmetrical national development; and to give to the operation of the government thus shaped under the influence of opinion and adjusted to the general interest both stability and an incorruptible efficiency” (emphasis mine). The New Freedom, 41. In unifying government on behalf of will, Wilson assumed that Darwinian science provided support for democratic government, as opposed to constitutional government. It is not surprising that any impediment to carrying out the will of the people is undemocratic. It is not the separation of powers (Newtonian), but the separation of politics and administration (Darwinian), that is compatible with the idea of progress in human affairs. Politics is the organic expression of the will (or spirit) of the people; administration is the technical, rational means by which it is made adaptable and put into practice.
5 Woodrow Wilson provides insight into the link between the new discipline of political science and its use in the transformation of the politics of the American regime. Wilson, with a PhD in political science from Johns Hopkins, helped undermine the natural right foundation of the American regime. He hoped to replace it with the newer Hegelian concept of the state. He understood that his adversary was the Constitution and the old political science of The Federalist that had created it.
6 Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 24–25.
7 G. F. W. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science (Heidelberg Lectures, 1817–1819), trans. M. Stewart and P. C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 242.
8 Ibid.
9 G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1988), 41.
10 Ibid.
11 Mary Parker Follett, The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1918), 138.
12 August Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy, trans. Frederick Ferre (Indianapolis, IN: Library of Liberal Arts, 1970), 13–14.
13 As Comte noted: “All competent thinkers will agree with Bacon that there can be no real knowledge except that which rests upon observed facts. This fundamental maxim is evidently indisputable if it is applied as it ought to be, to the mature state of our intelligence. But, if we consider the origin of our knowledge, it is no less certain that the primitive human mind could not and, indeed, ought not to have thought in that way. For if, on the one hand, every positive theory must necessarily be founded upon observations, it is, on the other hand, no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other. If in contemplating phenomena we did not immediately connect that with some principles, not only would it be impossible for us to combine these isolated observations and, therefore, to derive any profit from them, but we should even be entirely incapable of remembering the facts, which would for the most part remain unnoted by us.” Introduction to Positive Philosophy, 5–6.
14 John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 40–41.
15 Charles E. Merriam, American Political Ideas: Studies in the Development of American Political Thought 1865–1917 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1923), 371.
16 Lester Frank Ward, The Psychic Factors of Civilization (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1893), 30.
17 What is sometimes considered a distinctively American philosophy, pragmatism, nonetheless rests on the same theoretical foundation—that of philosophy of History and social evolution. In recognizing the importance of John Dewey’s contribution to social thought, Charles Merriam noted: “pragmatism is a tentative philosophy of developing life. Its basis lies in the broad historical background of modern life, in the central place of evolution in the scheme of modern thought, in the social character of consciousness—‘in short, it bears many of the resemblances of the general theory of things adapted to a democratic era.’ In ethics its followers applied it to the evolutionary theory of morality, although they did not originate this point of view.” American Political Ideas: Studies in the Development of American Political Thought 1865–1917 (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1923), 424.
18 Merriam, American Political Ideas, 371.
19 Charles E. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1910), 346.
20 Merriam, A History of American Political Theories, 332.
21 Ward, The Psychic Factors of Civilization, 304.
22 Charles A. Beard, “Politics,” Columbia University Lectures on Science, Philosophy and Art, 1907–1908 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908).
23 Interestingly, the very first books on sociology written in the English language were defenses of slavery: Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical (1854), and George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South. Both attempted to defend slavery using Comte’s new science of sociology. See L. L. Bernard, “Henry Hughes, First American Sociologist,” Social Forces 15, no. 2 (December 1936): 154–74.
24 At Johns Hopkins University, George Sylvester Morris referred to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right “as representing the high-water mark … in the treatment of the philosophical conception of the state.” “The Philosophy of the State and of History,” in Methods of Teaching History, vol. 1, 2nd ed., ed. G. Stanley Hall (Boston: Ginn, Heath, & Co., 1885), 163. Morris was the teacher of Dewey and Wilson, and he had studied in Berlin. To those students who were not able to read German, he recommended Elisha Mulford’s The Nation. In Heidelberg, Mulford, too, had come to appreciate the concept of the state as derived from Hegel.
25 Elisha Mulford, The Nation: The Foundation of Civil Order and Political Life in the United States (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1870), 340.
26 Ibid., 382.
27 Quoted in Mark E. Neely Jr., “Romanticism, Nationalism, and the New Economics: Elisha Mulford and the Organic Theory of the State,” American Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1977): 421.
28 John W. Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, vol. 1 (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1890), 67.
29 Ibid., 100.
30 Ibid., 58. In a similar vein, Woodrow Wilson, in his 1894 lecture on public law, thought it necessary to incorporate constitutionalism into the doctrine of the state. He noted: “[W]e have ado
pted the theory of the ‘Constitutional State.’ This involves an ‘organic’ conception of the nature of the State. Every State is the historical form of the organic common life of a particular people … (the) expression of a form of life higher than that of the individual: that common life which gives leave and opportunity to individual life, makes it possible and makes it full and complete.” The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 7: 1890–1892, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 13.
31 Frank J. Goodnow, “The Work of the American Political Science Association: Presidential Address by Frank J. Goodnow,” Proceedings of the American Political Science Association 1 (1904): 37.
32 Westel Woodbury Willoughby, An Examination of the Nature of the State: A Study in Political Philosophy, and Godkin, both cited in Dennis J. Mahoney, “A Newer Science of Politics: The Federalist and American Political Science in the Progressive Era,” in Charles R. Kesler, ed., Saving the Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 255.
33 Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 274–75.
34 American constitutionalism had made it possible to reconcile the “spirit of religion” and the “spirit of liberty.” But such a reconciliation required the separation of government and society, church and state. The acceptance of the idea of the rational state, on the other hand, required a new understanding of religion—one wholly secularized and democratized—that would be subordinated to the spirit of science. It required a new understanding of democracy, one in which the source of morality and legitimacy of the people is to be found in the evolving will of the intellectuals. The technical means to carry out that will is to be established in the bureaucratic apparatus of the administrative state. With the establishment of the modern research university, the expertise and method necessary to solve the problems of society could be generated. Science would be used in the service of compassion, or social welfare, thus uniting knowledge and power on behalf of humanity.
35 John Dewey, “Ethics and Physical Science,” Andover Review, June 1887.
36 John Dewey, The Ethics of Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1888), 28.