Posts Tagged ‘Harvey Mansfield’

A Jack Miller Center Pathway Essay

At the center of our politics and a lightning-rod for all of our political controversy, the American presidency has somehow managed not to command the same scholarly attention as it has political attention.   There have been countless great books written about individual presidents: Lord Charnwood’s biography of Abraham Lincoln stands out above the rest.  But books on the American presidency as an institution are much less common and, as a whole, much less good.  That being said, those few that do stand out also stand above nearly every book that has been written on American politics more generally.

Harvey Mansfield’s Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power is the best book on the executive branch, although it is a challenging read.  In the first place, Mansfield’s book is an unsurpassed intellectual history of the concept of the modern executive.  By showing the extent to which the modern executive emerges as a theoretical invention that allows free governments to maintain their security even as they also preserve their freedom, Mansfield manages to capture the essence of the constitutional problem posed by executive power.  In the wake of the controversies surrounding the Bush administration, Mansfield’s book gives us insight into both sides of the debate.  The republican (not R) opponents of a strong executive emerge as concerned with the rule of law over and against the danger of the quick-acting and power-hungry executive; the proponents of a strong executive, including Mansfield himself, emerge as concerned with the inefficiencies and insufficiencies of the rule of law on its own—inefficiencies and insufficiencies that can and must be corrected by the executive with a taste not just for power but also for grandeur.  This book’s own grandeur lies, among many other things, in its ability to be a partisan in the debate in a manner that can teach the rest of us what true partisanship actually looks like.

Much less ethereal than Mansfield’s Taming the Prince, Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency also stands out for its insight into the presidency and into the nature of American politics more generally.  If I had to choose only one book to recommend to someone who wanted to understand American politics, I would choose The Rhetorical Presidency.  Tulis begins with a brilliant exposition of the founders’ understanding of presidential power within a system of separated powers.  It concludes with an equally brilliant investigation of the political dilemmas that have been created by the twentieth-century transformation of the presidency into the rhetorical mouth-piece of the people.  Although Tulis considers the “original intent” of the founders, he is not an ordinary “originalist.”  In other words, he does not suggest that America is failing because the current presidency does not live up to the founders’ intent.  Instead, Tulis suggests that the founders’ intentions persist in the constitutional forms and formalities of both the presidency and the system of separation of powers, although these constitutional forms and formalities rest uncomfortably with the twentieth century post-Woodrow Wilson transformation of presidential power.   Having taught this book on many occasions, I can say that its most outstanding virtue is the extent to which it opens students’ eyes not just to the dilemmas inherent in the modern presidency but to those that inhere in all of modern American politics.

Nearly every recommender of important books on the presidency is almost compelled to include Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan.  Although Neustadt has been rightly criticized by many scholars, including both Tulis and Mansfield, for over-emphasizing persuasion and under-emphasizing the formal powers of command involved in the office, the book still stands high on my shelf if for no other reason than its immensely readable account of the unique political situations our “modern presidents” have faced and their differing responses to them.  The book is better than its thesis.  It is good for its perceptive and enjoyable account of politics.  It is written by a man with both a taste for political life and an insider’s insight into the world of which he writes.  In fact, as scholars have pointed out, his political accounts tend to reveal how important the powers of command are as supplements to the powers of persuasion that his thesis emphasizes.  For anyone seeking to understand the politics of presidential administration, Neustadt’s book is still in a class of its own.

If Neustadt’s book emphasizes persuasion too much, Edward Corwin’s The President: Office and Powers offers an antidote.  To say that Corwin places exclusive emphasis on the formal or institutional aspects of presidential power would be unfair to the nuanced understanding contained within this book.  Corwin explores a variety of the aspects of presidential power, illustrating both their nature and their use by surveying historical precedents and Supreme Court cases.  As a scholarly apparatus, Corwin’s book is irreplaceable (I say that as someone who has regrettably just lost his tattered copy of this out-of-print book).  Where Neustadt brings an insider’s perspective to the workings of the presidency, Corwin, who is not just a scholar but one of our greatest and most thoughtful constitutional scholars, offers us a broad and perspicacious view of the presidency.

Finally, Stephen Skowronek’s The Politics Presidents Make offers one of the most fascinating, though somewhat inaccessible, accounts of the sources for presidential authority over the course of American history.   Developing a theory of what he calls “political time,” Skowronek is able to account for both the success of “reconstructive” presidents like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR and the failure of “disjunctive” presidents such as John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, and Herbert Hoover.   His guiding question is as ambitious as the scope of the book.  Examining the history of the presidency from Jefferson to Clinton, Skowronek aims to explain why some presidents have the political authority to exercise the full range of their powers while others do not.  In aiming to answer this question, Skowronek ends up providing us with more: he gives us a thoughtful, though much too reductionist, political history of the United States.

Skowonek’s book appropriately finishes this list because it best captures the difficulties of writing about the presidency as an institution as opposed to writing about individual presidents.  Skowronek aims to create a theory capable of explaining when and why presidents are successful in upsetting an established political order and successfully creating a new one.  Skowronek aims to create a theory that explains the immense individual variation during the history of the presidency.  This theory is oddly enough predicated on the fact that the presidency attracts those who want to do more than just to hold office; they want the fame that can only come from, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, planning and undertaking “extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.”  Skowronek’s theory tends to reduce presidential success to their respective place in “political time.”  In other words, he downplays the importance of individual prudence.  Although this makes some sense in the context of more typical political ambition, i.e. Mayhew’s book, The Electoral Connection, on the ambition of members of Congress is sensible in its reductionism, it is much more problematic in an office that attracts the highest types who possess the greatest stage on which to exercise and display their political prudence.  To a far greater degree than any other institution in American government, presidential success or grandeur depend on any given president’s individual ability to navigate the political world in which he finds himself.

Benjamin Kleinerman is an Assistant Professor at James Madison College at Michigan State University and the author of a newly acclaimed study entitled The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power.

Kleinerman