Federal Preemption Under Reagan's New Federalism

Ronald Reagan defined his federalism program in terms of returningpolitical power to state and local governments. In practice,he was Janus-faced with respect to his views on domestic policyissues. His "public" face emphasized initiatives promoting areturn of political power to the states and local governments.His "silent" face encouraged additional centralization of politicalpower in several functional areas, and he signed bills prohibitingstate economic regulation of certain industries. Most of Reagan'sinitiatives were administrative, and increased to a limitedextent the discretionary authority of states. In general, thepresident favored a smaller federal regulatory role but notnecessarily a larger state and local government role. He signedtotal preemption bills granting greater freedom of action tothe banking, communications, and transportation industries,and tax sanction and crossover sanction bills. At the closeof his administration, intergovernmental relations were morecoercive than they had been in 1980.     

Kazin on Dreiser: What it Means to be a Literary Critic

Throughout his career as a literary critic, Alfred Kazin wrote often and with sympathy and insight about Theodore Dreiser, one of the most powerful, panoramic, and compassionate novelists in American literary history. Kazin was an intense reader and writer, committed in his books, essays, and reviews to connecting with and describing the personality of each author he examined. His interpretive work on Dreiser illuminates what it means to be a literary critic and teacher. When we read Kazin in the midst of twenty-first century theory, ideology, and professionalism, we realize all the more clearly the goal in his literary criticism that he aimed for, achieved, and represented—and that now is missing from literary education and experience.     

Social conflict over property rights: the end,a new beginning,or a continuing debate?

The ownership and control of private land is a core social value in the United States. Public planning can be seen as conflicting with this value. The long-standing tension between private property rights and public planning was heightened in the 1990s with the emergence of the so-called private property rights movement. This movement seeks to limit governmental authority over privately owned land through a multi-level strategy of legal, policy, political, and public relations actions. This paper explores the historical basis for this conflict, the legal framework within which it functions, and contemporary policy battles.

The paper concludes that there may be no final outcome to this debate. Property rights activists are impassioned and believe their view of history and law is correct. I argue that it may be best to see debate about land use and property rights as one of the central vehicles for a continual reframing of core values in the American experience.     

Did Max Weber's Agony and Ecstasy Influence His Scholarship?

When exploring the intellectual history of a discipline, one cannot help but wonder about the “real” person behind the scholarship. To what extent do personal life experiences influence a scholar's theories, conceptualizations, and expectations? Max Weber, the German scholar whose intellectual curiosity was, at least partially, inspired by strong personal anxieties, became one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. His own intellectual and personal obsessions, along with the efforts of his wife and colleagues to present his work to a larger audience, had much to do with who he was, as well as the body of scholarship that he created.     

The Idea of Citizenship in the Early Civil Rights Movement

Luther P. Jackson was a key supporter of the Association for the study of Negro Life and History and a leading historian of the African American experience. As a leader in the voting rights movement in Virginia as well a prominent activist within region-wide civil rights organizations, Jackson crafted a message of black citizenship that balanced rights and civic duties. His emphasis on political engagement and civic consciousness transcended the specific issues that occupied civil rights activists of the 1940s. This philosophy of political commitment tied the black freedom struggle to the fulfillment of the democratic promise enshrined in the founding documents of the American republic. It also connected the movement for racial justice to the working-class movement for union organization and economic democracy. His effort to place citizenship front-and-center in the civil rights movement echoed the universal ideals of the American crusade to free the world of fascism. It also resonated with the egalitarian aspirations of the Reconstruction era. By linking black equality to political engagement, Jackson set out the only terms under which full equality could be achieved. As much as his message of justice through citizenship challenged the racial orthodoxies of his day, it challenges our contemporary society, transfixed as it is by the illusions of consumerism and marketplace privatization. As Carter G. Woodson and Luther Jackson both understood, racial justice required more than historical consciousness; it required political awareness grounded in a sense of civic responsibility.     

Martin Luther King's Civil Disobedience and the American Covenant Tradition

Daniel J. Elazar introduced the covenant idea to political sciencein his four-volume work, The Covenant Tradition in Politics.As he showed, American government and society are indebted tocovenant ways of New England Puritans and their doctrine, "federaltheology". Puritan covenants fostered polities whose framesof government and patterns of civil order established a federalmatrix antecedent to modern American federalism. The moral orientationof covenant has also influenced modern American political thought,as evidenced by the public philosophy articulated by the Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement(1954–1968). In such works as "The Letter from the BirminghamCity Jail," King challenged his contemporaries' ideas aboutlaw and justice, Americans with an opportunity to examine moderncovenant practice.     

Barack Hussein Obama: the use of history in the creation of an ‘American’ president

ABSTRACT

From the time of his nomination as the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential candidate onwards, Barack Obama was the target of a panoply of political attacks. Conservatives, Republicans and even some Democrats played on his alterity in a way that previous non-white political hopefuls, particularly the Reverend Jesse Jackson, had not had to endure. If the intricate twists and turns of Obama's past did not make those attacks particularly surprising, the way in which he chose to deal with them was. In what stands as a deliberate pre-emptive attack, Obama used two substantive texts, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, to create and shape a historical narrative of his own past in such a way as to present himself to the US voting public as a truly American figure, worthy of the presidency. By the time he was running for high office, therefore, Obama had already used his knowledge of the discipline of history to create a usable past with which he and his supporters could denude many of those political attacks of their potency, whether they were focused on the years of his upbringing in an Islamic state, his familial ties to Kenya, his religious background or his purported links to radicalism.     

Nixon and the Jews

ABSTRACT

In public the 37th President of the United States did not express hostility or disparagement, or show any signs of religious prejudice towards Jews. But inside the White House, Richard M. Nixon's remarks were often scurrilous. His antisemitism was not casual; it was close to compulsive. And it could be coupled with other seething grievances, for example, towards liberals, radicals, the media, Blacks and Italian-Americans. Yet Nixon controlled his antisemitism. It had no adverse effect on Jewish life, either at home or abroad. The malice that he nurtured remained unmobilized. Apart from a few limited personnel instances (mostly but not completely ignored by Nixon's underlings), it is impossible to connect private resentment to public policy, probably because the barriers to the expression of antisemitism in the United States have been so high. The ugliness of his utterances in the Oval Office revealed his character, but did not extend outward to shape the processes of governance. A disconnect can therefore be discerned between what he felt and how he acted. Most American Jews voted for Nixon's Democratic opponents in 1968 and 1972. But even Jews who voted against him, even those who loathed him, have often acknowledged that Nixon's policies fortified the security of Israel; and he was proud of his support for the Jewish state during the Yom Kippur War. What betrayed Nixon, and what forced him to resign the presidency, was his decision to instal a secret taping system in the Oval Office. When the tapes were played in 1974, he showed himself to be conspiring to obstruct justice. In subsequent years, further exposure of the tapes revealed the extent and intensity of Nixon's antipathy to Jews. The expletives that had to be deleted did much to besmirch the dignity of the office. But such was the stigma the political culture attached to antisemitism that, had his bigotry become public before 1968, Nixon's career would have been over.     

Remembering Tony King

Tony King combined scholarship with a real‐world grasp that few could match. This was evident both in his public activities and in his published work. His studies of legislatures and of career politicians changed the way in which issues were viewed and he was skilled at identifying emerging trends before anyone else. He analysed the failings of government, but always as a practical improver. He was a natural communicator in the Bagehot tradition, as evidenced in his writings on the constitution, and he wanted a less adversarial political culture. He showed political scientists that it was possible to combine good scholarship with an ability to communicate.     

Bureaucracy and Democracy in the American Century: A.F. Davies on Administration and the 'KnowledgeableSociety'

American observation has shaped Australian social analysis for most of the 20th century. The high point in American influence on Australia was arguably between the 1940s and the 1980s. Its influence in Australian political science can be traced through the work of an insightful interpreter of the Australian polity and its bureaucratic practices, A.F. Davies (1924-87). The tensions between 'knowledge criteria' and 'political criteria', between bureaucracy as a 'stain' and the best means of delivering equalising outcomes, between the necessary skills of 'program professionals' and the demands of broad participation were at the core of his work. Testing his propositions 10 years after his final work shows Davies accurately foreshadowed the essentials of what he designated 'the steady evaporation of politics'. Davies's reflection on Australia was productively shaped by dialogue with America as the metropolitan culture. His insistence that the comparative framework, the bureaucratic imperative of complex organisation, and an interpretative sense of political cultures should inform political analysis remains an important message as we address the problems of the 1990s.     

Putting Conflict Where It Belongs: A Response to “Creating Shared Responsibility through Respect for Military Culture: The Russian and American Cases”

Professor Dale R. Herspring argues that civil‐military relations should move beyond a preoccupation with civilian control; instead, he says, the focus should be on the degree and nature of conflict within civil‐military interactions. This alternative theoretical view adds much to the extant literature and allows future work to concentrate both on a more nuanced account of the effects of civil‐military relations and, as Professor Herspring does, on the determinants of a “healthy” degree of civil‐military conflict. This piece responds to Professor Herspring’s alternative view, arguing that future work building on his framework could incorporate much from within public administration.     

Hobbes and the prophet Samuel on leviathan government

Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is one of the most important treatises in the history of political economy and has influenced writings on constitutional economics and public choice. In his treatise, Hobbes proposed the desirability of voluntary subjugation to an authoritarian ruler. Hobbes appealed to the authority of the prophet Samuel to make his case for Leviathan, a precedent that has remained unquestioned for some 350 years. Yet Samuel clearly warned against the dangers of appointing an all-powerful king. Hobbes’s argument in favor of Leviathan thus demands an authority other than Samuel.     

Michel Crozier's Long March: the Making of The Bureaucratic Phenomenon

Crozier's Bureaucratic Phenomenon was a landmark in the development of both the sociology of organizations as a research approach and the study of French society in the 1960s. To understand its genesis requires an exercise in the history ofcontemporary thought, locating Crozier's magnum opus within the context of the influence of Gouldner, March and Simon. His initial intellectual preoccupation was with the role of trade unions in the US and France during the cold war. This led to his main cultural finding: the fear of face-to-face communication. requiring impersonal mediation to avoid confrontation with those in authority. France required a new style of authority and her intellectuals should provide it as a way of dealing with the problem of overcoming cultural lag and changing France into a modern industrial society.     

Welfare Reform and the "Platonic Master Science": An Interview with Lawrence Mead

Lawrence M. Mead is a professor of politics at New York University, where he teaches courses on public policy and American government. He is the author and editor of six books on welfare and social policy. His recent book Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin (Princeton University Press, 2004) was a co-recipient of the 2005 Louis Brownlow Book Award, which is given by the National Academy of Public Administration. In the spring of 2006, Professor Mead was interviewed by Kevin R. Kosar on behalf of PAR.     

RESURRECTING THE DISMAL PARSON: MALTHUS, ECOLOGY, AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Abstract: Although a familiar figure in the history of ideas, Malthus has been trivialized, misunderstood and ignored, particularly as a political thinker. Yet his most famous work, the Essay on Population , was conceived and gained recognition as a contribution to a passionate political debate. His major feat—the powerful introduction of an ecological viewpoint into political and social theory—was later over-shadowed by the theory of evolution and the eventual decline of biologically oriented ideology. With the current resurgence of biology as a basis for social science and political ideology his work has a new relevance. In its content and development Malthus's thought is both rich and complex, while his argument provides a useful eighteenth-century parallel to the modern'ecological'debate. The'dismal parson'deserves resurrection as a major figure in the history of political theory.     

Radical civic virtue: women in 19th‐century civil society

This article contests the conservative revisionism that emphasizes the importance of traditional families, pietistic religion, individual moral virtue, and small government for undergirding democratic self‐government. The first part exposes the conservative misreading of American history and political theory. The second part uses the civic engagement of middle‐ and upper‐class women in 19th‐century America to construct a progressive alternative to conservative narratives. It shows that women did not stay home and focus on the family during the 19th century but instead entered civil society to address the problems created by industrialization, formed social reform movements, built institutions to pursue a social justice agenda, and demanded that the government take an active role in solving public problems. Their civic engagement built on and created social capital, grew out of and produced a sense of civic virtue (defined as public‐spiritedness), and resulted in the demand for progressive government.     

Squaring the Virtuous Circle: Exploring the Potential of the ‘Five Cs’

During his May 2014 visit to Australia Pascal Lamy, former Director General of the World Trade Organization, urged ‘public institutions, civil society, and global businesses’ to forge ‘creative coalitions’ for the purpose of engaging constructively and positively with the complex problems standing in the way of achieving social and economic sustainability. Lamy's visit was but the first of several occasions during 2014 in which intense public discussion erupted about the need for government, business, and civil society to pool their capacities in boundary‐spanning efforts to address complex policy problems. This article investigates whether the public discussion portends a heightened policy focus on the ‘five Cs’: co‐production, co‐design, corporate social responsibility, collective impact, and Lamy's creative coalitions.     

The reception of Bryant’s Unfinished Victory: insights into British public opinion in early 1940

Griffiths describes how, after its publication in January 1940, Unfinished Victory, a clearly pro-Nazi and antisemitic book by the historian Arthur Bryant, could arouse little adverse comment from the majority of its reviewers, and positive en­thusiasm from a good number of them. This examination will cause us to revise some of the usual presumptions about public opinion in relation to Nazi Germany in the period of the ‘phoney war’, and to reinforce others about the British public’s basic unconcern in relation to manifestations of antisemitism. Moreover, the belief, widely held until now, that the British public reacted violently against Bryant’s book, and that he himself immediately realized his mistake, is shown to be untrue. Bryant’s reactions to some of the few critical reviews of his book, and his correspondence with his publisher, show him to have been confident of the rightness of his attitude, as does his decision, some time after the book’s appearance, to send complimentary copies to the royal family and the prime minister. It was only after the fall of Chamberlain and the advent of ­Churchill, and the arrests of ‘fellow travellers’ in May 1940, that Bryant appears to have realized his mistake; he then bought up copies of the book, and started to write those patriotic works for which he is far more famous. An interesting aspect of the subject is Bryant’s relationship with his publisher Harold Macmillan. Surprisingly, given his anti-appeasement attitudes, Macmillan positively encouraged Bryant to produce the book, and seems to have been little affected at that time by its attitudes to Nazi Germany or by its antisemitic flavour. Given the reactions of some of his anti-­appeasement colleagues, however, he soon swung against it after its publication. His correspondence thereafter with Bryant, as he tried under various pretexts to remove him from the Macmillan list, is very revealing, as are Bryant’s knowing reactions.     

论“莫斯精神”在当代社会学中的遭遇

所谓莫斯精神,系指莫斯礼物交换思想中所蕴含的理论内核。莫斯本人试图通过人性重塑来重建欧洲社会秩序的人文主义情怀及其莫斯思想在社会学生命体中的延续。其理论内核体现为两个密切相关的命题:即礼物交换作为一种总体的社会事实和礼物交换作为一种全面呈献制度。莫斯以此为基础,通过对人性的追问,试图达到恢复和重建欧洲社会秩序的目的。莫斯精神对法国社会学界产生了极为深远的影响,成为了其思想源泉和发展的灵魂。