Debating the American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930–1970. By Anne M. Kornhauser. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 323 pp. $59.95 cloth.

• Date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12227
• Published date: 01 September 2016

Debating the American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan,

1930–1970. By Anne M. Kornhauser. Philadelphia, PA:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 323 pp. $59.95 cloth.

Reviewed by Aaron J. Ley, Department of Political Science, University

of Rhode Island

The rise of the modern day administrative state is a profound achieve-

ment that caused considerable anxiety among liberals who set out to

reconcile bureaucratic expansion with American democracy. In Debat-

ing the American State, Anne M. Kornhauser argues that the war mobili-

zation and economic conditions that gave rise to the administrative

state made these tensions even more apparent because the expansion

of the state occurred without first forming a “principled justification”

that would “confront the effects of bureaucracy on democracy, legality,

and individual autonomy” (p. 225). As bureaucratization accelerated,

American social scientists, German 

emigr

e legal academics, and the

moral philosopher John Rawls began generating “a principled ‘legiti-

mating theory’ for the administrative state” (p. 2). Despite their efforts,

the state “was never endowed with a principled rationale by the liberals

who supported it,” (p. 3) which may explain the persistent liberal cri-

tique of the administrative state and the exploitation of its contradic-

tions by “powerful conservative movements” (p. 222).

Kornhauser follows her argument with a carefully narrated

portrayal of contemporary American thinkers and German 

emigr

e

legal intellectuals struggling to strengthen statist liberalism during

the growth of the administrative state. The key actors are scholars

like Pendleton Herring who discovered that interest group plural-

ism might avoid newfound problems like “agency capture” by steer-

ing agencies toward standards like the “public interest.” As the

nation mobilized for war against Nazism, however, these scholars

shifted their focus to “guard[ing] against totalitarian tendencies,”

(p. 75) by curbing administrative discretion. In the backdrop of

totalitarianism, scholars worried that malefactors would seize on a

vague standard like “the public interest” in an effort to aggrandize

power. In turn, legal reforms like the Administrative Procedures

Act were passed to constrain power, while a sociological critique

emerged from scholars like Philip Selznick who delivered a damag-

ing takedown of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) program, an

exemplar of the administrative state. Troubled by the possibility of

TVA-style “bureaucracies [having] autonomous properties that

enabled them to govern quite apart from the other branches,” (p.

84) scholars embarked on reconciling the administrative state with

American democracy by advancing reforms like “representative

bureaucracy,” which continue to find contemporary support.

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