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.

Date01 September 2016
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12227
Published date01 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.
814 Book Reviews

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT