Politics and administration : a study in government
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Politics and administration : a study in government
（Library of liberal thought）
Transaction Publishers, c2003
- : pbk
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Note
Originally published: New York ; London : Macmillan, 1900
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The conventional model for explaining the uniqueness of American democracy is its division between executive, legislative, and judicial functions. It was the great contribution of Frank J. Goodnow to codify a less obvious, but no less profound element: the distinction between politics and policies, principles and operations. He showed how the United States went beyond a nation based on government by gentlemen and then one based on the spoils system brought about by the Jacksonian revolt against the Eastern Establishment, into a government that separated political officials from civil administrators.
Goodnow contends that the civil service reformers persuasively argued that the separation of administration from politics, far from destroying the democratic links with the people, actually served to enhance democracy. While John Rohr, in his outstanding new introduction carefully notes loopholes in the theoretical scaffold of Goodnow's argument, he is also careful to express his appreciation of the pragmatic ground for this new sense of government as needing a partnership of the elected and the appointed.
Goodnow was profoundly influenced by European currents, especially the Hegelian. As a result, the work aims at a political philosophy meant to move considerably beyond the purely pragmatic needs of government. For it was the relationships, the need for national unity in a country that was devised to account for and accommodate pluralism and diversity, that attracted Goodnow's legal background and normative impulses alike. That issues of legitimacy and power distribution were never entirely resolved by Goodnow does not alter the fact that this is perhaps the most important work, along with that of James Bryce, to emerge from this formative period to connect processes of governance with systems of democracy.
Table of Contents
- I: The Primary Functions of the State
- II: The Function of Politics
- III: Central and Local Politics
- IV: The Function of Administration
- V: The Effect of the Administrative System on the Relations of Politics and Administration
- VI: The Influence of the Governmental and Particularly of the Administrative System on the Position of the Political Party
- VII: Popular Government
- VIII: The Boss
- IX: Responsibility of Parties and Party Leaders
- X: Conclusions
by "Nielsen BookData"
