CHAPTER THREE Public Administration and Liberal Democracy
BUILDING THE WELFARE STATE
THE ASSOCIATION of public administration with liberal democracy is by now taken for granted. At the end of the twentieth century, this relation seems both natural and unavoidable. According to journalists and the authors of college textbooks, justice and freedom can only operate harmoniously in a liberal democratic welfare state. Almost all Western governments now embrace that idea, and these governments’ shared features have come to outweigh their cultural and institutional distinctions. In each of them professional administrators oversee the details of popular government, look after social services, regulate commerce, and provide for suitable transfers of income. In such welfare states, democracy has become synonymous with economic policy, usually signifying the distribution of entitlements or allowances, and services, and at least some public management of national resources, key industries, and corporate wealth.
There are, of course, degrees in the way different countries have pursued these activities. But these relate to differences of degree and not of kind. Whether a particular democratic welfare state adds utilities to its public sector or controls them indirectly by determining wage levels, hiring practices, and permitted profits, is a practical decision. But the government’s position of control remains awesomely powerful in either case. This became so in a mass democratic age, when entire populations began to demand an “equitable” distribution of wealth and of access to consumer goods. The creation of this state mechanism (what the French call aptly le dispositif social) took place in response to popular demand; that is, enlarged electorates produced mandates for a changed regime. It also drew legitimacy from a “liberal” creed: government exists to promote individual gratification. Absent that responsibility, the state is no longer living up to an implicit social contract.
Until recently, however, there was no necessary tie between a publicly administered unitary state and liberal democratic ideology. Before the French Revolution, public administration was a tool of monarchical sovereignty. Kings raised commoners (novi homines) to look after the public realm, to devise means for augmenting their revenues, and to mete out uniform justice throughout their territories. It was monarchs in Austria, Spain, Prussia, and France who set up schools of cameral science and public law, where future government lawyers and administrators studied.1 As Tocqueville noted in the mid-nineteenth century, a highly centralized national administration did not first originate in France with the Revolution. It was the gift bequeathed to Jacobin France by the monarchy that the revolutionaries overthrew.2 In the nineteenth century, public administration continued to develop in all major European states, no matter what their political complexion. From Tsarist Russia to liberal monarchical England and to republican France, public servants grew in importance and visibility.
The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) assigned to public administration an exalted role in the Philosophy of Right (1821–22). It “represented the generality” and carried out the daily work of a modern nation state without the taint of “social or material particularity.”3 In April, 1831, the government of the newly established July Mon archy recommended the integration of members of the public class into an expanded franchise. In addition to professors, military officers, physicians, and lawyers resident in their electoral districts for at least five years, the electorate was to be opened up to judges and their staffs. Guizot and others who formulated the original recommendation also hoped to extend the vote to local administrators managing populations of at least thirty thousand and to the chief officials in federal and municipal districts (départements and arrondissements). Significantly it was the republican Left in the French Assembly that defeated this specific proposal for extending the franchise. Looking at state officials as the instrument of political reaction, intransigent democrats voted for limiting the vote to upper-middle-class property holders and to members of the liberal professions.4
The growing demand for social services and income redistribution in the present century did not bring about entirely by itself a new political order. That order faced competitors for several generations before becoming the only respectable political model. In the interwar period it had to deal with two rival models of public management, and material redistribution, both of which had considerable followings. In The Managerial Revolution (1941), James Burnham underlined this rivalry and pointed to the common features of Soviet Communism, National Socialism, and welfare-state democracy. In all of them, Burnham believed, a new class of state administrators had succeeded to political power by deftly manipulating popular rhetoric and redistributionist slogans. What further united these managerial experiments was their distinctiveness from capitalism and socialism (as either would have been understood in the early-twentieth century). The new managerial state was built on neither a market economy nor true social equality. Rather, it elevated a managerial class which already had positioned itself in a corporate economy and would now provide state-authorized social services.5
For many, the fascists and communists seemed able to furnish those services while holding out the promise of regeneration for their societies. A vast literature exists for the rise and spread of the Communist movement in the West as well as outside of it, and it may be useful to recall that at the end of the Second World War the Communist Parties of Italy and France were the largest political organizations in those countries and commanded millions of votes. A less well-known fact, which John Diggins and John Lukacs have highlighted, was the widespread popularity enjoyed by fascism throughout the twenties and thirties.6 Despite the assassination of the socialist leader Giacomo Matteoti by fascist squadristi in June 1924, Mussolini remained popular among social reformers into the 1930s. A generally favorable view of his economic policies and style of leadership could be found in the New Republic and in other publications supportive of social planning. And within Italy itself, as the historian of fascism Renzo De Felice makes clear, Mussolini was generally perceived as a modernizer as well as a Latin nationalist. His fascist national revolution was hailed as an Italian path to restored political greatness and economic growth.
The appeal of this path, which was felt by, among other groups, revisionist Zionists and the back-to-Africa followers of Marcus Garvey, became less pronounced in the mid-1930s. By then Mussolini overreached in trying to create an empire, and Latin fascism became overshadowed by its more disagreeable German variant. Even more significantly, European fascists, under the disastrous leadership of Adolf Hitler, incited and lost the Second World War. In that struggle the Communists, after switching sides, came out, together with the “democracies,” as the perceived champions of the Good. In time, the Communists also lost credibility because of their inept planning and persistent brutality. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states in 1989 discredited conclusively that model of socialist government, though by then its appeal in the Western world had shrunk considerably, outside of rarefied circles of Marxist Leninist intellectuals.
The liberal democratic welfare state defeated fascism and communism partly by default. It survived after contributing to their downfall, and it picked up support from those who either defected or were converted from the two failed models. It also exhibited certain strengths its rivals never possessed. Liberal democracies have generally desisted from physical brutality in dealing with internal opposition. They have also tolerated opposition even while seeking to manage civil society. Liberal democracies have been, for the most part, economically prosperous, encouraging the coexistence of markets and private initiative with a public sector and a regulated economy.
From the Second World War through the 1970s, most Western countries saw the steady expansion of both GNP and the social welfare net. In 1945 France introduced social security (having had only one national social program before, accident insurance for workers, established in 1898). By the 1960s the French national administration collected and dispensed funds for a multitude of allowances (prestations) and social insurance programs, without having to lower the national standard of living. Despite increased government taxing, the French per capita Gross Domestic Product doubled between 1960 and 1982. By the early eighties the average Frenchman received almost $10,000 yearly after taxes, putting him well ahead of his English and Italian and only slightly behind his German counterparts. This growth took place in a country, moreover, in which subsidies to the agricultural sector remained almost as large as the revenues collected from the income tax.7 In Germany even greater prosperity occurred in the wake of ruinous defeat in the Second World War. According to documented studies by Karl Hardach and Eric Owen Smith, the postwar Wunderwirtschaft not only reindustrialized Germany but left it with the highest GDP of any major industrial power after the United States. This took place together with the establishment of enlarged welfare states at the provincial and federal levels. Today German wage earners pay at least half their income back to the government.8 In the United States the GNP and standard of living both rose in the postwar years. From the sixties into the nineties, the American GNP continued to rise despite the steadily greater share of earnings taken by the government. Between 1991 and 1995, U.S. tax collection soared by one-third.
In England the postwar democratic welfare state may be harder to justify. It has not taken shape amid prosperity, but it has survived, notwithstanding the economic crises that have dogged it since the late forties. Between 1913 and 1938 the English GNP doubled, and at the end of the Second World War England remained the most prosperous (or economically the least damaged) of the European industrial powers. Under these circumstances it seemed possible, according to the “Beveridge Report on Social Life,” submitted to the cabinet in 1944, to move decisively toward English social democracy.9 The postwar Labor government of Clement Atlee did exactly that, creating a national health service, pouring increased monies into public education, and nationalizing mines, utilities, transportation, steel, and other major industries. Though the distribution of consumer goods rose in the late forties, by the early fifties English voters, bothered by the very modest rise in living standards, brought the Conservatives back into power. But the returned opposition left most of Labour’s work untouched. In the sixties Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan competed with Labour in promising expanded social services. Both major parties were then committed to a large national welfare state. In the seventies Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson responded to militant demands and the threats of strikes by union leaders by announcing a new “social contract.” Thereafter, it was said, the government would negotiate with those working in nationalized industries instead of trying to intimidate them. This conciliatory approach did nothing to improve obsolescent national enterprises or to stem the loss of jobs. By 1979, when the Thatcher government came to power, English unemployment stood at 1.5 million, the highest since the Great Depression. Real wages in England had been falling for almost a decade, and the economy had contracted in two of the previous four years.10
Despite these disasters, an observation made by Harry Schwartz about English health services can apply equally well to other aspects of the English welfare state: to most of those living under this form of government it has been hugely successful.11 It is seen to protect them against utter dearth, and despite the reprivatization of major industries undertaken in the eighties, the public sector remains the largest English employer. A working- and middle-class concern is that the influx of Third World population from the Commonwealth will erode the financial base of the English welfare state. This concern is becoming widespread and, according to polls taken from the late seventies, has grown into a burning issue for a majority of the English.
The trend toward public control, with only intermittent setbacks, has continued throughout the Western world for more than half a century. It has blurred any sharp and permanent distinction between public and private enterprise. The proportion of the work force made up of public employees is already approaching 50 percent in France, Germany, Holland, Norway, and Denmark, and is, significantly, well over 60 percent in Sweden (where over 85 percent of earned income is taxable).12
At first blush it would seem that the United States has a smaller public sector than European industrial democracies. According to the Annual Report figures published by the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors, government employment accounts for about 15 percent of the national labor force, excluding military personnel. Even with that Factored in, however, government-authorized jobs remain less than 30 percent of full-time employment in the United States.13 But other circumstances should be considered to obtain an accurate picture of the American public sector. Government budgets grew from 26 percent to over 40 percent of the American GNP from the mid-fifties into the early nineties. As the economic historian Robert Higgs notes, moreover, the American government in the present century has expanded six times as much as economic growth.14 While a smaller and smaller percentage of earnings has been left to jobholders in the form of disposable income, the public sector has continued to grow, most strikingly since the sixties.
Equally important, its control is far greater than the number of jobs it directly creates. The distribution of public funds and the awarding of licenses and contracts have allowed the American government to supervise what it has not authorized explicitly. A study by the economist Thomas DiLorenzo traces the extent of this “hidden” growth of the public sector. DiLorenzo demonstrates that this growth has been sufficiently dramatic to invalidate the often made contrast between American free enterprise and European statism. Controlled economic activity need not take the form of public sector employment. Nor does government spending in the United States have to conform to the budgetary guidelines found in the Annual Report. Though the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and the resulting Congressional Budget Office were designed to set overall targets for revenues and expenditures, the United States Congress has evaded the intended restraints.15 Congressmen have resorted to off-budget outlays, as in the funding of synthetic fuel research and the 1995 bailout of the Mexican currency. Neither major party has resisted this circumvention of budgetary limits.
In view of this analysis it may be premature for American movement conservatives to celebrate “the death of socialism,” or to join the American Enterprise symposiast who in July 1995 proclaimed that “the Gingrich revolution is a rollback of both the 1960s and 1930s.”16 With all due respect to American postwar debates, no American or European political party seems likely to roll back the welfare state. A party may dispute anticipated tax increases to cover entitlements or allowances, and it may even muddy discussion by equating the “American welfare state” with Aid to Dependent Children. Finally, it may even be made to appear that socialism is vanishing because direct government ownership of the means of production has lost its mantra-like appeal among self-declared socialists. That is to say, the criterion of socialism given by Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and others at the end of the last century, nationalization of industry, is no longer a popular idea, even among social reformers.17
But what has taken its place in liberal democracies is a more enduring form of collectivism, the perceived growth of public administration as an instrument of equity. This has gone forward as liberal democratic states intrude on economic and social activities without, at least in the United States, nationalizing anything outright. The terms “socialism” and “capitalism” no longer describe the process at work, which is one of administrative engulfment. In a probing response to conservative movement predictions about the end of socialism, New Republic senior editor John B. Judis notes the obvious fact that government control of the economy has not gone away. Judis looks forward to an international regulation of capital, under an enlightened global administration that protects “international labor rights.” But this development will occur, Judis explains, without the linguistic and genealogical burdens of past socialist models: “It is unlikely anyone will describe this new international as ‘socialist.’ And I certainly don’t think that future intellectuals will describe themselves as ‘Marxists’ in the same worshipful way as past generations.”18
THE POLITICS OF SOCIALIZATION
An indisputable strength of liberal democracy is its power to incorporate both liberal and democratic elements in defining its character. This absorption of political forms nonetheless has been selective and determined by what is compatible in each element with modern public administration. From democracy, liberal democrats have taken their insistence on general elections, carried out with minimal voting restrictions, and they have stressed the characteristically democratic values of political and social equality. Like nineteenth-century liberals, they have turned to party organizations to stage elections and to arrange for a “rotation of governments” behind which administration can do its daily work. Liberal democrats also appeal to an expanded notion of freedom, what L. T. Hobhouse called “the self-directing power of personality.” Basic to this thinking is the belief in a progression from a selfish, antisocial view of freedom to a fuller, more compassionate one. This progression is thought possible because of the formation of a science of society, and because of public administrators trained in the “experimental-scientific method” in preparation for managing their fellow citizens.19
In the early twentieth century, Anglo-American social planners fleshed out this vision of a liberal democratic future. In Liberalism and Social Action, drawn from his Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia in 1935, Dewey discusses the new “scientific” liberalism. Unlike the nineteenth-century liberals, who “lacked historic sense and interest” and were “frozen” in free-market doctrine, the new liberals view society as being “in continuous growth.” This growth poses no mystery for these new liberals who, unlike earlier ones, are not “blinded by their own special interpretations of liberty, individuality and intelligence.”20 Dewey’s liberals, who are not “historically conditioned,” can grasp and control the constant features of a world otherwise in flux. The reason for this is their acquisition of a scientific method which, together with technology, has been the “active force in producing the revolutionary changes society is undergoing.” Through the understanding of social data, “the engineering mind in the invention and projection of far-reaching social plans” can furnish liberal democracy with a “concrete program of action.” This, Dewey argues, is particularly urgent at the present time. Faced by authoritarian ideologies that feature their own forms of social control, liberal democrats must learn to profit fully from “scientific method and experimental intelligence.” They must respond to any “narrowing of choice” between fascists and communists with their own call for “discipline, order, and organization.” Indeed “regimentation of material and mechanical forces is the only way by which the mass of individuals can be released from the regimentation and consequent suppression of their cultural possibilities.”21
Aside from the defense of a “scientifically” regimented economy, Dewey’s lectures make a sustained plea for government as a vehicle of public education. Unlike the old liberals who held “a conception of individuality as something ready-made, already possessed, and needing only the removal of certain legal restrictions,” the new liberalism demands extensive socialization. It seeks to prepare individuals for the “conflict between institutions and habits originating in the pre-scientific and pre-technological age and the new forces generated by science and technology.” Such training, in a properly administered society, will open up “cultural possibilities” based on “cooperative and experimental science.”22
Education was the keystone of social planning for Dewey and Deweyite social reformers, and for several generations their ideas ruled American schools of education, starting with the one where Dewey taught, Columbia University. Moreover, the call to restructure public education around scientific and democratic values goes back to the dawn of liberal collectivist thinking. Like the “renascent liberalism” in Dewey’s Page-Barbour Lectures, the “constructive liberalism” expounded by L. T. Hobhouse in 1911 prescribes that the state be an “overparent”: “It is on the basis of the rights of the child, of his protection against parental neglect, of the equality of opportunity which he may claim as a future citizen and of his training to fill his place as a grown-up person in the social system” that the state should assume this function, which includes the right to education.23 By the twenties and thirties, this role of “overparent” would entail far more in the minds of democratic social planners. As Allan Carlson and Nikolaj-Klaus von Kreitor demonstrate in studies of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal as architects of Swedish social democracy, Scandinavian reformers in the interwar years treated public education as a means of national socialization. The Myrdals argued that the Swedish state, by monopolizing educational activities, could mold entire families in accordance with scientific collectivist methods. Until after World War Two, that ethos was not always identifiably leftist. In the thirties it included glorification of the Folknemmet (national home), a Sterilization Act for racially and genetically defective individuals, and the acceptance of other forms of eugenic engineering. A longtime justification for Swedish social planning was the need to increase the natality of the Nordic peoples in a changing economic environment. What provided the common link in all phases of Swedish social democracy, however, was the combination of public administration with a vision of social reconstruction. Educational reform as well as economic control were foundational for whatever social changes were envisaged by Swedish social democrats.24
Liberal democratic education has become increasingly different from its older liberal predecessor. It acquired two functions: shaping social personality and helping to fill the social space. When Prussian reformers introduced the Volksschule during the Napoleonic Wars and when in the 1830s liberal ministers reformed and expanded French primary and secondary education, the justifications were both practical and nonegalitarian. The members of a modern nation, it was said, had to be literate in order to be employable, and besides, it was believed, national unity required some type of shared learning. The French minister of education at the time, Guizot, took pains to distinguish between his national plan and a democratic one whereby public schools would be used to level down society.25 Liberal democratic education, by contrast, has aimed explicitly at changing social structure and social attitudes. A conspicuous case in point is postwar West Germany where since 1945 “remolding the civic culture” has been a duty of both public educators and public administrators. In The German Polity, David Conradt outlines the extent of this program, with obvious approval. Resocialization in Germany has aimed at inculcating democracy and encouraging Germans to “overcome their past [Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung].” The horrors of the Nazi era are regularly invoked to explain this national effort at creating a democratic culture.26
At the end of the Second World War in Europe, Time featured expert testimony by prominent social scientists on what measures should be taken to transform the “German character.” Basic to these suggestions was the need to reconstruct the German family. German males were seen as “passive-aggressive” bearers of the “authoritarian personality,” who were prone to follow undemocratic leaders.27 They presumably developed these personalities because of defective relations to their wives and children, and the German household was presented as a spawning ground for social pathology contributing to dictatorship and strife.
This therapeutic zeal common to journalists, academics, and politicians may be traced to the passions of war, especially one fought against the representatives of a murderous ideology. But this analytic discussion was not limited to plans for an occupied Germany. What it proposed was no different from what American liberal democratic theorists would be doing at home. These reformers advocated the diffusion of “critical thinking” about traditional belief systems, and by the seventies they introduced measures to produce gender equality in the home and workplace. These proposals were equated with progress and science, and the failure of others to accept them became proof positive that public experts were needed to make liberal democracy work.
In Liberalism in Contemporary America, Dwight D. Murphey shows how liberals in the first half of the century presented their cultural and educational agendas as practical responses to socioeconomic pressures.28 For example, Dewey calls for the social use of intelligence to forestall an impending “crisis in democracy.” He then attributes that crisis to the failure to apply to American political life “scientific procedure.” Though Dewey advocates the resocialization of his fellow Americans, he claims to be guided only by science in his pursuit of the common good. He contrasts “the state of intelligence in politics to the physical control of nature” and looks forward in the area of social questions to the “outstanding demonstration of the meaning of organized intelligence” already achieved by technology.29 Note that the crisis to which Dewey refers is moral and social, and his responses, as his biographer Robert B. Westbrook remarks, expressed his own moral judgments. By the 1950s some of Dewey’s values, particularly his commitment to self-government, had lost out to his own scientific and technical procedures. His disciples S. M. Lipset, Robert Dahl, and Arthur Bestor abandoned the plan for genuine popular government and, according to Westbrook, came to identify democracy with electoral laws and an expertly run welfare state. Calling themselves “realists,” they also “conflated description and prescription.… All too often a description of the way politics works in the United States provided realists with their normative conception of what democracy should be.”30
The work of Dewey’s friend Herbert Croly also illustrates the practice of hiding personal preferences behind “historical necessities” and appeals to science. In the end he too reduced democracy to a set of procedural and administrative problems. In The Promise of American Life (1909), Croly maintains that the Jeffersonian model of local democracy is no longer appropriate for the new industrial age. One could not depend on outdated social habits in preparing Americans to compete in a “world economy.” In Progressive Democracy (1918), Croly comes back to the same theme in constructing a brief for long-range national economic planning.31
This future Wilsonian, soon to be editor of the New Republic, was as much concerned about social education as he was about America’s economic place in the world. He complained about American provincialism and spoke of the need to adapt German social planning to a unified American people. Though Wilsonian liberals supported the Allied side in 1914, Croly continued to be well-disposed toward German state socialists. He professed admiration for Hegel’s attempt to integrate the sphere of individual liberty into the ethical will of a unified state. Croly fretted little that the “march of constructive national democracy” would be over the body of democratic localism. Indeed, he wished to accelerate that march by having the federal government socialize the American people. He insisted their political problems could be traced to an “erroneous democratic theory,” one that sacrificed collective education to individual interest. In the new democracy “the nation must offer to the individual a formative and inspiring opportunity for public service.” All learning must be made into a “national educational experience,” and those who shape the new state must realize that “democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility and the adoption of measures looking in the direction of realizing such an aspiration.”32
Walter Weyl, Croly’s collaborator at the New Republic, was more explicit about the “progressively diffused education” that would nurture a modern industrial society. In The New Democracy (1912), Weyl makes the point that economic changes and social grievances require centralized planning, but such planning can only succeed if accompanied by a “socialization of education.” A sober democracy demands that citizens be willing to control their appetites and national consumption.33 Instead of “capitalist anarchy of production and anarchy of consumption,” the new democratic leadership must prepare citizens to think entirely of the collective good: “The future education of the masses cannot be the traditional Procrustean, unrelated, and undifferentiated education of yesterday. It must be an education which will aid society, the conservation of the life and health of the citizens in their progressive development.”34
This socialization of education proposed by Dewey, Weyl, and Croly was both attitudinal and vocational. It called for training citizens to be economically useful but also to look upon resources and consumer goods as a public benefit. Though Croly, Weyl, and the New Republic placed some emphasis on experimental science in the schools, this analytic tool seemed to them more important for public administrators than for the masses of citizens. The “individual” for whom these thinkers planned was expected to accept their judgments, after receiving the proper social education. Croly believed that “a democratic nation must not accept human nature as it is but must move in the direction of improvement.” Without a regime that sought this improvement, the unenlightened individual would harm himself and others. This was the temptation faced by those who embraced the “false tradition” of an unplanned economy: “The popular enjoyment of practically unrestricted economic opportunities is a condition which makes for individual bondage.”35
By the thirties and forties the program of socialization which American reformers of the Progressive era had outlined became more heavily cultural. The writings of Horace Kallen (1882–1974), one of Dewey’s close associates and a founder of the New School for Social Research, indicate this turning toward social control presented as positive freedom. Though Kallen popularized the term “cultural pluralism,” his “approach to liberty” left rather limited room for social or cultural diversity. Such diversity had to fit Kallen’s definition of democratic humanism: that which “cannot favor any race or cult of man over any other; nor any human doctrine and discipline over any other.” In the “orchestrations of humanism with democracy” offered by Kallen, there is no place for orthodox Christianity, particularly in its ridiculed Catholic form. Democratic humanism, which is the appropriate outlook for a democratic society, can only tolerate a tolerant deity, one who “brings forth impartially all the infinite diversities of experience and who allows men to survive or to perish by their own dispositions and abilities.”36
The democratic pluralism and democratic humanism that Kallen advocates are intended to benefit all of mankind, and so he moves in his pluralist vision beyond national planning toward a global perspective. He invokes a future “international mind” that would be informed by scientific attitudes and envisages a United Nations consisting entirely of democratic nations. This internationalism would lead to social reforms that Kallen would be pursuing at home.37 These would entail public ownership of some of the means of production and substantial redistribution of wealth, both aimed at furthering individual human betterment and the “liberal spirit.” Kallen perceived no contradiction between his economic measures and free enterprise, which “satisfies the natural preference of natural men.”38 His economic policies were intended to humanize “great economic and financial undertakings” that “deal with men and women as if they were merely animate tools, merely beasts of burden.” Among those forms taken by “arbitrary and authoritative” rule of the kind that Kallen wished to abolish are “religious establishments and political orders, which are as totalitarian as cartels and monopolies as hierarchical as armies.”39 Liberal democracy should lead to the overthrow of such “tyrannical” structures, which Kallen associates specifically with General Franco’s regime in Spain. It would not be an unjustified speculative leap to think that these structures, for Kallen, included Catholic theocracy and corporate capitalism, both of which he detested. What is left unanswered is what or who would control that “government for the people” that Kallen trusted would bring down anachronistic powers.
It was not strange that liberal social planners in the United States and elsewhere stressed public education and values-formation in the context of defining “industrial democracy.” Their project of rebuilding society presupposed the filling of the social space with appropriate ideas and concerns. What had to be decided was not whether a socialization of education should occur but what public ideology squared best with social progress. On this point there were differences which became perceptible over time. These reflected the changing views of historical progress and of the power the state might properly claim in remolding individual lives and communal habits.
From the founding of the New Republic and the Progressive era down to the 1960s, liberal collectivists in America appealed to a science of-public administration and to the ideals of a national welfare state. Both scientific method and the national interest were ready counterweights to be used by social planners against local opposition. Nationalization of decision-making has remained a useful process down to the present for American reformers intent upon removing perceived patterns of social and gender discrimination. Multiculturalism, the movement toward open borders, and the extension of Fourteenth Amendment protections to illegal aliens have signaled the journey of American liberalism from a national to a global educational purpose. This trend in the United States has grown particularly pronounced in “civil rights policy making.” As two sympathetic analysts, Anthony Champagne and Stuart Nagel, observe in surveys of such policy initiatives: “Equality is not a concept withoutcontroversy. Changes interfere with human prejudice, tradition, and economic demands. Compliance with laws is a function of the benefits of noncompliance being outweighed by the benefits of compliance. It is important to note that courts have become havens for oppressed groups in our society. The other branches are more responsive to established, more powerful groups who can influence elections and provide funds for campaigns.”40 Aside from the questionable reference to “powerful groups,” which can certainly be applied to policymaking judges and administrators, Champagne and Nagel are correct to view compliance to social policy as an essential object of a nationalized American administration. Contemporary policymakers have set out to bring to their society equality of esteem and pursue this end by trying to modify social behavior.
THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC MODEL
Several objections can be registered to this study of an evolving liberal democratic ideology. This ideology, it can be argued, is barely worth discussing. It describes a mere by-product of socioeconomic changes that would have occurred without individual visionaries or collective visions. Industrialization, urbanization, and other processes engendered industrial democracies, which then developed into welfare states out of popular demand. These welfare states required managers to deal with their complex problems, much as corporate capitalism called forth a similar managerial elite.
A related form of this corporate argument can be found in the Marxist analysis of C. Wright Mills and James Weinstein. These sociologists do not deny the cultural and social impact of political bureaucratization, but they attribute it to the extension of corporate capitalism into government. Once business titans organize a late-capitalist global economy, the resulting economy imposes its own corporate structure upon the state. Thus there emerges a capitalist welfare regime that mirrors an already bureaucratized economy.41 In a variation of this theme, the counterrevolutionary populist exponent of Mills, Samuel T. Francis, has stressed the “isomorphic” nature of polity, the economy, and society present in a managerial order. All of these elements of human association have become assimilated to the same bureaucratic model that dominates the present age. For Francis, like Mills and James Burnham, ideology takes a backseat to social forces in explaining modern political organization. For all of these thinkers, moral visions are the mere accompaniments of the process by which classes make themselves economically dominant and try to control other groups. In the language of Antonio Gramsci, values are the means by which the ruling class establishes its “cultural hegemony.” They therefore wield no power outside of their instrumental use.42
Although sympathetic to these attempts to unmask managerial ideology, it seems to me that all of them fail to take ideas and values seriously. One could organize a welfare state that provides social services without instilling a liberal democratic ideology. Similarly, one could have built the German autobahnen and increased the social benefits of German workers in the 1930s without carrying out a Nazi revolution. Likewise it would be possible for the American government to provide entitlement programs for its middle class without enforcing what are now unpopular quotas for designated minorities.43 In all of these cases welfare states in industrialized societies have done more than address the majority’s material demands. They have also tried to shape or reshape social relations to fit particular worldviews.
Equally important, it is hard to demonstrate that managerial elites have consistently benefited by pushing their own bodies of belief. Nazi administrators, to the extent they embraced Hitler’s global vision, were rushing headlong into cosmic violence and arbitrary personal rule. Another telling example can be cited to demonstrate our point. No major American newspaper nor presidential candidate, save for Pat Buchanan, has called for restricting immigration, and neither the liberal Democratic New York Times nor the pro-business Republican Wall Street Journal will even publish an immigration-restrictionist argument except to ridicule it.44 Yet faced by what is now predominantly Third World immigration (between 1981 and 1990, 35 percent of legal American immigrants came from Central and South America), the majority of respondents to both New York Times/ CBS and Newsweek polls in 1993 favored significant reductions in the number of immigrants being admitted into the United States. By a 50 percent to 30 percent margin New York Times respondents also believed that immigrants “cause problems rather than contribute to the country.”45 On the immigration question, including social services to illegal immigrants, American political and journalistic elites are almost without exception pitted against a growing popular consensus. The reason is not undemocratic arrogance, as claimed by their populist opponents. The elites’ understanding of democracy is based on globalist and managerial premises that most people do not accept wholeheartedly. Its adherents in government embrace that ideology out of genuine conviction. They insist on agreement even with aspects of their worldview that are least likely to resonate among the American people. When conservative Republican Congressman Dick Armey lectures his Texas constituents on the need for even higher levels of immigration from Mexico, it is not opportunism but ideological fervor that explains his behavior.46
It is also factually incorrect to believe that those who built the modern welfare state were impervious to its theoretical architects. Croly’s The Promise of American Life had a profound effect on both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, a fact well-documented by Arthur S. Link. According to Link, it is impossible to overestimate the impact of The Promise of American Life on Roosevelt, who in 1909 was searching to define his own political nationalism: “Roosevelt read the book with enthusiastic approval, and it helped him systematize his own ideas. In any event, he at once began to translate Croly’s abstruse and heavy language into living political principles that the rank and file could comprehend.”47 Croly chastised and supported Woodrow Wilson, who responded to both actions with respect. In an oft-quoted editorial in the New Republic, published on 21 November 1914, Croly scolded Wilson for believing that his “economic reorganization” of the American nation should end with the creation of two agencies, the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Trade Commission. Wilson’s satisfaction with such meager change, thundered Croly, “shows he is a dangerous and unsound thinker upon contemporary political and social problems.”48 Wilson took this scolding to heart and worked to prove by example and by consulting Progressive intellectuals that he was worthy of their esteem. In 1916 he cultivated them for reelection as president, and Link marvels at “the way in which independent progressives—the social workers, sociologists, and articulate intellectuals—moved into the Wilson camp.”49
A similar development occurred during the New Deal, as former brain truster Raymond Moley notes, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration moved decisively toward controlling business in the fall of 1935. Having seen himself stymied by the Supreme Court, which struck down the National Recovery Act and other forms of federal interference in intrastate commerce, FDR stressed the need for structural changes in American government. His relations with industrialists and corporate executives, as shown by Moley, Basil Rauch, and Allan Brinkley, became increasingly adversarial.50 Moreover, his attempted packing of the Supreme Court to create a favorable majority dramatized his willingness to override opposing branches of the federal government. By 1936 FDR had forged an open alliance with organized labor, by which the newly formed mass industrial union, the CIO, became joined to the Democratic Party. FDR’s spirited support for the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, sponsored by New York Senator Robert Wagner, betokened this burgeoning alliance with the working class. After the passage of the act, the federal government created a National Labor Relations Board, which oversaw labor-management disputes. It also guaranteed to unions the rights to organize and collectively bargain, regardless of the wishes of managers or owners.51
It is possible to see FDR’s actions as driven by nonideological concerns; for example, his own political position in a country beset by depression and in which wealthy industrialists were electorally outnumbered, or his exasperation with a hostile Supreme Court. There is also no reason to assume that all New Deal politicians read Rexford Tugwell or agreed with the industrial policies of those brain trusters FDR periodically consulted. Besides, Democratic politicians, like Republican ones, then as much as now, were interested in holding offices and enjoying the benefits of their incumbency. Even so, FDR, like Woodrow Wilson, a president whom he had served and admired, and like his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, had considered himself a Progressive. His trusted advisors, such as Tugwell, Harold Ickes, Adolf Berle, and Raymond Moley (before Moley’s defection from the New Deal), read the New Republic, respected Croly, and identified their own liberalism with social planning. Like Wilson, the Swedish social democrats and the English Labourites, FDR did not live and act in an ideological void. His moves to nationalize economic problems, to put the federal government on the side of mass unions, and to provide for scientific management of social issues reflected the liberal collectivism becoming dominant in his time. In the United States these stands had the explicit endorsement of those whom Link sees as moving into the Wilson camp in 1916, “the social workers, sociologists, and articulate intellectuals.”
Too much has been made of the fact that the liberal, social democratic welfare state was conceived or planned as something different from what it became. For example, like John Dewey, the Wilsonian founders of the New Republic, Walter Weyl and Walter Lippmann, were self-declared socialists; and their mentor and cofounder, Croly, did not deny the use of that term in describing his own politics. In 1932, brain truster Rexford Tugwell expressed unabashed admiration for Soviet industrial policies. In one memorable statement, Tugwell explained that “the interest of the liberals among us in the institutions of the new Russia of the Soviets has created wide popular interest in ‘planning.’ ”52
Such remarks can be misleading for those plotting a genealogy for the democratic welfare state. Some American Progressives and New Dealers were deeply impressed by the Soviet experiment, and others, like the young Horace Kallen, endorsed with equal enthusiasm the model of social planning then associated with Mussolini.53 There were also discernible ethnic nationalist and eugenic concerns in the platforms of interwar Scandinavian socialism, and certainly there is evidence of radical rightist impulses operative in Swedish social democracy into the early forties.
But this appeal to interwar historical data misses an obvious point. Managerial ideologies have borrowed from each other and invoked the same “historical crisis” without becoming identical. The attempt to find a common denominator for all modern managerial regimes has produced useful speculation, as attested by the works of Burnham, Adolph Berle, and Bruno Rizzi. But one should not rely exclusively on this denominator, lest it divert us from the crucial differences among managerial states. The distinctions between Nazi Germany and Western welfare states overshadowed the shared forms of public administration, which Burnham outlined in 1940. Focusing on structural similarities can be instructive but should not come at the cost of ignoring institutional and ideological differences. Only one political managerial model has triumphed in the industrial West by the end of the twentieth century, and that model is by now recognizably American and intertwined with liberal democratic ideology.
In Crisis and Leviathan a principled libertarian, Robert Higgs, critically surveys the evolution of the American liberal democratic welfare state. The picture drawn in detail is one of a steadily expanding federal administration interfering increasingly in the private sphere. Wars and other calls for national mobilization have had a “ratcheting effect” on administrative expansion, and executive power since the New Deal is said to have personalized bureaucratic sovereignty.54 Looking at the cumulative results of this managerial dominance, Higgs notes a “substantial expansion of government authority in our economic decision-making.… “Given capitalist colors by the form of private property rights, the system has denied the substance of any right whenever governmental authorities have found it expedient to do so.”55 In this system of economic control and diminishing property rights, Higgs insists, the federal government (and its derivative state administrations furnished with federal funds and directives) can redefine or infringe on any group’s liberty. This encroachment on property in the name of industrial planning and social equity became the icebreaker for the state’s continuing invasion of society.
Another critical libertarian view of the American administrative state is offered by Northwestern professor of law Gary Lawson. In a study of federal agencies and their powers since the New Deal, Lawson observes that “the post–New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless revolution.56 This modern regime is predicated upon a constitutionally dubious power, asserted by Congress and the president but found nowhere in the Constitution: the delegation to nonelected agencies of continuing oversight and judicial authority. Lawson notes that the Constitution does not allow any branch of the federal government to create new and permanent instruments of public control; nor should Congress be able to confer upon these agencies judicial powers, which were intended in Article Three for a system of courts. It is furthermore questionable, according to Lawson, whether the Commerce Clause in Article One can be honestly applied to justify the twentieth-century administrative state. That clause provides for congressional oversight of interstate commerce but is not a standing invitation to establish agencies. It does not, for example, give Congress the power to regulate all economic activities, as opposed to mere commerce, and it does not authorize Congress or its created instruments to interfere in commercial enterprises entirely within states.
Lawson points to an interpretative problem that even jurists who do not share his politics acknowledge to be real: the American administrative state rests on its own political, or political-scientific, logic and not on constitutional legitimacy. As one social democratic legal scholar, Bruce Ackerman, admits, it may be necessary to ignore this “deficient ratification” of the post–New Deal administrative state and to treat that authority as a constitutional given.57 Reluctantly, Lawson concurs with this point. If given a choice between constitutional propriety and public administration dispensing material favors, most voters would gladly take the second, he maintains. And he concludes his observations with this provocative passage: “Modern champions of the administrative state seem loathe to abandon the sheltering language of constitutionalism. But tactical considerations aside, it is not at all clear why this is so.… After all, the moral relevance of the Constitution is hardly self-evident.”58
What Higgs overlooks but Lawson does not is the resounding popular success of what they condemn. The liberal democratic welfare state gained vast power because it gave to most people what they wanted. The “substantial expansion” of its authority into “economic decision-making” fortified its base; and one reason this secular process has continued until now is that the welfare state has built a consensus around economic management. The redistribution of earnings and the furnishing of social services have both middle- and lower-class backing, and as Kevin Phillips proves in a study of American voter reaction, any perceived threat to middle-class entitlement programs can destroy a conservative candidate running for elected office in almost any voting district.59 It is this democratic consensus for government economic policy that has allowed the American government to go beyond welfare-state measures into social engineering. The management of economic democracy has provided public administrators with what Carl Schmitt calls “social legitimation for the exercise of political power”—popular acceptance of a claim to moral authority made by those expanding their political control. More and more administrators have used that authority to implement a liberal democratic ideology to which they have assigned global implications.
This socializing mission has also assumed messianic tones, and both John Dewey and U.S. Commissioner of Education John Ward Studebaker affirmed the importance of bringing to Americans their own “democratic faith.”60 In this view, liberal democracy is not about a set of procedures or constitutional arrangements. It is a “living faith” which the American government is to impress first, on its own citizens and eventually, on the rest of humanity. In a massive biographical study, In the Time of the Americans: F.D.R., Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, and MacArthur, David Fromkin, professor of international relations at Boston University, makes an observation telling as much about his own faith as the one attributed to his subjects: “In the First World War, Wilson had inspired people Franklin Roosevelt’s and Harry Truman’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s age to go out and change the politics of the rest of the planet. It took nearly a century; it was by no means entirely of their own doing, and for the most part they did not realize where the forces would lead that they were putting into motion … but, in the end, they did it.”61
This passage underscores the belief in the imperative to export liberal democratic ideology. America is not to be a state or society of the kind that exists elsewhere, but the instantiation of a political model informed by the “democratic faith.” Today that faith is filtered through a managerial state, which expresses faith through abstract ideals assumed to have universal validity. That faith must be made to apply to others if its truths are the permanent and transcendent ones that its proponents claim they are. But the content of those truths has changed over the last eighty years, and today’s democratic ideology of pluralism has weakened the legitimacy of the state that proclaims it. For the pluralist version of the democratic faith has come to incorporate doctrines that are breeding popular discontent. As Gary Lawson reminds us, the modern administrative state stands or falls not on constitutional legality but on the demand for its services. When those services carry disagreeable social and cultural costs, the “liberal democratic” regime faces an erosion of its popular legitimacy as well as constitutional foundation. The appeal to a partly resurrected nineteenth-century liberal vocabulary of rights will not cause these problems to go away. As the astute critics of modern liberalism Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen note, the same trick has been tried too often to hide the fact that the administrative state is now widely viewed as undemocratic.62
This problem does not cease to exist because the regime in question claims to be “liberal.” By now that decontextualized term means what the user wishes it to signify, providing that he can browbeat others into accepting his definition. Basic to this liberalism is that freedom be presented as what judges, public administrators, and journalists see fit to impose on other people. Presumably no one would be free, because inequality and discrimination would be rampant, unless our lives were supervised by experts. This freedom, which the administrative state guarantees, is what today’s democratic faith is about; and for more than half a century it has worn the tag “pluralist.”
The supposed essence of liberal democratic life, pluralism, has made its own semantic journey through the decades in various guises. Its advocates have claimed to be pursuing strategies of national unity, enhanced freedom, and cultural diversity but have contributed steadily to a different result, the growth of state managerial power. In recent years pluralists inside and outside of government have pushed social designs such as cultural inclusiveness, “secular-scientific” thinking, and global education upon increasingly resistant citizens. Whence the perception of Christopher Lasch in “The Revolt of the Elites” that a gulf is widening in America between the political-professional class and everyone else: “The masses today have lost interest in revolution. Indeed their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators.” Furthermore, Lasch continues, “Upper-middle-class liberals have mounted a crusade to sanitize American society … to censor everything from pornography to ‘hate speech’ and at the same time, incongruously to extend the range of personal choice in matters where most people feel the need for solid moral guidelines.”63
The invective directed by Lasch against America’s transnational elite is noteworthy in view of its source. By no means an apologist for the political economy of pre–New Deal America, Lasch is an avowed egalitarian. A morally conservative socialist, he celebrates blue-collar habits of mind against those of yuppie administrators and cultural revolutionaries. Another man of the Left now turned against administrative rule, Pierre Rosanvallon, points out the inescapable tie between pluralism and the ascendancy of experts. In an interview with L’Express (25 March 1993), Rosanvallon asserts that “pluralism results in misunderstandings as in the lack of rationality: on one side stand competent experts and on the other the incompetent many. For the latter to be rational and informed, it suffices that one accepts the opinions of the former.”64 Like Lasch, Rosanvallon stresses the structural presuppositions of pluralist ideology. Without the rule of administrators and social experts, that is to say, pluralism would not have remained for so long the American “democratic faith.”
A question that remains to be considered in terms of this rule is whether successive attempts, presented as pluraslism, to formulate and update the “democratic faith” have internal consistency. That question should be approached by shifting the focus from any further consideration of a “liberal tradition” to the role of social planning within liberal democratic regimes. From that developmental perspective, it is possible to understand how pluralism became the justification for interventionist social policies. Contemporary pluralists, it will be argued, have not strayed far from the purposes or methods of their social engineering predecessors. Rather, they have widened the scope and definition of socialization to include behavior modification and the creation of a “sensitive” civic culture.