THE STATE OF THE NATION
Kammen, Michael
BOOKS i THE STATE OF THE NATION MICHAEL KAMMEN Aspects of Amert~n Liberty: Philosophical, Ilistortea| and P o | t t | ~ | Edited by GEORGE W. CORNER American Philosophical Society, $10 200...
...Each one was widely noticed at the time of publication and, on the whole, rather, well received...
...p. 149: "Critical [voting] realignments have historically been.induced by the political system's incapacity to undergo more than marginal incremental change...
...108) ! In general this collection of essays by political scientists is marred by sloppy thinking and shoddy scholarship...
...The addresses presented at the American Philosophical Society observance are largely historical in orientation, and tend to be of higher quality...
...How to make government responsive to it when it was expressed...
...How to get them to express it...
...Gunther goes on to argue yet another fresh point of view, one that will have to be considered quite seriously by historians and jurists: To me, the critical innovation was the Supremacy Clauses in Article VI of the Constitution...
...Yet 200 Years o/ the Republic is not a dead loss...
...Burnham's important piece is entitled "Revitalization and Decay: Looking Toward the Third Century of American Electoral Politics...
...He displays the breadth and maturity of his scholarship by making illuminating compari, sons between political practices in England and her colonies...
...During the mid-1970s a new delineation of the Revolution has been unveiled, thereby helping us to see its innovative and radical dimensions more clearly than we ever have before...
...More the pity that Burnham is given to such usage as "volatilized," "power implosion" and "impaction...
...51-52, 55), yet Sydney Ahlstrom of Yale stresses their radical character (pp...
...but Burnham states its essence on...
...The essays commissioned by the Journal of Politics were prepared primarily by political scientists...
...The contributors to Aspects of American Liberty are on the whole a much more distinguished group...
...We may not all agree, but that challenging proposition is eminently worthy of discussion...
...Bork is "provocative" in the best sense of that word...
...And what to do when the apparent will of the people ran counter to what their representatives thought good and right for them...
...BOOKS i THE STATE OF THE NATION MICHAEL KAMMEN Aspects of Amert~n Liberty: Philosophical, Ilistortea| and P o | t t | ~ | Edited by GEORGE W. CORNER American Philosophical Society, $10 200 Years of the RepNb||e in Retrospect Edited by WILLIAM C. HAVARD University Press o~ Virginia, $12.50 Despite all the criticisms of our Buy-centennial, many of them entirely justified, the 200th anniversary of the United States did elicit quite a number of serious assessments of the state of the nation: how we reached our present circumstances, how we are doing, and where we are going...
...They have been America's surrogate for revolution...
...Strangely out of place between its covers are several strong essays...
...Some of the addresses are scholarly and documented, while others are speculative --"essays" in the most literal sense...
...Caroline Robbins's piece on William Penn, James Hutson's on tendencies toward intercolonial union, and Gerald Gunther's on "Nationbuilding Elements o~ the Constitution" all call attention to the origins, acceptance and implications of diversity as a positive value in American political culture...
...He describes, for example, "the enormous progress of the Negro race in the United States, a progress which has given them a status unequalled by blacks anywhere else in the world...
...What replaces it is bureaucratic and judicial government, which may be benign and well intentioned, and may respond somewhat to popular desires, though not always, but cannot by definition be democratic...
...180) Ultimately, however, I find that Bork has a vague and ~ somewhat strange definition of "democracy," referring more to process than to purpose, concerned more with an abstract ideal of freedom than with compassion for human needs...
...Bork served as Solicitor General of the United States under Presidents Nixon and Ford...
...Gunther and Jones are refreshingly revisionist in regarding the Constitution as much less a repudiation of the Articles than it has recently been regarded in the conventional academic wisdom...
...More serious, perhaps, because more pervasive, is the fact that so many of these political scientists posit as their starting point a very conservative American Revolution...
...Jasper B. Shannon cannot even quote correctly from one of the most famous statements in the entire history of political thought: Thomas Hobbes's observation that in a state of nature the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and Short...
...By relying upon outmoded works of historical interpretation from the 1950s --books by Clinton Rossiter, Daniel Boorstin, Louis Hartz, Robert E. Brown and others whose views have long since been discarded or revised by serious students of the American Revolution...
...Gunther and Harry W. Jones, Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia, both give us particularly vigorous articles...
...But for better (Aspects o/ American Liberty) and for worse (The Republic in Retrospect), both books may serve as benchmarks of the American (large ly academic) mind at the time of our Bicentennial--a particularly significant moment of political anomie, social change and intellectual adjustment...
...Here is Morgan's own summation of the critical question he has chosen to assess: In sum, the American Revolution marked the culmination, in America at least, of a transformation that took government out of the hands of monarchs claiming to rule by the grace of God and placed it in the hands of the people...
...In several instances there is lively disagreement among the contributors, even when they are colleagues at the same institution...
...It was that Clause that declared the Constitution to be the law of the land, enforceable in courts...
...Commonweal: 217 Such volumes as these tend to be ephemeral and fall between the cracks...
...Where do they get it...
...He has the courage to voice some very unfashionable ideas-though admittedly the neo-conservatism which he represents seems to be gaining currency day by day...
...Edmund S. Morgan offers an immensely important and highly original piece entitled "The Problem of Popular Sovereignty...
...There, to me, lies the most ereative contribution: the Convention's decision, emanating from surprising sources and not wholly understood in the summer of 1787, to assure the effectiveness of the national government not through resort to military and political confrontations, but rather through invocation of routine judicial processes...
...112-13) Closely related to these questions is the title of Robert Bork's essay, "Can Democratic Government Survive...
...Ren6 de Visme WiUiamson, the author of "British and European Commentaries on the American Political Experience," shoots off a number of absurd claim~ because he is just delighted with the status quo...
...The political science pieces are less well written, more often burdened with professional and academic jargon, and in many instances are curiously dependent upon interpretive studies now considered out of date...
...CL Shannon, "Bicentennial Reflections on Party Government," p. 129...
...Constitution a lot more visible, which is fine, but at the expense of making the Declaration of Independence and its embarrassing egalitarian principles all but invisible...
...But the transformation left unanswered a number of questions that had arisen as soon as the people began to take a hand in government through elected representatives, whether in England or in the England's colonies...
...How to know whether there was any will to express...
...147...
...As the editor explains, they were "speakers chosen for the wide range of their understanding of the sources of American political freedomma poet (Archibald MacLeish), a high officer of the law (Robert H. Bork), a veteran public administrator (David E. Lilienthal), professors of classical, medieval and modern history, scholars versed in the history of religion, law, science, and statecraft...
...200 Years of the Republic originated as a special issue of the Journal of Politics in August 1976...
...Bork's great fear is that we are being governed more and more by two sorts of officials--bureaucrats (who are not elected) and judges (most of whom are not elected)-rather than by our elected representatives...
...Aspects, pp...
...Its thesis is quite complicated and must be followed out in detail...
...His neoconservatism, nonetheless, is at least galvanized by intelligence, honesty, and realism~unlike the rusty neoconservatism which pervades 200 Years of the Republic...
...and they are, over31 March 1978:214 all, inferior to those in Aspects of American Liberty...
...Aspects, p. 147) Joseph Strayer's contribution, called "The Rule of Law," is wise in comprehending so many of the ironies Commonweal: 215 of western history, and in perceiving some of its curious discontinuities...
...The prospect, then, is the in31 Maich 1975:216 creasing irrelevance of democratic government...
...and they both find many components of the Constitution originating directly in those Articles of Confederation which provided our frame of government prior to 1789...
...How to discover the will of the people...
...George W. Carey and James McClellan, for example, in"Toward the Restoration of the American Political Tradition," would like to make the U.S...
...Robert R. Palmer of Yale, for example, emphasizes the bland and only partially innovative character of the American Enlightenment and Reyolution (pp...
...Neither one appeared in the book form until 1977, however, and neither one has attracted much notice...
...One of them, for instance, was written by WaRer Dean Burnham, who is quite critical of the neo-conservatires (see .p...
...65-66...
...How do they justify it...
...In other respects, however, there is unanimity...
...Such neglect is not entirely justified, though both volumes are uneven in texture and value...
...The two best known collections, perhaps, are The American Commonwealth, 1976, edited by Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol (Basic Books, 1976) and America's Continuing Revolution, edited by Stephen I. Tensor (Anchor Books, 1976...
...The two books being reviewed here were first present as symposia in 1976...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 7
