Must we reconcile ourselves to the federal bureaucracy?
Paul Gottfried's mixed review of Claremont senior fellow John Marini's summa on unconstitutional government, Unmasking the Administrative State, leaves the reader with the more than sneaking suspicion that the answer is yes. “It represents a dramatic departure from what our federal union was intended to be, and a deviant model that may already be beyond our control,” Gottfried sighs. “We are being technically ‘administered' by congressional agencies that run roughshod over our historic liberties;” worse, “there may be no way out of this situation.”
Also concerning, however, is the pique Gottfried reserves not for the nominal villains in the modern history of American government but for Marini himself. Marini's account of their origins strikes Gottfried as not just overwrought—”he might have spared us his practice of repeating all the talking points of his colleagues at the Claremont Institute”—but indeed unacceptable: “In the book's introduction, Ken Masugi lets us know (lest we miss the point) that the author is carrying forward the philosophical tradition of Jaffa, ‘who took account of the radical assaults on constitutional government demanded by Rousseau and above all, Hegel.'”
To his credit, Gottfried doesn't scrimp on praise for Marini's attack on Congress for abdicating its duties to the Washington regulatory apparatus. But in approvingly citing Marini's discussion of Carl Schmitt, who diagnosed the same legislative weakness in Weimar Germany, Gottfried appears to think that “legislatures have been forced into doing what they were not meant to do” by “indecisive” executives—hardly the conclusion reached in Marini's richer and more sophisticated account that Gottfried rejects. Faced with Marini's claim that “ideology and politics become intelligible only with reference to a philosophy of history, which originated in the political thought of Kant and Hegel,” Gottfried, “as someone who has written on both German philosophy and the administrative state,” is left “truly puzzled.”
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