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The Public Philosophy: Interest-Group Liberalism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Theodore Lowi
Theodore Lowi*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Until astonishingly recent times American national government played a marginal role in the life of the nation. Even as late as the eve of World War I, the State Department could support itself on consular fees. In most years revenues from tariffs supplied adequate financing, plus a surplus, from all other responsibilities. In 1800, there was less than one-half a federal bureaucrat per 1,000 citizens. On the eve of the Civil War there were only 1.5 federal bureaucrats per 1,000 citizens, and by 1900 that ratio had climbed to 2.7. This compares with 7 per 1,000 in 1940 and 13 per 1,000 in 1962—exclusive of military personnel.

The relatively small size of the public sphere was maintained in great part by the constitutional wall of separation between government and private life. The wall was occasionally scaled in both directions, but concern for the proper relation of private life and public order was always a serious and effective issue. Americans always talked pragmatism, in government as in all other things; but doctrine always deeply penetrated public dialogue. Power, even in the United States, needed justification.

Throughout the decades between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression, almost every debate over a public policy became involved in the larger debate over the nature and consequences of larger and smaller spheres of government. This period was just as much a “constitutional period” as that of 1789–1820. Each period is distinguished by its effort to define (or redefine) and employ a “public philosophy.”

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , March 1967 , pp. 5 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1967

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Footnotes

*

This article was made possible by a Social Science Research Council Fellowship. Thanks are also due Professors Richard Flathman, L. A. Froman, Jr., George LaNoue, and Grant McConnell for their many helpful criticisms and suggestions. For his considerable encouragement I am grateful to Max Ascoli of The Reporter; and to him, to Henry Kariel (in The Decline of American Pluralism) and to Grant McConnell I am doubly grateful for their early recognition of problems with pluralism.

References

1 See especially Rossiter, Clinton and Lare, James (eds.), The Essential Lippmann (New York: Vintage, 1965), pp. 171ff.Google Scholar

2 Mosca, Gaetano, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), p. 70.Google Scholar

3 Rossiter, Clinton, Conservatism in America (New York: Knopf, 1955), pp. 12 and 15.Google Scholar

4 Dahl, Robert A. and Lindblom, Charles E., Politics, Economic and Welfare (New York: Harper & Bros., 1953), Chapter 1.Google Scholar

5 The distance above or below the line is not meant to convey additional information about the degree of public involvement. However, as Dahl and Lindblom's analysis suggests, that is a desirable and practicable consideration.

6 Placement along the continuum is gross and informal. However, it is clear that no basis for placing these policies according to impact could reduce their spread. And, differences of opinion as to the placement of specific policies (should anti trust go in the middle or over on the left?) would lead to the very kind of policy analysis political scientists need to get involved in.

7 Some, especially “liberals,” might object, arguing that the true basis of the distinction is public vs. private but that it involves much more than merely change vs. maintenance. Equality and welfare as well as change are the attributes of public policies. Adding dimensions to the one diagram would overly complicate it, but some response to the objection can be made: (1) A strong element of the equality dimension is already present in the sense that those policies on the left do represent change and “change toward equality.” However, (2) note the fact that, at least to this observer, “equality” is present among public but also among private policies and practices. Furthermore, (3) many public policies aim at the reduction of equalizing (as well as change) forces in the private sphere. Those in the upper right area of the Diagram serve as examples. Thus, “equality” is not a basis for distinguishing positions any more than “change,” with or without consideration of the equality aspects of change. I will not attempt to defend the absence of the “welfare” dimension except to say that no definition of welfare could possibly show that it is strictly within the province of the public or the private sphere. Any diagram based on any definition of “welfare” would show policies above and below the line and to the left and the right.

8 They are so placed on the Diagram above. Interest groups are not policies strictly speaking. However, individuals and corporations belong to and support trade associations and other groups as a matter of policy; and each such group formulates relatively clear policies supported by the members. Placing “old interest groups” on the Diagram and to the right is meant to convey two hypotheses: (1) that the existence of the group is itself conservative, and (2) that it is highly probable that the policies formulated by such old groups will be conservative.

9 The preceding two paragraphs were taken, with revision, from the Introductory Essay of my Private Life and Public Order (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967).Google Scholar

10 For an excellent inquiry into this assumption and into the realities of the internal life of the interests, see: McConnell, Grant, “The Spirit of Private Government,” this Review, 52 (1963), 754–770Google Scholar; see also Kerr, Clark, Unions and Union Leaders of Their Own Choosing (Santa Barbara: Fund for the Republic, 1957)Google Scholar; and Lipset, S. M.et al., Union Democracy (New York: Anchor, 1962).Google Scholar See also Miller, Arthur S., Private Governments and the Constitution (Santa Barbara: Fund for the Republic, 1959).Google Scholar

11 It is assumed that “countervailing power” usually crops up somehow. Where it does not, government ought to help create it. See Galbraith, John K., American Capitalism (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1952).Google Scholar

12 Hansen, Alvin H., The American Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957) pp. 152ff.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., pp. 158–59. Keynes said “… the Class War will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie”: quoted in ibid., p. 158.

14 No citations are necessary to emphasize the fact that presidential delegation and subdelegation to administrators is just as extensive as congressional. As to the popular basis of presidential authority, see Dahl, Robert A., Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956)Google Scholar; and Kendall, Willmoore, “The Two Majorities,” Midwest Journal of Politicial Science, 4 (1960), pp. 317–345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 For pioneer expressions, see Bentley, Arthur F., The Process of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908)Google Scholar; and Herring, E. Pendleton, Group Representation Before Congress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929).Google Scholar More recent arguments of the same methodological sort are found in Truman, David, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951)Google Scholar; and Latham, Earl, The Group Basis of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952).Google Scholar

16 Op. cit., p. 268.

17 A Grammar of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1950), p. 7.

18 Ibid., pp. 8–9. In order to preserve value-free science, many pluralista (“group theorists”) denied public interest altogether, arguing instead that there is a “totally inclusive interest” and that it is served by letting groups interact without knowing what it is. Cf. Truman, op. cit., pp. 50–51.

19 For discussions of the extent to which group theory is a satisfactory statement of reality, see my “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies and Political Theory,” World Politics, 16 (1964), pp. 677–715, and the excellent essays cited therein.

20 For more on the expansion and justification of these practices in agriculture see my “How the Farmers Get What They Want,” Reporter, May 21, 1964, pp. 35ff.

21 “‘Creative Federalism’ and the Great Society,” Fortune, January, 1966, p. 122.

22 A third major intellectual of the Kennedy Administration was Professor Richard E. Neustadt. That he is a political scientist makes all the more interesting his stress upon the necessary independence of the Presidency rather than the desirability of presidential partnerships and countervailing power. See his Presidential Power (New York: Wiley, 1960).

23 Galbraith, op. cit., p. 118.

24 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., Kennedy or Nixon—Does It Make Any Difference? (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 43.Google Scholar

25 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., A Thousand Days, as reprinted in Chicago Sun-Times, 01 23, 1966Google Scholar, Section 2, p. 3.

26 By proper application of the old-school criteria, Kennedy was on balance conservative. Most of his programs belong to the right of center (on the Diagram, horizontal axis), and he did an amazing number of things that showed a preference for private sector activity (on the Diagram, vertical axis). Examples include his “actuarially sound” medicare, his investment tax credit and tax cut proposals, his preference for expansion of housing through investment incentives, his reluctance to ask for new civil rights legislation, his appreciation for governmental contracting and other executive powers to deal with civil rights, his opposition to “Powell Amendments” and parochial school aid in federal education legislation, his concerted effort to make agriculture controls work, his support for very permissive depressed areas legislation that would bail out needy businesses and industries while reducing needs or pressures of entrepreneurs to move to some other section of the country.

27 See for example, “How the Farmers Get What They Want,” op. cit.

28 See Bauer, Raymondet al., American Business and Public Policy (New York: Atherton, 1963), pp. 73ff.Google Scholar

29 Op. cit., p. 122.

30 Quoted in Congressional Quarterly, Weekly Report, April 22, 1966, p. 833.

31 Witcover, Jules and Knoll, Erwin, “Politics and the Poor: Shriver's Second Thoughts,” Reporter, 12 30, 1965, p. 24.Google Scholar

32 “How The Farmers Get What They Want,” op. cit.

33 Einaudi, Marioet al., Nationalization in France and Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955), pp. 100–101Google Scholar, emphasis added.

34 “How The Farmers Get What They Want,” op. cit., p. 36.

35 Op. cit., p. 462. For a profound appreciation of the public power of private authorities in occupational licenaing, see Willbern, York, “Professionalization in State and Local Government: Too Little or Too Much?” Public Administration Review, Winter, 1954.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Arthur S. Miller, op. cit.

36 Op. cit., pp. 467–468.

37 Witcover and Knoll, op. cit.

38 Adams, Walter S. and Gray, Horace, Monopoly in America (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 48–50.Google Scholar

39 Cf. ibid., pp. 44–46, and their discussion, from a different point of view, of the “abridgement of sovereignty by grants of privilege.” See also Fainsod, Merleet al., Government and the American Economy (New York: Norton, 1959), pp. 400–404.Google Scholar They observe the same thing happening in television and for the same reasons.

40 See accounts in New York Times, August 2 and August 29, 1966, and Time Magazine, August 12, 1966, p. 38.

41 Herbert Kaufman, “The New York City Health Centers,” Inter-university Case Program. Sayre, Wallace and Kaufman, Herbert in Governing New York City (New York: Russell Sage, 1960), Chapter XIXGoogle Scholar, generalize on this pattern. They refer to “islands of functional power” as the formal power structure of the city. Each island enjoys considerable autonomy, each is a system of administrators and their “satellite groups,” each resists interactions with other islands. The big city is possibly in an advanced stage of what in this paper is observed as an important tendency at the national level. Because of the tragic stalemate in the cities, these pronounced city patterns might serve as a better warning than my illustrations drawn from national practices. See also Kaufman, Herbert, Politics and Policies in State and Local Governments (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), Chapter V.Google Scholar

42 Cf. Friedrich, Carl, Constitutional Government and Democracy (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1950), pp. 291–294.Google Scholar See also a classic critique of occupational representation by Douglas, Paul H., “Occupational versus Proportional Representation,” American Journal of Sociology, (09, 1923)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and David Truman, op. cit., pp. 525–526.

43 Op. cit., p. 535.

44 Op. cit., p. 4.

45 This rule is made more interesting for the argument here because it was given new currency in the Schechter Poultry and Panama Refining cases, both of which involved the most extreme instance of delegation of sovereignty to groups, the NRA. For a recent expression, see Friendly's, Judge Henry J.The Federal Administrative Agencies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 5ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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