Presidential Power and Presidential Purpose

In: The review of politics, Volume 47, Issue 4, p. 566-587

Abstract

The article first examines the ways in which Richard Neustadt's Presidential Power attempts to connect the activities of power-seeking presidents to the public ends their actions presumably further and then discusses what is problematic in these linkages. The critique focuses on the defects in Neustadt's concept of the "grain of history," the diminished sense of public purposes revealed by the standard of "viability," the difficulties in evaluating presidential actions with the criteria developed and the ways in which the failed linkage between the means to power and the ends served undermines Neustadt's own teaching. The paradoxical quality of Presidential Power, in which insightful analysis of the means to power is combined with unsatisfactory discussion of the purposes for which that power is to be employed, is seen as possibly rooted in Neustadt's tacit acceptance of positivist and historicist views, which are now increasingly called into question. The article contends that those concerned with the separation of the normative and the empirical begin efforts to reconnect presidential power to public purpose by going beyond the terms of Neustadt's argument and by reexamining the American Founding for what it may suggest about the intended ends of politics and the presidency.