Suchergebnisse

Exposing and explaining patterns in presidential history will indicate that outcomes are not entirely open‐ended, but it is a long way from there to a claim that everything of significance is determined. It is arguable that studies of presidential leadership have been far more attentive to contingencies than to regularities and that there is more to be gained at present from closer attention to those features of our politics that structure the latter. The goal, however, remains a more balanced assessment of the play of structure and agent. The Politics Presidents Make sought to illuminate and explain hitherto unattended patterns in national political leadership, but it did not foreclose the significance of individual efforts, and in many particulars, it invited closer attention to the leader's formative role.

American political scientists in the 1890s were deeply divided on the central question they had chosen to address: Where to place government in the United States in the larger scheme of Western political development. The "idealists," led by John Burgess of Columbia University, argued that the American Constitution had "perfected the Aryan genius for political civilization" by "emancipating it from the remaining prejudices of European Teutonism." Late-century America was, in their view, "the cosmopolitan model for political organization in the world" (Burgess 1895, 406). By placing the U.S. in this advanced position, the idealists mounted a strong case against demands for structural reform. Burgess himself thought that the proper American response to the new governmental challenges of the industrial age was more of the same. He urged a strengthening of the separation of powers, a further bolstering of the judicial and executive branches to counter the increasingly radical impulses of the states and Congress.

As "Lincoln and the Politics of Union" is the only thing that Michael Holt has ever written with which Mark Neely entirely disagrees, I can understand his impatience with the arguments of The Politics Presidents Make. Each of us has a fish of this sort waiting to be fried, and the opportunity afforded by my reference to Holt's essay must have been hard to resist. At least Neely took enough care in seizing this opportunity to acknowledge his "reductionist rendering" of my thesis.

The political foundations of the modern presidency were laid during the New Deal years. Franklin Roosevelt was the New Deal president. The relationship between these two facts is a matter of some consequence. On it hinges our understanding of presidential leadership and modern American government generally, not to mention the political significance of Roosevelt himself.

The American presidency reflects nothing so clearly as the idiosyncrasies of personality and circumstance. The discrete dynamics of the men and their times are naturally pronounced; the general dynamics that define the institution in time, correspondingly obscured. This makes thematic analysis of the presidency peculiarly dependent on uncovering broad-ranging patterns in institutional history. By isolating different historical regularities we can locate different dimensions of the problem and significance of presidential action.