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It has become impossible, or so it seems, to reach agreement on reasonable solutions to the problems confronting American government. Many claim that our political system is broken, our unique Constitutional scheme of governance - separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, pluralism—dysfunctional or obsolete. Would James Madison, the principal author of that scheme, agree? It Truem the way our political system works can undermine the general welfare. Often our politics seem farcical. Bur Madison would know why. Our governing structures do not fail. We, the people, do. Liberty and justice cannot be secured, Madison argued, unless the people embrace the principle that the stronger parties among them submit to a government that protects all parties, the weaker as well as themselves. When the people abandon this principle - when, for example, wealth rules and joblessness persists - liberty and justice for all, the goals of our republican democracy, are in jeopardy.

Federalist No. 51 can be read as a statement of the national government's dual responsibility to serve the public interest and to preserve liberty. It is built on James Madison's belief in checks and balances as a method for keeping government's parts in their proper places. This essay asks whether this gridlock has gone too far in rendering the constitutional design obsolete. Drawing on previously unpublished fragments of Federalist No. 51, the author argues that Madison fully anticipated these problems, and he offers the unpublished text as a salutary appendix to this iconic defense of liberty.

Although the rule of law is universally regarded as a fundamental principle of democratic governance, the field of public administration continues to exhibit the "anti‐legal temper" that emerged in the 1920s, when Leonard White's managerialism largely displaced Frank Goodnow's emphasis on the intimacy of law and administration. Although administrative law is a distinguished subfield of scholarship and practice within public administration, the consensus view within the profession seems to be that law is one of many constraints on administrative discretion rather than its source, a challenge to administrative leadership rather than its guiding principle. In addition to unacceptably narrowing the range of values infusing public administration, such a view undermines the profession's ability to contribute to the design of our governance arrangements at a time when constitutional institutions are being seriously challenged. To fulfill its constitutional role, public administration must commit itself to the rule of law as an institution that secures its legitimacy.

Contemporary critiques of traditional government in both America and Germany are based on serious distortions and misunderstandings of the rationale and the dynamics of its creation. This misunderstanding concerns how and why governing institutions evolved, the essential path dependence of national institutional development, and the purposes bureaucracy has and continues to serve on behalf of liberal democracy. The consequence is misguided efforts at administrative modernization that are doomed to failure. The historical reality is that both the American administrative state and the German Rechtsstaat were devised to serve liberal, republican purposes. That such institutions endure is less a reflection of the well-known pathologies of bureaucracy—although such pathologies are always present as institutions evolve—as of their continuing value to the preservation of civil society, an endurance that has accommodated change within flexible frameworks of law and practice.

In this John Gaus Lecture of 2007, Lynn argues that the practice of theorizing in a positive sense about administrative practice began with the founders of public administration, such as Gaus (The Frontiers of Public Administration, 1936; & Reflections on Public Administration (1947). Gaus developed the theory of "organization in public administration" & that of "the process of government." Lynn notes that early public administration theorizing was more like political philosophy, eg, asking how our system of government does work rather than proposing how it should work. After WWII public administration, the focus began to change. Gaus & others concentrated on the recruitment, education, & training of the bureaucracy & on procedures through which work & policies can be revised in light of experience. John Millett (1954) emphasized the pragmatic & craft-oriented tenets of public management. Concepts such as accountability & legitimacy entered the public administration literature. However, this kind of specificity narrowed the scope of theorizing. In closing, Lynn contends that public administration ought to provide an academic forum for resolving problems of strategy & how they do & do not lead to good management. S. Stanton

Books reviewed in this article:Donald F. Kettl, The Transformation of Governance: Public Administration for the Twenty‐First Century AmericaLester M. Salamon (ed.), The Tools of Government: A Guide to the New GovernanceH. George Frederickson and Kevin B. Smith, The Public Administration Theory Primer