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Bureaucracy and Constitutionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Norton E. Long
Norton E. Long
Affiliation:
Western Reserve University
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Extract

There is an old aphorism that fire is a good servant but a bad master. Something like this aphorism is frequently applied to the appropriate role of the bureaucracy in government. Because bureaucracy is often viewed as tainted with an ineradicable lust for power, it is alleged that, like fire, it needs constant control to prevent its erupting from beneficient servitude into dangerous and tyrannical mastery.

The folklore of constitutional theory relegates the bureaucracy to somewhat the same low but necessary estate as Plato does the appetitive element of the soul. In the conventional dichotomy between policy and administration, administration is the Aristotelian slave, properly an instrument of action for the will of another, capable of receiving the commands of reason but incapable of reasoning. The amoral concept of administrative neutrality is the natural complement of the concept of bureaucracy as instrument; for according to this view the seat of reason and conscience resides in the legislature, whatever grudging concession may be made to the claims of the political executive, and a major, if not the major, task of constitutionalism is the maintenance of the supremacy of the legislature over the bureaucracy. The latter's sole constitutional role is one of neutral docility to the wishes of the day's legislative majority.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , September 1952 , pp. 808 - 818
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1952

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References

1 Locke, John, The Second Treatise of Civil Government and A Letter concerning Toleration (Oxford, 1947), Ch. 8, p. 87Google Scholar,

2 See Part 1 of Bureaucracy in a Democracy (New York 1950)Google Scholar. For a penetrating but sympathetic criticism of Hyneman's views, see Barnard's, Chester I. review of the book in American Political Science Review, Vol. 44, pp. 990–1004 (12, 1950)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For Appleby's central position, see Ch. 16 of his Big Democracy (New York, 1945) and p. 164Google Scholar of his Policy and Administration (University, Alabama, 1949)Google Scholar.

4 Constitutional Government and Democracy, rev. ed. (Boston, 1950)Google Scholar, Ch. 2.

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7 Cf. Galloway, George B., Congress at the Cross Roads (New York 1946), pp. 150–151Google Scholar; Young, Roland A., This Is Congress (New York, 1943), Ch. 2Google Scholar.

8 Appleby, Policy and Administration, Ch. 2.

9 Friedrich, Ch. 1.

10 Mosca, Gaetano, The Ruling Class, trans. Kahn, Hannah D., ed. Livingston, Arthur (New York, 1939), p. 258Google Scholar.

11 Galloway, pp. 28 ff.; Young, pp. 173 ff.; Ogg, F. A. and Ray, P. O., Introduction to American Government, 9th ed. (New York, 1948), pp. 304–305Google Scholar; and McKinney, M. M., “The Personnel of the Seventy-seventh Congress,” American Political Science Review Vol. 36, pp. 67–75 (02, 1942)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Cf. Barnard, op. cit. (above, n. 2), p. 1004, and Burns, James MacGregor, Congress on Trial (New York, 1949)Google Scholar. Hyneman is aware of these misgivings; “If there is widespread and serious doubt that Congress can make the major decisions—including the decision as to what authority the President shall have—in a way that the American people as a whole will find acceptable, then we had better get busy with the improvement of our political organization, our electoral system, and the organization of Congress so that the grounds for such doubt will be removed” (op. cit., p. 217). Burns and others have pointed out the road blocks in the way of such reform. Compensation for congressional deficiencies through the presidency and bureaucracy seems the normal course of our development. Had Professor Hyneman considered the possibilities of moral restraints, as Barnard suggests, this road might not have seemed so perilous.

13 A thoughtful interpretation of the whole problem of interests and the bureaucracy is contained in Truman, David B., The Governmental Process (New York, 1951)Google Scholar, esp. Chs. 8 and 9.

14 Cf. Graham, George A., “Essentials of Responsibility,” in Marx, P. M. (ed.), Elements of Public Administration (New York, 1946)Google Scholar.

15 Young, Ch. 1.