Dear BU Readers,
I’ve prefaced the book manuscript chapter on Wilson that I’m presenting with a table of contents and opening pages of my introduction so you can see where this chapter (Chapter 6) fits within the overall manuscript. You’ll note on the table of contents a conclusion entitled “The Past and the Present of Political Science.” I plan to write a conclusion that highlights and synthesizes the points made in the history I tell that are most resonant for us in the field today. One thing I hope to get out of this presentation is a read on what points in the Wilson chapter most engage you, as political scientists of “the present,” to help me decide how to focus the conclusion.
THE AMERICAN BIRTH OF POLITICAL SCIENCE: LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction. Liberalism and the Birth of Political Science……………………..……….
PART ONE: EUROPEAN EXEMPLARS Chapter One. The “Political” in Political Science: The Classical Liberal Debate about Democracy…………………..………………………………….…..……… Chapter Two. The “Science” in Political Science: German Universities and the Varieties of Historicist Science…………………..…..…………………
PART TWO: AMERICAN PRECURSORS Chapter Three. Classical Liberalism and Political Science in the American College: Francis Lieber and Theodore Dwight Woolsey………….………………… Chapter Four. Political Science and Political Economy in Post-Civil War America: Andrew Dickson White and William Graham Sumner……………………. Chapter Five. Historical and Political Science at the John Hopkins University: Training PhDs and Founding National Associations ………………………
PART THREE: AMERICAN PIONEERS Chapter Six. From Democratized Classical Liberalism to Progressive Liberalism: The Political Science of Woodrow Wilson……………………….………. Chapter Seven. The Politics of Mass Democracy in Transatlantic Perspective: James Bryce and A. L. Lowell on Parties and Public Opinion……………. Chapter Eight. Founding a Freestanding Field: From the Columbia School of Political Science to the American Political Science Association………………….. ..
Conclusion. The Past and the Present of Political Science……..………….…………… 1
INTRODUCTION. LIBERALISM AND THE BIRTH OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
“A new political science is needed for a world altogether new.”1
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Preface to Vol. 1 (1835)
Multiple histories can be told of political science. Some start with the philosophers of classical
Athens.2 Others start with the sciences of the state (Staatswissenschaften) of the early-modern
German universities, or with the moral sciences of the Scottish Enlightenment.3 But if we are specifically interested in political science in its contemporary form as one of the institutionally differentiated academic fields that together make up today’s social sciences, then it was born in
America at the turn of the twentieth century. Its birth deserves close attention from historians of liberalism as well as historians of the social sciences. The field that developed in America, and subsequently grew to a scale and international intellectual influence unmatched by any other nation’s twentieth-century scholarship about politics, embodies and expresses liberal beliefs, hopes, and fears. This book situates the American birth of political science as an episode in the transatlantic history of liberal political thought.
My study contributes in three ways to our understanding of the intertwined histories of political science and liberalism. First, I emphasize the plurality and historicity of liberalism. My interest is in alternative liberal political visions, their contrasts and interactions, and how they
1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 7. 2 Gabriel A. Almond, “Political Science: The History of the Discipline,” in A New Handbook of Political Science, eds. Robert E. Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 50-96. Almond carries forward a venerable tradition in starting with classical Athens, see for example, Sir Frederick Pollock, An Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics, New Revised ed. (London: Macmillan, 1914). 3 For an interpretation of the Staatswissenschaften as central to the history of political science, see Wilhelm Bleek, Geschichte der Politikwissenschaft in Deutschland (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2001), chap. 3; cf. David F. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of the State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chap. 1. On Scottish Enlightenment moral sciences, see James Farr, “Political Science and the Enlightenment of Enthusiasm,” American Political Science Review 82, no. 1 (1998): 51–69. 2 change in response to challenges to the beliefs, hopes, or fears that structure them. I hence study the American birth of political science in terms of, and to illuminate, multiple liberalisms.4 In exploring precursors and pioneers of the field I highlight three liberal visions: democratized classical liberalism, which crystallized in the 1830s, and with somewhat reworked content, reached its high tide in post-Civil War America; and the twin competing visions of progressive liberalism and disillusioned classical liberalism, forged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century through divergent critical adaptations of democratized classical liberalism. These three visions contrast in multiple ways, but most significantly for political science, they disagree about the character and potential of democracy. My history of the birth of political science is therefore, at the same time, a history of debates within liberalism about democracy.5 American progressive liberalism has been much studied, and its integral relation to the birth of political science as an academic field well established. But neither the democratized classical liberalism that preceded it, nor the disillusioned classical liberalism that competed with it, have received as much, or as charitable consideration.6 I give equal attention to all three liberal political visions.
4 The founding book in the genre of disciplinary history, Crick’s The American Science of Politics, emphasized the liberalism of American political science. But Crick, under the influence of Louis Hartz, treated American liberalism as an enduring Lockean monolith. Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Bruce and Company, 1955); for more on Crick’s book and its reception, see Michael Kenny, “History and Dissent: Bernard Crick's The American Science of Politics,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (2006): 547-53. 5 I thank Emmanuel Teitelbaum for this phrasing. In setting up this book as a history of debates within liberalism about democracy I seek to bridge a divergence in recent scholarship. Intellectual historians have studied political scientists alongside members of other disciplines, situating them together in broader cultural and political contexts, and in doing so highlighting their liberalism. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). By contrast, recent disciplinary histories by political scientists make the concept of democracy—so enduringly pivotal to the internal discourse of the field— a centerpiece of their studies. Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); James Farr, “Political Science,” in The Modern Social Sciences, Vol. 7 in Cambridge History of Science, eds. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 306-28; John G. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 6 By “charitable” I have in mind charity as a principle of interpretation that favors presenting a vision in its clearest and most compelling moments. I strive to be charitable in this sense to all the liberal visions I engage in this book. 3
My book’s second contribution is to interpret American intellectual developments in a transatlantic perspective.7 The Americans who shaped political science as an academic field were deeply engaged with nineteenth-century European thought.8 They drew from British, German, and French intellectual currents of primarily liberal orientation, and adapted these transatlantic inheritances to address tensions between liberalism and nineteenth century American democratic principles (ex. faith in the political capacities of the common man) and practices (ex. the spoils system). The shaping of political science through the selective adaptation of European influences is one major episode within the Americanization of liberalism, a broad process interwoven with the democratization of liberalism, and which eventually saw America supplant Europe during the twentieth century as the leading home of innovations in the liberal tradition. To see the American birth of political science as a part of this broader process necessitates a transatlantic perspective that studies Americans in light of European liberal beliefs, hopes, and fears they engaged.
Intellectual influences are, however, only part of a full-fledged transatlantic perspective.
My third contribution is to spotlight the importance of transatlantic comparisons. When liberals in Europe debated democracy they usually did so with one eye looking across the Atlantic. Some saw in America a harbinger of a democratic future that European nations would sooner or later
7 I extend here the vibrant agenda of historians who have adopted a transatlantic perspective to re-envision American intellectual, cultural, and political history from the mid-nineteenth century through the New Deal. The major works by James Kloppenberg and Daniel Rodgers focused on progressivism, but Leslie Butler has extended this agenda to an earlier generation with a classical liberal vision. James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). While my study has the form of a historical narrative, its content parallels sociological insights into general mechanisms structuring the transnational flow of people and ideas as explicated by Johan Heilbron, Nicolas Guilhot, and Laurent Jeanpierre, “Toward a Transnational History of the Social Sciences,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 44, no. 2 (2008): 146-60. 8 John Gunnell and Brian Schmidt have highlighted transatlantic debts of American political science with regard to German influences on the subfields of political theory and international relations. John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998). I focus, by contrast, primarily on studies of American and comparative politics and administration, and I encompass additional European influences, most especially British ones. 4 have to address in their domestic politics. Others saw an exceptional nation relevant to European political systems primarily as a contrast. When engaging European liberal thought the American precursors and pioneers of political science thus engaged debates in which interpretations of their own nation played a leading role. They encountered alternative narratives of how America led, lagged, or was on a different path from, political developments in Britain, France, or Germany.
Political science as it took shape in America was centrally focused upon using, debating, and remaking these liberal transatlantic comparisons. Some precursors and pioneers of the field believed their nation to be politically ahead of Europe, with lessons to teach about constitutional law, federalism, broad suffrage or mass political parties. But others saw America as behind, with lessons to learn—whether from Britain, France, or Germany—about civil service or municipal reform, responsible political parties, or policy responses to conflicts and demands of industrial society. Leader and laggard interpretations could, moreover, each be challenged by, or combined with, beliefs about American exceptionalism. Transatlantic comparisons formulated by European liberals were hence refashioned in America by political science’s precursors and pioneers, who thereby articulated three liberal visions, each offering its own view of American democracy. 5
CHAPTER SIX. THE POLITICAL SCIENCE OF WOODROW WILSON:
FROM DEMOCRATIZED CLASSICAL LIBERALISM TO PROGRESSIVE LIBERALISM
From the Chair of Political and Social Science William Graham Sumner took up at Yale in 1873, and Theodore D. Woolsey’s 1877 textbook Political Science, to Andrew D. White’s
1879 “Education in Political Science” address, and the Historical and Political Science program developed at the Johns Hopkins as the decade ended, “political science” had a characteristic content in the American academy of the 1870s. That content was, first and foremost, the legacy of Francis Lieber, whose wide political science, allied with history and encompassing political economy, established the antebellum academic beachhead into which teaching and research in political science advanced during the post-Civil War emergence of the American university. Yet by the time “political science” was used in 1903 in naming the new American Political Science
Association (APSA), the phrase would have shed much of its earlier Lieberian content. This third and final part of The American Birth of Political Science follows the transformation of “political science” between the mid-1880s and the early years of the twentieth century—a transformation that pioneered seminal intellectual and institutional features of the field as it remains to this day.
In recounting the late-nineteenth century transformation of political science I concentrate on the work of scholars significant enough to subsequently be elected as early APSA presidents.
A majority of the association’s presidents in its first decade are discussed in this third part of my book. But to introduce and explicate my main concepts and themes, I select two figures for more extended treatment: this chapter centers on Woodrow Wilson, APSA president in 1910; Chapter
Seven centers on A. Lawrence Lowell, his precursor in the office. Both born in 1856, in the mid-
1880s each began publishing the series of works that won them reputations as political scientists. 6
Their academic prominence was further enhanced by service as university presidents: Wilson led
Princeton from 1902-1910; Lowell led Harvard from 1909-1933. While Wilson left the academy to become governor of New Jersey, then president of the nation in 1912, and as a result the best- known figure in our field’s history; Lowell’s long administration at Harvard saw the Government department he had founded prosper to become, by the mid-1920s, the academically best-ranked department of political science, as it remains to this day almost a century later.9
If Woodrow Wilson had not gone on to win fame in the twentieth century as one of the most transformative American presidents, the political science works he wrote as a student and young professor would still be essential for my book. They exemplify the genesis of progressive liberalism in the American academy of the mid-to-late 1880s. First in Wilson’s political science, and then again in the works of other early APSA presidents discussed in Chapter Seven, we see this new liberal vision articulated via the transatlantic comparisons central to the nascent field.
But Wilson also offers us, more uniquely, a chance to follow closely within one political scientist’s works how progressive liberalism developed from democratized classical liberalism.
In 1883 Wilson entered the Hopkins historical and political science department as a 26-year-old who had been publically propounding democratized classical liberal views since his time as a
Princeton undergraduate in the late 1870s. In speech and print he had celebrated the principles and practices of British Liberal political leaders—specifically, Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone— who fought for free trade and other classical liberal reforms.10 However, by 1889 Wilson would be expounding a progressive liberal vision in The State. That new vision was forged, against the backdrop of the mid-1880s onset of major changes in the American state, out of the intertwining
9 Harvard was first ranked as the leading department in 1925. Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science: From Burgess to Behavioralism (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1967), 105-106. 10 See the long lionizing character sketches of these leaders of liberalism that Wilson presented while studying law at the University of Virginia in spring 1880. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 1 (1966), 608-21, 624-42. 7 of a liberal idealization of representative government Wilson brought with him to Hopkins, and continental European intellectual currents in administration and political economy Wilson was introduced to at Hopkins, principally by Richard Ely.
The Constitution and Representative Government: Comparing America and England
The impact of Ely on Wilson is clear, as we will see in the next two sections. Impact from
Herbert Baxter Adams, who headed his dissertation, is harder to discern, perhaps because Wilson was already immersed in intellectual currents characteristic of Adams before he entered Hopkins.
At Princeton in the late 1870s Wilson read multiple works by Lieber and Freeman, and embraced a classical liberal developmental historicism. In 1878 we find him writing in the Princetonian of
“the German forests in which the English race was cradled,” expressing his gratitude that the
American people were “a lusty branch” of that “noble race,” and exhorting readers to cherish
“the grand principles of liberty in whose development nine centuries have been consumed.”11
Five years later, when Wilson put aside a post-Princeton foray into law to pursue an academic career, he identified “Constitutional History” as his special research interest on his application to study historical and political science at Hopkins.12
Wilson hence arrived at Hopkins in 1883 imbued with a developmental historicism that situated American politics in light of transatlantic lineages and saw liberal lessons within those lineages. More specifically Wilson wanted to apply his liberal historicism in relation to the US constitution. Since the late 1870s he had been working out an argument that American national politics fell distressingly short of liberal ideals of representative government, and diagnosing the
11 Arthur S. Link, ed. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), Vol. 1 (1966), 442-43, 374-75. 12 Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 2 (1967), 430. 8 executive-legislative divide in the constitution as the root of this problem.13 Within a month of his arrival at Hopkins, Wilson asked Adams if he could develop this argument as a dissertation, even though the project would not involve original source research. We saw in Adams’s postdoctoral work in Chapter Four that he was interested in the constitution, and he warmly welcomed the proposal. By the end of Wilson’s first year he would be presenting chapters to the
Seminary of Historical and Political Science. In fall 1884 he finished a full manuscript that was then quickly published. Wilson had thus been a graduate student less than 18 months when his
Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics appeared in early 1885. Though it would count as his dissertation, the book was intellectually less a Hopkins product than a culmination of self-guided “studies in comparative politics” that, as Wilson put it, had been his
“delight during leisure hours for the last five or six years” prior to graduate school.14
Congressional Government applied a comparative developmental approach to American national political institutions. Wilson cast contemporary glances at the Reichstag of “our cousin
Germans” and the Assembly of France’s Third Republic.15 But his main comparison country was
England. Wilson treated the American political system as a historical growth from centuries-old
English rootstock that branched onto its own national developmental path during the founding.
Eighteenth-century England thus offered a shared historical departure point to frame comparison of more recent developments in representative government in England and America. In using a developmental historicist Anglo-American comparison Wilson echoed Lieber’s antebellum Civil
Liberty and Self-Government. But Congressional Government used the comparison to decidedly
13 Wilson had first published a version of this argument in the summer after his 1879 graduation from Princeton. See “Cabinet Government in the United States,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 1 (1966), 493-510. 14 The composition of Congressional Government and its relation to Wilson’s reading and writing in this topic area since the late 1870s is summarized in an editorial note in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 4 (1968), 6-13. Wilson describes the interest he brought with him to Hopkins, and securing Adams approval to develop it in his dissertation, in an Oct 13, 1883 letter to his fiancée. See Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 2 (1967), 478-80. 15 Wilson, Congressional Government, 304, 123-29. 9 new effect. Wilson argued that representative government had been hamstrung in America by a written constitution whose veneration protected even its flaws. It had, by contrast, flourished in the more flexible constitutional context of England, where parliamentary reforms of the 1830s and 1860s had created a “House of Commons truly representative of the nation.” The Commons was the center of a “system of self-government” that was now “superior” to America’s system.16
Wilson’s interpretation of England was heavily indebted to the classical liberal Bagehot’s
The English Constitution. As we saw in Chapter One, Bagehot emphasized the parliamentary vs. presidential contrast. Wilson took up the English content and positive valuation Bagehot gave to the parliamentary side of this contrast. But he thought Bagehot’s presidential concept overlooked key features of contemporary American politics, and sought to provide for America the analysis of how power works in practice Bagehot had pioneered using the case of England. Writing to his fiancée as he began drafting Congressional Government, Wilson explained his goal for the book:
My desire and ambition are to treat the American constitution as Mr. Bagehot (do you remember Mr. Bagehot, about whom I spoke to you one night on the veranda at Asheville?--) has treated the English Constitution. His book has inspired my whole study of own government. He brings to the work a fresh and original method which has made the British system much more intelligible to ordinary men than it ever was before, and which, if it could be successfully applied to the exposition of our federal constitution, would result in something like a revelation to those who are still reading the Federalist as an authoritative constitutional manual.17
Wilson aimed to identify the “real depositaries and the essential machinery of power” in
American politics, and thereby to highlight, as Bagehot had done for England, how this “‘living reality’” differed from “the ‘literary theory’ of the Constitution” presented in legal treatises and celebratory accounts. He argued that the century since adoption of the federal constitution had seen transformative political change. The powers of the states and the presidency had waned to the point that balances highlighted in the text and theory of the constitution now obscured more
16 Wilson, Congressional Government, 306-15. 17 Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 2 (1967), 641. 10 than they reflected the “actual form of our present government.” A student of American politics hence had to “escape from theories and attach himself to facts.” Doing so revealed, Wilson held, that political power in contemporary America was not centered in the presidency. What America had in practice was not presidential but “congressional government,” since “the predominant and controlling force, the centre and source of all motive and of all regulative power, is Congress.”18
Having identified what he took as a historical trend of concentrating power in Congress,
Wilson interpreted this trend in transatlantic perspective. It paralleled, he suggested, the increase in power of the House of Commons. These trends together testified to “the inevitable tendency of every system of self-government like our own and the British to exalt the representative body, the people’s parliament, to a position of absolute supremacy.”19 For today’s readers this grand developmental assertion may appear ironically awry in light of the later growth in the power of
America’s president, in which Wilson’s own presidency played a notable role. But the assertion was not idiosyncratic at the time. William Graham Sumner, for example, had declared in 1881:
“The legislatures of modern times are the real depositaries of the power and will of the State. The centre of gravity of our system tends all the time to settle more firmly in the House of
Representatives.”20
Where Wilson struck his most original note was in his comparative analysis of changes in the internal working of Congress and Commons that accompanied their growth in power. Wilson suggested that these changes be seen as “experiments in the direction of the realization of an idea best expressed … by John Stuart Mill” in his legislative commission proposal, which expressed the “necessity of setting apart a small body, or bodies, of legislative guides through whom a ‘big
18 Wilson, Congressional Government, Chap. 1. Specific quotes are drawn from pp. 6 and 10-12. 19 Ibid., 311. 20 William Graham Sumner, “Presidential Elections and Civil-Service Reform,” Collected Essays in Political and Social Science (New York: Holt, 1885), 157. This article had first been published in the Princeton Review in 1881. 11 meeting’ may get laws made.”21 Before Mill registered it in liberal thought, this “necessity” had already prompted changes in political practice. It was here that Wilson saw a pivotal divergence between America and England. In America, as Congress grew in power, it proliferated Standing
Committees that parceled out the power of lawmaking. This led to “government by the chairmen of the Standing Committees of Congress,” who wielded power in ways uncoordinated with, or even antagonistic to, other chairmen and the executive branch. In England, by contrast, a Cabinet composed of the leaders of the party with a Commons majority evolved to function as “a single standing committee” for originating legislation, and as “a device for bringing the executive and legislative branches into harmony and cooperation.”22 For Wilson, analyzing the who and how of power showed that congressional government was hence in practice “Committee Government,” while parliamentary government was in practice, as Bagehot taught, “Cabinet Government.”23
This Anglo-American comparison was loaded with theoretical importance for Wilson by the liberal ideal of representative government. He saw England and America as developing out of the same lionized historical lineage of self-government through representatives, but believed this liberal inheritance had been adapted to flourish better in contemporary England. In an 1879 essay he had decried America’s “committee government” for being “utterly at variance with the true principles of representative government as understood by our English fore-fathers.”24 That same year Wilson had spelled out, in terms parallel to Mill’s Considerations on Representative
Government, the ideal content he ascribed to representative government:
At its highest development, representative government is that form which best enables a free people to govern themselves. The main object of a representative assembly,
21 Wilson, Congressional Government, 115. 22 This contrast is developed in Wilson, Congressional Government, Chap. 2. Quotes from p. 102 and 117-18. 23 Wilson moved back and forth in the terms he emphasized within his twin equations Congressional Government = Committee Government, and Parliamentary Government = Cabinet Government. While Congressional Government highlighted in its title the first side of these equations, their second side was highlighted, for example, in the tile of Wilson’s 1884 essay “Committee or Cabinet Government?” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 2 (1967), 614-640. 24 Woodrow Wilson, “Congressional Government,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 1 (1966), 557. 12
therefore, should be the discussion of public business. They should legislate as if in the presence of the whole country, because they come under the closest scrutiny and fullest criticism of all the representatives of the country speaking in open and free debate. Only in such an assembly, only in such an atmosphere of publicity, only by means of such a vast investigating machine, can the different sections of a great country learn each other’s feelings and interests. … debate is the essential function of a popular representative body. In the severe, distinct, and sharp enunciation of underlying principles, the unsparing examination and telling criticism of opposite positions, the careful, painstaking unraveling of all the issues involved, which are incident to the free discussion of questions of public policy, we see the best, the only effective, means of educating public opinion. … The educational influences of such discussions is two-fold, and operates in two directions,—upon the members of the legislature themselves, and upon the people whom they represent.25
After thus expounding his ideal, Wilson had then directly declared “this matter of a full and free discussion” to be the “hinge” upon which he judged the merits of the contemporary American and English political systems, to the decided advantage of the latter.26
When Wilson elaborated his Anglo-American comparison during 1883-1884 to produce
Congressional Government he offered more empirical detail than in his 1879 essays, but stepped back from fully enunciating his liberal political ideal. Explaining this move to a friend from his
Princeton days, Wilson declared that he had “abandoned the evangelical for the exegetical.”27
Yet a strong deliberative and educational ideal still shone through between the empirical details to give a clear liberal thrust to Wilson’s book. Thus, for example, in the midst of his description of Standing Committees, Wilson asserted that the “chief, and unquestionably the most essential, object of all discussion of public business is the enlightenment of public opinion.” He then used this belief to turn his observation that Committee proceedings were “private and their discussions unpublished” into a complaint that they did not help to instruct the “nation.” Indeed, the absence from Congress’s legislative process of the “searching, critical, illuminating” public discussions involving a politically consequential “contest of principles,” which he saw as occurring in British
25 Wilson, “Cabinet Government,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 1 (1966), 494, 500-501. Italics in original. 26 Ibid., 501. 27 Letter to Robert Bridges, Nov. 19, 1884, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 3 (1967), 465. 13 parliamentary debate, struck Wilson so strongly that it spurred him to declare that the American political system lacked “essential conditions of intelligent self-government.”28
The belief that representative bodies can and should be deliberative spaces of principled debate, in dynamic—both responsive to, and enlightening of—interaction with public opinion, is a persistent substratum of Wilson’s liberalism. It is in light of this ideal that we can best interpret his criticism of the American constitution. Early in Congressional Government Wilson presents himself provocatively as a member of a new American generation challenging the “unquestioned prerogative of the Constitution to receive universal homage.”29 He puts this challenge into action when he treats the practice of committee government as revealing a flaw in the constitution itself.
For Wilson, the growth of the committee system showed that the way the constitution “parcels out power” had proved in practice to be “a radical defect” because it “confuses responsibility.”
Most specifically, separation of legislative and executive power was “the defect which interprets all the rest.”30 This separation had put America on a political path inimical to the interweaving of these powers that developed with cabinet government in England. The cabinet provided a clear center of power whose actions the British public followed in the decisions of cabinet members, and the explanations they gave of these decisions in parliamentary debates and questioning. The contrast between contemporary practices of representative government in America and England showed, Wilson contended, that interweaving executive and legislative power is a prerequisite of a system in which the actions of power holders are visible and responsible to public opinion.
28 Wilson, Congressional Government, 83-86. A hundred pages or so later Wilson’s deliberative educational ideal is again evident when he observes that the public “cannot watch or understand forty odd Standing Committees, each of which goes its own way in doing what it can” and argues that “Congress evades judgment by avoiding all coherency of plan in its action.” These more specific points are part and parcel of a general critical charge that “we lack in our political life the conditions most essential for the formation of an active and effective public opinion.” See 185-89. 29Ibid., 4. 30 Ibid, 283-86, 318-19. 14
Wilson’s belief that the executive and legislative powers must be interwoven to support a dynamic interaction between power holders and public opinion was the basis of his indictment of the separation of these powers. His constitutional criticism was, as such, premised on his liberal deliberative and educational ideal of representative government. Locating Wilson’s criticism as a criticism from within the liberal tradition helps us grasp why he saw his argument as updating, rather than rejecting, the spirit of America’s constitution. He held that the wisdom of the framers had consisted, not in every feature of the constitution they crafted, but in their practical ability to learn from experience—an ability such that, if they could now be reconvened to study “the work of their hands in the light of the century that has tested it, they would be the first to admit that the only fruit of dividing power had been to make it irresponsible.”31
In locating Wilson’s constitutional argument as criticism from within the liberal tradition, we should also recognize that he was less radical a critic than his rhetorical embrace of criticism might suggest at first glance. His advocacy of critical analysis of the constitution was moderated by an expectation that this analysis would find flaws in some features of the constitution, but not reject it more fundamentally. When Wilson responded in 1886 to an A. Lawrence Lowell article that challenged Congressional Government, he reframed his constitutional criticism by pairing it with praise for features of the constitution he believed did warrant veneration. He here identified
“the distinct division of powers between the state and federal governments, the slow and solemn formalities of constitutional change, and interpretative functions of the federal courts” as features
“of our Constitution … to which our national pride properly attaches.”32 Wilson’s constitutional criticism was hence decidedly delimited in its substantive reach. There was, moreover, nothing
31 Ibid., 284. See also 332-3. 32 Woodrow Wilson, “Responsible Government under the Constitution,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson Vol. 5 (1968), 123. This article was later republished as Chap. V of Woodrow Wilson, An Old Master and Other Political Essays (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1893). 15 especially radical about his taking aim at the separation of the executive and legislative powers.
The far from radical Sumner had shot at the same target in complaining that “the Constitution very mistakenly endeavored to sunder” the “bond between the executive and the legislative.”33
The willingness to criticize the constitution propounded in Congressional Government would become a characteristic trait of American progressive liberal political science. But, as the early 1880s overlaps between Wilson and Sumner demonstrate, that willingness was not in itself sufficient to constitute progressive liberalism. We must look ahead to Wilson’s later scholarship to find arguments that decisively depart from democratized classical liberalism, which had been the starting point of Wilson’s political thought just as it had been Sumner’s. It is only in the mid- to-late 1880s, as the influence of the Hopkins department, and especially Ely, becomes evident in
Wilson’s political science, that he moves in a direction unambiguously divergent from Sumner’s classical liberalism, which was at this time, as we saw in Chapter Four, itself becoming newly disillusioned.
Administration: Continental Europe, Convergence, and the Expansion of Government
The impact of Ely first registers clearly in Wilson’s published work in two 1887 articles:
“The Study of Politics” and “The Study of Administration.” The “Politics” article flags Wilson’s introduction to the “war among the political economists” in which “John Stuart Mill no longer receives universal homage, but has to bear much irreverent criticism.”34 In Chapter Five we saw
Ely recruit Wilson’s classmate and friend Albert Shaw into this war, and in the next section we will see how Ely also drew Wilson into battle. First, I take up Wilson’s “Administration” article, which vividly captures the post-Congressional Government turn in his thought. Administration
33 Sumner, “Presidential Elections,” 145. 34 Woodrow Wilson, “The Study of Politics,” New Princeton Review 3, no. 2 (1887): 188. 16 and its reform had been a major sub-theme in Wilson’s first book. But when he returned to the topic in his 1887 article Wilson treated it using a new transatlantic framework that registered his introduction, through Ely, to the continental European science of administration.35
Wilson had arrived at Hopkins with strong views about administration. A strong advocate of civil service reform, he had looked forward in early 1881 to “a great organized agitation” for reform modeled on Cobden and Bright’s democratized classical liberal Anti-Corn Law League.36
Later that year, the reform cause began to advance faster than Wilson had hoped after President
Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled office seeker, and the National Civil Service Reform
League was founded to coordinate local reform leagues that had sprung up during recent years.
Following on from these events a surge of public support led to enactment of the Pendleton Civil
Service Reform Act of 1883.37 The promise of the Act’s introduction of competitive exams for selected government offices was soon made tangible for Wilson when, in 1884, his own former law partner qualified for a Treasury position, from which he would provide Wilson with material for the “Revenue and Supply” chapter in Congressional Government.38
Wilson’s treatment of administration in Congressional Government trumpeted the “recent movements in the direction of a radical reform of the civil service” as the beginning of a process pointing toward a “consummation devoutly to be wished!” What “consummation” would involve was suggested by Wilson’s contention that “real and lasting reform” required drawing “a sharp line between those offices which are political and those which are non-political.” In exploring this line Wilson gave an expansive reading of the reach of non-political offices, questioning if
35 In his autobiography Ely saw administration as the area in which his teaching most clearly influenced Wilson, and explained that he taught “the idea that in matters of administration the United States lags far behind other countries with which we would like to rank.” Richard T. Ely, Ground Under Our Feet: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 114. 36 Wilson, Papers of Woodrow Wilson Vol. 2 (1967): 38. 37 On the Act, and especially the role of public opinion in its success, see Sean M. Theriault, “Patronage, the Pendleton Act, and the Power of the People,” Journal of Politics 65, no. 1 (2003): 50-68. 38 See letters to Wilson from Edward Ireland Renwick, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 3 (1967), 22, 52, 54-55. 17 even the Secretary of the Treasury and other cabinet members had “properly political” duties.39
The Pendleton Act had put only an initial 10.5% of federal positions onto a merit-selection basis and Wilson’s comments reflected his support for extending that percentage, as happened step-by- step through subsequent decades to reach 70% during Wilson’s own presidency.40
In addition to exploring the proper extent of the domain of non-political offices, Wilson also considered the standard that operation of those offices should be judged by. He highlighted
“efficiency” as “the only just foundation for confidence in a public officer” serving in a non- political position. To convey this standard Wilson favored business analogies on the grounds that
“the executive duties of government constitute just an exalted kind of business.”41 Non-political offices hence ought to be characterized, he held, by the “strictest rules of business discipline” as well as “merit-tenure and earned promotion.”42 But business was not Wilson’s only model. He also valorized Britain as having “achieved the reform for which we are striving” through the civil service reform it began in the 1850s. On a more technical note, in considering financial policy and administration, Wilson also favored Britain as having “the most advanced” system.43 The interpretation of America as lagging mid-century classical liberal Britain that framed the political central theme of Congressional Government hence extended to its administrative sub-theme also.
Yet, during 1885, the very year Congressional Government appeared, Wilson abruptly reworked his transatlantic comparisons to replace Britain with Germany and France as models of good administration. In spring of that year he took Ely’s course on Methods of Administration in
England, Germany, and France. Ely used Bluntschli’s Lehre vom modernen Stat in lectures and
39 Wilson, Congressional Government, 236, 290, 261-65. Italics in original. 40 Biography of Ideal: A History of the Federal Civil Service, accessed at http://www.opm.gov/biographyofanideal/ on June 24, 2011. The steps of this trend are described on p. 207-219 of the downloadable .pdf text of this history. 41 Ibid., 255-56. 42 Ibid., 290. 43 Ibid, 285-89, 180. 18 provided bibliographic introductions to continental European literature on administration more broadly. Wilson would draw upon these sources extensively during following years as he made administration one of his own academic specializations.44 It was via Ely that Wilson thus came, during 1885, to believe that: “Neither the practice nor the theory of administration has ever been reduced to a science either in this country or in England … The Germans and the French have done most in developing a science of administration.” This belief, in turn, spurred him to craft a distinctively transnational intellectual agenda: adapting the science “developed by German and
French professors” to make it of “use to us in the solution of our own problems of administration in town, city, county, State, and nation.”45 Wilson’s prospectus of this agenda in his 1887 article, and his increasingly sophisticated pursuit of it in lectures he gave at Hopkins from 1888-1896, marks the beginning of administration as a specialization within the nascent American field of political science.46
Coming into his new agenda from a liberal historicism that celebrated Anglo-American exceptionalism, Wilson was acutely aware that some Americans might be skeptical of a science from continental Europe. He accordingly stressed that it was essential that this “foreign science
44 On Ely’s course see editorial notes, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 3 (1967), 335 and Vol. 5 (1968), 43. While Ely drew on the third Politik als Wissenschaft volume of Bluntschli’s Lehre—which Wilson, in turn, cites in “Study of Administration”—Wilson was also introduced to other parts of Bluntschli’s work in Fall 1884 and Spring 1885 in Adams’s “History of Politics” lectures. In fall 1885 Wilson read for himself and took notes on the first Allgemeine Statslehre volume. See editorial notes, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 5 (1968), 56 and Vol. 6 (1969), 154. 45 Woodrow Wilson, “Notes on Administration” and “The Art of Governing,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 5 (1968), 49, 52, italics in original. 46 As Wilson pursued the agenda that took shape with the 1885 shift in his transatlantic administrative comparisons he would adapt his views. For example, while the attraction to business as a model derived from his early classical liberalism lingered into “Study of Administration,” Wilson would step away from it in his Hopkins lectures of 1888. Assessing the belief that “organs of a government” are “best tested by the same standards of propriety and efficiency by which we test the organs of a great commercial corporation,” he now contended that, while there is an “important element of truth” here, “little but confusion can result from its adoption as a guiding view.” Woodrow Wilson, “The Functions of Government,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 5 (1885-1888), 689-90. Wilson’s refining of his views points toward later lectures as the best source for study of his mature position on administration. I focus on mid-to- late 1880s texts because my goal is, by contrast, to show a critical juncture in the trajectory of his thought and the role that transatlantic comparison played at this juncture. A detailed study of Wilson’s mature position, as developed through a decade of reading, reflection, and teaching on administration, lies beyond the scope of this book. 19
… be Americanized, not in language only, but in thought, in principle, in aim as well.” He also, moreover, saw help toward overcoming “obstacles to its domestication” in recent changes that were making continental Europe less politically unpalatable to Americans. Moving to subsume his earlier exceptionalist narrative within a broader transatlantic convergence, Wilson began to
“discern a tendency, long operative but only of late days predominant, towards the adoption of the same general principles of government everywhere.”47 The convergence narrative that took shape in his thought in 1885-1886 would appear in print in “Study of Administration” in 1887.
Wilson’s article revisited a core comparison in the history of government: the comparison between the path of institutional development followed since the early-modern era in continental
Europe versus in England and America. By revisiting this pivotal comparison Wilson shifted his transatlantic perspective away from that of classical liberals like Sumner, for whom continental
European governments provided only negative warnings. On the one hand, Wilson still preached the liberal belief that the exceptional history of England and America led to “vast advantages in point of political liberty, and above all in point of practical political skill and sagacity.” Yet, on the other hand, he moved in a new direction by holding that the “English race” neglected “the art of perfecting executive methods,” with progress in this aspect of government instead charted on the European continent, where especially Prussia, but also France, led the way “in administrative organization and administrative skill.”48 Paralleling Bluntschli’s placement of the onset of the
“modern” at the time of Prussia’s eighteenth-century administrative reforms, Wilson held:
Those governments are now in the lead in administrative practice which had rulers still absolute but also enlightened when those modern days of political illumination came in when it was made evident to all but the blind that governors are properly only servants of the governed. In such governments administration has been organized to subserve the general weal with the simplicity and effectiveness vouchsafed only to the undertakings of a single will. // Such was the case in Prussia, for instance, where administration has been
47 Wilson, “Art of Governing,” 52-53. 48 Woodrow Wilson, “The Study of Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1887): 206. 20
the most studied and most nearly perfected. Frederic the Great, stern and masterful as was his rule, still sincerely professed to regard himself as only the chief servant of the state, to consider his great office a public trust; and it was he who, building upon the foundation as laid by his father, began to organize the public service of Prussia as in very earnest a service of the public.49
There had thus been two historical paths of modern progress in government, one charted in England and America, the other in France and Germany. The present day was characterized, in turn, by reforms trying to bring the two paths together. On the European continent institutions of representative democracy had recently been established. The contemporary challenge there was to develop a public opinion that was effectively sovereign and thereby make the new institutions democratic in their actual practice.50 In America, which had long ago “enthroned public opinion” and thus “realized popular rule in its fullness,” it was professional administrative institutions that had only just been introduced. The challenge on this side of the Atlantic was to develop “a corps of civil servants prepared by special schooling and drilled, after appointment, into a perfected organization, with appropriate hierarchy and characteristic discipline,” while keeping that corps
“sensitive to public opinion” so as to ensure that there was not “anything un-American” about it.51 Wilson’s new grand narrative, in sum, highlighted the promise of transatlantic convergence in recent reforms and the contrasting challenges to realization of that promise in continental
Europe and America arising from the legacy of their previously exceptional historical paths.
The articulation of a convergence narrative that directs American attention to continental
European administration brings us to the borderline of progressive liberalism. Herbert Baxter
Adams, on the one hand, stayed shy of a new progressive vision by interpreting rising American
49 Ibid., 204. 50 Wilson’s was franker in his preliminary drafts than he was in print about his view that France and Germany had not as yet met this challenge. He contended there that the “essential difference between free governments and unfree governments lies in the authority which public opinion invariably has in the former and often or always lacks in the former,” and then observed that “when judged by this radical test” Germany and France remained “examples of the unfree.” Italics in original. Wilson, “Art of Governing,” 53. 51 Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 207, 216. 21 attention to administration as a welcome return to concerns of the founding fathers.52 Wilson’s interpretation, by contrast, moved decisively into progressive liberal terrain. This is evident in further details of “Study of Administration.” In opening the article Wilson identified it as “the object of administrative study to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or of energy.”53 The stress on efficiency in the secondary object echoes Wilson’s stance in Congressional Government and remains entirely compatible with classical liberalism. But, when we turn to Wilson’s treatment of the prior object—“what government can properly and successfully do”—we find him articulating a new liberal vision.
Wilson took it as his article’s first task to explain why the science of administration was, as he (in contrast to Adams) saw it, “a birth of our own century, almost of our own generation.”
He goes on to present his age as one in which “the functions of government” were “everyday becoming more complex and difficult” and “vastly multiplying in number,” with administration
“everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings.” Alongside this trend in government practice the “idea of the state and the consequent ideal of its duty” was “undergoing noteworthy change” to embrace “every day new things which the state ought to do.”54 Wilson’s sense of being in the midst of a transformative era in practice and theory parallels Sumner’s sense of the mid-to-late
52 In 1887, the year that Wilson published “Study of Administration,” Adams held that the “professorship of law and police” Jefferson had established at the College of William and Mary over a century earlier “was much the same as the modern science of administration, which is just beginning anew to creep into our university courses in America.” Extending his interpretation across divides of the founding era Adams also held that the “schools of administration now flourishing in Paris and Berlin are based upon precisely the same idea as that proposed by Washington in his plan for a national university in the Federal City.” Adams, “College of William and Mary,” 39, 48. These claims show the possibility of supportively interpreting American attention to administration without using the progressive liberal idea of a new era with new tasks for government that Wilson, building on Ely, uses. A return-to-the-founders frame was a well-worked alternative already applied to administration by, for example, Henry Adams, who argued for civil service reform in terms drawing on the 1780 Massachusetts Bill of Rights, authored by his great grandfather John Adams. Henry Adams, “Civil Service Reform,” North American Review 109, no. 225 (Oct., 1869): 443-75. 53 Ibid., 197. 54 Ibid., 198-201. 22
1880s. But where Sumner criticized the transformation as a falling away from classical liberal verities, Wilson presented it as a given to be observed, accepted, and indeed, even welcomed.
Alongside their shared sense of ongoing transformation, and their broad divergence over how to react to it, Wilson and Sumner disagreed, at the same time, on the more concrete level of contemporary American legislation. In the midst of his grand interpretation of the age Wilson put flesh on his claims by pointing, as an example of new government undertakings, to the “creation of national commissioners of railroads.”55 Readers in 1887 would have seen reference here to the
Interstate Commerce Act signed a few months before Wilson’s article was published (and indeed the subject of the article that followed Wilson’s in that issue of Political Science Quarterly). As we noted when discussing Sumner’s criticism of the Act, this landmark law made railroads the first industry subject to federal regulation. In suggesting support, Wilson’s comment enables us to date quite precisely the divergence between his and Sumner’s liberalism. Both had supported the 1883 Civil Service Act, expected to make government more efficient, but they now disagreed about the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act, with its expansion of government’s roles. Wilson was now forging a progressive liberal vision that could welcome this, and other expansions to come, while Sumner was charting a disillusioned classical liberalism that rejected such expansion with anxious foreboding. However we judge their disagreement, both had grasped a trend. During the next two decades federal government positions would expand to reach almost 370,000 by the end of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. By contrast, there had been only just over 130,000 positions when the 1883 Civil Service Act, with support from Wilson and Sumner, first introduced merit selection into the federal workforce.56
55 Ibid., 201. 56 These figures on federal positions are drawn from Biography of an Ideal, 207-219. 23
The progressive liberal turn in Wilson’s political science may be unpacked in alternative ways. There is, on the one hand, a hint of Hegel in the “Administration” article. In setting up his interpretation of his era, Wilson quotes Hegel—who he heard lectures about in a “Philosophy of
History” course at Hopkins in fall 1884—on the relation of philosophy to its own time.57 But this performance of acquired academic erudition concerned historicist method not political theory. It must be considered alongside Wilson’s ringing embrace of popular sovereignty, which makes his article a far cry politically from Hegel’s anti-democratic view of sovereignty. Moreover, where
Hegel’s political vision assumed, as we saw in Chapter Two, a pre-industrial society, Wilson’s progressive liberal vision turned to America’s industrializing economy to underwrite its account of expanding government.
Industrialization was, in Wilson’s presentation, creating new problems—such as “giant monopolies” and “ominous” labor tensions—in light of which “no one can doubt” the need for government to undertake such new tasks as to “make itself the master of masterful corporations.”
It was the “fast accumulating” and “enormous burdens of administration” created by “the needs of this industrial and trading age” that made administrative reform and expansion of government roles imperative.58 The pivot of the progressive turn in Wilson’s liberal political science was not a dose of Hegel, but an economically based transformative historicism. Specifically, it was the view—which we met in Ely in Chapter Five—of industrialization as a transformative change creating a new society needing new laws and institutions.
57 The lecturer was George S. Morris. Wilson’s notes from lectures in November 1884 which Morris contrasted Spencer and Hegel are reproduced in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 3 (1967), 426-28, 457-58. 58 Ibid., 199-201, 218. 24
Political Economy: From Classical Liberal Principles to the Progressive “Middle Ground”
Wilson’s concern with political economy, like his interest in administration, predated his entry to Hopkins. Here again the substance of his views shifted while he was at Hopkins, and did so even more dramatically. Wilson’s views about administration and economics were more than connected—with the latter providing support for the former—they also changed in tandem—at the same time, and both under the influence of Ely.59 This change is a centerpiece of the shift from democratized classical liberalism to progressive liberalism in Wilson’s political science.
As a Princeton undergraduate awed by the ability of Bright and Gladstone “to control and direct the current of public feeling and conviction” in mid-century Britain, Wilson longed to see his fellow American college students aspire to emulate his democratized classical liberal heroes.
In 1878 he expressed a hope that students would “thoroughly study the interests of the country” so they could “go forth prepared to lift the people to the comprehension of the great principles of political economy: raising the masses to the level of each great principle rather than lowering the principle to the level of the masses and thus degrading both.”60 After graduating Princeton, and attending law school at the University of Virginia, Wilson tried out this edifying role himself in newspaper articles and public testimony to a Tariff Commission established by Congress. These
1881-82 public pronouncements show that the pre-Hopkins Wilson held classical liberal views in political economy. Writing about the Southern economy he took as given that “true principles of political economy” favored “free agricultural labor,” and concluded from this that the “unnatural system of slave labor” hindered the pre-Civil War economy. With slavery ended, the South now, by contrast, had a “natural division of labor” on the basis of which agriculture, commerce, and
59 The contemporary shifts in Wilson’s thinking about administration and political economy have been connected by Niels Thorsen. See Niels Thorsen, “The Origins of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘The Study of Administration,’” American Studies in Scandavia 21 (1989), 16-29. 60 Woodrow Wilson, “Some Thoughts on the Current State of Public Affairs,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 1 (1966): 352-54. 25 manufacturing with a characteristic “naturalness” were all growing. Speaking as a Southerner as well as a classical liberal, Wilson proudly pointed to this new South, which “needs and asks no
‘protection’ even for the infancy of her manufactures,” as a positive lesson for the North in “the healthy principles of free trade.”61
Wilson’s political economy at this time was not simply classical liberal but stridently so.
In his 1882 Tariff Commission testimony Wilson criticized John Stuart Mill for tempering free trade principles to allow that it might be expedient in practice for new countries to use a tariff to temporarily protect infant industries. He asserted that, to the contrary, “manufactures are made better manufactures whenever they are thrown upon their own resources and left to the natural competition of trade.”62 The “whenever” in Wilson’s claim exemplifies a dogmatic tendency to treat classical liberal economic principles as automatically always applying in practice without qualification. This tendency was again displayed as Wilson confidently predicted future capital investment in the South on the grounds that capital was “certain to come soon where it can find its most facile, and therefore most profitable, employment.”63 Future movement of skilled labor to the South was, likewise, “a simple question of supply and demand … Labor will flow to the best market as surely as will molasses or any other marketable commodity.”64
The young Wilson’s dogmatic application to the concrete case of the South of classical liberal economic principles about the free flow of trade, capital, and land exemplifies a mode of argument John Stuart Mill had warned against. In his Principles of Political Economy Mill had, when treating Ricardo’s theory of rent, stressed a fundamental methodological point:
61 Woodrow Wilson, “Stray Thoughts from the South,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 2 (1967): 19-25. 62 Woodrow Wilson, “Testimony Before the Tariff Commission,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 2 (1967): 142- 43. 63 Wilson, “Stray Thoughts,” 24. 64 Woodrow Wilson, “New Southern Industries,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 2 (1967): 125. 26
It is not pretended that the facts of any concrete case conform with absolute precision to this or any other scientific principle. We must never forget that the truths of political economy are truths only in the rough … it is impossible in political economy to obtain general theorems embracing the complications of circumstances which may affect the result in an individual case … The laws which we are enabled to lay down respecting rents, profits, wages, prices, are only true in so far as the persons concerned are free from the influence of any other motives than those arising from the general circumstances of the cases, and are guided, as to those, by the ordinary mercantile estimate of profit and loss.65
Failure to grasp this point, Mill went on to observe, “led to improper applications of the abstract principles of political economy, and still oftener to an undue discrediting of those principles.”66
Mill here, in effect, foresees the trajectory of Wilson’s political economy, which would abruptly shift from its dogmatic starting point in “improper applications of the abstract principles” to the
“discrediting of those principles” after Ely introduced him to the historical school in economics.
Wilson began to study political economy with Ely as soon as he arrived at Hopkins. In fall 1883 lectures he heard Ely present his classification of political economy, which separated socialists from scholars, and subdivided scholars into dueling schools: the “Historical” school versus the “a priori school of England.”67 In Wilson’s second semester Ely’s manifesto “The Past and Present of Political Economy” appeared in Studies in Historical and Political Science, and
Ely asked Wilson to collaborate on a book on the History of Political Economy in the United
States. Late in 1884 Wilson began the research he was assigned on American thinkers and works since the late 1830s. In spring 1885 he finished the research, summarized his findings for the
Seminary of Historical and Political Science, and drafted his part of the book.68
65 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. 2 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 422. 66 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. 3 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 461. 67 Woodrow Wilson, “Notes Taken in Dr. Ely’s Minor Course in Political Economy,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 2 (1967): 506. 68 On Wilson’s courses in 1884-1885, see Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 3 (1967): 335. On his project with Ely, see editorial notes, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 3 (1967): 447-48 and Vol. 4 (1968): 628-31. 27
Although the book project was never completed, Wilson’s draft makes evident the extent to which he had internalized the linking of method and policy in Ely’s account of schools. What
Wilson did, essentially, was to apply Ely’s classification to structure a chronological survey in which older American thinkers expressed “orthodoxy” and “rigid laissez-faire,” but there was advance over time toward the “historical” approach, culminating with the “essentially modern”
Francis Amasa Walker.69 In summing up his research on American political economists for the
Seminary of Historical and Political Science, Wilson suggested that the “progress of the science” was marked by “a general tendency to use less and less the strictly and exclusively deductive method and to adopt more and more exclusively the opposite, the inductive, method.” He also identified the “decline of the fondness for the a priori methods” as culminating with “Francis A.
Walker, the most rationally inductive writer our economic literature has yet produced.”70 Walker was an older American scholar, with the prestige of a university president (of M.I.T.), who Ely and his young fellow founders of the American Economic Association (AEA) enlisted as their association’s first President, a position Walker held from 1885 until 1892. Ely’s satisfaction with
Wilson’s changed views on political economy is suggested by his consulting with Wilson about the AEA’s organization, and Wilson’s election, beside his friend and fellow Ely-student Albert
Shaw, to the large council of the new association at its founding meeting in September 1885.71
The interpretation of the “progress of the science” offered in Wilson’s draft contribution for a History of Political Economy in the United States is a key moment in his progressive liberal turn. The view of scientific method that underwrote this interpretation shows Wilson inheriting
69 Woodrow Wilson, “Wilson’s Section for a History of Political Economy in the United States,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 4 (1968): 631-63. 70 Woodrow Wilson, “Draft of a Report to the Historical Seminary,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 4 (1968): 424. 71 Richard T. Ely, “Report of the Organization of the American Economic Association,” Publications of the American Economic Association 1, no. 1 (March, 1886): 7, 40. In his autobiography half a century later Ely recalled Wilson’s draft fondly, saying that it had “expressed what were then somewhat new and modern ideas in this country, namely, an appreciation of the evolution of thought and the relativity of economic doctrines” and noting that “I still have [the manuscript] and treasure it as a precious possession.” Ely, Ground Under Our Feet, 112-13. 28 the standpoint from which Ely was striving to give scientific authority for founding the AEA as explicitly anti-laissez-faire in economic policy. This move was pivotal for liberal visions within political science. The field’s Lieberian precursors in the America academy understood “political science” as encompassing political economy, and working within this wide conception, they had rested their advocacy of limited government upon the authority of classical political economy. In promoting “the historical school” as a methodological advance over classical political economy
Ely and his allies, who now included Wilson,72 were clearing ground for a new liberalism. They deployed transformative historicism to reinterpret historical overlap between liberal commitment to representative constitutional government and laissez-faire in economic policy as a contingent juxtaposition outdated by industrialization, not an indelible feature of liberalism.
The foundations for progressive liberalism laid during the mid-1880s organizing of the
AEA were subsequently preached for a broader audience in textbooks Ely and Wilson authored.
Wilson gave Ely feedback on his Introduction to Political Economy, which was completed just before Wilson’s The State, with both appearing in 1889.73 Their shared interpretation of laissez- faire was concisely summed up when Ely stated, as if it were an uncontestable matter-of-fact:
laissez-faire, has generally been abolished both by science and practice in all civilized lands. It is thought that it performed good service at the time it became powerful, but that it is no longer suited to the needs of the modern world.74
Wilson, in turn, made rejection of laissez-faire central to the final chapter of The State. Here he presented the “controversy” about “the proper objects of government” by framing two “extreme views” and propounding “the middle ground” between them. The first extreme was laissez-faire.
72 Further evidence for locating Wilson within this scholarly network is provided by his choice to assign Francis A. Walker’s Political Economy and Ely’s French and German Socialism in Modern Times as his two textbooks when teaching political economy at the recently opened Bryn Mawr, where he held his first professorship from 1885-88. See “Wilson Reviews His Course Work at Bryn Mawr,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 5 (1968), 733. 73 Richard T. Ely, Introduction to Political Economy (New York: Chautauqua Press, 1889), 6. 74 Ely, Introduction, 125. 29
In presenting the view as a dogma—rather than, as Mill had favored, a practical maxim about the burden of arguments for government action—Wilson took Ely’s interpretation of it as given. He then identified the extreme “in the opposite direction” as the view that “would have society lean fondly upon government for guidance and assistance in every affair of life.” This second extreme was attributed, among others, to the “fathers of Socialism” who were presented as believing “the state can be made a wise foster-mother to every member of the family politic.”75 This reading of socialism was, of course, no less contestable than Wilson’s presentation of laissez-faire. It was, however, precisely the extremity of these interpretations that enabled Wilson to use the frame of two opposing “extremes” to open up a “middle ground” that positioned progressive liberalism as exemplifying the deliberative moderation liberals had long venerated.76
Wilson’s discussion of socialism brought the Ely-echoing concept of “modern industrial organization” into his argument. He credited socialists for highlighting problems accompanying industrialization, but argued they went astray in blaming competition. It was not, Wilson held, competition per se that caused problems, but specifically “distorted” and “unfair competition.”
Problems calling for government action arose when “unconscientious” rivals drove principled businessmen to “the choice of denying their consciences or retiring from business.” Government regulation was then justified in pursuit of the goal “of making competition equal between those
75 Woodrow Wilson, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics, A Sketch of Institutional History and Administration (Boston: Heath, 1889), 656-57. 76 The frame of seeking the sensible middle ground is found likewise in Ely’s promotion of “the golden mean” of “practicable social reform.” Richard T. Ely, Socialism: An Examination of its Nature, and its Weaknesses, with Suggestions for Social Reform (New York: Crowell, 1894). As an example of how this framing works in relation to concrete policy consider the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act. Applying Wilson’s framing would position the Act as seeking the “middle ground” between “extremes” of no national regulation versus having government buy, build, and run railroads (as was being done on the European continent). The “middle ground” policy of the Act and the Interstate Commerce Commission it set up was to introduce federal regulation while retaining private ownership and operation. More generally, on the centrality to progressive political theory of the search for a “via media” between laissez-faire and revolutionary socialism, see James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 30 who would rightfully conduct enterprise and those who would basely conduct it.”77 Wilson here parallels Ely’s argument in Introduction to Political Economy for government regulation to raise
“the moral level of competition.”78
In laying grounds for government regulation in an industrial economy, Wilson pursued a pivotal move in liberal thought. Taking up a classical liberal economic principle—the aggregate benefits of competition—he reformulated its concrete content—by emphasizing fair and equal rather than free competition—and used it to justify expanding rather than limiting government action. The blend of inheritance and adaptation here is a recurring trait of Wilson’s progressive liberalism. This was strikingly evident when, in the closing pages of The State, he stepped back from economic policy to address generally the “natural and imperative limits to state action.” In using this language and declaring that no serious student of society can doubt that there are such limits, Wilson showed the classical liberal inheritance on which he drew. But in giving concrete content to his view, he exemplified his progressive liberal adaptation of that inheritance. Wilson declared state action to be legitimate when
it is indispensable to the equalization of the conditions of endeavor, indispensable to the maintenance of uniform rules of individual rights and relationships, indispensable because to omit it would inevitably be to hamper or degrade some for the advancement of others in the scale of wealth and social standing.79
The emphasis on uniform rules in the second clause of this statement carried forward a core tenet of classical liberalism. The first and third clauses, by contrast, offered egalitarian goals that could justify expanding roles for government. Such expansions had the potential, moreover, to become
77 Wilson, The State, 656-64. 78 Ely, Introduction, 83-85. If I point from Wilson to Ely’s textbook for more on this argument, Ely in turn points his readers to Henry Carter Adams for “undoubtedly one of the best treatises ever written in the English language on the functions of the State.” Ely, Introduction, 93; referring to Henry C. Adams, “Relation of the State to Industrial Action,” Publications of the American Economic Association 1, no. 6 (Jan 1887). 79 Wilson, The State, 664-65. 31 antithetical to classical liberalism to the extent that pursuing these egalitarian goals might require government to act through means beyond the promulgation and enforcement of uniform rules.
Wilson’s progressive liberal view of legitimate state action allows us to see how various elements we have been following in his political science came together. Political institutions that concentrate power and responsibility fit with a professionalized administrative apparatus as both increasing governmental capacity to formulate and carry out action in pursuit of such demanding goals as “the equalization of the conditions of endeavor.” In his transatlantic comparisons Wilson first diagnosed America in Congressional Government as surpassed by England on the political side of government. He next turned to diagnose America in “Study of Administration” as behind continental Europe on the administrative side. Wilson’s now two-sided transatlantic narrative of modern government was, at the same time, connected to the belief that industrialization creates a modern economy whose problems require the attention and capacity of modern government. The
State carried forward these interwoven narratives about the “modern.” But it also further rounded out Wilson’s political science by using the concept of the modern to revisit issues of freedom and self-government that had engaged him since his democratized classical liberal youth. Explicating this rounding out of the “modern” will, in turn, round out my account of Wilson.
Political Development: The Modern Democratic State as the Liberal End of History
Writing about his ongoing projects in 1887 to Albert Shaw, his fellow Hopkins PhD and future APSA president, Wilson explained that alongside his textbook The State he was pursuing a grander scholarly ambition. He had begun “an extended study and analysis of Democracy” that he hoped “to fill with the best thoughts of my lifetime.” Wilson’s “great Democracy plans” were formulated at the end of 1885 under the working title The Modern Democratic State, and re-titled 32
The Philosophy of Politics by 1891. The plans would never reach fruition. But major conceptual and historical moves crafted for the project did appear in 1889-1891 scattered across The State and several addresses and articles.80 These moves promoted two interwoven intellectual thrusts: they wedded the “modern state” to individual freedom, and they projected “modern democracy” as its culminating form of government. In sum, Wilson advanced a view of political development that made the “modern Democratic State” the liberal end of history.
Throughout the evolution of his political science Wilson remained steadfastly committed to conceiving history, as he had as a Princeton student, in terms of liberal progress. He remained, moreover, specifically committed to viewing individual freedom as the driver of progress. Thus he forthrightly declared in The State:
The hope of society lies in an infinite individual variety, in the freest possible play of individual forces: only in that can it find that wealth of resource which constitutes civilization, with all its appliances for satisfying human wants and mitigating human sufferings, all its incitements to thought and spurs to action.81
This passage may read in isolation like a classical liberal clarion call. But it appeared in the final chapter of Wilson’s textbook in the middle of his progressive liberal argument for government’s role in the era of “modern industrial organization.” The coherence of this chapter presupposed a prying apart of individual freedom from the limiting, or even diminishing, of government’s roles with which it was interwoven in classical liberal narratives of political progress. By propounding just this separation Wilson’s historical and conceptual moves in prior chapters laid the basis for the progressive liberal “middle ground” advanced in The State’s final chapter.
Building on Freeman and other mid-century developmental historicists, The State treated political development as exemplified in the institutions and ideals of western “Aryan” peoples.
80 Letter to Albert Shaw, May 29, 1887, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 5 (1968), 511. For more about Wilson’s project and its fate, see the editorial note on p. 54-58 of Vol. 5, preceding the memo for, and partial draft, of “The Modern Democratic State” that appear on p. 58-92. 81 Wilson, The State, 660. 33
Wilson began with a historical survey running from early Aryan institutions, through ancient
Greece and Rome, up to the medieval fusion of Roman and Teutonic institutions. This then led to nation-by-nation surveys of the history and contemporary character of government in modern continental Europe, England, and the United States. Finally, in his concluding chapters, Wilson stepped back to make synthesizing claims about the broader trajectory of the historical changes surveyed, and in doing so, articulated a forceful challenge to classical liberal views of progress.
In his penultimate chapter Wilson advocated distinguishing change in “conceptions of the nature and duty of the state” from change in the “functions” governments undertake. Taking up the historical advance of individual freedom celebrated by classical liberals, he interpreted this development specifically as a change in the former respect, i.e. in conceptions of the state.
The modern idea is this: the state no longer absorbs the individual; it only serves him: the state, as it appears in its organ, the government, is the representative of the individual, and not his representative even, except within the definite commission of constitutions; while for the rest each man makes his own social relations.82
For Wilson, paralleling Bluntschli’s Lehre vom modernen Stat, this “modern idea” was embodied in constitutional and representative government. Liberal institutions were thus necessary to fully realize it. But the historical development of these institutions had not been accompanied by any general reduction in the functions undertaken by government. Quite to the contrary, comparative study of what governments actually do showed that “even under the most liberal of our modern constitutions we still meet government in every field of social endeavor.”83
Classical liberals failed, Wilson suggested, to grasp the nuance of the change that set the modern state apart as a progressive development beyond the ancient. It was “not the activities of government” that changed with the advance of individual freedom, but rather “the way in which it does them.” Government in modern states did “not stop with the protection of life, liberty, and
82 Wilson, The State, 640, 645-46. 83 Wilson, The State, 646. 34 property, as some have supposed.” Its “ultimate standard of conduct” remained, as it had been in ancient states, to serve “social convenience and advancement.” The heart of liberal progress lay in “new ideas as to what constitutes social convenience and advancement.” Governments learned to aspire “to aid the individual to the fullest and best possible realization of his individuality” by creating “the best and fairest opportunities,” while rejecting “administration of the individual by the old-time futile methods of guardianship.”84 Wilson offered here a historicist interpretation of political development in which the relation between government action and individual freedom was not fixed historically as positive or negative, but itself changed as part of progress, moving toward reconciliation and mutual support. It was in light of this interpretation that The State’s final chapter envisioned a progressive liberal government that would leave “wide freedom to the individual to pursue his self-development,” while also providing “mutual aid” to individual self- development and guarding it “against the competition that kills,” and thereby, in sum, reducing
“antagonism between self-development and social development to a minimum.”85
Wilson’s vision of government in modern states as reconciling individual freedom with social progress closely resembled Bluntschli’s liberal reformulation of German idealist theory of the state in Lehre vom modernen Stat. But Wilson’s treatment of political development cannot be seen as just importing a mid-century German academic liberalism. When Bluntschli interpreted the modern state as the liberal end of political development, he also, as we saw in Chapter Two, argued that conditions in different modern nations suited them for either of two modern forms of government: “constitutional monarchy” or “representative democracy.” While Wilson presented the modern state as assuming more than one form of government historically, in looking forward he, by contrast, projected that “Democracy seems about universally to prevail.” He declared that
84 Wilson, The State, 646-47, emphasis in original. 85 Wilson, The State, 660. 35 the tendencies of his age “promised to reduce politics to a single pure form by excluding all other governing forces and institutions but those of a wide suffrage and a democratic representation.”
The “modern State” Bluntschli had presented as the liberal end of history was thus reformulated in Wilson’s The State as finding its culmination specifically in “the modern Democratic State.”86
For Wilson, as he stressed in an 1889 article, “the most truly significant thing” about democracy was “its place and office … in the process of political development.”87
Wilson’s textbook invoked a global democratizing trend briefly as a given fact. To see more fully how he understood that trend we can turn to his “Nature of Democracy in the United
States.” Wilson devoted several pages of this 1889 public address to “the forces … bringing in democratic temper and methods the world over.” The most important force was, he proposed, the
“progress of popular education.” But it did not act alone. “Steam and electricity … coöperated with systematic popular education” in “the diffusion of enlightenment among the people.” These technologies were, in turn, reinforcing “the mighty influences of commerce and the press.” For
Wilson the overall dynamic of “the forces which have established the drift toward democracy” seemed clear: “when the world’s thought and the world’s news are scattered broadcast where the poorest can find them, the non-democratic forms of government find life a desperate venture.”88
The forces Wilson highlighted were relatively new, and some decidedly so. He dated the drift toward democracy from the mid-eighteenth century, and saw it as really gaining momentum in the next century, successively reinforced by further democratizing forces. It was thus, his 1890 public address “Leaders of Men” held, “the Nineteenth Century” that “established the principle
86 Wilson, The State, 603-605. 87 Woodrow Wilson, “Bryce’s American Commonwealth,” Political Science Quarterly 4, no. 1 (1889): 168. 88 Woodrow Wilson, “Nature of Democracy in the United States,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 6 (1969), 224- 26. Given as a public address in May 1889 this work was published with small changes as “Character of Democracy in the United States,” Atlantic Monthly LXIV (Nov. 1889): 577-88, and again after more small changes in Wilson, An Old Master, 99-138. 36 that public opinion must be truckled to … in the conduct of government.”89 To study this latest stage of political development it was essential to see that, just as the forces promoting democracy were distinctively modern, so the character of the democracy being promoted was itself novel. In first formulating his democracy project, Wilson stated it as “a conception absolutely prerequisite to any competent study of the development of the modern state that the democracy which is now becoming dominant is a new democracy.”90 The outcome under study was to be conceptualized as “modern democracy,” which Wilson contrasted to “ancient democracy” to convey its distinct character. As presented in The State this paired contrast made “modern democracy” distinct on multiple dimensions: it was representative rather than direct, it rejected slavery and recognized personal rights, and it saw the State as existing for the sake of the individual rather than vice versa.91 On each dimension “modern” served in effect as a synonym for liberal. Wilson hence made “modern democracy,” by definition, liberal democracy.
Wilson’s democracy project brought his evolving political science into a nuanced relation with the racialized developmental historicism he had embraced as a Princeton undergraduate. A clear Teutonist note was sounded in his 1889 “Nature of Democracy” when Wilson declared it:
a deeply significant fact … that only in the United States, in a few other governments begotten of the English race and in Switzerland where old Teutonic habit has had the same persistency as in England, have examples yet been furnished of successful democracy of the modern type.92
Long historical experience with local self-government had habituated these peoples in “adult self-reliance, self-knowledge, and self-control, adult-soberness and deliberateness of judgment, adult sagacity in self-government, adult vigilance of thought and quickness of insight.” Now, in the modern era, this habituated “maturity” was proving key to success introducing and operating
89 Woodrow Wilson, “Leaders of Men,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 6 (1969), 658. Italics in original. 90 Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 5 (1885-1888), 80. Italics in original. 91 Wilson, The State, 603-05. 92 Wilson, “Nature of Democracy,” 230. The quotes in the rest of this paragraph are from p. 227-231 of this address. 37 modern democratic government. The educational, economic, and technological forces sweeping the world were, Wilson qualified, “critical” forces with “little in them of constructive efficacy.”
They explained the general undermining of non-democratic forms of government. But their very prevalence meant that they could not explain why modern democratic government took firm root and flourished in only some nations, while elsewhere socio-economic modernity fed a turbulent politics of revolutions, confusion, and paralysis. Wilson appealed to the presence or absence “of the highest and steadiest political habit” in a nation’s people to explain cross-national variety in success with modern democracy, and he turned to Teutonist historicism to explain differences in political habit (or, as twentieth-century political science would rename it, “political culture”).
If Wilson’s study of modern democracy gave major explanatory work to a developmental historicism reminiscent of mid-century, he at the same time practiced transformative historicism in his conceptual work. His penchant for conceptualizing modern democracy via contrast went beyond the ancient vs. modern contrast commonplace in the liberal tradition. Taking up the self- government of Swiss villages and New England towns in his 1891 lecture “Democracy,” Wilson now put them to use as another contrast against which to spotlight the transformed character of modern democracy:
The democracy of the local assembly is not modern: it is as ancient, probably, as Aryan states … It is not of this democracy that I would speak, but of quite another: that modern democracy in which the people who are said to govern are not the people of a commune or a township, but all the people of a great nation, a vast population which never musters into any single assembly, whose members never see each others’ face or hear each others voices, but live, millions strong, up and down the reaches of continents…93
This size contrast was used, in turn, as a spur to revisit the concept of popular sovereignty. While
Wilson had used this concept without qualms as recently as “Study of Administration,” he now provocatively saw little more than “patriotic fervour” in Lieber’s attribution of sovereignty to the
93 Woodrow Wilson, “A Lecture on Democracy,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 7 (1969), 347. Italics in original. 38 nation. Asking what “we mean when we say that we have here in America a sovereign people, a nation governed by itself,” Wilson contended that “[w]e cannot mean that the people themselves originate measures and shape policies, as those little groups do that meet from season to season in town-halls and in Swiss market places.”94 To carry over the concept of popular rule from local self-government to a modern nation obscured key practical differences in politics at these levels.
The concept hence had to be reworked to study modern democracy, and Wilson proposed that:
What we really mean when we say that the people govern is that they freely consent to be governed, on condition that a certain part of them do the governing,—that part which shall, by one process or another, be selected out of the mass and elevated to the places of rule:—and that is the best democratic government in which the processes of this selection are best…95
This re-conception broke decisively from the democratized classical liberal treatment of democracy. The break is evident, for example, in relation to civil service reform, which informed
Wilson’s concern with selection processes. In Chapter One we saw John Stuart Mill settle upon merit-selected civil servants as a power, suited for a modern society, that could counterbalance democracy to temper its illiberal potential. To envision civil servants playing this role assumed that merit selection, favoring as it does the better educated, was not itself democratic. Wilson moved, however, to reframe it in just these terms. He contended that a meritocratic civil service was “not democratic in the sense in which we have taught our politicians wrongly to understand democracy,” but it was “democratic in this sense, that it draws all the governing material from the people.” Selecting into government positions by merit “such part of the people as will fit themselves for the function” was “but another process of representation.” Wilson here carried
94 Wilson, “Lecture on Democracy,” 351, 353. Italics in original. 95 Wilson, “Lecture on Democracy,” 357. Italics in original. Wilson here builds on a lecture on “Sovereignty” he had given a month earlier, which was later published as “Political Sovereignty” in his 1893 An Old Master collection. 39 forward Mill’s conclusion that merit selection of civil servants is liberal, but he departed from
Mill in conceptualizing such selection as “eminently democratic.”96
We earlier saw Wilson build liberalism by definition into modern democracy. Now we have seen him read democracy into a prominent liberal reform. Where democratized classical liberals saw liberal commitments and reforms in potential tension with democracy and debated how to mitigate this tension, Wilson removed the tension by conceptualizing modern democracy as liberal, and contemporary liberalism as democratic. His interpretation allowed that there had been tensions between liberalism and democracy historically, and that traces of that history still lingered among, for example, opponents of civil service reform. But these tensions were, Wilson taught, to be superseded in the march of political development toward his liberal end of history: the modern Democratic State. After envisioning this end in his political science, Wilson would later strive to lead America toward it in his political career as a progressive liberal reformer.
Conclusion: Democracy and the Divided Legacy of Democratized Classical Liberalism
We have now followed through the interwoven elements of Wilson’s turn in the 1880s away from the democratized classical liberalism of his youth. This turn took place in the same decade, and departed from the same starting point, as the movement in Sumner’s thought studied in Chapter Four. Throughout this current chapter I have repeatedly compared these two figures.
To conclude both the chapter and the comparison, I summarize the divergence in their treatment of democracy, which is especially significant when we situate Sumner and Wilson within The
American Birth of Political Science. Each developed his own treatment of democracy starting from the same mid-century democratized classical liberal analysis, which had been a focal point of political science as pursued by Tocqueville and Lieber. By separately developing different
96 Wilson, “Lecture on Democracy,” 351, 356. 40 sides of the earlier analysis, Wilson and Sumner divided its legacy into two alternative, indeed conceptually incompatible, late-nineteenth century treatments of democracy
The analysis of democracy by mid-century democratized classical liberals was given a two-sided character by its emphasis on the potential compatibility of liberalism and democracy.
If realized this potential made liberal democracy possible. One side of the democratized classical liberal analysis of democracy explored the properties of this hybrid and the prerequisites of its successful functioning and maintenance. But liberalism and democracy were only potentially, not necessarily, compatible. There could be a non-democratic liberal regime, as in mid-century
England, or an illiberal democracy, as exemplified by Louis Napoleon’s France. The dark second side of the democratized classical liberal analysis of democracy explored its illiberal forms.
Sumner and Wilson in the 1880s moved in divergent directions away from democratized classical liberalism’s emphasis on the potential compatibility of democracy and liberalism. As
Sumner lost faith in his fellow Americans he increasingly came to interpret democracy as simply inimical to classical liberalism. A hybrid “democratic republic” had seemed viable for a period in mid-century America, but for Sumner democracy was now failing the late-century test posed by the economic strains following from the Panic of 1873 through the next two decades. Democratic reactions to these strains had undercut classical liberal ideals and institutions. But in doing so, far from triumphing, democracy opened the way to domination for plutocracy in America. Sumner here developed the democratized classical liberal analysis of the dark side of democracy to speak to late-nineteenth events. But developing only this dark side of the earlier analysis led Sumner to begin treating democracy as irremediably illiberal in its character and consequences.
In Wilson’s treatment of democracy we see, by contrast, hopeful exploration of liberal democracy come to the fore as the main legacy being developed from democratized classical 41 liberalism. As a youth Wilson inherited both sides of the democratized classical liberal analysis of democracy. Worry about illiberal democracy was evident, for example, in his 1879 essay on
“Self-Government in France,” which lingered over the “minutely-complete centralization” that focused the “powers of despotism” in France, and enabled periods “centralized democracy” that were “a virtual despotism.”97 Fear of illiberal democracy still remained part of Wilson’s political science in late 1885 when he first formulated his study of modern democracy. In an early draft he anxiously suggested that, if the “democratic polity based on individual initiative” failed, modern nations would turn “in the doubtful light of Socialism, towards a democratic polity based on communal initiative.”98
Yet by 1887 Wilson’s notes show him move to refocus the “substantial correspondence” between socialism and democracy onto the “germinal conceptions of democracy”—i.e. ancient democracy. The modern vs. ancient contrast had led him to stress that, under the influence of “a political philosophy radically individualistic, but not necessarily democratic,” the “democracy of our own century” observed “individual rights” in a manner at odds with either ancient democracy or socialism.99 By the time fragments of his democracy project appeared in The State and articles and addresses in 1889-91, Wilson had firmly relegated the dark side of democracy to the past. He now consistently articulated “modern democracy” in terms that made it liberal by definition. No longer just potentially compatible, as they had been for democratized classical liberals, liberalism and democracy were here indelibly interwoven through mutual redefinition. Wilson’s historicist interpretation of political development made this interweaving itself part and parcel of modern progress. From his late-nineteenth century standpoint, democracy had become liberal, and liberal
97 Woodrow Wilson, “Self-Government in France,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 1 (1966), 523. Italics in original. 98 Wilson, “Modern Democratic State,” 62. 99 Woodrow Wilson, “Socialism and Democracy,” Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 5 (1968), 561-62. 42 reform agendas of the present, such as civil service reform, were to be conceived and expounded as eminently democratic, rather than as tempering democracy.