Aaron Wildavsky: facts, policies, morals.

I

I HAVE BEEN AN ADMIRER of Aaron Wildavsky for so long that when he died, a decade ago, I felt a personal injury--something akin to losing a limb. Just who would take up leadership of the intellectual defense of the common culture? I am surely not the only person to ask such an admittedly rhetorical question. He gave backbone to so many people in public life and in academic pursuits that the problem of Aaron not being among us was less the quality of his legacy--already assured--but the character of the remaining living. It was somehow always easier to be courageous knowing Aaron was in your corner. How would we fare with him gone?

If this appears a strange way to enter a discourse on publication of a new edition of The Revolt Against the Masses (2002 [1971]), it will, nonetheless, have to suffice. I hope that by the close of my remarks, the source of my personal concerns will be evident. As The Revolt Against the Masses makes plain, Aaron compelled us to think in multiple tracks. He always asked first, what are the facts in any given situation?--whether it is the nature of presidential leadership in foreign affairs or political determinants of economic decisions. Second, he asked, what are the policy implications of any serious analysis? Since, in every major empirical study, the author drives and the reader is taken for a ride in the fast lane, what are we to do about the affairs described? Third, Aaron compels us in nearly every essay to answer the moral call: what are the human consequences of events and then of policies? Like Herbert Croly, who started the close examination of formal organization with political aspirations the century before him, what haunted Aaron Wildavsky was the "unrealized promise of American life" at the close of the twentieth century. In that phrase lies the moral goodness of a people still in search of its ethical moorings.

If there is a "secret" in Aaron's style of work, and I suspect that he would be properly dismissive of any sort of mystical turn to that phrase, it is a methodology that eases into a morality mediated by a policy. In my capacity as editorial director at Transaction, I have supervised the publication or the republication of no fewer than twelve of Aaron's titles in just about every field in which he worked--from public budgeting to the nature of representational politics. With the guidance of a variety of his former students and colleagues, we have also turned out five posthumous volumes of Aaron's papers--and have done so at considerable personal cost to people who put aside their own labors to complete the task. Aaron is worth it. For those with little time to spare and who are new to the wonders of Aaron, I would suggest two books--published while he was very much alive and with us: Speaking Truth to Power (1987), and now, The Revolt Against the Masses. These texts, available in new editions, will make one either a convert to, or a critic of, Aaron. He would not mind either outcome. He never lacked for good friends, but he never shrank from a good fight. Opponents no less than allies define who we are and where we stand. This Aaron well knew. Like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he welcomed a plethora of opinions, but held firm to the idea of the stubborn singularity of facts.

II

Aaron's play of words on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses (1930) should not be taken as more than that. His concerns in The Revolt Against the Masses are not the emergence of mass repudiation of inherited elitist notions of domination and power, and certainly not with the dangers in the accession of the masses to social power. Rather, Aaron's intuition is to show how elites have struggled within themselves to maintain their domination and power. Far from being a source of humanistic tradition as Ortega held, the new elites are a source of anti-populist efforts to re-divide the wealth. In these ideas, Wildavsky is largely indebted to the Franco-Italian tradition in political sociology--especially Gaetano Mosca, Roberto Michels, and Vilfredo Pareto, rather than to the tradition of Spanish humanistic education. He makes the intent of this volume, its organizing principle, quite clear early on, in the essay that bears the title of the book.

"The revolutionaries of contemporary America do not seek to redistribute privilege from those who have it to those who do not. These radicals wish to arrange a transfer of power from those elites that now exercise it to another elite, namely themselves, who do not. This aspiring elite is of the same race (white), the same class (upper middle and upper), and the same educational background (the best colleges and universities) as those they wish to displace. The goal of this white, radical, privileged elite is clear: a society purged by them of the values, tastes, preferences and policies desired by the mass of Americans. The white elite is in revolt against the masses. "The incendiary character of this opening gambit is not accidental, but part of a deeply held conviction by Wildavsky that the masses in America represent the source of the democratic tradition. At one fell swoop, Aaron undercuts the idea of a conservative or restorationist bias--and affirms a deep suspicion of radical ideologies as the answer to that which needs curing.

Wildavsky's deep fear, fueled in large part by the Vietnam War, was the raw capacity of elites to undercut the survival of national legitimacy as such, and seek solace in global imperatives. "Ways of life are in contention; that is why our image of America as a single nation, indivisible, is shaken." In truth, the thirty years that have passed since Aaron's writing of this essay indicate that he was correct about breaks in the national fabric--its sources in a war that was poorly defined--and in his belief that the masses were the source of whatever cohesion and integration that existed. Arguably, it was not until the terror bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 that the sense of urgency in regaining an integrated approach was realized. When the nation was perceived to be in danger and at risk, this, rather than any great political awakening, accounted for a rallying to the idea of national survival and protection.

Concluding in a prophetic mode, one that foreshadows events that would occur long after Aaron passed away, he instructs his readers not to panic. "The greatest weapon the radical elite possesses is its ability to convince others that society is falling apart. Fire-bombings, window breaking, and shooting at police, however deadly or upsetting they may be, are mere pinpricks. They cannot, by themselves, move the levers of power. Only inappropriate responses by those in power can do that. Neither capitulation to violence nor indiscriminate repression will help. So long as most Americans do not abandon their posts, the radical elite can only kill or annoy; it cannot rule." While most commentators on Wildavsky have focused on his work on the budgetary process, federal policymaking, overseas development, and issues of risk and efficiency--all themes fully covered in The Revolt Against the Masses--few have celebrated, or for that matter even confronted. Aaron's larger moral vision. Perhaps this is one reason why this marvelous collection of essays has received far less attention than his middle-range writings. In an age given over to technical solutions to manageable problems, this may be understandable--if indeed regrettable.

With the exception--and it turned out to be a rather large one--of Aaron's concerns with developing a modern political science vision of Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (1987), the essays gathered in The Revolt Against the Masses cover the major areas of his lifelong interests through the 1970s. His essay on "The Two Presidencies" may be the most widely cited work in the political science literature. That it was first published in Transaction/Society is, to be sure, a matter of personal pride. In the section demarcated as "Political Analysis" we find Aaron's essential method: get to the heart of things and move beyond the conventional rhetoric of the day. In those halcyon days of the mid-1960s, the talk was about the "imperial presidency," which followed a period of much talk about "constitutional dictatorship." Whatever the merits of those earlier formulations, it was clear to Aaron that the historians in particular were often generalizing from one president, with little relevance to the nature of the presidency (or for that matter, Congress) as such.

The essence of Aaron's masterful essay--which he revisited at a later stage, with some modification--is that the presidency is the office that is guardian of foreign policy concerns. Indeed, in an era of rapid communication, transportation and delivery of weapons of mass destruction, the lodging of foreign policy decision-making in the executive branch is an absolute necessity. At the same time, the domestic affairs of the nation--from the budgetary process to the administration of social welfare--is essentially an activity lodged in the congressional realm. If this division of labor is not exactly what each branch of government would like to be known for, it does accord with the image of the founding fathers. The constitution provides precisely for the sort of dual role of president as commander-in-chief that gives him a special role to play in military and defense affairs. Congress, for its part, ever sensitive to public opinion, is in a better position to make decisions that have intimate consequences for the home front. The budgetary process underscores this division. So, in a sense, both those who argue for (or against) notions of an imperial presidency and a logrolling Congress are right--but only within the realms of foreign and domestic policies respectively. Aaron looked at behavior rather than formal structure as the grounds of political analysis.

The sharp critique of policy programs driven by accounting and budgeting--the rage of government in the late 1960s--well illustrates Aaron's special quality of looking at the political culture writ large and not simply specialized bits and pieces. Indeed, PPBS (Planning, Programming and Budgeting System), as it was known, derived from the Defense Department model evolved in response to military procurement and manpower needs during the Vietnam War epoch. The New Civilian Militarists, as I dubbed them in The War Game (1963), were convinced of the advantages of managing policy from Washington rather than in the field--otherwise known as the United States. Aaron felt that the ill-defined Vietnam War led to an even less well-articulated method of governance.

Wildavsky's withering critique of a top-down bureaucratic approach to policy-making was made at a variety of levels. He argued that conditions in the national society that could permit management and manipulation of resources were absent; there was no body of knowledge waiting to be applied in areas like welfare and crime the way there was in military confrontations; and the personnel running agencies simply lacked a policy culture. But even within agencies with a policy tradition, like the Department of Defense, there are problems. Not least of these are decisions about avoiding or simulating nuclear war. Areas in which there is no body of data to draw upon require something more than programming or implementing new policies. Finally, given the difficulty of achieving consensus on goals, advocates of policy programming and budgeting were reduced to fixing their gaze on very limited operational goals that different leaders and agencies could agree upon. In short, public programs and policies needed something other than "a fashionable pretense." The virtual collapse of such mechanical contrivances reduced policy to zero-based budgeting techniques. This failure was better understood by Wildavsky than by those enthralled with the conversion of policy and evaluation research into technique.

Not everything in The Revolt Against the Masses remains politically relevant. The essays on the actual presidential politics of the 1960s clearly are of more historical than analytical interest. But even here, in noting the growing impatience of Left and Right with democratic policies, and their turn to leadership models divorced from party systems and practices, one can detect how the ghost of Goldwater reappeared in the physical presence of the Clinton presidency. Wildavsky found the tendency to subjectivism and an uncompromising attitude to compromise itself to be disturbing. They still remain so. Ultimately, what he most feared was a frontal assault on the legitimacy of the system. In his view, "the greater the attack on the legitimacy of the system, the less the willingness to accept responsibility for it."

Even so strong a democrat as Wildavsky was desperately seeking leaders who could rise to the level of a Charles de Gaulle--who salvaged the system from its destroyers. In reviewing The Revolt Against the Masses, one is brought sharply to the realization of how fractured and fragmented America was during the Vietnam War period--a war that corresponded with domestic developments that seriously weakened any sense of national cohesion, much less a new consensus. The classes alienated from American society were not about to urge a course of action based on racial harmony or ethnic unity. And the classes who directed American society were themselves so wrapped up in turf struggles with each other that they likewise could not be counted upon to direct the nation into a new dawn. This essentially pessimistic reading of American society may not remain warranted, but this is not the issue. Even more open to doubt is what these essays suggest about how Aaron himself would react to current events in Iraq. It is assuredly wiser to read his essays in a way that enables us to adopt his multi-tracked approach to learning: first the facts, then the policies, and finally, the moral consequences. That in itself would represent a great leap forward in the conduct of political science, and who knows, perhaps of politics as such.

III

There was a private side to Aaron not easily observed by casual acquaintances. He could appear gruff, blunt to a fault, with a touch of sarcasm in his voice. That he did not suffer fools readily was apparent. But there was another aspect to his private self: a deep reverence for tradition and family. In his delightful autobiographical essay "A Boy from Poltava," he told the story of his love and reverence for his father. It was evidently deep and life-long. In the larger sphere, his belief in the Jewish tradition and religion in which he was reared governed his moral sensibility and informed his political judgments. His two books on the subject were as radical in their own way as was Freud's Moses and Monotheism (1939). If there were conjectural elements in the transmigration from Old Testament readings of the Jewish rulers and princes of the ancient kingdoms to modern issues, there was no question of the authenticity of his reading. He saw a world of political leadership superimposed on the struggles of Moses and Joseph to define the Jewish Project of David and Solomon and to provide legitimacy to this Project.

This Jewish element showed up in various guises in his other writings: Aaron's deep animus for "lawless behavior," his dismissal, even contempt, of the fundamentalist fears of a Catholic in the White House, his invoking of the Jewish experience to explain African-American oppression. "When people have been disadvantaged for a long time, they (like the ghettoized Jews who refined self-hatred into a high art) may become carriers of their own victimization." But the clearest indication of his deep respect for tradition emerged in Aaron's constant acknowledgment of help and support from everyone and every place in which he taught. All honors were bestowed to Brooklyn College, Yale University, Oberlin College, the University of California at Berkeley--wherever Aaron landed. He always pointed out the positive benefits of his experience, his encounters, with little known, but outstanding teachers, in his many acknowledgments.

He was able to integrate his political and theological interests only in later life. In two works produced during the 1980s, well after the papers in The Revolt Against the Masses, he wrote Assimilation versus Separation: Joseph the Administrator and the Politics of Religion in Biblical Israel (2001) and The Nursing Father: Moses as a Political Leader (1984). In both of these works Aaron broke new ground simply by ignoring the vast exegetical literature, and returning to the biblical sources of Jewish history. It might well be that these volumes included an admixture of apocryphal and actual events, but the result is a heightened sense of the place of culture in the formation of a nation. For beyond the Weberian issues of charisma and bureaucracy, or even customs and laws, is the deeper issue of what it takes for a people to survive and a national entity to emerge triumphant. The full panoply of emotions, sentiments, and interests weigh as heavily in modern America as in ancient Israel. And while we may find it hard to understand, the relationship of the universal to the particular, the legal to the empirical, the good and the evil, was clearly apparent to the ancients. Forms change, technology expands, scientific knowledge multiplies--but the problem of human survival remains painfully impervious to all such blandishments of modernism and post-modernism alike.

Aaron also translated his own affections into an ability to work with other people, especially younger scholars. I know of few scholars of his singular grandeur who wrote as many essays as joint papers--with a plethora of colleagues and students--some relatively well known, others now in obscurity. From Mary Douglas to Naomi Caiden and Max Singer who were beyond the pale of political science to Jeffrey Pressman, Nelson Polsby, and Richard Ellis within the discipline, Aaron was generous in acknowledging the role of others in his own work. And indeed, he worked with others in collegial enterprise more easily and naturally than most people in social research. Aaron's agenda was clear enough. He wanted to develop a group of people who recognized the need for political science in which the two words were equally weighted. It is fair to say that in the decade since his death we have seen the evolution of just such an army of followers. These are not acolytes, but people for whom working with him on an essay or under him on a dissertation theme was and remains a singular badge of honor and respect. This was gained without intimation, without imposing a sense of his authority--simply by emphasizing on the work object what it meant and what larger purposes it thereby served. This all sounds simple in the telling, but as I reflect on how few academics there are for whom one can speak equal words, the singular achievement of Wildavaky as a teacher becomes clear.

Culture was not simply a term of endearment for Aaron, but a peculiar transmission belt in which an older generation bestows on a younger generation the wisdom of the past, without enveloping that wisdom in mysticism or dogmatism. I am not sure in a world gone instrumental and electronic that this same sense of intimacy, of a human past informing a human present, will survive intact--at least not in the same way as was experienced by Aaron. Ultimately, the wisdom of the people serves as carrier of the core culture. In this, "The Revolt Against the Masses" led by narrow elites parading forth as guardians of the people, is defeated. There is a touch of wish fulfillment in this paradigm of commoners trumping elites, since it is not always the case that the masses behave in quite as principled a way in other nations and lands as they supposedly do in the United States and the United Kingdom.

It was this faith in the commoner, this retention in the personality of those with the common touch, that made Aaron special in the private as well as the professional realm. He came armed in every intellectual battle with a belief that ordinary people carry the high virtues and not just the common touch. He also believed that those in the academy, who disdain ordinary virtues while masquerading as champions of the people, would be exposed and defeated. This indeed is what happened to the narrow band of Rightists whose isolationism disguised disdain for the democratic cause against the Axis powers. This rupture within the narrow band of ultra-Leftists, whose internationalism disguised a no less vile acceptance of the Communist International, also made leadership of the masses impossible.

His hatred for all forms of totalitarianism, coupled with a faith in the prospects of a democratic political culture, revealed Aaron's commitments most fully. Many of the essays in this volume start with a review of empirical information showing that ordinary people were not uniformly well served by their political directorates. This moved him to a belief that it was possible to forge policies that would alleviate common suffering and improve the lot of the people. He believed this was feasible precisely because the mechanisms of democratic government were entirely intact in the United States--shaky commitments and adventures in foreign lands notwithstanding. Aaron internalized a moral conviction as to the decency of ordinary people--especially the American people. That is evident in the many essays in The Revolt Against the Masses. The flinty vision that infused Aaron is a key to the legacy of measured hope that he left us with. Political science may have been the discipline that guided his efforts, but like Adam Smith long before him, it was moral philosophy, and not ideology, that made that discipline acceptable and worthy of emulation.

At the end of the day, if there is an end of the day in matters of fundamental doctrine, I suspect that what irritated Aaron's opponents most was not anything he said or wrote, but rather what he did not say or write. He was appalled by the posturing among social scientists that led them to advocate one or another form of liberal or conservative doctrines. "Ism" words left Aaron just plain cold. He was one of the few people in the field who took the word "science," as in political science, to mean precisely that: the scientific study of political behavior and its institutions. He is also one of the even rarer group of people in the discipline who expressed his moral preferences and concerns in plain words. The entitlement for doing so was the wealth of scientific evidence and shared experience in any of the fields properly covered by the discipline.

Nowhere are these beliefs more clearly exemplified than in Wildavsky's other late-life efforts: the understanding of the relationship of innovating to conserving. In a series of works ranging from Risk and Culture (with Mary Douglas) (1982) to Searching for Safety (1988), he made it perfectly clear that decisions made are policies advocated. Much of this originated in his 1976 study of Dixon-Yates: A Study in Power Politics, where it became evident that the advancement of utilities involves environmental risks. In turn, risk must be evaluated against the benefits to the larger society being promulgated. There is no progress without risk. There is no harnessing or control of nature without admitting to prospects of risk--or more bluntly, failure. Hence, ideological argumentation is utterly worthless. Only actual empirical analysis of the dangers incurred, the results obtained, the policies implemented, tell us whether to pursue or cancel any particular policy or program. Again, for Aaron, these decisions help define the common sense of the common culture. It also allows us to think of political science precisely as a science.

In Aaron's mind, the pursuit of political science is simple and uncluttered: the creation of adequate policy outcomes, predicated on a grounded culture rooted in Western values. As complex a person as he was, Aaron also was a simple teacher of political science. His enemy was not right nor left, neither conservative nor liberal. Rather, it was those who reversed this causal chain--the people who made political analysis an esoteric, complex chore, far removed from ordinary minds. The anomaly of people writing about democracy without the least interest in observing its canons never ceased to amaze him. The themes in The Revolt Against the Masses illustrate both sides of the equation as he saw it: the need for political science and the faith in the common culture. I can hardly imagine a better way to begin the serious study of Aaron Wildavsky than with this fine collection of his politically rooted and morally aware essays.

IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ is Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus at Rutgers and Chairman of the Board and Editorial Director of Transaction Publishers.