Democracy and Administration: Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management.

Democracy and Administration: Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management. By Brian J. Cook. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007. 279 pp.

In Democracy and Administration: Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management, Brian J. Cook provides a masterful survey of Woodrow Wilson's writing on the two great themes that shaped his conception of the modern age. This analysis of Wilson is particularly valuable because Cook devotes considerable attention to the lesser-known administrative studies that Wilson pursued after the publication of Congressional Government. Cook uses those writings to build a case for the continuing importance of Wilson to modern students of public administration and to construct hypothetical dialogues between Wilson and other prominent figures in the public administration tradition.

Dissenting from the conventional view that Wilson was an Americanized version of Max Weber defending the superior rationality of impersonal and hierarchical formal bureaucratic organization, Cook argues that Wilson was more ambivalent about the virtues of expertise and bureaucratic autonomy than is traditionally recognized. According to Cook, Wilson saw the need for expertise in governing a complex modern society, but he also recognized the limits of expert knowledge and the dangers of "a domineering illiberal officialism" (p. 106). The introduction to Democracy and Administration describes Alexis de Tocqueville's quest for a "more democratic, more participatory, more political future" (p. 2), a dimension of Tocqueville's thought that Cook believes was well-described by Sheldon Wolin in Tocqueville Between Two Worlds. Cook finds in Woodrow Wilson some of the same reservations against paternalistic, bureaucratic statism that are such prominent themes in Tocqueville. "Wilson also assessed to a limited extent the wisdom of this centralization of administration and its effects on the states, in a manner reminiscent of Tocqueville's critique of the 'enervating' effects of administrative centralization" (p. 27).

Admirably, Cook does not simply gloss over the passages in Wilson's writings that have provided evidence for the interpretation of Wilson as a proponent of the separation of politics and administration and an admirer of Prussian bureaucratic efficiency, but he does contend that those passages do not tell the whole story. If politics and administration are separate, then the reconciliation of democracy and administration is straightforward. The will of the people should be formulated in the political arena, and administrators should neutrally carry out that will. Cook rejects this diminished, instrumental portrait of administration, arguing that administrators are and should be involved in the determination of policy because their day-to-day experience with implementing laws provides the best vantage point for learning how to improve them. Administration is inherently political, although not narrowly partisan, so administration is a constitutive activity. The participation of unelected bureaucrats in the process of determining who we are and the policies that will govern us poses a problem for democratic legitimacy, and, Cook argues, Wilson should be praised for understanding this dilemma and straightforwardly confronting it. Cook's interpretation of Wilson, which depreciates the significance of the separation of politics and administration in Wilson's thought, is controversial. Critics will surely maintain that the origins of Wilson's thought in German historicism and the organic theory of the state point to the centrality of the distinction between politics and administration, and that Democracy and Administration exaggerates the significance of Wilson's qualifications concerning this trajectory of thought. Be that as it may, Cook has provided a valuable survey of Wilson's writings as they bear on this topic.

After exploring Wilson's ideas in Part I of the volume, Cook then proceeds to analyze Wilson's practices in Part II. He examines a variety of scholarly assessments of Wilson's performances as governor of New Jersey, as presidential reformer enacting the New Freedom, and as wartime leader, and the relationships between those performances and Wilson's ideas on leadership and administration. Cook notes that at certain times, Wilson's governing style is more congruent with his early preference for parliamentary/ cabinet government, and that at other times, he gravitates toward the presidential style defended in Constitutional Government. Cook probes the strengths and weaknesses attributable to each of these modes of governance.

In the third and final section of Democracy and Administration, Cook argues for the continuing relevance of Wilson's ideas for modern administrative practice. This contention is the fundamental contribution of the book, and even critics who dispute Cook's interpretation of Wilson will concede that Cook has provided a valuable contribution to the field of public administration by reasserting the foundational status of Woodrow Wilson's thought and rescuing it from simplistic abridgement. More controversially, Cook argues that Wilson erred in departing from his original commitment to cabinet government and the linkage it provides between legislation and administration. Cook believes that Wilson's turn to the presidency as an alternative way to link statesmanship and administration was a misstep that led away from a synthesis of democracy and administration and toward a more insular and unaccountable administrative state. Intriguing questions to ask include whether the early Wilson's recommendation for cabinet government is more consistent with the historicist foundations of his thought, and whether Wilson's later turn to the presidency advanced his political ambitions at the expense of his theoretical consistency. To argue that the early Wilson's endorsement of cabinet government provided an appropriate agenda for reform of American government would require a much longer book than Democracy and Administration. Cook does help us to better understand Woodrow Wilson, and that is contribution enough.

--Donald R. Brand

College of the Holy Cross