Exceptional Proff only

Administrative Theory & Praxis, 37: 227–241, 2015 Copyright # 2015 Public Administration Theory Network ISSN: 1084-1806 print/1949-0461 online DOI: 10.1080/10841806.2015.1083824

Inserting Frontier into Dichotomies: Politics, Administration, and Agonistic Pluralism

R. McGreggor Cawley

University of Wyoming

This article employs the concept of “frontier,” from Chantal Mouffe’s political theory, to present an interpretation of the political significance of dichotomies generally, and then applies it to Woodrow Wilson’s formulation of the politics/administration dichotomy. The central premise is that dichotomies, rather than a source of frustration, serve important and necessary purposes for political and administrative life in a discursive landscape shaped by values pluralism and liberalism. In pursuing this premise, the article suggests that Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the American frontier may have influenced Wilson’s thinking. The article concludes with comment regarding the possible utility of the presented argument for contemporary public administration.

What Deborah Stone (2012, p. 2) says of paradoxes can be applied equally well to dichotomies: They “are nothing but trouble … and political life is full of them.” The primary problem is that a dichotomy presents opposing categories that usually make sense in the abstract but turn out to be far less helpful for navigating the twists and turns of practical governing. Exasperating as this may be, the situation is exacerbated by the fact that major political controversies frequently entail traversing multiple dichotomies. Thus, difficult as unpacking any one dichotomy is, the task of mapping the interactions among several of them is roughly analogous to unraveling the Gordian Knot without the benefit of Alexander’s sword.

While perhaps less dramatic than Alexander’s solution, the argument I pursue in this article is that a concept taken from Chantal Mouffe provides a way to unravel at least some of the knot-like character of dichotomies in the governing process. Mouffe is an unlikely source for my task in some respects. The centerpiece of her project has been to reclaim and revitalize a leftist political critique in the face of the apparent “collapse” of Communism around the world (Mouffe, 2005, p. 1). As such, her approach is more attentive to encour- aging and sustaining political conflict than the governing process, from an administrative perspective. For my purposes, however, one of the concepts from her theory strikes me as useful, and as I will argue, may even have a rather surprising connection with the foundation of American public administration.

In simple terms, Mouffe proposes envisioning the oppositions in a dichotomy as being separated, not by a clearly delineated boundary, but rather by a “frontier” that “is not given once and for all but constructed and constantly shifting” (p. 51). Adopting this view leads to at least three points. First, dichotomies are concepts constructed to define sites for ongoing political

Address correspondence to R. McGreggor Cawley, Department of Political Science, Dept. 3197, University of Wyoming, 1000 E. University Ave., Laramie, WY 82071-2000. E-mail: [email protected]

contestation. Second, and related, the oppositions in dichotomies are less important than the unsettled political space between them. Third, the apparent inability finally to settle the space separating the oppositions can be read as an indication of a vibrant democratic discourse. As Mouffe argues: “The absence of a political frontier, far from being a sign of political maturity, is the symptom of a void that can endanger democracy” (p. 5).

While Mouffe’s theory seeks to address a specific agenda animated by events in the contemporary political world, her argument about the connection between frontier and democracy is curiously similar to Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis in his now-classic essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Therein Turner argued that “the most important effect of the frontier has been the promotion of democracy” (Turner, 1893/1921, p. 30). It is the case, of course, that Mouffe and Turner are talking about different kinds of frontiers—Mouffe’s is a metaphorical space, and Turner’s, a geographical region. However, for my purposes, the more important point is their shared belief that sustaining democracy requires some sort of unresolved political space. While this similarity is intriguing in its own right, there is one more connection to consider.

As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, Turner attended a series of lectures on the subject of administration delivered by a young professor named Woodrow Wilson. More important, the two also lived in the same boarding house at the time and carried on long conversations about their shared dissatisfaction with the character of American history scholarship. One result of those exchanges was a lifelong friendship between Wilson and Turner. Another, as Ray Allen Billington (1973) reports, was Wilson’s developing “a proprietary interest in the frontier thesis” because “he and Turner had talked of the significance of the West during their hours together at Johns Hopkins” (p. 187).

As might be obvious from the trajectory of these comments, my intent is to use Mouffe’s formulation as an opportunity to do a bit of archaeological work on the politics/administration dichotomy during the founding era. Two points of clarification seem warranted. First, my interest in Mouffe’s theory operates on two levels. On the one hand, I will distill some of her concepts to construct an analytical vehicle for thinking about the political significance of frontier. On the other hand, her advocacy of agonistic pluralism will allow me to offer some concluding remarks about how the argument presented here might provide some insights into a contemporary discussion regarding the interaction between values pluralism and public administration (Overeem & Verhoef, 2014; Spicer, 2014; Wagenaar, 2014).

Second, while I am going to emphasize Wilson, I am not specifically interested in rehearsing the extended conversation about his views. Instead, my argument is that reading Wilson’s classic essay through the lens of Turner’s thesis creates room to suspect that the idea of frontier and related themes might have been implicit in his thinking. I will also demonstrate that a kind of frontier concept was embedded in the writings of Johann Bluntschli, which Wilson employed in his discussion of the politics/administration dichotomy.

The structure of this article is relatively straightforward. I begin by fleshing out some of the concepts from Mouffe that have direct bearing on my project, followed by a brief summary of Turner’s thesis. The material in those sections creates a context for revisiting Wilson’s essay. Finally, I conclude with comment on the utility of this approach in general and, more specifically, in terms of the relationship between values pluralism and administration.

228 CAWLEY

MOUFFE AND FRONTIER

As Patrick Overeem’s (2012) excellent study demonstrates, over a century of conversation about the politics/administration dichotomy has produced a clearly delineated map of the positions at dispute. Useful as the map is, it does not help answer the question of why the dichotomy has remained an issue of spirited argument. I think that aspects of Mouffe’s theory provide an avenue for posing an answer to this question. Given her focus on agonistic pluralism, Mouffe’s primary project is to present a theoretical justification that recognizes conflict as a necessary, even beneficial, component of democratic discourse. Thus, her theory concentrates more on the underlying structures of political conflict than the specific issues being contested. The argument I pursue in this part of the article is that even though Mouffe does not address the politics/administration dichotomy directly, her approach gives us a new, or in any event different, perspective on the subject.

Putting Mouffe’s (2009) idea of frontier into context requires understanding the distinction between what she calls “the political” and “politics.” The former embodies the “dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations … that can take many forms and emerge in different types of social relations”; and the latter, the “ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order” (p. 101). Her definition of the political is generally consistent with a recurring point in public policy literature. The issues animating political conflict at any given moment are always a relatively small set of the concerns that produce disagreements among people in society (Kingdon, 2011). However, the political is more than simply a background feature of collective life in Mouffe’s view; it is a source of potential issues always available for contestation. The existence of the political, then, makes unrealistic any notion of removing conflict from the fabric of social life.

At a broad level, Mouffe’s definition of politics clearly reflects her Marxist foundation. In her view, social order is always the “product of a given hegemony,” and therefore an “expression of power relations” (Mouffe, 2005, p. 69). In consequence, her theory infuses the usual definition of politics as competition among interests with the possibility that it also entails a struggle about differing visions of appropriate social order. Stated differently, while political conflicts tend to emphasize specific issues, their resolution always carries implications about the structure of power relations in the political community. Two points follow from this aspect of her definition.

First, remaining attentive to the power-relations element in political conflicts helps explain why issues that otherwise might appear to be rather mundane matters often produce extended and heated controversy. Second, while Mouffe has a definite ideological posture, she neverthe- less recognizes that the political contains a diversity of issues available for exploitation by multiple ideological postures. This point helps explain why political conflicts in a democratic society seldom have a final resolution. Simply put, the “losers” in a political conflict at one point in time are seldom exiled or executed, and in consequence, they remain attentive to issues in the political that can be used to reopen the argument. However, it is another dimension of her definition that provides a direct connection to the political role of dichotomies.

Politics, Mouffe (2009, p. 101) argues, “is always concerned with the creation of an ‘us’ by the determination of a ‘them.’ ” Her phrasing here is particularly important—the us/them polit- ical structure is a constructed relationship, not an a priori one. Moreover, Mouffe maintains that the us/them structure can assume two basic forms. On the one hand, it can define a relationship

FRONTIERS AND DICHOTOMIES 229

of antagonism in which them is viewed as an enemy that must be defeated, if not destroyed. On the other hand, it can also define an adversary relationship in which them is viewed as opponents “whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question” (p. 102).

Clarifying her definition, Mouffe’s explains that an adversary should not be confused with the more prosaic notion of “competitor.” To the contrary:

An adversary is an enemy, but a legitimate enemy, one with whom we have some common ground because we have shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy: liberty and equality. But we disagree concerning the meaning and implementation of those prin- ciples, and such a disagreement is not one that could be resolved through deliberation and rational discussion. (p. 102)

Equally important, the adversary formulation is not a call for protagonists to moderate the intensity of their advocacy.

An important difference with the model of “deliberative democracy” is that for “agonistic pluralism,” the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize passions toward democratic designs. (p. 103)

And for her, the basic democratic design is “the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity” (p. 101).

With Mouffe’s antagonism and adversary forms in hand, we can gain a better sense of her “frontier” concept. Structurally, both forms present a confrontation between opponents who hold entrenched positions. What distinguishes the forms, then, is the question of how the pro- tagonists view the boundary separating them. In the antagonism form, the positions are divided by a boundary regarded as clearly delineated and fixed, thereby producing a conflict animated by the biblical warning “He that is not with me is against me.” As such, there is less room for compromise, and resolution of conflict always contains the potential for exclusion, oppression, or perhaps even violence. The antagonism form, therefore, disrupts attempts to sustain demo- cratic discourse.

The boundary in the adversary form operates differently. It represents a kind of discursive no-man’s land, hence a “frontier,” where protagonists engage in ongoing skirmishes over situ- ating the dividing line between their positions. The political contains an abundant supply of specific issues that can be exploited for boundary clashes. Although these encounters produce winners and losers, they are only temporary gains/setbacks, always susceptible to revision by the outcomes of subsequent conflicts. In a similar fashion, there is room for compromises in the adversary form, “but they should be seen as temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation” (p. 102). Thus, the adversary form is better equipped to create a democratic design based on unity in a context of conflict and diversity.

A brief comparison with another advocate of agonistic liberalism might help bring Mouffe’s adversary form into sharper focus. Like Mouffe, Stuart Hampshire regarded conflict as a per- manent feature of political life. Explaining why some political controversies present particularly thorny problems, Hampshire (1978, p. 45) argued that what might appear to be a conflict “between two values which in more fortunate circumstances could both be realized” is often “a conflict between two ways of life neither of which could ever be fully realized without some

230 CAWLEY

deliberate impairment of the other.” Troublesome as these kinds of situations might be, Hampshire (2000, pp. 95–98) believed that as long as there are formal dispute resolution institutions (courts, etc.) regarded as legitimate by the opponents, and the opponents feel they have had a fair hearing of their positions, the conflicts could be resolved without disrupting the democratic order.

While Hampshire and Mouffe present very similar formulations, I think their projects are intended for different audiences. Hampshire’s approach sought to provide reassurances about the continuing viability of governing institutions. Therefore, it treats antagonism as an inevitable condition of collective life and concentrates on methods for resolving conflict “within the political domain” without recourse to “violence or the threat of violence” (Hampshire, 2000, p. 98). As such, there was no need for Hampshire to worry about a distinction between antagonism and adversary forms of conflict. In contrast, Mouffe’s approach seeks to encourage activists not to abandon their criticism in the face of the changed political landscape. Therefore, she stakes out a strategy in which the use of conflict serves as a vehicle to stimulate ongoing public discussions about the appropriateness of prevailing social standards and practices. For Mouffe, then, the antagonism/adversary distinction is crucial because the adversary form affords a way to sustain conflict while “domesticating hostility” (Mouffe, 2009, p. 101).

As I have noted, Mouffe’s theory addresses a project broader than the use I want to make of it. Nevertheless, I think it is possible to distill some talking points for considering the political role of dichotomies from these threads in her theory. First, dichotomies are discursive inventions that construct oppositions between the dominant values of a given social order. Second, the opposing categories in dichotomies are open to multiple interpretations. Third, the multiple possible definitions for the categories in a dichotomy create an unsettled political space, or a “frontier.” Taken together, these points lead to an interesting proposition. Rather than a source of conflict, dichotomies are better classified as structuring agents that help keep political conflicts from veering into the realm of violence or threat of violence. On the one hand, they provide widely accepted foundations that facilitate organizing us/them alignments about specific issues; and on the other hand, they also provide an ongoing venue where changing social conditions can be used for contestation about acceptable/unacceptable arrangements of social life.

As a quick test of these points, consider the church/state dichotomy. Although it is treated as a universal principle in our discourse, it is a distinction meaningful only in a given social order. For example, the church/state dichotomy has very little currency in the governing discourse of an established theocracy. Moreover, “church” and “state” are abstract categories with multiple definitions, which means that assigning them an opposing relationship necessarily establishes a frontier open for contestation. Equally important, we have over 200 years of conflict structured by the church/state dichotomy, and while there are certainly exceptions, most of the conflict has remained in the adversary realm. Finally, the precise boundary between church and state is no clearer today than it was 200 years ago. At the very least, this situation raises the possibility that keeping the frontier between church and state an unsettled political space has, in fact, served to sustain unity in a context of conflict and diversity.

Whatever else might be said of Mouffe’s theory, and there is plenty of room for criticism of her approach, I think her contention about the necessary connection between frontier and democracy produces a useful framework. Yet it is the case that her frontier is a metaphorical space. Let us now consider Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay. What I want to demon- strate is how he uses the physical frontier to develop a theory surprisingly similar to Mouffe’s.

FRONTIERS AND DICHOTOMIES 231

In doing so, Turner’s thesis also suggests that we can view a version of agonistic pluralism as the foundation of American political life.

TURNER AND FRONTIER

In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau issued a report documenting a fundamental demographic change in the country. Whereas in the past a geographical boundary could be identified that div- ided the continent into settled and unsettled regions, the results of the 1890 census suggested that the unsettled region now comprised a series of largely isolated pockets dispersed through- out a settled continent. The primary significance of this change for the Census Bureau was one of bureaucratic data reporting—unsettled region would no longer be used as a category in its reports. However, a synonym for unsettled region is frontier, and in an 1893 paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the closing of the frontier represented an important political development.

Unlike the frontier in Europe, which he characterized as “a fortified boundary line running through dense populations,” Turner (1893/1921, p. 3) contended that the American frontier pro- vided a “gate of escape from the bondage of the past” for people who had “scorn of older society … its restraints and its ideas” (p. 36). It represented a site of “perennial rebirth” that cre- ated the “fluidity of American life” (p. 2) and cultivated key American political attributes— individualism and democracy, as well as “antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control” (p. 30). The closing of the frontier, therefore, raised important political questions: Would it lead to the stagnation of American society and the erosion of essential American political attributes?

A recurring criticism of Turner’s thesis is his unabashedly Anglo-centric perspective. Valid as this criticism is, it is also important to note that part of his intent was to demonstrate the utility of social evolution theory for analyzing history. The frontier in Turner’s thesis was not a variation on a nature possessing intrinsic power, as made popular in the Romantic litera- ture of the day; nor was it a variation on the state of nature—an original space where free individuals forge civil society. Instead, it was an often hostile environment that required Europeans possessing preexisting ideas about ways of life to transform their thinking and habits, becoming, in the process, “a new product that is American” (Turner, 1893/1921, p. 4). And if the frontier experience changed people, the same was true of governing institutions. “The history of our political institutions, our democracy,” he argued, “is not a history of imitation, of simply borrowing; it is a history of the evolution and adaptation of organs in response to changed environment, a history of the origin of new political species” (Turner, 1896/1921, pp. 205–206).

Like Mouffe, then, Turner’s thesis equated frontier with democracy. Where they differ, of course, is on the question of what kind of frontier is necessary in order to sustain a vital democracy—a physical space or a metaphorical space? There is a sense, I think, in which we could use Mouffe’s theory to update Turner’s. Rather than posing a threat to democracy, the closing of the physical frontier created a need to develop metaphorical frontiers. Yet Turner’s emphasis on the physical frontier raises another issue. Although he did not use the term, Turner’s thesis can be read as proposing a physical foundation for the development of liberalism as the dominant ideology in American political life.

232 CAWLEY

Isolation was an essential feature of the physical frontier. As such, frontier life afforded more opportunity for people to organize their ways of life around values that seemed reasonable to them, and at the same time, less opportunity for different ways of life to come into disagreement with each other. As Robert Wiebe (1967, p. xiii) put it: “America during the nineteenth century was a society of island communities.” One consequence of frontier conditions, then, was that they “promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people” (Turner, 1893/1921, p. 22). Turner’s description here strikes me as being rather similar to Mouffe’s (2009, p. 101) definition of the goal for politics in an agonistic liberal context: “the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity.” This definition, in turn, could be read as captur- ing the underlying philosophy of the U.S. Constitution: e pluribus unum.

Once again, like Mouffe’s, the bulk of Turner’s thesis deals with the significance of the fron- tier in terms of political life. However, at one point Turner made a connection between frontier and administration.

The policy of the United States in dealing with its lands is in sharp contrast with the European system of scientific administration. Efforts to make this domain a source of revenue, and to with- hold it from emigrants in order that settlement might be compact, were in vain … . The reason is obvious: a system of administration was not what the West demanded; it wanted land (Turner, 1893/1921, pp. 25–26).

While this passage is consistent with Turner’s view that the American governing system was not simply an imitation of European systems, it also hints at an interpretation that posits politics and administration as opposing components of governing.

Interestingly enough, in an address to the American Historical Association seventeen years later, Turner (1910/1921, pp. 319–320) had apparently changed his mind:

The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary federal activity in limiting individual and cor- porate freedom for the benefit of society. To that decade belong the Conservation Congresses and the effective organization of the Forest Service, and the Reclamation Service.

These developments, he argued, were part of a new political era in which American society found “itself engaged in the task of readjusting its old political ideals to new conditions and is turning increasingly to government to preserve its traditional democracy.”

At one level, of course, Turner’s revised assessment can be explained by his evolutionary- based analysis. In his view, notions of appropriate governing systems emerged from material social conditions, not ideological concerns. But at another level, it is his phrasing that is impor- tant for my purposes. The early conservation movement generally, and the Forest Service specifically, represented major inroads for the establishment of “scientific administration” derived from European approaches in America (Pinchot, 1947/1974). As Samuel Hays (1959/1999, p. 265) explained, scientific administration was a crucial vehicle for accomplishing the conservation movement’s broader goal of effecting the “transformation of a decentralized, nontechnical, loosely organized society … into a highly organized, technical, and centrally planned and directed social organization which could meet a complex world with efficiency and purpose.”

The first part of Hays’s description captures, I think, the image of American society that Turner argued was the product of frontier life in his 1893 essay; and the second part of the description strikes me as generally consistent with Turner’s observations about changes taking

FRONTIERS AND DICHOTOMIES 233

shape in his 1910 address. Framed differently, the first part of Hays’s description could be portrayed as a society in which agonistic liberal politics dominates, and the second part, as a society in which administration dominates. The question, then, is whether or not there is room for politics based on agonistic liberalism in the kind of society envisioned by the second part of Hays’s description. What I want to suggest is that Woodrow Wilson’s “The Study of Administration” offers a way to approach this question.

WILSON AND THE DICHOTOMY

It is the case that Wilson published his essay in 1887, six years before Turner presented his. However, if we accept Ray Billington’s (1973) account, then Turner and Wilson discovered they had developed similar ideas independently of each other when they met at Johns Hopkins. One idea they shared was the need for scholars to incorporate more attention to the role the West had played in American political history. Another, and related, idea was the belief that adaptation to material social conditions was a better reference context for judging the effective- ness and appropriateness of governing systems than adherence to ideological principles. My intent for this section of the article is twofold. First, I want to do a bit of close text reading to demonstrate a parallel between Wilson’s and Turner’s arguments. Second, I will suggest how a notion of frontier was embedded in Wilson’s version of the politics-administration dichotomy.

Although an obvious point, it is important to remember that the partition between adminis- tration and partisan politics had been established three years before Wilson published his essay. As Leonard White (1958, pp. 278–302) argued, moreover, the civil service reform movement was more about wresting control of government from party machines and special interests than about developing a science of administration. In consequence, the need for the dichotomy emerged originally from politics, not administration.

However, Wilson offered a different interpretational veneer, one based in social evolution theory, for the origin of the partition between politics and administration. It was part of “three periods of growth through which government has passed in all the most highly developed of existing systems, and through which it promises to pass in all the rest.” The first period was “that of absolute rulers,” which had “an administrative system adapted to absolute rule.” The second was the elimination of absolute rulers by the creation of constitutions that established “popular control,” but during this period “administration is neglected.” In the final stage, “the sovereign people undertake to develop administration under the new constitution which has brought them to power” (Wilson, 1887, p. 204). An obvious question, then, is where Wilson situated America in this evolutionary scheme.

“With a new country,” Wilson explained, “in which there was room and remunerative employment for everybody, with liberal principles of government and unlimited skill in prac- tical politics, we were long exempted from the need of being anxiously careful about plans and methods of administration” (p. 203). Thus, America was in the second stage, and in Wilson’s view, the time had come for the country to move into the third stage. What I want to highlight, of course, is the rather striking parallel between Wilson’s statement and Turner’s thesis. While Wilson does not use the term “frontier,” I think his reference to “room and remunerative employment for everybody” more or less captures Turner’s argument about the

234 CAWLEY

significance of the physical frontier. It provided an environment in which people were free to pursue their ways of life as they saw fit, thereby encouraging values pluralism and antipathy to control. In consequence, frontier conditions also represented a social environment favorable for “liberal principles of government” in which there was little need to be “anxiously careful about plans and methods of administration.” Equally important, like Turner, Wilson believed that changing social conditions signaled an end to this earlier period of American political history.

As an aside, it could be argued that the social evolution theory employed by Turner and Wilson was itself an ideological posture. But to do so is to ignore that social evolution theory in their day was viewed as having a scientific, and not an ideological, basis. At the same time, a rough synonym, in the context of a public administration discourse, for the frontier conditions in Turner’s and Wilson’s formulations is the Jacksonian era and the patronage system, which tended “to reduce public administration to the role of servant of party rule” (Cook, 1996, p. 52). In consequence, Wilson’s and Turner’s depictions of that era of American political history has at least some empirical foundation.

The more important point for my purposes is that proposing to detach administration from politics against the backdrop of the Jacksonian era was obviously a foreign concept. Wilson’s finessing of this issue presents an even more striking parallel with Turner’s thesis. As noted above, Turner argued that the development of American political institutions was not one of simply borrowing and/or imitating European institutions, but rather an “evolution and adaptation” process which produced a “new political species” (Turner, 1896/1921, p. 133). Wilson developed a nearly identical argument in his essay.

The science of administration existed in Europe, but it had been “adapted to the needs of a compact state, and made to fit highly centralized forms of government” (Wilson, 1887, p. 202). Since neither of these factors existed in the American geopolitical environment, Wilson explained, the task at hand required a transformation of European administration: “we must Americanize it, and that not formally, in language merely, but radically, in thought, principle, and aim as well” (p. 202). The ultimate goal, then, was not simply to borrow/imitate European approaches, but rather to generate a new species of administration that was “congenial to American habit” by basing it on “tested practices” and “standards of practical politics” (pp. 220–221).

While part of the adaptation process necessarily entailed attention to the techniques of administration, Wilson viewed this as a more or less minor matter—a point he reinforced with his playful, albeit rather bizarre, metaphor: “If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder” (p. 220). The more important part, however, was adjusting the science of administration to the demands of the American political habit. Indeed, he identified “popular sovereignty” as the primary obstacle to “naturalizing this much-to-be-desired science of administration” (emphasis added). The problem in this regard was that “the people” had “a score of differing opinions. They can agree on nothing simple: advance must be made through compromise, by a compounding of differences, by a trimming of plans and a suppression of too straightforward principles.” The situation was exacerbated by the fact that “with opinions, possession is more than nine points of the law. It is next to impossible to dislodge them” (pp. 207–209).

Two aspects of Wilson’s view strike me as important. First, it is essentially a description of the practical conditions within an agonistic liberal political arena. Second, and related, it also recognizes that public interest does not exist a priori, but emerges instead from contestation

FRONTIERS AND DICHOTOMIES 235

within the political arena, and therein was the bind. Developing the plans and methods needed for running government required a more or less stable definition of public interest, but “the hurry and strife of politics” (p. 209) in an agonistic liberal arena tended to make the definition of public interest an ongoing point of contention. Wilson’s proposed response to this bind, of course, was Johann Bluntschli’s notion of the politics/administration dichotomy: “Politics, he says, is state activity ‘in things great and universal,’ while ‘administration, on the other hand,’ is ‘the activity of the state in individual and small things’” (p. 210).

While Wilson viewed the “distinction between administration and politics” as “too obvious to need further discussion” (p. 211), Bluntschli’s original argument added an extra twist. As Patrick Overeem (2012, p. 46) notes: “[Bluntschli] calls the line between politics and adminis- tration ‘a fluid one’ (ein fliessender).” Explaining Bluntschli’s thinking, Overeem continues: “many administrative issues are political at the same time, and every administrative issue can in principle become a political issue.” My contention, in turn, is that the idea of a fluid boundary can be interpreted as implying something akin to Mouffe’s notion of a frontier separ- ating politics and administration. As such, the time has come to disengage from Wilson and return to the broader issues I raised earlier.

MOUFFE AND ADMINISTRATION

Roughly 130 years of ongoing argument provides empirical evidence that Wilson was simply wrong in asserting there was no need for further discussion about the dichotomy. Yet we are left with the question of why the dichotomy has remained an issue of contention. Surely we have not been trapped in a century-long yes-it-is/no-it-isn’t shouting match. But as I suggested above, I think Mouffe’s theory gives us other ways to think about the situation. A central prem- ise of her theory is that focusing on the structure of conflict represents a more productive pursuit than concentrating on the specific issues at dispute.

Following her lead, my contention is that understanding why the dichotomy has been the source of continuing debate requires a similar approach. Stated differently, the important ques- tion may not be how to arrive at a definition of the boundary between politics and administra- tion, but rather what role the dichotomy occupies in the public administration discourse. More specifically, I propose, first, that the dichotomy fits Mouffe’s definition, establishing a frontier that is constantly shifting space, and second, that the dichotomy as frontier presents an opport- unity to interpret the ongoing dispute about it as evidence of a stream of agonistic pluralism embedded in the discourse. My second point, in turn, allows me to conclude with brief comment about a contemporary, and spirited, exchange on the question of whether or not values pluralism has practical implications for the practice of administration (Overeem & Verhoef, 2014; Spicer, 2014; Wagenaar, 2014).

As a starting point, let us return to Mouffe’s (2009, p. 101) distinction between the political, defined as the “dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations,” and politics, defined as the “ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a cer- tain order.” By this definition, then, administration is an order seeking institution, and therefore an artifact of politics. Indeed, as long as we accept Wilson’s (1887, p. 210) notion that “politics sets the tasks for administration,” we also have to accept that all administrative activity serves a political agenda seeking to establish/maintain a certain social order. This point is certainly

236 CAWLEY

supported by history. During the patronage era, administration was an institution seeking to maintain the old social order, and the good-government movement viewed civil service reform as a step in creating a new social order. To use Mouffe’s phrasing, the good-government move- ment and the larger progressive movement were a self-conscious effort to change the patterns of social/political power relations.

Moreover, this line of reasoning seems generally consistent with the contours of the dichot- omy proposed by Bluntschli and adopted by Wilson. In any event, it strikes me that politics addressing “things great and universal” can be read as implying a primary concern with envi- sioning the shape of social order, and administration addressing “individual and small things” as a concern with negotiating the twists and turns of implementing that vision. Were it not for Bluntschli’s characterizing the boundary between politics and administration as fluid, the dichotomy would appear to be a more or less orderly division of labor for the governing pro- cess. I think Mouffe’s concept of the political offers a way to understand Bluntschli’s position.

The dynamic nature of social life introduces a level of instability to the governing process. For example, unexpected events and changing conditions can create advantages for one side or the other in conflicts, as well as opportunities to reopen debates about established social stan- dards and practices. Indeed, the assassination of President Garfield was largely responsible for the success of the civil service reform effort (White, 1958, pp. 278–302). Governing in this con- text makes the hope of establishing a clearly delineated and fixed boundary between politics and administration highly problematical, if not impossible. Instead, the boundary is better described as a constructed and constantly changing space that provides a venue for continuing debates about administration, politics, and the interaction between them. Once again, following Mouffe’s reasoning, this debate serves an important purpose—it helps ensure that the governing discourse remains vibrant and democratic.

Let me now suggest how viewing the dichotomy through the lens of Mouffe’s theory might be useful in thinking about the public administration discourse. Mouffe (2009, p. 101) argues that the basic democratic design produced by agonistic pluralism is “the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity.” There is a sense in which the dichotomy fulfills this func- tion within the public administration community. It represents a common focal point for estab- lishing an ongoing debate over the question of whether or not politics and administration can be separated. Over a century of conversation about the issue would seem to indicate that an inability to resolve the dispute once and for all does not inhibit administrators from carrying out their assigned tasks. It would also seem to indicate that resolving the issue is perhaps not the point of the debate.

Another possibility is to interpret the dichotomy as a discursive invention useful for organizing an us/them structure based on value differences in the administration community. While the debate about the dichotomy is usually phrased in quasi-empirical terms—Can politics and administration be separated?—a close analysis reveals that more often the actual question is, Should politics and administration be separated? Since this question defies empirical resolution, the disagreement over it is largely animated by individual value differences. But as Hampshire (1978, p. 45) argues, value disagreements often reflect confrontations between “ways of life.” What the dichotomy defines, then, is two visions of the appropriate way of administrative life. One in which administrators are insulated from the “hurry and strife of politics” (Wilson, 1887, p. 209), and therefore free to pursue their tasks in a businesslike manner; and another in which administrators must remain attentive to politics, perhaps even participate in it.

FRONTIERS AND DICHOTOMIES 237

Once again, Mouffe’s reasoning suggests that the irresolvable character of the debate over the dichotomy serves important purposes in the administrative discourse. First, as all students of administration know, it is one of the key divides to be traversed in the process of developing their identity within the discipline. Second, and related, it helps keep the discipline inclusive in character. Third, it also helps prevent the discipline from becoming stagnant by providing a platform for ongoing self-reflection about the character of administrative life. In short, the benefits that agonistic liberalism brings to political life, Mouffe argues, are very similar to the benefits it brings to administrative life. In a curious way, this brings us to the recent exchange about the utility of values pluralism in the practice of administration.

VALUES PLURALISM AND ADMINISTRATION

The pages of Administration & Society recently offered a stage for a spirited exchange on the relevance of values pluralism for public administration. Overeem and Verhoef (2014) fired the opening salvo with their criticism of the similar, albeit slightly different, defenses of values pluralism by Hendrick Wagenaar and Michael Spicer, both of whom offered responses to the criticism (Spicer, 2014; Wagenaar, 2014). Though several issues were raised in the exchange, I want to concentrate on only one of them. Overeem and Verhoef (2014, pp. 1000–1002) con- tended that values pluralism “is primarily a notion in meta-ethics, not in political philosophy” as a footing to challenge Wagenaar’s and Spicer’s contention that values pluralism necessarily leads to liberalism.

I think the argument I have developed in this article might give us another way to think about the possible connection between values pluralism and liberalism. A word of clarification is necessary before embarking on my final comments. It could be that Overeem and Verhoef are correct in a strictly theoretical, and/or perhaps European, context. It also could be that their position is not as accurate in terms of the American political experience. The following comments, then, apply only to American political life.

As might be noticed, one of the players I invited to my discursive table seems to have dis- appeared: Frederick Jackson Turner. However, his theory becomes quite relevant at this point in the discussion. Once again, his thesis proposed that a kind of liberalism developed in America not as a choice among competing ideological postures, but as a result of practical conditions encountered on the physical frontier. Building loosely on Turner’s thesis, Louis Hartz (1955, p. 11) argued that liberalism was so deeply embedded in the American experience that it did not appear to be an ideology, it was “the American Way of Life.” And without reference to either Turner or Hartz, Foucault (2008, p. 218) offered a similar observation: “Liberalism in America is a whole way of being and thinking.”

More to the point, Wilson described the American political habit in terms of liberalism and values pluralism. Habit is a complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, it denotes a noncon- scious behavior that often appears almost instinctual. On the other hand, it is learned behavior, and therefore susceptible to change. Wilson, in turn, believed that changes in social conditions combined with assertive political leadership held promise for changing the American political habit (Cawley, 1998; Cook, 2007). Suffice it to say, the change he, and other reformers, advo- cated was to deemphasize values pluralism in favor of value monism. Although progressive reform efforts during the first half of the twentieth century did not eliminate values pluralism

238 CAWLEY

from the American political habit, they did succeed in relegating it to a more or less recessive position in our political discourse.

Conditions in the second half of the twentieth century presented a need to rethink the American political habit. The Nazi regime in Germany and the Soviet Union provided graphic evidence of the dangers associated with value monism. A primary response was to revisit the liberal foundation of the American governing system, emphasizing its roots in interest-group competition and political pluralism. Yet, as conflicts escalated, it began to look very much as if values pluralism offered a better picture than political pluralism. For example, while the civil rights movement can be described in political-pluralism terms, its ultimate, and largely successful, goal was to challenge established social standards and practices. This goal, in turn, seems better classified under the rubric of agonistic liberalism.

Despite the fact that he did not use the term, I think Samuel Huntington’s (1975) depiction of the 1960s political landscape also implies a reappearance of something very much like agonistic liberalism. It was an era of “dramatic renewal of the democratic spirit in America” animated by “the challenging of the authority of established political, social, and economic institutions” (p. 59). He identified one consequence of this activity as “democratic distemper, involving the expansion of governmental activity, on the one hand, and the reduction of government authority, on the other” (p. 102). For Huntington, of course, democratic distemper posed a troublesome development for the continued viability of the U.S. governing system. However, I want to take Huntington’s concept in a different interpretational direction—one loosely grounded in Mouffe’s theory.

If we interpret the second half of the twentieth century as a revival of agonistic liberalism, then it could be read as having a beneficial consequence for administration, at least initially. After all, the expanded government activity in Huntington’s formulation was largely the growth of the bureaucracy. This growth, moreover, fits the Bluntschli/Wilson definition of administra- tion’s role in the dichotomy—implementing the social order determined by politics. At the same time, opponents of the revised social order neither conceded defeat nor disappeared. Instead, they interpreted the project of developing the bureaucratic infrastructure needed for the new social order as creating a frontier in which they could conduct boundary skirmishes. An interpretation more or less in line with Bluntschli’s assertion that administrative issues either are or can become political issues (Overeem, 2012, p. 46). With hindsight, it is now clear that opponents were also exploiting the political in an attempt to mobilize support for reopening the broader conflicts.

The election of Ronald Reagan is widely recognized as the event marking the return of those conflicts. Equally important, the (in)famous line from his first inaugural address—“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”— expresses the central theme of the turmoil in our governing process from the 1980s to the current so-called Tea Party movement. I have argued elsewhere that assessing this conflict as only an outburst of antigovernment sentiment is a misdiagnosis of the situation (Cawley, 2013). Rephrasing my position in terms of the reasoning developed in this article, the underlying com- plaint animating the conflict of the last three decades is not big government per se, but rather the established social order that supports it. From this perspective, then, the political turmoil gives us another example of revitalized agonistic liberalism. But in this case, the practical consequence for administration has been the opposite of the earlier part of the twentieth century—a reduction in bureaucracy. And this brings us back to the exchange with which I began this section.

FRONTIERS AND DICHOTOMIES 239

In a sense, my conclusion is similar to Overeem and Verhoef’s (2014). They write:

[Values pluralism] can in its less metaphysical meaning, also alert us to the pervasiveness and stickiness of value conflict in social and administrative life. But it does not, by itself, state that our moral situation is problematical, let alone suggest remedies for it. (p. 1005)

Where I would differ from their assessment is in terms of the subject of this symposium— neutrality. To put it a bit playfully, a political arena in which the combination of values pluralism and liberalism are understood to be a “way of life,” not a self-conscious ideological choice, has little neutral space. Instead, the basic rule of the game is either pick a side or one will be assigned to you.

As my brief, and very impressionistic, summary of twentieth-century political history sug- gests, failure to acknowledge this rule carries the potential to make situations rather problem- atical for administrators. The expansion and reduction of bureaucracy has less to do with the way administrators carry out their assigned duties than with administration’s being assigned the role of symbol for a certain social order in a broader conflict about the appropriateness of that order. In saying this, I don’t want to be interpreted as issuing a call for administrators to abandon neutrality and become proactively engaged in political conflicts.

To the contrary, my intent is to offer an alternative diagnosis regarding the current state of affairs. The aspects of Mouffe’s theory I have emphasized here lead, I think, to three proposi- tions. First, to assume that neutrality can, or even should, be the guiding principle of adminis- tration runs the risk of ignoring the fact that administration is always connected to a given social order. Second, and related, recognizing the politics/administration dichotomy as constructing a frontier for ongoing boundary disputes helps explain why efforts to make administrative prac- tices more efficient, effective, and/or inclusive often seem unappreciated. Third, and perhaps most difficult, viewing critics of administration as adversaries may be a better, or at least more practical, approach than viewing them as antagonists. After all, in a value pluralistic, liberal political arena, “enemies” are seldom defeated or eliminated.

REFERENCES

Billington, R. A. (1973). Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, scholar, teacher. New York: Oxford University Press. Cawley, R. M. (1998). We may help to make up the general mind: Reuniting Wilson, Taylor, and Pinchot.

Administrative Theory & Praxis, 20, 55–67. Cawley, R. M. (2013). On ideographs, individuals, and freedom: Henry David Thoreau meets F. A. Hayek.

Administrative Theory & Praxis, 35, 335–355. doi:10.2753/atp1084-1806350301 Cook, B. J. (1996). Bureaucracy and self-government: Reconsidering the role of public administration in American

politics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cook, B. J. (2007). Democracy and administration: Woodrow Wilson’s ideas and the challenges of public management.

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hampshire, S. (1978). Public and private morality. In S. Hampshire (Ed.), Public and private morality (pp. 23–53).

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hampshire, S. (2000). Justice is conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hartz, L. (1955). The liberal tradition in America. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Hays, S. P. (1959/1999). Conservation and the gospel of efficiency: The progressive conservation movement,

1890–1920. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

240 CAWLEY

Huntington, S. P. (1975). The United States. In M. Crozier, S. P. Huntington, & J. Watanuki (Eds.), The crisis of democracy (pp. 59–118). New York: New York University Press.

Kingdon, J. W. (2011). Agendas, alternatives, and public policies (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Longman. Mouffe, C. (2005). The return of the political. London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2009). The democratic paradox. London: Verso. Overeem, P. (2012). The politics-administration dichotomy: Toward a constitutional perspective. Boca Raton, FL: CRC

Press. Overeem, P., & Verhoef, J. (2014). Moral dilemmas, theoretical confusion: Value pluralism and its supposed implica-

tions for public administration. Administration & Society, 46, 986–1009. doi:10.1177/0095399713519096 Pinchot, G. (1947/1974). Breaking new ground. Washington, DC: Island Press. Spicer, M. W. (2014). In defense of value pluralism in public administration. Administration & Society, 46, 1010–1019.

doi:10.1177/0095399714550855 Stone, D. (2012). Policy paradox: The art of political decision making. New York: Norton. Turner, F. J. (1893/1921). The significance of the frontier in American history. In F. J. Turner (Ed.), The frontier in

American history (pp. 1–38). New York: Henry Holt. Turner, F. J. (1896/1921). The problem of the West. In F. J. Turner (Ed.), The frontier in American history (pp. 205–221).

New York: Henry Holt. Turner, F. J. (1910/1921). Social forces in American history. In F. J. Turner (Ed.), The frontier in American history

(pp. 311–334). New York: Henry Holt. Wagenaar, H. (2014). The necessity of value pluralism in administrative practice: A reply to Overeem. Administration

& Society, 46, 1020–1028. doi:10.1177/0095399714550856 White, L. D. (1958). The republican era, 1869–1901. New York: Macmillan. Wiebe, R. H. (1967). The search for order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill & Wang. Wilson, W. (1887). The study of administration. Political Science Quarterly, 11, 197–222. doi:10.2307/2139277

R. McGreggor Cawley ([email protected]) is a professor of public administration in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wyoming.

FRONTIERS AND DICHOTOMIES 241

Copyright of Administrative Theory & Praxis (M.E. Sharpe) is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.