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Twenty-Two The Deficit and the Public Interest

1. See James M. Buchanan and Richard E. Wagner, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Keynes (New York: Academic Press, 1977). [BACK]

2. Sheldon S. Wolin, "The New Public Philosophy," Democracy (October 1981), pp. 23-36. [BACK]

3. Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, 2d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). [BACK]

4. B. Jessop, The Capitalist State (London: Martin Robinson, 1982). [BACK]

5. Fred Block, "The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State," Socialist Revolution, Number 33, Vol. 7, No. 3 (May-June 1977), pp. 6-28; quote on pages 7-8. [BACK]

6. Where Marx emphasized the causal force of the substructure of society as the relations engineered by ownership of production, holding the superstructure of ideas to be determined by it, the capitalist vanguard theory has it at least partly in reverse. What, then, following up the parallel to the proletarian vanguard as the Communist party, would prevent the state apparatus from subordinating industrialists to their own purposes? [BACK]

7. Stephen L. Elkin, "Between Liberalism and Capitalism: An Introduction to the Democratic State," in Roger Benjamin and Stephen L. Elkin, eds., The Democratic State (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), p. 5. [BACK]

8. Block, "Ruling Class Does Not Rule," pp. 13-14. [BACK]

9. Ibid., pp. 23-24. See also Nicos Poulantzas on the relative autonomy of the state, arguing that the state cuts into the short-term economic advantages of business in order to secure its long-range political dominance. Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1974). [BACK]

10. See Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1969); and G. William Domhoff, "State Autonomy and the Privileged Position of Business: An Empirical Attack on a Theoretical Fantasy," Journal of Political and Military Sociology 14, no. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 149-62. [BACK]

11. See Block, "Ruling Class Does Not Rule"; and Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977). [BACK]

12. Jon Elster, "Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory: The Case for Methodological Individualism," Theory and Society 11, no. 4 (July 1982), pp. 453-82. [BACK]

13. Claus Offe, "The Capitalist State and the Problem of Policy Formation," in Leon N. Lindberg, Robert Alford, Colin Crouch, and Claus Offe, eds., Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973). [BACK]

14. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, "On the Road Toward a More Adequate Understanding of the State," in Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 347-66; quote on p. 354. [BACK]

15. In his The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975) James O'Conner argues that the government, unable to rely on the private sector create sufficient employment, subsidizes both worker and capital, thereby depleting its resources while providing insufficiently for each; he carries further the contention that the state has become the arena for class conflicts it cannot contain. Maybe. Just as (or more) likely, the expansion of resource mobilization into the furthest reaches of the population generates pressures to control state spending so as to alleviate taxation. Indeed, tax revolts skip a step by reducing revenue in order to place downward pressure on spending. [BACK]

16. Apparently the term "ungovernability" was coined by news commentator Eric Severeid in 1974. James Douglas, "Review Article: The Overloaded Crown," British Journal of Politics 6 (October 1976), pp. 483-505. [BACK]

17. Ibid., p. 493. [BACK]

18. Samuel Brittan, "The Economic Contradictions of Democracy," British Journal of Politics 5 (April 1975), pp. 129-59. [BACK]

19. Samuel P. Huntington, "Postindustrial Politics: How Benign Will It Be?" Comparative Politics 6, no. 2 (January 1974), p. 181. [BACK]

20. Douglas, "Overloaded Crown," p. 484. [BACK]

21. Quoted in Douglas, "Overloaded Crown," pp. 492-93. [BACK]

22. Huntington, "Postindustrial Politics," p. 177. [BACK]

23. Douglas, "Overloaded Crown," p. 494. [BACK]

24. Claus Offe, "New Social Movements as a Meta-Political Challenge," typescript, 1983, p. 4. [BACK]

25. Ibid., p. 4. [BACK]

26. Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: The Trilateral Commission and New York University Press, 1975). [BACK]

27. Huntington, "Postindustrial Politics," pp. 189-90ff. [BACK]

28. See Herb McClosky and John Zaller, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes toward Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). [BACK]

29. Earl Latham, The Group Basis of Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1952). [BACK]

30. Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); Raymond Bauer, Ithiel Poole, and Lewis Dexter, American Business and Public Policy (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine Atherton de Gruyter, 1972); Theodore Lowi, "The Welfare State and the State of Welfare," typescript, n.d.; James Q. Wilson, ed., The Politics of Regulation (New York: Basic Books, 1980). [BACK]

31. See Carolyn Webber and Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986). [BACK]

32. See Aaron Wildavsky, "The Three-Party System—1980 and After," The Public Interest, No. 64 (Summer 1981), pp. 47-57. [BACK]

33. For discussion of these categories, see Aaron Wildavsky, "Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation," American Political Science Review 81, no. 1 (March 1987), pp. 3-21; Michael Thompson and Aaron Wildavsky, "A Poverty of Distinction: From economic homogeneity to cultural heterogeneity in the classification of poor people," Policy Sciences 19 (1986), pp. 163-99; and Mary Douglas, "Cultural Bias," in Douglas, In the Active Voice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). [BACK]

34. David Truman, Governmental Process (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1951), all quotes from pp. 512-15. [BACK]

35. Ibid., pp. 506-7. The battle of the budget can be described only partly in his terms because his book is about preferences, not effectiveness. The whole "nonpolitical" side of our story, the economic crisis and the difficulty of response, requires different terms and questions than Truman provides. He could say, of course, that resource constraints must exacerbate group conflict. But that does not tell us what kind of governance is possible and therefore how much we can demand of our governors. The cognitive difficulties of policymaking and the relationship between the financial markets and the politicians cannot be discussed only as attitudes. They constitute constraints of systematic importance. These resource constraints serve, in effect, as objectives that must be met to secure system maintenance. We judge our representatives, as David Mayhew points out, by whether they represent our preferences; see Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974). But we judge our government by its effects; in evaluating our political system and explaining its gyrations, therefore, we have to ask what it can do, not just what it wants to do. [BACK]

36. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974). [BACK]

37. See C. E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977); and David Vogel, "Why Businessmen Distrust Their State," British Journal of Political Science 8 (January 1978), pp. 45-78, as sources of further argument and evidence. [BACK]

38. Lowi, End of Liberalism, chap. 2. [BACK]

39. Ibid., p. 50. [BACK]

40. Charles W. Anderson, "Political Design and the Representation of Interest," Comparative Political Studies 10, no. 1 (April 1977), p. 139. [BACK]

41. Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966), pp. 51-52. [BACK]

42. Lowi, End of Liberalism, pp. 50-51, 96-97. [BACK]

43. No one has ever put this better than John C. Calhoun in his Disquisition on Government (New York: Political Science Classics, 1947):

I have said—if it were possible for man to be so constituted, as to feel what affects others more strongly than what affects himself, or even as strongly—because, it may be well doubted, whether the stronger feeling or affection of individuals for themselves, combined with a feebler and subordinate feeling or affection for others, is not, in beings of limited reason and faculties, a constitution necessary to their preservation and existence. If reversed—if their feelings and affections were stronger for others than for themselves, or even as strong, the necessary result would seem to be, that all individuality would be lost; and boundless and remediless disorder and confusion would ensue. For each, at the same moment, intensely participating in all the conflicting emotions of those around him, would, of course, forget himself and all that concerned him immediately, in his officious intermeddling with the affairs of all others; which, from his limited reason and faculties, he could neither properly understand nor manage.... Government would be impossible; or, if it could by possibility exist, its object would be reversed. Selfishness would have to be encouraged and benevolence discouraged. Individuals would have to be encouraged, by rewards, to become more selfish, and deterred, by punishments, from being too benevolent; and this, too, by a government, administered by those who, on the supposition, would have the greatest aversion for selfishness and the highest admiration for benevolence.

To the Infinite Being, the Creator of all, belongs exclusively the care and superintendence of the whole. (pp. 5-6)


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