Separation of powers was an idea accepted by all sides in the American founding, though its precise meaning remained unclear--at least until its famous exposition in the Federalist, the defense of the Constitution written by "Publius," the pen name of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The aim of such republicans as John Milton and Philip Hunton was to establish the rule of law by guaranteeing that those who made the law could not execute it and that those who executed it could not make it for the sake of their private advantage. In effect, of course, the doctrine was anti-monarchical, inasmuch as it reduced the King to the status of an "executive" (that is, someone who carries out the will of another).[1]
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The administrative state was born to replace an outmoded constitution with a new one, organized around a powerful centralized government retaining, at most, only the independent judiciary as a holdover from a principled separation of powers. The new government would feature a closely integrated executive and legislative, dominated in partisan matters by a President who could influence Congress through his leadership of public opinion, and dominated on the administrative side by a Congress whose committees could control the executive agencies. On many levels, this is a description of American national government today. From the Framers' point of view, this picture represents a critical breakdown in the separation of powers. From the viewpoint of Woodrow Wilson and the advocates of the administrative state, it represents a stupendous breakthrough for enlightened political theory and practice.
The Constitution defended in the Federalist presumed that in order to be respectable, republican government had to be good government. It had, that is, to secure private rights and the public good, rather than simply obey the majority's will. Furthermore, it presumed that man, as a creature of passions as well as reason, would often act rashly and unjustly if he were not taught or habituated to respect the moral law superior to his own will, the law embodied in the Constitution.
But the Progressive architects of the new order assumed that history itself would guarantee the victory of reason in politics. Granted, this victory would not be direct but dialectical, employing men's passions as the vehicle by which reason would progress. Actually, however, the doctrine encouraged the belief that in political life there is no compelling need for self-restraint, for the moderation of political passions, for the accommodation of prejudices to reason. Practically speaking, no respect is owed to anything except the future--that became the new meaning of idealism, in whose name leaders and experts of all sorts were (in effect) to claim the right to rule ordinary citizens.
The success of the politics of progress was, on its own terms, the token of reason's ascendancy over passion. Man seemed, so to speak, to be reducing the distance between himself and God, as his reason worked itself out in the life of the administrative state. This is a strange, impious justification for bureaucratic rule, but perhaps, in the final analysis, it is the only compelling one.
