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Stephen Skowronek

The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, Revised Edition Paperback – March 25, 1997

by Stephen Skowronek (Author)

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Stephen Skowronek’s wholly innovative study demonstrates that presidents are persistent agents of change, continually disrupting and transforming the political landscape. In an afterword to this new edition, the author examines “third way” leadership as it has been practiced by Bill Clinton and others. These leaders are neither great repudiators nor orthodox innovators. They challenge received political categories, mix seemingly antithetical doctrines, and often take their opponents’ issues as their own.

Print length

576 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
Publication date

March 25, 1997
Dimensions

6.46 x 0.52 x 9.12 inches
ISBN-10

0674689372
ISBN-13

978-0674689374
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A magisterial work, one of the most important studies of the presidency--indeed, of American politics--ever written...[Skowronek] comes very close to identifying the root problem affecting presidents...This is the all-important fact that the Constitution is unchanging and nondeveloped, while at all times intersecting with a social, economic, and political world that has undergone incessant development from the beginning. The whole work may be read as an extended, powerful, and penetrating meditation on some of the global consequences of this fact.”―Walter Dean Burnham, American Political Science Review

“In evaluating the field of political authority, Skowronek skillfully and systematically makes use of historical evidence. His approach can only be applauded as it brings a new and broader understanding of the historical evolution of the presidency.”―Birgitte Nielsen, American Studies in Scandinavia

“Skowronek...brings illuminating insights to each president that he discusses...A major theoretical contribution to the study of the presidency.”―Richard M. Pious, Political Science Quarterly

“The book brings together current ideas of political scientists on the theory of presidential leadership, as well as incorporating the major historical works on the various presidents. It is history from the top rather than from the bottom, and while current historical trends are in the opposite direction, this sophisticated, scholarly analysis of presidential leadership illustrates that the history of political leadership is a subject on which innovative, imaginative approaches can still produce important new perspectives.”―Peter G. Boyle, The Americas

“Stephen Skowronek's much awaited book relating cycles of the US presidency to what the author has previously called "political time" is an instant conversation piece. The Politics Presidents Make is a book that will engage scholars of political leadership and, particularly, those of the US presidency with its categories and its arguments. It is also easy to imagine that this book will evoke theological debates.”―Bert A. Rockman, Governance

“A work of great insight...This is a book that kicks aside all the conventional ways of thinking about presidential leadership and erects a daring, powerful, analytic machine that compels attention.”―Hugh Heclo, George Mason University

“This is a remarkable book...A skilled practitioner of the use of historical evidence systematically to understand not only the evolution, but also the current nature, of American political institutions, [Skowronek] examines the whole crowded history of the presidency to catalog and organize the two hundred year experience in a fresh and striking fashion.”―Joel Silbey, Review of Politics

“In this pathbreaking work, Stephen Skowronek escapes from "secular time" to view presidents in what he calls "political time," meaning incumbents' relationships to their predecessors and to the status quo...This rich, insightful, resonant volume merits reading and rereading. It is destined to be a classic of presidential scholarship.”―Gil Troy, Journal of American History

About the Author

Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press; 2nd edition (March 25, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674689372
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674689374
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.66 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.46 x 0.52 x 9.12 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,095,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #87 in Public Administration
- #928 in General Elections & Political Process
- #4,295 in History & Theory of Politics

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4.7 30 ratings

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Virginia P.

Great read!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 14, 2022

Verified Purchase

My brother-in-law loves this book!!

Helpful

Deborah Sprenger

Excellent Addition to my Government Curriculum

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 7, 2017

Verified Purchase

I added this book to curriculum for a Government class group project on Models of the Presidency. It contrasts so clearly with the Barber model of the presidency, that I feel the method of analysis that Skowronek presents is most useful to students.

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Richard W. Thackeray Jr.

A great theory and a readable narrative

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 28, 2012

Verified Purchase

I first read this book for a class, and it quickly became a great bedside book. If you have an interest in American political history, this book is a must. Get it now and read it!

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Amazon Customer

Wrought with superfluous vocabulary

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 18, 2016

Verified Purchase

This was a book required for a PoliSci course. It is not an easy read. Wrought with superfluous vocabulary.

5 people found this helpful

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W.A.P. Thompson, Jr.

Transformative leadership

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 29, 2014

Verified Purchase

Skowronek's "leadership" is the best book I have studied on the Presidency for the concept of transformative leadership through an overview of the Presidents: Adams through Bush.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 28, 2013

Verified Purchase

This work is brilliant and is so incredibly detailed that after you read this, you will be predicting all the president next move!

One person found this helpful

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Stephen R. Shulman-Laniel

Wraps the first 42 presidents in a breathtaking arc

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 3, 2008

Among the many, many charms in this book is that it lives up to the standard that David Herbert Donald set for himself in his biography of Lincoln. This standard is one that, in turn, JFK had set for Donald and his historian brethren: '[Kennedy] voiced his deep dissatisfaction with the glib way the historians had rated some of his predecessors as "Below Average" and marked a few as "Failures." Thinking, no doubt, of how his own administration would look in the backward glance of history, he resented the whole process. With real feeling he said, "No one has a right to grade a President -- not even poor James Buchanan -- who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions."'

The Politics Presidents Make is a source book for the sort of historian that JFK would have loved to groom. From President Adams through the first George Bush, Stephen Skowronek studies the problems that defined each president's tenure, and finds himself deeply sympathetic to all of them. The trouble in John Quincy Adams's presidential tenure, for instance, is that he was essentially trying to hold together the old patrician order that the founding fathers had established, while a new era of party-centered politics was on its way in. It took Andrew Jackson -- the founder of the spoils system -- to midwife the partisan revolution.

Or take Herbert Hoover, the classic (to modern eyes) failed president. First of all, Skowronek reminds us, Hoover tried a lot of things before collapsing into inaction in the midst of the Depression; Skowronek says that modern historians have raised some doubts that the New Deal was very new at all (though he doesn't say this with much confidence). Hoover's big problem, says Skowronek, was that he tried to hold together the strains of his ideology even as he systematically violated its tenets: he came in believing in an American System uniquely combining the free-enterprise system with a limited government, then expanded the government's role little by little until his original beliefs were hardly recognizable. Yet he insisted that his policies weren't the least bit innovative, and that they still conformed to the American System. As Skowronek puts it, "Hoover himself would never accept the notion that his actions were opening the door to the displacement of the old order and thus he could never link his initiatives with the promise of constructing a new one."

The grand arc connecting every president, says Skowronek, is the relation they bear to the existing order, and how durable that order is. A president like Hoover, who's a defender of the existing vulnerable regime, is a "disjunctive" president. Hoover's successor, there to overthrow the vulnerable regime, is a "reconstructive" president. After the reconstructive presidents, we typically get a line of "articulating" presidents; after Roosevelt, these are presidents like Eisenhower and Johnson who rule at a time when the electorate supports the given order; they innovate atop what they're given. The president's relation to the existing order forms the basis for essentially the entire book. (Those drawing a little matrix at home will have noticed something missing from the reconstructive/articulating/disjunctive division: those presidents who oppose an existing order that the electorate supports. These presidents are few, and include men like Richard Nixon. They are a hard lot to categorize; Skowronek sets them to one side near the start of the book, basically never to return to them.)

We proceed from Thomas Jefferson, the first reconstructive president (overthrowing the Federalists), all the way through to the most recent disjunctive president (Jimmy Carter), then to the latest reconstructive president (Ronald Reagan), and one articulating president (George Bush). Skowronek has released another edition that extends the story to Bill Clinton; I have to imagine that Clinton counts as an articulating president, largely taking the New Deal as given except for the bits that Reagan had made distasteful (like welfare).

Reagan is an interesting case, exemplifying the trend to which Skowronek draws our eye: the revolutions are getting smaller. Skowronek says it's been this way almost from the start. Thomas Jefferson could basically reinvent the entire U.S. government. By the time we get to Andrew Jackson, he had banks to fight off. Lincoln had strong parties -- the fruits of Jackson's revolution -- to contend with. The New Deal was a big deal, but now FDR had to appease labor unions and corporations before he could get anywhere. And when Reagan tried to kill the New Deal, he couldn't slay the beast of Social Security. In fact he couldn't even come close. To use the term that Skowronek attaches: the institutions have thickened. The more power centers there are, the harder it is to push any one of them.

Skowronek pulls off a really neat trick in The Politics Presidents Make: lay out a political theory while telling each president's story grippingly. It's the most condensed biography imaginable of the first 41 presidents. You hardly need to read it as a work of theory; Skowronek's presidential typology works just as well as a narrative frame for 41 life stories.

Finally, it's not a small virtue in The Politics Presidents Make that it is copiously footnoted. I circled 27 references that look like winners.

I've not felt this sort of intellectual exhiliration in a long while. The Politics Presidents Make is one of the best books I've read this year.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kamran Khajavi-Nouri

Decent

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 30, 2000

I read this as part of a course (taught by the author himself) in my sophomore year of college. Skowronek is I think to be applauded for his historical approach to presidential politics, and for his style of writing: it seems more as if youre reading a story than a political science book. Time and time again, Skowronek comes back to his thesis and main themes (legitimacy and presidents ability to correctly understand and manipulate their historical moment. The book never loses focus as Skrownek discusses different presidents or as he tells stories about a particular president. And hes done his research really really well. In particular his use of presidential quotes is very very impressive. Numerous times he gives examples of Presidents who attempt to build political legitimacy using words that fit very well into Skowronek's conceptual framework ("preserving foundations", recovering old sacred truths, continuing work that has already begun). The problem with Skowronek's book is that I think, given the sort of analysis hes doing here, its not very naunced. Im sure for example, articulation presidents often distanced themselves from their predecesors in some form or another. Some may not have a problem with this: after all S. is trying to prove his point and prove it well. However I thought at times that the book could have been more nauanced. Just my thoughts....OHH BUY THE BOOK!

9 people found this helpful

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