Comments on Theory and History, Structure and Agency

Any comment on Professor Skowronek's response courts the dangers of useless repetition sometimes illustrated in other journals. However, my comments can be brief, given the nature of Professor Skowronek's thoughtful response. Much of that response revisits and summarizes the original intents behind Politics (Skowronek 1993), a project hardly requiring further comment from me. The way issues are formulated, though, can obscure rather than clarify some of our interpretive differences. For example, that I cite examples from Politics itself, of presidents seeming to act against the situation typologically indicated, is related to the larger point of whether these instances should be seen as signs of a more fluid and open "political time" (my view) or as cases that, for Professor Skowronek, "(defy) a logic outlined in the typology" but also "may be read as exceptions in support of the more general rules I have posited" (p. 49). That Politics also notes a president's own struggles in political time should be understood in terms of the extent to which these actions occur within given "rules" or signal uncertainty about such rules--as in the now "preemptive" Clinton, who only a short time ago sought his "reconstructive" moment with national health insurance. And that multiple historical instances are cited by myself is not intended merely to show that Poetics does not tell the "whole story" but as evidence of how framing particular choices by a theory of time can obscure the perspectives of specific presidents as they made their choices. Aside from the framing of issues, I wish also to respond briefly to what I take to be the core argument. The response expresses uncertainty about the nature of the original criticism as combined (somewhat paradoxically) with certainty that Politics does what I argue it does not do. In probing the nature of my critique, it does not seem helpful simply to ask, as in the response, whether one sees the same broad patterns of varied presidential impacts that Politics notes and tries to explain. The issue is not whether there are any observable "regularities" in the presidency but whether Politics adequately explains a given pattern. To restate what is more fully developed elsewhere, the questions raised were whether the condition of "the regime" (one of the most basic variables shaping political time) was as consistently known to presidents as to retrospective analysts, whether regime states were less determinative than contested, whether the dichotomous state of that regime as either "vulnerable" or "resilient" matches the complexity of shifting circumstance and frequently divided government, whether presidents themselves can shape their own regime much more than Politics allows, and whether specific historical accounts were not just incomplete but partial in a way reinforcing the concerns listed. Given this discussion, I saw Politics as much too deterministic in its analysis. It is at this point that I find Professor Skowronek's response most puzzling. If I understand correctly, his view is that the situational determinism discussed in the critique does not occur in Politics and that his work "endorses much of the view" in my article. To assess a difference this basic, one probably needs to read Politicsm full (and here Professor Skowronek and I approach consensus), but the exact nature of my original perspective is also pertinent. …