Disciplining the State: Strategies of Defence 1947 and 1995 in the American Administrative State

The paper compares two snapshots in the history of the US administrative state: the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 and the regulatory reform efforts of the 104th Congress in the mid-1990s under the auspices of Newt Gingrich's 'Contract with America'. It argues that the earlier period's emphasis on constraining administration by external juridical institutions and logic is supplemented in the 1990s by an emphasis on cost-benefit analysis and bureaucratic self-regulation. The role of individual freedom as part of the justification for the strategies and mechanisms employed in each snapshot is relatively muted in the latter period: law becomes a strategic tool rather than a marker of freedom. But freedom persists as a talismanic image in the form of a search for 'freedom from risk' rather than 'freedom from government intervention'. Dignity and autonomy are thus reconfigured as safety and security.