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STEPHEN S9OWRONEK, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from ]ohn Adams to George Busk (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 1993), 526 pp.
$29.95 hardcover (ISBN 0-674-68935-6).
This book is not for the faint-hearted. It is long, dense, and complex. Moreover the prose defies both brevity and simplicity; indeed, in the theoretical chapters particularly it is both turgid and arcane.
Thus forewarnd, take the plunge nevertheless. The reward for this considerable effort will be an important lesson in the complexity of presidential leadership.
Skowronek signals his seminal work by taking on his predecessors-including some of political science's most venerated preachers. Wrhile praising Richard Neustadt for "raising the study of leadership efforts above the idiosyncrssies of the case at hand," he nevertheless goes on to charge that Neustadt's scheme imposes "severe limits on the analysis ofleadership" (p. 5). Similarly, Theodore Lowi is faulted for extracting the Reagan presidency from the historical context within which it was embedded and thus concluding - erroneously in Skowronek's view - that the Reagan years were just another example of the "new 'plebiscitary' politics" (p. 410).
Above all, Skowronek is an historian of presidential leadership. While he is of course...