Alexander Hamilton's Public Administration

Alexander Hamilton's influence and legacy are experiencing a well-deserved revision by historians. Richard T. Green's Alexander Hamilton's Public Administration contributes to this reevaluation by focusing on Hamilton as the early republic's top administrator, and by situating Hamilton's theory on public administration within his more well-known political theory. Public administrators can easily be overlooked as nonpolitical, wonkish bureaucrats working for and with executive power (but without the glamor and attention attached to the presidency) to quietly make institutional policy behind the scenes (but without the constitutional gravitas of formal legislative power). But Hamilton as public administrator cannot be dismissed as such, as Green convincingly demonstrates, because he infused vitality, a political agenda, discretion, policy making, and moral responsibility into the important, constitutionally required work of public administration. Green's book devotes four chapters to the conceptual framework for Hamilton's administrative theory, including the five principles of republicanism that influence good administration, the energetic executive's duty to share administrative responsibility with its coequal branches, the jurisprudence of administration, and the responsibilities and obligations that accompany good public administration. The book concludes with two chapters detailing Hamiltonian political economy and military/foreign affairs policy but with a focus on how Hamilton administered (or sought to administer) it. Because Green situates Hamilton's administrative theory comfortably within his political theory, each chapter covers at least some familiar ground

Administration (probate law · Administrative discretion · Discretion · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Presidency · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Law · Public Administration

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