Preliminary Thoughts on Reading American Governance Symbolically

Are there fundamental, enduring ethical values within which contemporary American public administrators operate and by which the nation is governed? This commentary suggests a different way of seeing--or conceptualizing--American governance in the twenty-first century by proposing that our secular state is profoundly shaped and sustained by hidden patterns of sacred myth, ritual, and symbols rooted in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Unlike Louis Hartz, Samuel P. Huntington, Richard Hofstadter, and others who have stressed the continuity of Lockean values throughout American history, this article offers a specific symbolic reading of U.S. constitutional and administrative state documents. By viewing these founding sources as religious symbols, it is argued, we may begin to appreciate historical value connections between yesterday and tomorrow, especially how today's statecraft continues to manifest itself as a unique style of religious reform-craft unlike that found in any other modern nation

Corporate governance · Craft · Management · Mythology · Political science · Protestantism · Sociology · Yesterday · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Religion and Society Interactions

• Building a New American State

  Open Access•Stephen Skowronek•Building a New American State•1982

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• "Bureaucracy" in the Introductory American Government Textbook

  Beverly A Cigler, Heidi L Neiswender•Public Administration Review•1991

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