The Exhausted State: Lessons in the History of Administration

Have you ever asked yourself who invented the system of GRANTS? Do you know how accelerated depreciation came into being? And who killed federal housing programs? There is nothing more mesmerizing than the history of administration. This book is about how we became what we are. It looks back on an adminstrative era:

In the 1960s, many Western states adopted new and seemingly daring approaches to governance. Together with modernized social and political institutions, policymaking was to more effectively predict, monitor, and manage all manner of crises. U.S. president Johnson launched an ambitious domestic agenda targeting poverty and racial injustice called the Great Society, including what came to be known as the War on Poverty. Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as president marked another sea change. The new administration quickly moved to act on its rejection of large-scale, federally funded programs, especially in the social sphere, a strategy it termed »starving the beast«.
Ariane Leendertz’s major study focuses on an underlying and little-appreciated element of this critique of the state: the discourse on complexity. According to this discourse, the social world is far too complicated and unmanageable and state intervention will thus always result in unintended consequences and merely exacerbate the problems addressed. Belief in the state’s capacity to solve social problems, she asserts, has been eroding since the 1960s.  Leendertz offers a convincing analysis of the transformation of statehood and the connections between neoliberal theory and political practice.
Ariane Leendertz is a historian and currently a member of the research staff of the Historical Commission Munich. She was previously head of the Research Group on the Economization of the Social and the History of Complexity at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. (Text from the publishing house: https://www.hamburger-edition.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Hamburger_Edition/Foreign_rights/HamburgerEdition_ForeignRights_NewTitles_2022.2a.pdf ).

Frank Fabel, CPA, ACA, MA will review the book that exists so far only in German.

It seems as if the exhaustion of the state was also an exhaustation of concepts. But this book is full with original methodological ideas.