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You are invited to the Political Science Department’s William V. Shannon ’47, LITT.D ’64 Spring 2022 Lecture, Thursday, March 24, at 12 Noon, Jefferson 133. Our Speaker will be Brian J. Cook, Professor Emeritus of Public Administration and Policy in the School of Public and International Affairs in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech. He has made significant contributions to the field of public administration and constitutionalism through his work on public administration in American political development and the politics of public policy design and implementation.
Prior to joining the faculty at Virginia Tech in 2010, Cook taught for over twenty years in the Political Science Department at Clark University. He is the author of numerous books, including Democracy and Administration: Woodrow Wilson’s Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management and Bureaucracy and Self-government: Reconsidering the Role of Public administration in American Politics.
His talk will be on his most recent book, The Fourth Branch: Reconstructing the Administrative State for the Commercial Republic, which considers the accumulating derangements in the American constitutional system, how the administrative state has contributed to these problems, how it has been a key force in addressing the troubles, and how it can be reformed to serve the system better. Cook offers a new theory of regime design and a comprehensive account of the historical development of successive political economies and administrative states in the United States and provides the normative grounding for more far-reaching constitutional change. Cook calls for a decisive, pattern-breaking constitutional redesign to accommodate a fourth branch, an administrative branch.
The talk is free and open to the public.
