Russell Muirhead serves as the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College and is Co-Director and Founder of Dartmouth’s Political Economy Project.  Earlier in his career, he held faculty positions at Williams, Harvard, and the University of Texas.  He also has served as a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives since 2020.

 

Just weeks before the 2024 presidential election, the Princeton University Press published Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos, which was co-authored by Professor Muirhead and Professor Nancy L. Rosenblum, the Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Governance Emerita at Harvard.  In the preface to their book, the authors stated, “We were drawn to this project because of our appreciation for the vital work of public administration.  We call the willful destruction of state capacity ungoverning.  We name it, diagnose it, spell out how it works and what it portends, and recommend what needs to be done.”

 

Their preface also contained the following warning, “Defeating ungoverning is more than the work of one election.  It will require rehabilitating the administrative state in the minds of citizens.  It will require re-creating a partisanship that contests rival approaches to governing rather than a partisanship that contests whether government should have the capacity to govern.  And it will require a nation that is alert to the peril of personal rule.”

 

Sponsored by:  The Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law & Public Policy, Institute of Politics