ABSTRACT
Larry B. Hill recently outlined in a journal an agenda for a research program using a "bureaucratic-centered image of governance." Its focus, he suggested, must concern the role of bureaucratic power in the American governance process. The essential classicism of the founders' thought lies in their conception of liberty and the difficulties involved in preserving it. People consider the fragile nature of liberty first, and then they give a more detailed consideration to how bureaucracy entailed the substance of the threat to liberty. Bureaucracy also posed a second, indirect hazard through its potential for disturbing the always-fragile checks and balances essential to the preservation of political liberty. The Whig pamphleteers developed three alternative hypotheses about who actually wields the power of the administrative branch against the peoples' liberties. With the success of the revolution, the new nation was no longer subject to the whims of ministers who had the ear of a pliant king.
