America's Unwritten Constitution: Science, Religion, and Political Responsibility

Abstract

Don K. Price seeks the cause of the nation s inability to develop coherent policies and manage consistent programs and finds it in American attitudes toward authority. This country s managerial disarray can be traced to religious and philosophical roots of our informal system of government and its development. Price shows how a native American skepticism toward all establishments, combined with a belief in the role of science as advancing progress, has given us a moralistic, reformist view of government that rejects compromise even for the sake of coherence and continuity. This is unlike the experience of Great Britain and Canada, which he relates in a series of incisive comparisons.