| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Presidency and Political Science: Two Hundred Years of Constitutional Debate. By Raymond Tatalovich and Thomas S. Engeman. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xvi, 268 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-7321-5. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8018-7322-3.)

Students of the U.S. presidency now have a thoughtful assessment of the various ways in which this constitutional office, its political capacities, and its personalities have been described and understood since 1787. In the first eight chapters, Raymond Tatalovich and Thomas S. Engeman construct an insightful and concise intellectual history of the American presidency by summarizing the written views of more than thirty-five political scientists, historians, and public officials. In two subsequent chapters, they offer an overview of presidential scholarship since the 1980s—a virtual who's who in this academic field. A final chapter returns to the six research questions that—at least to this reader—awkwardly frame the conclusions of each chapter, and the authors also briefly assess the possibility of a "full-blown theory of the presidency" (p. 225). Their history of the study of the presidency successfully organizes many disparate works into three major interpretative paradigms and what they see as a distinct and more complete contemporary scholarly consensus concerning the modern presidency.

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