Debating American State: Liberal Anxieties and New Leviathan, 1930-1970. By Anne M. Kornhauser. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 323 pp. $59.95 cloth.The rise of modern day administrative is profound achievement that caused considerable anxiety among liberals who set out to reconcile bureaucratic expansion with American democracy. In Debating American State, Anne M. Kornhauser argues that war mobilization and economic conditions that gave rise to administrative made these tensions even more apparent because expansion of occurred without first forming justification that would confront effects of bureaucracy on democracy, legality, and individual autonomy (p. 225). As bureaucratization accelerated, American social scientists, German e^migre^ legal academics, and moral philosopher John Rawls began generating a principled 'legitimating theory' for administrative state (p. 2). Despite their efforts, was never endowed with principled rationale by liberals who supported it, (p. 3) which may explain persistent liberal critique of administrative and exploitation of its contradictions by powerful conservative movements (p. 222).Kornhauser follows her argument with carefully narrated portrayal of contemporary American thinkers and German e^migr^e legal intellectuals struggling to strengthen statist liberalism during growth of administrative state. The key actors are scholars like Pendleton Herring who discovered that group pluralism might avoid newfound problems like agency capture by steering agencies toward standards like interest. As nation mobilized for war against Nazism, however, these scholars shifted their focus to guard[ing] against totalitarian tendencies, (p. 75) by curbing administrative discretion. In backdrop of totalitarianism, scholars worried that malefactors would seize on vague standard like the public interest in an effort to aggrandize power. In turn, legal reforms like Administrative Procedures Act were passed to constrain power, while sociological critique emerged from scholars like Philip Selznick who delivered damaging takedown of Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) program, an exemplar of administrative state. Troubled by possibility of TVA-style bureaucracies [having] autonomous properties that enabled them to govern quite apart from other branches, (p. 84) scholars embarked on reconciling administrative with American democracy by advancing reforms like representative bureaucracy, which continue to find contemporary support.War mobilization also meant that renewed questions were raised about constitutional democracy during times of emergency. Liberal critics could not ignore that highly bureaucratized and centralized arrangements through which Nazi regime claimed to exercise lawful power resembled same administrative arrangements that were created by Americans to mobilize for war. Kornhauser argues that German ^emigre^ intellectuals used their experience under Weimar Republic to reinvigorate debate over administrative and, consequently, brought fresh perspective to threats to constitutional democracy by administrative hegemony (p. 14). For different reasons, diverse scholars such as Friedrich von Hayek and Franz Neumann began theoriz[ing] concept of rule of law under duress (p. 94) that placed formal constraints on power and advanced an ethical dimension of rule of law ideal by emphasizing generality, fairness, and rationality-characteristics that promoted individual freedom and equality. …