Law Professors against “Tyrannophobia”

Over at the American Conservative, I have a review of Eric Posner and Adrian Vermuele’s new book Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. Funny enough, the working title for my book on presidential power was “Executive Unbound,” but P&V have a very different take on the dangers of concentrating power in the executive (they coin the term “tyrannophobia,” for irrational fear of executive abuse).


From the review’s intro:

The New York Times book editors assigned their review to the Straussian political philosopher Harvey Mansfield, the self‐​styled expert on “manliness” who’s as rabid a supporter of the imperial presidency as you’re likely to find. In the late Bush era, Mansfield wrote a 3,000-word Wall Street Journal op‐​ed, “The Case for the Strong Executive,” arguing that defects in the rule of law ‘‘suggest the need for one‐​man rule.”


Yet even Mansfield blanched at Executive Unbound’s case for unbridled presidential power. He began his review by noting indignantly, “Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, law professors at Chicago and Harvard, respectively, offer with somewhat alarming confidence the ‘Weimar and Nazi jurist’ Carl Schmitt as their candidate to succeed James Madison for the honor of theorist of the Constitution.”


Gott im Himmel! A book that embraces a leading “Nazi jurist,” applauds the American presidency’s liberation from law, and is apparently hardcore enough to scare manly Harvey Mansfield? What sort of work is Executive Unbound? A Satanic Bible for worshippers of the strong presidency? The black‐​metal version of John Yoo?


As I dug into the book — while Tomahawk missiles rained down on Libya in yet another unauthorized presidential war — that’s what I was expecting. But Posner and Vermuele have produced something very different and, quite to my surprise, I liked it.

You can read the rest here.