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To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2008.00733.x Byline: RICHARD J. STILLMAN (1) Author Affiliation: (1)Richard Stillman is Professor of Public Administration at the University of Colorado Denver and Editor in Chief of Public Administration Review.

Is the Public Administration Review still necessary? Some think that PAR, which debuted in 1940 as America's first and only generalist scholarly public administration journal, belongs to a bygone era of two-cent postage stampsua time of coal furnaces, steam radiators, and wood-burning stoves, when language was crafted longhand or by manual typewriter; when a slide rule calculated most math problems; when a long-distance telephone call was rare and expensive; when the entire Army, Navy, and State departments were housed within a single building in Washington, DC, the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House; when President Franklin D. Roosevelt communicated to Americans through fireside chats; and when many in the United States still worried about keeping their jobs in the aftermath of the Great Depression, fiercely favoring isolationism over foreign entanglements and strict racial segregation throughout the South.

The United States is commonly referred to as the last global superpower, exercising unrivalled political, economic, military and social influence. Yet, paradoxically, unlike any other nation, Americans were--and remain--radically antistatist. Until roughly the twentieth century the United States did not want, need, nor create a powerful administrative state to govern itself, let alone others abroad. This essay explores that peculiar paradox, namely how Americans govern as the last global superpower today, yet retain an inherently fierce hostility to government. The thesis that is developed argues that it is a deep-rooted reformist faith which ultimately shapes US statecraft as a unique style of reformcraft, with both benign and not-so-benign consequences.