Extract
Put the politics back into political science.
"I remember all these mathematical formulas," Robert Caro recalls of his coursework as a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University. "Equations. Equations. They kept getting longer and longer. All of a sudden I looked at my notebook and said, 'This is all wrong. This isn't how highways get built.'"
Caro is explaining how he came to write The Power Broker, his penetrating study of Robert Moses, the former New York City highway czar who drew much of the map for that metropolis. Previously a reporter at Newsday, Caro knew how highways got build; it was when Robert Moses wanted them built. His decision to tell the story resulted in a prize-winning account of the interaction between an individual and institutional power: how a wily and single-minded administrator, never elected to public office, came to tower over his supposed superiors who were elected. Caro says he never intended to be a biographer. But, "the more textbooks I read on political science and urban and regional planning, the more I felt they didn't have any relationship whatsoever to the realities of how political decisions are made."...See the full content of this document
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