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The Study of Administration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Marshall E. Dimock
Marshall E. Dimock
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

It is now fifty years since Woodrow Wilson wrote his brilliant essay on public administration. It is a good essay to reread every so often; there is so much in it that sounds modern, so much that will hold permanently true. “It is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one.” Was this said only yesterday? No, Woodrow Wilson clearly saw the importance of governmental administration half a century ago. “Administration is the most obvious part of government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of government, and is of course as old as government itself.” Yet democracies have badly neglected administrative principles and structural improvements. “Like a lusty child, government with us has expanded in nature and grown great in stature, but has also become awkward in movement. … English and American political history has been a history, not of administrative development, but of legislative oversight—not of progress in governmental organization, but of advance in law-making and political criticism. … We go on criticising when we ought to be creating.”

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , February 1937 , pp. 28 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1937

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References

1 Wilson, Woodrow, “The Study of Administration,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 2 (June, 1887), pp. 197–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 203ff.

3 Ibid., p. 207.

4 Ibid., p. 210.

5 It is significant that instead of qualifying the term with “public” or “governmental,” Woodrow Wilson wrote merely about administration.

6 “The realm of political science is, or lies within, the realm of social associations or administrative organizations,” points out Dr. Means. Public administration, as viewed by Woodrow Wilson or Gardiner Means, constitutes the bulk of government—its very essence. See Means' article, “The Distribution of Control and Responsibility in a Modern Economy,” in a symposium edited by Lippincott, Benjamin E., Government Control of the Economic Order (Minneapolis, 1935), pp. 1–17Google Scholar.

7 In the “Conclusion” to the symposium cited, p. 118.

8 Wilson, op. cit., pp. 209–210.

9 Ibid., p. 211.

10 There needs to be a closer working relationship between public law and public administration. I cannot agree with Woodrow Wilson that the distinction between constitutional and administrative questions is that “between those governmental adjustments which are essential to constitutional principle and those which are merely instrumental to the possibly changing purposes of a wisely adapting convenience.” Basic design controls, and unless altered will rob administration of its vitality for social accomplishment.

11 Ibid., p. 210.

12 “An individual sovereign will adopt a simple plan and carry it out directly: he will have but one opinion, and he will embody that one opinion in one command. But this other sovereign, the people, will have a score of differing opinions. They can agree upon nothing simple: advance must be made through compromise, by a compounding of differences, by a trimming of plans and a suppression of too straight-forward principles. There will be a succession of resolves running through a course of years, a dropping fire of commands running through a whole gamut of modifications.” Woodrow Wilson, ibid., p. 207.

13 Ibid., pp. 213–214.

14 Ibid., p. 217.

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