The age of the amateur in politics is over according to Dean Acheson. Up until the eighteenth century it was possible, owing to the nature and development of the arts and sciences, for a gifted amateur to hold his own with the experts in many fields, but in the twentieth century the amateur is no longer capable of mastering more highly specialized fields of knowledge. The expansion of knowledge has been so great that no amateur can hope to vie in competence with an expert in a given field. This point of view, while somewhat general and a priori, would arouse little opposition among philosophers and historians of ideas. Congress, according to Acheson, is composed primarily of amateurs, and collectively, it represents the point of view of the untrained and unspecialized. It is an eighteenth-century conception which has survived into the twentieth. If we make Acheson's argument explicit—which he diplomatically declines to do—we get the following: amateurs are not competent to formulate public policy under modern conditions. Congress is a collection of amateurs. Therefore, it follows, that Congress is not competent to formulate public policy. The executive branch, on the other hand, attracts the specialist, depends upon him, and uses him extensively. Congress, because of its situation, that is, its deficiency in specialized knowledge and because of its position as a competing power with the executive, is constantly trying to frustrate the executive. A fundamental problem for American democracy, according to Acheson, is to discover which tasks are suitable for the experts (the executive) and which for the amateurs (Congress) and to facilitate the appropriate performance of each accordingly.