(administrative science: "...a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable") (administrative cadre: "A corps of civil servants prepared by special schooling and drilled, after appointment, into a perfected organization, with appropriate hierarchy and characteristic discipline...serving with good behavior...meaning steady, hearty allegiance to the policy of government, a policy with no taint of officialism..")

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First Step Questions

Q     What does Wilson see as the proper relationship between the political evolution of American government, the American brand of constitutional and popular democracy and the creation of a science of administration?

Q     How does Wilson's view compare and contrast with Goodnow's 1900 discussion of the relationship between politics and administration? To Herring's argument about bureaucracy and organized interest groups in the mid l930's?

Q     How does Wilson's perception support or detract from Weber's view of a well organized bureaucracy and Taylor's view of the managing and outcome driven production?

Q     What would Wilson likely say to Mosher's view of the Executive in federal government and the relationship of collective bargaining to civil servants?

Q     What would Wilson have to say about Thompson's l980's view of the ethics of neutrality and the ethics of structure in administrative responsibility?

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Wilson Excerpts

• "It is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one." (12)
• "the poisonous atmosphere of city government, the crooked secrets of state administration, the confusion, sinecurism and corruption ever and again discovered in the bureaux at Washington forbids us to believe in any clear conception of what constitutes good government.....it is a foreign science....developed by French and German professors."(13)
• " Like a lusty child, government with us has expanded in nature and grown great in statute, but it has also grown awkward in movement. The vigor and increase of its life has been altogether out of proportion to its skill in living." (14)
• " Among those nations which entered upon a season of constitution making and popular reform before administration had received the impress of liberal principle, administrative improvement has been tardy and half done. Once a nation has embarked upon the business of manufacturing constitution, it finds it exceedingly difficult to close out that business and open a bureau of skilled, economical administration." (15)
• "It is harder for democracy to organize administration than for a monarchy. The very fact that we have realized popular rule in its fulness[sic] has made the task of organizing that rule just so much more difficult....the people cannot agree on something simple; advance must be made through compromise, by a compounding of differences by a trimming of plans and a suppression of too straightforward principles."(16)
• "Wherever regard for public opinion is a first principle of government, practical reform must be slow and all reform must be full of compromises" (17)
• Institutions which one generation regards as only makeshift approximation...the next generation honors as the closest approximation and the next worships as the principle itself" (17)
• A truth must become not only plain but commonplace...and to not act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences....to know the public mind of the United States one must not only know the older stock, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of negroes. "(17)
• " the object of administrative study is to rescue executive methods from the confusion and costliness of empirical experiment and set them upon the foundations laid deep in stable principle.....civil service reform is thus but a moral preparation for what is to follow....administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions." (18)
• "A clear view of the difference between the province of constitutional law and the province of administrative function leave no room for misconception. Public administration is detailed and systematic execution of public law. Every particular application of general law is an act of administration. The broad plans of governmental action are not administrative, the detailed execution of such plans is administrative."(19)
• "To discover the best principle for the distribution of authority is of greater importance. possibly , under a democratic system where officials serve many masters..administration must be fitted to conditions of clear cult responsibility to insure trustworthiness....the cook must be trusted with a large discretion of the fires and the ovens."(20)
• "large powers and unhampered discretion seem the indispensable conditions of responsibility. There is no danger in power, only if it is not irresponsible. If it is divided, it is obscured...but if it is centered in heads of the service and heads of the branches of the service it is easily watched and brought to book. "(20)
• "Our peculiar American difficulty in organizing administration is not the danger of losing liberty, but the danger of not being able or willing to separate its essentials from its accidents."(20)
• "It will be necessary to organize democracy by sending up to the competitive examinations for the civil service men definitely prepared for standing liberal tests as to technical knowledge. .bureaucracy can exist only where the whole service to the state is removed from the common political life of the people, its chiefs as well as its rank and file. (21)
• "Monarchies and democracies, radically different as they are in other respects, have in reality much the same business to look to.....we can borrow the science of administration with safety and profit only if we read all fundamental differences of condition into its essential tenet. We can never learn either our weaknesses or our virtues by comparing ourselves with ourselves. (22-23)
• [If} We study administration as a means of making what is democratically politic toward all administratively possible toward each...we can learn without error what foreign systems have to teach us."(23)
• "Our duty is to supply the best possible life to a federal organization, to systems within systems, to make town, city, county, state and federal governments live with a like strength and equally assured healthfulness."(24)