44 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics
administration’s equivalents of the Guardians in Plato’s Republic. On the par-
ticularly American issues of the separation of powers and centralization versus
decentralization, Waldo argued that the preferences of administration scholar-
ship were equally clear: Administration scholars were hostile to the tripartite
partition of power in the American system and sought to increase the power of
the executive at the expense of the judiciary and the legislature. Th ey were also
in favor of a centralized state. Th ey placed their faith in the competence of a
professional administrator, who, given the requisite power and authority, could
tackle the obstacles standing before the realization of the good life.
If administration scholarship advanced such a distinct and defi nable political
philosophy (some might say ideology), it raised an immediate and formidable
intellectual obstacle to attempts at conceptually dividing politics and adminis-
tration: How could students of administration claim that politics was largely ex-
ternal to their interests when their intellectual history revealed such a systematic
value-based philosophy of government? Waldo pointed out that administration
is frequently claimed to be at the core of modern democratic government, and
that this claim helps justify the entire discipline of public administration. If this
claim has merit, it implies that democratic theory must deal with administration,
and that administrative theory must deal with democratic politics. As a practical
matter of explaining the operation and role of administration in government, not
to mention as a point of intellectual honesty, students of administration cannot
deal with the problems of politics by assuming them away.
Waldo argued that administrative scholarship’s failure to incorporate poli-
tics explicitly into its theoretical development was a product of its early cultural
and intellectual environment. While recognizing the impossibility of cleanly
dating the beginning of public administration scholarship as a self-conscious
body of thought, Waldo took as his starting point such writers as Woodrow
Wilson, Frank Goodnow, and Frederick W. Taylor, namely, infl uential man-
agement, administration, and organization theorists who wrote near the turn
of the twentieth century. Th e work of these scholars refl ected not only the dom-
inant cultural values of their time but also the contemporary problems in ad-
ministration they sought to address. Cultural values led them to accept science
as the surest path to knowledge and commerce as the central activity of society.
Th e central problems they sought to address consisted of an unappetizing stew
of ineffi ciency marinating in political cronyism and seasoned with graft.
One of the outcomes of these contextual forces was that, from the beginning,
students of administration adopted effi ciency as their guiding principle. Th e term
was vaguely defi ned, though “effi cient administration” clearly meant “good ad-
ministration.” When administration scholars operationalized the concept, they
mainly seemed to be talking about an input-output ratio, the most output for
the least input being the implied objective (Waldo 1948, 201–202). A “good”
decision or administrative act was thus one that maximized outputs for a given
set of inputs. As Waldo pointed out, this is a concept fundamental to businesses