Architects of the Administrative State: Public Administration in the Twentieth Century

Abstract This article shows how public administration experts theorized and enacted changes to the American administrative state over the twentieth century. In the prewar period, they advanced a strict politics-administration binary that legitimated an expanding administrative state on the premise that it was a politically neutral vehicle for the execution of the public good. But during the Second World War, mounting scrutiny of the administrative state exposed the fragility of the politics-administration binary and undermined confidence in prewar administrative principles and the statebuilding they had sustained. In response to escalating dissatisfaction with existing administrative forms, public administration experts rejected administrative neutrality and turned to new theories and practices of administration emphasizing political responsiveness, managerial efficiency, and individual discretion and choice. In the late twentieth century, these shifts culminated in reforms that cut and contracted out the administrative state, recasting administration as an arbiter of private interests rather than a neutral instrument for realizing a unified public will.