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THE AMBIGUITY OF EXPERTISE IN THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2021
Abstract
When the modern administrative state emerged in America during the Progressive Era, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was typically grounded on the premise that administrative officials are experts who should be insulated from politics. This theory, combined with emerging ideas of scientific management, contributed to the intellectual justification for the administrative state. However, progressives never fully reconciled the tension between this theory and the democratic nature of American politics. Because of this ambiguity and tension in the progressives’ theory of expertise, the politics/administration dichotomy was abandoned shortly after the administrative state was constructed. The place of expertise in the administrative state is still ambiguous, even in the twenty-first century.
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- © 2021 Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation. Printed in the USA
Footnotes
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Social Science Division, Politics, Hillsdale College, jpostell@hillsdale.edu.
References
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15 As president, Theodore Roosevelt told a foreign diplomat that Lippmann was “on the whole the most brilliant man of his age in all the United States” (William E. Leuchtenburg, “Introduction,” in Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, reprint [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985], 1). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text as DM followed by the page citation.
16 See also DM, 98: “You have in a very literal sense to educate the industrial situation, to draw out its promise, discipline and strengthen it …. You have to see to it that technical schools produce men trained for such work; you have to establish institutes of research, that shall stimulate the economic world not only with physical inventions, but with administrative proposals. You have to go about deliberately to create a large class of professional business men.”
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37 295 U.S. 602 (1935).
38 Franklin Roosevelt to William Humphrey, August 31, 1933, cited in Humphrey’s Executor, at 619.
39 Ibid., 624.
40 Ibid., 628.
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53 Ibid., 1057.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., 1063.
56 Ibid., 1067.
57 An important exception is David Rosenbloom, Building a Legislative-Centered Public Administration: Congress and the Administrative State (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000). Rosenbloom argues persuasively that Congress asserted its control over the administrative state in the latter half of the twentieth century and that this model of accountability is superior to the “orthodox” public administration view that the president should be the locus of accountability.