CALLING FOR A NEW DISCIPLINE ON RUNNING A GOVERNMENT
While Alexander Hamilton,18 Thomas Jefferson,19 Andrew Jackson,20 and other notables of the first century of the republic have dealt with the problem of running the administrative affairs of the state, it was not until 1887 that we find a serious claim made that public administration should be a self- conscious, professional field. This came from Woodrow Wilson’s famous 1887 essay, “The Study of Administration.” Although it attracted slight notice at the time, it has become customary to trace the origins of the academic discipline of public administration to that essay.
While Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) would later be president, first of the American Political Science Association, then of Princeton University, and later of the United States, in the mid-1880s he was a struggling young instructor at Bryn Mawr College for Women. During this time he worked on several textbooks now long forgotten; wrote fiction under a pen name (but it was all rejected); and wrote a political essay that remains his most enduring contribution as a political scientist. On November 11, 1886, Wilson wrote to the editor of the Political Science Quarterly to whom he had submitted his article.21 Wilson asserted that he had very modest aims for his work, which he thought of as “a semi-popular introduction to administrative studies.” He even said that he thought his work might be “too slight.” Ironically, one hundred years later, the American Society for Public Administration would launch a Centennial’s Agenda Project to identify the critical issues for the field and cite the publication of Wilson’s essay as “generally regarded as the beginning of public administration as a specific field of study.”22
In “The Study of Administration,” Wilson attempted to refocus political science’s study of govern- ments. Rather than be concerned with the great maxims of lasting political truth, he argued that politi- cal science should concentrate on how governments are administered. This was necessary because, in his words, “It is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one.”
Wilson wanted the study of public administration to focus not only on personnel problems, as many other reformers of the time had advocated, but also on organization and management in gen- eral. The reform movement of the time, which had already secured the passage of the first lasting fed- eral civil service reform legislation, the Pendleton Act of 1883, had a reform agenda that both started and ended with merit appointments. Wilson sought to move the concerns of public administration a step further by investigating the “organization” and “methods of our government offices” with a view toward determining “first, what government can properly and successfully do, and secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or energy.” Wilson was concerned with organizational efficiency and economy—that is, productivity in its most simplistic formulation.