Part of the answer, explained Waldo, must be found in the accidents of history. From its
inception, Political Science was fascinated by and paid ‘‘more attention to the Greek
literature of politics than to the Roman experience of government and its consequences for
the contemporary world’’. The Greeks ‘‘brought ‘the political’ to self-awareness, and their
concepts, values, and theories became the basis of Western political thought’’. But ‘‘citystates
(as against ancient empires) required relatively little administration’’ and in them
administration was regarded as part-time or short-term, honorific and amateur. To that, one
may add ‘‘the propensity of the Romans, to whom much administration owes a debt,
toward the practical rather than the philosophical’’. It is true that they created an administrative
apparatus governing an empire extending over three continents, yet ‘‘while they
‘rationalized’ it in law, they did not ‘philosophize’ about it’’. All of these considerations
were decisive for much that followed. ‘‘There are weighty tomes that treat the development
of political theory through two and a half millennia without so much as a mention of
administration’’. In fact, ‘‘language, terminology, is indicative: political theory, not government
theory; political is derived from the Greek ‘polis’, government from the Latin
‘gubernare’ ’’. The political ‘‘reached self-awareness with the Greeks’’ while administration
‘‘did not reach self-awareness until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’’.
Governments had always had corps of functionaries and even training ‘‘schools’’ for them,
nonetheless ‘‘only within the last century has the idea of administration as such arisen’’
(Waldo 1981; Waldo in Brown and Stillman II 1986, pp. 166–167).