Waldo concluded that public administration scholarship was anchored by well-developed responses to all of these issues. Like theorists from Machiavelli to Marx, public administration scholars had a vision of what the “good society” looks like: It is industrial, urban, and centrally planned; it has no poverty, no corruption, and no extremes of wealth. Science is its ideal, and waste and inefficiency are its enemy. These same scholars also had a clear preference for the criteria of action: A scientific analysis of the facts should decide what should be done. Public administration orthodoxy espoused particularly firm beliefs about who should rule: “The assertion that there is a field of expertise which has, or should have, a place in and claim upon the exercise of modern governmental functions—this is a fundamental postulate of the public administration movement” (1848, 89–90). Technocrats blessed with the requisite competence and expertise were public administration’s equivalents of the Guardians in Plato’s Republic. On the particularly American issues of the separation of powers and centralization versus decentralization, Waldo argued that the preferences of administration scholarship 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. They were also in favor of a centralized state. They 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.