If administration scholarship advanced such a distinct and definable political philosophy (some might say ideology), it raised an immediate and formidable intellectual obstacle to attempts at conceptually dividing politics and administration: How could students of administration claim that politics was largely external to their interests when their intellectual history revealed such a systematic value based philosophy of government? Waldo pointed out that administration is frequently claimed to be at the core of modern democratic government, and that this claim helps justify the entire discipline of public administration. If this claim has merit, it implies that democratic theory must deal with administration, and that administrative theory must deal with democratic politics. As a practical matter of explaining the operation and role of administration in government, not to mention as a point of intellectual honesty, students of administration cannot deal with the problems of politics by assuming them away.