Waldo's insistence on posing the question of the"metaphysics" of administration was dead on, but his directive to contest the"verdict of science" and call into question the"sovereignty of the facts" as a way to surface and confront this metaphysics seriously deflected from what I take to be a more basic inquiry. That line of inquiry would have examined the deeper political and 1 shall argue, ontological crisis of the People, of which the appearance of an administrative state represented both a symptom and proposed solution." Waldo's move served inadvertently to insulate public administration and reinforce its second order status by focusing intellectual energy on the interminable question of the appropriate content of administrative action. More broadly, it effectively bracketed the theorization of democracy to consideration of procedural and legal forms within the administrative state. This, as I shall come to, would place administration in a highly dangerous and defensive position, which would ultimately reinforce precisely the problems Waldo hoped to overcome.