ABSTRACT
Luther Gulick’s two contributions to the Papers on the Science of Administration occupy an important place in the intellectual history of the field of public administration. In most accounts, these two papers are presented as perhaps the purest distillation of ideas that were widely held within the public administration community before the Second World War, and only abandoned after a series of critical academic studies in the post-war period. Wallace Sayre was probably the first academic to adopt this view: he argued that the Papers, together with the 1937 report of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, represented the ‘‘high noon of orthodoxy in public administration theory in the United States’’(1)—two canonical works whose authority was only shaken after the close of the war, most notably in works by Herbert Simon, Dwight Waldo, and Paul Appleby.(2) Sayre’s account of the evolution of the field is now widely accepted.(3)
This account of the development of public administration is incorrect, and may lead contemporary readers to misinterpret Gulick’s papers. To characterize the pre-war period as one of orthodoxy’’ is to overestimate the solidity and power of the public administration community, and to underestimate the strength of dissenting voices in those years. The community of scholars specializing in public administration was, in fact, only tenuously established in the mid-1930s, and there were many powerful actors who questioned the legitimacy of the new field, often in terms that presaged the complaints of the post-war years. Far from being a proclamation of the orthodoxy, Gulick’s contributions to the Papers are best regarded as attempts to provide some defense for a new and weakly-institutionalized field of study. This is not to say that there were not serious deficiencies with the arguments relied upon in these two papers; but this new approach may help us to understand their
tone-most notably, their defensiveness, and their doggedness in asserting that there could be an apolitical ‘‘science of administration.
