ABSTRACT
My essay “The Organ of Experience” (Cook, 2010) was my first attempt to work through some ideas as part of a larger enterprise to develop a theory of the political constitution of the administrative state. That Stephanie Newbold and David Rosenbloom have found it a fitting addition to their project to promote a Constitutional School in the study and practice of public administration is a wonderful bonus. Any attempt to connect public administration and the character of the administrative state to constitutional theory and constitutional design will be comfortably at home in this venture to create and sustain a Constitutional School tradition in public administration scholarship and education. At the heart of my own endeavor is my ongoing quest to fashion a thor-
ough and convincing conception of public administration as a constitutive institution of a liberal democratic regime. In “The Organ of Experience” I tried to bring to bear in a concentrated way what I had learned from my study of Woodrow Wilson’s ideas about public administration and its role in a constitutional democracy (Cook, 2007). The insights to be found in Wilson’s thinking on such matters, synthetic rather than original though they may have been, remain insufficiently known and appreciated by scholars. I thus attempted to add some provocation to the essay by placing emphasis on Wilson’s ideas about the nature of constitutions-that they are as much markers of the emergence of a people as a distinct polity as they are blueprints for a regime-and his contention that public administration, far more than just an instrument for running a constitution, plays a central role in continuing constitutional growth and change. The argument is complex and covers a lot of ground, so in this reflection I will add further emphasis to just a few central points, and comment briefly on where the larger enterprise must go next.
