ABSTRACT
Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) was the most influential twentieth century American Public Administration Theorist. His seminal work, The Administrative State (1948), conceptualized the normative foundations of the newly emerged American administrative state, challenging its powerful framing classical orthodox dogmas, and raising fundamental questions about its scope, development, and purposes that scholars continue to wrestle with: e.g., the meaning of economy and efficiency? Or, the relationship between politics and administration? While Waldo spent most of his career as a university professor at the University of California, Berkeley as well as at The Maxwell School, Syracuse University, he exercised profound influence over the field while serving as the editor-in-chief of the Public Administration Review (1967–1978), the President of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (1977–1978), and by his sponsorship of The New Public Administration Movement in the late 1960s. However, his intellectual contributions from numerous essays and books elaborating on many dimensions, issues, and complexities of public administration are what serve to continue to provoke debate and discussion among contemporary administrative scholars.
