ABSTRACT
For most of American history the terms "bureaucrat" and "bureaucracy" have been used in popular discourse as epithets, when they have been used at all. Bureaucracy and bureaucrats were familiar figures in European government. Every revolution against the traditional state has raised the question of the role of the bureaucracy, whether it is in the administration of the Nazi regime or the structure of revolutionary Marxist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In a sense, Woodrow Wilson's argument provides a historical and constitutional rationale for a movement which had, since shortly after the Civil War, been attempting to cope with the consequences which reformers saw in the Jacksonian revolution in government and administration. Wilson and his generation of administrative reformers were articulating a problem that was to plague not only the Progressive movement and the history of reform ever since but also those historians who sought to understand the relation between theories of democracy and administrative reform.
