ABSTRACT
The administrative explanation depends on the assumption that a bureaucracy can function to some degree as a distinct system within society. It was popular in the 1950s and 1960s during the debate on ‘the nineteenth-century revolution in government’, when there was much talk of the initiating role of the professional in urban government, and of dynamic relationships between central and local administrations. The failure of the 1848 Public Health Act was merely the most notorious of numerous episodes, both national and local, in which the administrative dynamic dashed itself to pieces against an implacable public opinion. The nineteenth-century trend towards greater intervention would thus be the product of a widening gap, the result either of an actual deterioration of the urban environment combined with static or rising expectations, or of an improving environment combined with an even faster rise in expectations.
