ABSTRACT
The planning which is the unavoidable consequence of this new situation implies that the mere provision of services and ad hoc economic interventionism characteristic of administrative operations of the previous period have been replaced, at least ideally, by the pursuit of a co-ordinated policy with interrelated objectives. This demands the recruitment, deployment and utilization of administrative skills in a very new way. The French and Prussian bureaucracies had already been consolidated before Britain had even begun to think in terms of a unified civil service. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the French and Prussian kings were extinguishing local ‘liberties’ and imposing centralized rule over regions. Even in the field of local government, where radical reform is particularly difficult, some progress towards the rationalization of boundaries and redistribution of powers has been achieved. Such changes, so obviously justified, have commended themselves to administrative reformers.
