ABSTRACT
Every ruler has need of a tax collector, and one of the most important branches of government is the administrative or the civil service. This chapter considers the ancient art of civil administration and the state’s uses of bureaucracy. This aspect of government eventually posed the ideal of a science of administration. Historically, the Chinese have the longest track record of formal bureaucracy, so we take a closer look at government under the Ming dynasty, with its emperors, eunuchs and cohorts of Confucian scholar-officials – and the competitive examinations that budding officials had to pass. We then move ahead to absolutist Prussia and consider the development of the cameral and police sciences. Across the Atlantic, the constitution of the United States posed a problem for the growth of a permanent administrative branch of government. And the examples of both China and Prussia supported the birth of administrative sciences there, spurred on by Woodrow Wilson’s famous essay on this topic. The chapter covers the development of the administrative state in the twentieth century, and the shift from administrative science to public policy, which occurred against a deep-seated American scepticism of all things bureaucratic.
