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like the public administration movement that preceded it, was presented by its advocates as an empirical necessity. The tendency to convert preference statements into empirical necessities appears to be irresistible, even though changing preferences ultimately render such an insistence futile. IMPLICATIONS: THE FELON AND THE BEAR In his essay advocating the study of public administration, Woodrow Wilson wrote a famous statement in which he suggested how the search for effective administrative methods could be separated from the political preferences of public leaders. To make his point, he offered a parable. A sharpener of knives, he said, could improve his or her craft by observing the methods utilized by a person preparing a similar weapon for an awful crime. “If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder with it.”34 By this statement, Wilson meant to suggest that administrative principles of universal benefit might be established, regardless of the type of regime for which they were invented. The belief in the existence of universal, objective principles of administration was an important component of the early public administration movement. Not content to let the opportunity for drawing lessons from common experience slip away, Dwight Waldo offered another parable in The Administrative State. Waldo sought to make the point that administrative methods inevitably vary with the purposes of their creators. To demonstrate his point, he offered the parable of the bear. A rifle, he noted, was efficient for hunting a bear, but not for keeping it alive. “For the purpose of killing a bear . . . a large-bore rifle is more efficient than a bag of meal, but for the purpose of keeping a bear alive, the reverse is true.” His observation produced a phrase that came to characterize his work: “efficiency for what?” In this sense, efficiency was not an end in itself but rather a concept “necessarily measured” in terms of the different values preferred by people operating in the public sphere.35 The choice of administrative methods, as this chapter has suggested, has varied not with the general intelligence of reformers but with shifting preferences concerning the purpose of government. Those shifts have followed cultural and ideological trends within the society at large. Yet the shifts have not been wholly random. In American public administration, for example, interest has shifted between centralization and decentralization, large government and small, and neutral civil servants and representative ones. 50 McCurdy The tendency for one reform to follow another suggests an added dimension to this process. In his famous study of polities, the Greek historian Polybius proposed that each simple form of government contains a degenerate form. Thus monarchies through a process of gradual decline tend to degenerate into tyrannies. Aristocracies become oligarchies, and democracies descend into mob rule. This proposition was influential in molding the thoughts of the drafters of the U.S. Constitution, who sought to combine elements from each virtuous form as a means of checking the inherent weaknesses in all. In a similar manner, simple administrative forms possess their own degenerative tendencies. Any single method carries the source of its own destruction. When Andrew Jackson, in his first inaugural address, proposed the practice of civil service rotation, he did so for a noble purpose. Yet within a half-century that principle of rotation had degenerated into a system of excessive political interference and spoils. The same could be said for the system of bureaucratic administration that replaced it. Bureaucrats were appointed for a noble cause, to restore impersonality to a government that had become too dependent upon favoritism and political rewards. Over time, however, the idea of experts in the bureaucracy acting impersonally came to be viewed as too elitist for the American polity. From this perspective, the choice of administrative methods is not fated to change randomly but moves in response to political preferences and the excesses inherent in each administrative form. In a similar manner, the political preferences of public leaders may shift through cycles of attachment and excess. In discussing the vision of “the Good Life” that motivated the early public administration movement, Waldo noted the reformer’s preference for features such as central planning and urbanization.36 Those preferences suffered from their own excesses , however, ensuring that none would dominate the exercise of political power for all time. The result is likely to be a never-ending process of administrative reform, obdurately tied to a cycle of normative...

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