I. INTRODUCTION
America's original Progressives, rising to prominence at the turn of the twentieth century, sounded the theme of democratic reform. The American Constitution, they contended, placed too much distance between the people and their government, due to an inordinate fear by the Constitution's Framers of the factious tendencies of unfiltered public opinion. Because of this indirect and representative form of popular government, Progressives complained that popular majorities of their own day were unable to direct the government to act effectively in response to the pressing social and economic crises of the nation.Footnote 1 Instead, a small but powerful minority, Progressives argued, was taking advantage of the Constitution's limits on popular rule to benefit itself at the expense of the great mass of people.Footnote 2 It is for this reason that many of the reforms advocated by Progressives involved reducing or eliminating the distance between majority opinion and governing at the federal, state, and local level. Progressives, regardless of certain important differences among them, universally supported movements toward more direct forms of democracy: the ballot initiative, recall, referendum, and direct primaries for elections. Democratization was, arguably, the most important theme of the Progressive Movement, as it sought to place more governing power in the hands of popular majorities.
The Progressive push for democratization, however, is complicated by the fact that the Movement was also the launching point for the modern administrative state.Footnote 3 It helped put into place a system whereby significant portions of government decisionmaking are exercised not by the traditional branches of government that are accountable to the people through elections, but by unelected, bureaucratic agencies that regulate with substantial independence from political control. While Progressives, on the one hand, sought to make the nation's traditional political institutions much more accountable to majority opinion, on the other hand they also believed that those institutions were not capable of managing all of the new activities in which Progressives wanted the national government to become involved.Footnote 4 Under the Progressive model, political institutions were to become both more democratic and less important. How democratic, then, was national Progressivism? In what ways does its reliance upon expert governance complicate its democratic theory?
The relevance of these questions comes from the influence that this dual character of Progressivism has had on contemporary American government. American politics today maintains a near obsession with public opinion; even minute movements in benchmarks such as the presidential approval rating are watched as intently as heart monitors on critical patients. And yet while public opinion occupies a place of tremendous importance, its authority is also deflected in ways that reflect Progressive governing principles. In spite of the intense focus on national political debates, most real governing today is done by bureaucratic agencies. Often, these agencies govern in ways that defy public opinion. Most of the critical activity in the second half of President Barack Obama's first term, for instance, will take place in regulatory agencies rather than the national legislature.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is presently in the process of issuing final rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Due mostly to concerns over the impact of such rules on the economy, a similar scheme of regulation garnered strong, bipartisan opposition in the 111th Congress and failed to pass. (One Democratic Senate candidate, Joe Manchin, won election from West Virginia in 2010 due in part to a television commercial which featured him shooting a copy of the proposed legislation with a high-powered rifle). In spite of the legislative failure, these rules are now in the process of becoming law. Such a maneuver is possible because when Congress enacted the Clean Air Act and its subsequent amendments, it defined the EPA's power in such broad and vague terms that it amounted to a delegation of near plenary legislative power.Footnote 5 In a similar example, Congress in 2008 considered, and voted against, a taxpayer-funded bailout of major American automobile manufacturers. Nonetheless, the national government proceeded to bailout both General Motors and Chrysler. It was able to do so because the previously enacted Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)Footnote 6—enacted for the purpose of bailing out banks and other financial service entities—had been written vaguely enough that the Treasury Department had ample discretion to divert funds to a wide array of entities having little to do with the financial services industry. Many such examples could be drawn from a variety of policy areas, the point of which would be to demonstrate that much governing today is done by expert agencies—sometimes with political support and sometimes without it.
The tension within today's administrative state—between democratic governance and governance by unelected experts—reflects a similar tension in the democratic theory of America's original Progressives. This essay is a preliminary effort to explore this tension in Progressive democratic theory by looking to Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), the two most prominent Progressives on the national political stage.Footnote 7 This is an admittedly limited scope (among others, the Progressive writer Herbert Croly (1869–1930) would deserve attention in a fuller treatment of this question), necessitated by the confines of space; it focuses largely on national Progressivism as opposed to the very important state and local elements of the Movement, and it speaks more to the political issues as opposed to the many social and cultural facets of Progressivism. Yet in the thought of Roosevelt and Wilson we find an important contrast which helps to illuminate the nature of Progressive democratic theory. Roosevelt offered the typical Progressive critique of the republican constitutionalism of the Federalists, and insisted upon very direct popular control over national government. Almost implausibly, Roosevelt sees little or no tension between his strong democratic impulse and his call for the employment of expert commissions in the national regulation of business and property. Wilson, on the other hand, while equally convinced about the necessity of pushing democratic reforms, more readily acknowledged the uneasiness of the coexistence he envisioned between an increasingly democratized politics and an increasingly expert and powerful administrative apparatus. The result would be, as the essay argues, a more nuanced and realistic democratic theory which has, as a consequence, a greater relevance for contemporary American government.
II. Roosevelt and the People's Right to Rule
For Theodore Roosevelt, the Constitution's Federalist Framers had obsessed about majority tyranny and thus erected a system which enshrined minority tyranny.Footnote 8 Worried that the many in a democracy would use their legislative power to vote in such ways that they themselves would benefit from the wealth of the few, the Framers had given a pride of place to individual property rights which had turned, in Roosevelt's time, into a system of concentrated wealth and power. The courts—both state and federal—had become to Roosevelt the institutional enablers of this form of minority tyranny.Footnote 9 Roosevelt crusaded against antimajoritarian judicial decisions, contending that majority tyranny was no longer a problem in America: “I have scant patience with this talk of the tyranny of the majority…. We are today suffering from the tyranny of minorities…. The only tyrannies from which men, women, and children are suffering in real life are the tyrannies of minorities.”Footnote 10 The Founders had limited the power of popular majorities on the basis of an abstract theory of individual, natural rights; fundamentally, Roosevelt believed any system that deliberately thwarted majority opinion in this way—or in any way—could not call itself popular. Such was the thrust of his crusade against the courts and his push for mechanisms of direct democracy. “How can the prevailing morality or a preponderant opinion,” Roosevelt asked, “be better and more exactly ascertained than by a vote of the people?”Footnote 11
Roosevelt believed that if the real will of the people was allowed to prevail, a fundamental recasting of the scope of national government would be in order. The existing concentrations of wealth, upheld by a theory of abstract equality, would have to give way to a system that regulated business and property in order to effect an actual or real “equality of opportunity” for the average man. Roosevelt's speech on the “New Nationalism,” which he gave in 1910 and which became the foundation for his subsequent attempt to recapture the presidency, laid out a vision of national power that would spark progress toward real equality. The speech identifies the enemy as “special privilege,” or “special interests,” “who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.”Footnote 12 The way to defeat the special interests, Roosevelt argued, was to employ “a policy of far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had.” Combinations of wealth could not be undone, Roosevelt reasoned, as they were “the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation.” But their effects could be controlled, and could be transformed for the benefit of all men. “The way out lies,” Roosevelt concluded, “not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare.”Footnote 13
How could such “complete control” be accomplished? Through the use of expert agencies. Among other tactics, Roosevelt emphasized in the New Nationalism the role of the Federal Bureau of Corporations and the Interstate Commerce Commission, the powers of which “should be largely increased.”Footnote 14 When launching his run for the presidency in 1912, Roosevelt elaborated that the key to investing such agencies with regulatory power was their expert and nonpartisan character. The problem had been that regulatory policy, to the extent it had been practiced at the national level, was overly subject to the influence of politics. Such influence led to unscientific policy. In order to remedy this problem, Roosevelt called for “administrative control of great corporations…. A national industrial commission,” he contended, “should be created which should have complete power to regulate and control all the great industrial concerns engaged in interstate business.”Footnote 15 Tariff policy, too, had suffered by having itself subject to the political process. Special interests were too influential in that process, leading again to “unscientific” regulatory policy. The remedy was to empower a “permanent commission of nonpartisan experts.”Footnote 16
In calling both for increased popular control over national government and for removing economic policy from the political process and granting it to expert commissions, Roosevelt did not see a tension between the two aims, nor did he seem to think that it called into any question “the right of the people to rule.” The problem was not that democratic politics itself was corrupt and unscientific, but rather that decentralized politics—particularly as practiced by the national legislature—was corrupt. Thus the way to ensure objective and scientific regulation was not, as Wilson was arguing, through separating administration from politics altogether; it was instead to place ultimate accountability for expert regulating in the hands of the popular executive—the one political entity that could claim to embody the broad national will. Experts and commissions were to govern—this was the only way, Roosevelt acknowledged, for the national government to handle the many new tasks that Progressives had in mind for it—but constantly with the understanding that they answered to the people. He explained in 1912 that “we, the people, rule ourselves, and what we really want from our representatives is that they shall manage the government for us along the lines we lay down…. We welcome leadership and advice, of course, and we are content to let experts do the expert business to which we assign them without fussy interference from us. But the expert must understand that he is carrying out our general purpose.”Footnote 17 Policy could be managed by experts, Roosevelt later explained, but “it is for the people themselves finally to decide all questions of public policy and to have their decision made effective.”Footnote 18
Roosevelt did not see any significant tension between policymaking by commission and rule by the people. Expert commissions could be given great power, could be shielded from the influence of special interests by insulating them from the legislature, all while being held strictly accountable to democratic opinion. The key, Roosevelt explained, was centralization. In his 1908 State of the Union message, he argued that
the danger to American democracy lies not in the least in the concentration of administrative power in responsible and accountable hands. It lies in having the power insufficiently concentrated, so that no one can be held responsible to the people for its use. Concentrated power is palpable, visible, responsible, easily reached, quickly held to account. Power scattered through many administrators, many legislators, many men who work behind and through legislators and administrators is impalpable, is unseen, is irresponsible, cannot be reached, cannot be held to account.Footnote 19
Roosevelt clearly meant that the national government's new powers of economic control could be made democratic by concentrating ultimate responsibility for them in the president—that is to say, in himself. In looking to the presidential leader as the key to balancing democracy and expert governance, Roosevelt would have something in common with Woodrow Wilson.
III. Wilson and Modern Democracy
Like Roosevelt, Wilson believed that the American system of government was too undemocratic and, also like Roosevelt, he pinned blame on the Framers' obsession with a highly individualized and abstract notion of liberty. Fear of majority tyranny, or faction, had led the Framers to restrict too severely the powers of the national government by means of mechanistic checks and balances, thereby impeding the people from using the government as an instrument of their will. While Roosevelt frequently railed against the courts for their antimajoritarian decisions, Wilson criticized the separation of powers system as a whole. He was an Anglophile, and had from his earliest years of thinking seriously about government been an admirer of the British parliamentary model. The parliamentary model stood for democracy and efficiency, providing for the smooth translation of democratic will into public policy through the overlapping of and cooperation between legislative and executive functions. The American separation of powers system, by contrast, with its intentional antagonism between the legislative and executive branches, was designed to protect the people from themselves, purposely throwing up as many obstacles as possible to the people getting their way.
While Roosevelt's favored remedy for the undemocratic character of America's original system of government was to advocate direct popular means of circumventing institutions altogether (the ballot initiative, referendum, etc.), Wilson preferred to reform the institutions themselves. He suggested new ways of conceiving of American political institutions that would facilitate the functional, if not formal, demise of the separation of powers system.Footnote 20 The point of these reforms was to make the system responsible. Wilson explained the challenge in his book Congressional Government:
It is … manifestly a radical defect in our federal system that it parcels out power and confuses responsibility as it does. The main purpose of the Convention of 1787 seems to have been to accomplish this grievous mistake. The ‘literary theory’ of checks and balances is simply a consistent account of what our constitution-makers tried to do; and those checks and balances have proved mischievous just to the extent which they have succeeded in establishing themselves as realities. It is quite safe to say that were it possible to call together again the members of that wonderful Convention to view the work of their hands in the light of the century that has tested it, they would be the first to admit that the only fruit of dividing power had been to make it irresponsible.Footnote 21
The criticism of separation of powers from the perspective of responsibility is a consistent feature of Wilson's writings, from the earliest to the most mature. He called repeatedly for America to be made more democratic by instituting some form of cabinet or parliamentary government—where the national legislature depends closely upon majority public opinion and the executive branch exists by virtue of sustained support in the legislature. The only means of bringing genuine democracy to American government, Wilson made clear, were “certainly none other than those rejected by the Constitutional Convention.”Footnote 22
Wilson's criticism of the Constitution for its undemocratic institutional arrangements was grounded in a democratic theory sharply distinct from that of the Founding generation. The political theory of the Founding is the subject of much debate, and I have addressed it elsewhere at greater length.Footnote 23 For the sake of understanding how Wilson's democratic theory departs from it, I will say here only that it was based on the idea of social compact: the end of government is understood in light of certain rights which all human beings possess by virtue of their human nature. The Declaration of Independence thus speaks of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God,” and man's fundamental rights come neither from government nor from some particular set of historical conditions. They are not contingent upon the current sentiment of a popular majority or whatever a particular society deems expedient at a given time. Government is consented to and constituted by men for the purpose of securing these rights. Wilson and other Progressives identified this social compact principle as the heart of the American Founding, and it was the point of departure for their own very different democratic theory.
Wilson criticized natural rights theory as contrary to the reality of historical development. It relied upon a fixed and speculative picture of man which, Wilson argued in his 1889 book The State, “simply has no historical foundation.”Footnote 24 Instead, rights ought to be viewed through the lens of history, where their nature and extent depend upon social circumstance. Wilson offered his evolving understanding of human liberty as “destructive dissolvent” to the social compact principles of political philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) and others who had influenced the American Founding generation. Locke and other social compact thinkers, Wilson claimed, put forth an unrealistic and static account of nature that served as the foundation for keeping government permanently limited and unresponsive to the evolving historical spirit. The true foundation of government, Wilson countered, could only be uncovered by looking to the actual history of its development, where one would see that the individual never had any primary or special existence that preceded or transcended society.Footnote 25
Wilson took his democratic theory not from a conception of the autonomous individual, but from what he said was the true historical origin of government: the patriarchal family or tribe. Yet if such a rejection of the pre-political, abstract individual sounds certain Aristotelian themes, we should not mistake Wilson's democratic theory for a call to return to the classical model. Wilson rejected classical democratic theory just as thoroughly as he rejected the modern social compact. The classical conception of democracy, Wilson proclaimed, “exaggerates the part played by human choice.”Footnote 26 He rejected the classical notion of prudence, where statesmen possess wisdom with respect to what is good universally and employ it as best they can in particular historical situations.Footnote 27 Such a conception gives too much credit to the ability of human choice to affect the course of history. Great individuals, Wilson countered, cannot transcend their environments but are instead the products of great historical forces.Footnote 28
Wilson rejected classical democratic theory not only because it falsely exalted the prudence of great men over the power of history, but also because it adhered to a “cycle” of regimes.Footnote 29 The problem with the Aristotelian cycle was that it failed to conceive of democracy as a permanent condition of man. While Aristotle had suggested a continuous cycle of regime change based both upon fortune and the wise or imprudent choices made by individuals, Wilson countered that history leads to the permanent victory of the modern democratic state. History is not cyclical, but linear; and the historical conditions were such, or were in the process of becoming such, that democracy was here to stay. Earlier periods of democratic activity were fleeting, Wilson reasoned, because history had not then adequately prepared a permanent home. He explained that “the cardinal difference between all the ancient forms of government and all the modern” is that “the democratic idea has penetrated more or less deeply all the advanced systems of government.”Footnote 30 In an 1885 essay on “The Modern Democratic State,” Wilson argued that modern democracy (as contradistinguished from both classical democracy and Founding-era, rights-based democracy) is the permanent and most advanced form of government. “Democracy is the fullest form of state life: it is the completest possible realization of corporate, cooperative state life for a whole people.”Footnote 31 The classical world had not been ready for genuine democracy. Neither had America been ready for it during the Founding era. This is why the Framers were fearful of popular majorities and had structured the Constitution so as to limit their influence. “Democracy is poison to the infant,” Wilson wrote, “but tonic to the man.” It “is a form of state life which is possible for a nation only in the adult stage of its political development.”Footnote 32 The nation, Wilson argued, had matured to adulthood, but strict adherence to the Constitution would keep it bound to a form of government suited for infancy.
The critical ingredient for modern democracy—the historical condition that had been missing from earlier attempts—was unity in the mind of the public. The old fear of faction, which James Madison had surmised was a permanent condition “sown in the nature of man,”Footnote 33 no longer applied. That the many might abuse their democratic power and rule only for their own advantage at the expense of the few was one of the “childish fears” about democracy that “have been outgrown.” The difference was that “this democracy—this modern democracy—is not the rule of the many, but the rule of the whole.”Footnote 34
With the people thus unified in mind, the power of popular sentiment could be unleashed without fear of tyranny, in spite of the fact, Wilson argued, that “many theoretical politicians the world over confidently expect modern democracies to throw themselves at the feet of some Caesar.”Footnote 35 The course of America's own history, as Wilson understood it, demonstrated the advance of the permanent democratic idea. In spite of the rigid and mechanistic structure of the Constitution, America had overcome its decentralized and individualistic origins to evolve into a true nation. Wilson brought up the presidency of Andrew Jackson to make his point. Jackson had tried to turn the clock back on national progress through his autocratic attack on the national bank. Jackson's “childish arrogance and ignorant arbitrariness” in seeking to retard the growth of national power proved futile; history was on the side of national growth and America had marched steadily from primitive to modern democracy.Footnote 36
While Wilson's work reveals several intellectual influences—from that of English political writer Walter Bagehot on Wilson's love for the British constitution to that of social Darwinism on Wilson's concept of the American constitution as “living” organism—his idea of modern democracy as the permanent endpoint of history shows his profound debt to the German philosopher Georg Hegel.Footnote 37 Wilson believed that the modern democratic state was the preordained end of history, and that the history of regimes had not been mere random adaptation, as a Darwinian analysis might suggest, but had instead been leading up to the permanent victory of modern democratic ideas. In early essays such as “The Art of Governing,” Wilson commented that history points to the development of a single kind of human government.Footnote 38 And in later works such as The New Freedom, Wilson put forth a vision of modern democracy as the end-state of historical progress. Given the campaign context of his New Freedom speeches, he used a parable about building a house to explain his vision:
What we have to undertake is to systematize the foundations of the house, then to thread all the old parts of the structure with the steel which will be laced together in modern fashion, accommodated to all the modern knowledge of structural strength and elasticity, and then slowly change the partitions, relay the walls, let in the light through new apertures, improve the ventilation; until finally, a generation or two from now, the scaffolding will be taken away, and there will be the family in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive, not afraid of any storm of nature.Footnote 39
Wilson went on to reassure his audience that the triumph of democracy at the end of history was guaranteed and irreversible—that it would not be subject to any cycle of degeneration: “Nor need any lover of liberty be anxious concerning the outcome of the struggle upon which we are now embarked. The victory is certain.”Footnote 40
With history having thus prepared the ground, Wilson described his New Freedom as “A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People.” He spoke on the campaign trail of the Founding-era antipathy toward democracy and contrasted it to the Progressive embrace of democracy. He spoke of these as “two theories of government,” and identified the Founding-era plan with the Federalist thought of Alexander Hamilton—“a great man,” claimed Wilson, “but, in my judgment, not a great American.” Hamilton and his fellow Federalists had constructed the Constitution on the principle of “guardianship”—a fear of what the people would do if they were given the freedom to govern themselves.Footnote 41 “I believe,” Wilson countered, “in the average integrity and the average intelligence of the American people.” He employed this argument to attack Roosevelt, connecting the old, Hamiltonian, guardianship theory with Roosevelt's plan to grant regulatory power to expert commissions. “I do not believe,” he explained, “that the intelligence of America can be put into commission anywhere. I do not believe that there is any group of men of any kind to whom we can afford to give that kind of trusteeship. I will not live under trustees if I can help it.” He proclaimed in the same speech that “I don't want a smug lot of experts to sit down behind closed doors in Washington and play Providence to me.”Footnote 42
Wilson used this kind of democratic, anti-expert rhetoric effectively against Roosevelt on the campaign trail. Yet when he won and assumed office, most of Wilson's major domestic initiatives involved the very kind of regulation by commission that Roosevelt had advocated in the New Nationalism.Footnote 43 In fact, Wilson's agenda looked so much like that on which Roosevelt had campaigned that one Roosevelt scholar has remarked that it was “exceedingly embarrassing to the Progressive Party. Wilson had stolen its thunder and much of its excuse for being.”Footnote 44 As much as Wilson's domestic agenda as president was a sharp departure from the attacks on commission government he had made while campaigning, President Wilson was not actually setting off in a new direction. Instead, he was reverting to an embrace of expert administration which he had developed and endorsed throughout his voluminous writings on government, and from which his presidential campaign had been a convenient and temporary diversion.
IV. Wilson and Modern Administration
For as long as Wilson had been writing about the theory and practice of government, he anticipated, as has been shown, that the increasing unity of the public mind would facilitate a final and permanent democratic state. And as intense as his democratic rhetoric could get, he did not think that democratic politics would be of the greatest importance in the modern democratic state. Since, instead, the people were already in agreement—at least implicitly—on what they wanted, once their will was emancipated the real task of modern government would be administration. Once history had overcome factiousness and established the “rule of the whole,” the vital question became one of means, not of ends. In the “Study of Administration,” Wilson wrote: “The trouble in early times was almost altogether about the constitution of government; and consequently that was what engrossed men's thought…. The weightier debates of constitutional principle are even yet by no means concluded; but they are no longer of more immediate practical moment than questions of administration. It is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one.”Footnote 45 In spite of his attacks on Roosevelt's regulatory proposals in the 1912 campaign, Wilson had been saying since the mid-1880s that the wide scope of governmental responsibility that progressives advocated would require a system in which the particulars of policymaking were delegated to expert administrators. In attacking commissions as undemocratic in 1912, Wilson was actually attacking proposals that were largely consistent with his own, long-stated views. That he almost immediately turned to expert agencies upon assuming the presidency should surprise no one who read just about anything he wrote prior to coming on the national political stage.
Since the mid-1880s, Wilson's writings reflect a strong apprehension about the influence of politics on administration. He insisted that if Progressives wanted to entrust the national government with significantly increased supervision of private business and property, they could not do so until they had found a way for expert administrators to make decisions on the basis of objectivity and science as opposed to political considerations. In an 1887 essay “Socialism and Democracy,” Wilson embraced socialism in principle, explaining that it is perfectly consistent with genuine democratic theory. Genuine democracy, like socialism, will not allow individual rights to be a barrier to unfettered state action. But, Wilson explained, democrats could not quite accept the socialist agenda in practice, because socialists wanted the government to act in areas where it was not then capable of doing so competently.Footnote 46 In order to remedy this practical obstacle to the adoption of the socialist agenda by progressive democrats, a new science of administration first had to be developed.Footnote 47 Administration had always been a part of American national government, of course, but it had been administration within the confines of the republican executive, and thus subject to political control. In order to move forward with modern democracy, administrative entities would, Wilson concluded, have to be shielded, to some considerable degree at least, from traditional political accountability.
It was in his landmark essay “The Study of Administration,” written just around the same time (1886), that Wilson directed his most sustained thoughts to this new kind of administration, and where he advocated—at least to some degree—the separation of administrative governance from politics. As such, it was an essay that would come to have a profound influence on the birth and development of the public administration discipline in the United States. Administration, Wilson wrote in the essay, could be freed from the control of politics because it differed from politics in fundamental ways. “Administration,” he argued, “lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions.” Understood in this way, it was questionable if administration could even be subject to constitutional definition. “The field of administration is a field of business,” Wilson argued. “It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics; it at most points stands apart even from the debatable ground of constitutional study.”Footnote 48 In making this argument, Wilson was extending the line of reasoning from an even earlier essay—“Government By Debate” (written in 1882)—where he had contended that large parts of the national administration could be immunized from political control because the nature of the policies it made were matters of science as opposed to matters of political contention. The administrative departments, wrote Wilson, “should be organized in strict accordance with recognized business principles. The greater part of their affairs is altogether outside of politics.”Footnote 49
Civil Service Reform had been a start to the neutral science of administration that Wilson sought to develop. Wilson believed that continuing down that path would allow the increasingly complex “business” of national government to be handled by a professional class of experts. The most important achievement of the Civil Service Reform movement had been the establishment of the principle that it was desirable, at least in some cases, for politics to be kept out of administration. Wilson explained that “civil service reform is thus but a moral preparation for what is to follow. It is clearing the moral atmosphere of official life by establishing the sanctity of public office as public trust, and, by making the service unpartisan, it is opening the way for making it businesslike.”Footnote 50 Perhaps most important, a Civil Service appointment, with its secure tenure and independence from politics, would allow an expert to disregard special interests and act on behalf of the general interest. For Wilson, the importance of this calling can be traced back to his earliest works, where as a young man he frequently expressed disgust with the dominance of politics by narrow, special interests. He said repeatedly that a career in politics was no longer a respectable or worthy goal for an educated young man who was interested in public service. He envisioned that the young and educated could, instead, form the foundation of a new, apolitical class of expert policymakers, trained in the emerging social sciences for service in a national government with greatly expanded responsibilities. “An intelligent nation cannot be led or ruled save by thoroughly-trained and completely-educated men,” Wilson explained. “Only comprehensive information and entire mastery of principles and details can qualify for command.” He championed the power of expertise—of “special knowledge, and its importance to those who would lead.”Footnote 51
V. Reconciling Democracy and Administration?
In championing the importance of educated experts, of their independence from political influence, and of their being given, at least to some degree, a role in governing, the obvious question is how one squares this with Wilson's fervently stated democratic principles. While Roosevelt seems not to have acknowledged this conundrum, Wilson understood that he needed to deal with the question of public opinion. “The problem,” Wilson explained, “is to make public opinion efficient without suffering it to be meddlesome.” Public opinion is a “clumsy nuisance” when it comes to the “oversight of the daily details and in the choice of the daily means of government.” While Wilson called for introducing public opinion more directly into politics, politics must confine itself to general superintendence—to the role of setting the broad goals of the nation.Footnote 52 In conceiving of the separation of politics and administration, Wilson sought to maintain the veneer of popular government while giving fairly wide berth to unelected administrators. The greatest obstacle to the necessary growth of apolitical administration, Wilson candidly acknowledged, is what Roosevelt would call the “right of the people to rule.” “What then,” Wilson asked, “is there to prevent” this “much-to-be-desired science of administration”? And he answered: “Well, principally, popular sovereignty.”Footnote 53
If Progressive governance was to involve the exercise of at least some authority over policymaking by unelected experts, then, as Wilson acknowledged, expert governance would somehow have to be reconciled with progressive democratic theory. This was true for Roosevelt as well, even if he did not quite see the difficulty in the way that Wilson did. For both men, the key to this reconciliation seems to have come from their notions of leadership. Roosevelt's was much more populist in tone and in its actual character than Wilson's. It was also, arguably, more simplistic and self-serving. As explained above, Roosevelt believed that expert governance could be reconciled with democracy by centralizing power. While the legislative process had become corrupted due to the influence of special interests, the president represented the unified whole of public opinion. Expert administration, held accountable to the people through their popular president, could thus be unleashed to make policy on behalf of the general interest over and against special interests.
Wilson, too, spoke to the necessity of a popular leader embodying the unified public mind.Footnote 54 Yet he had reflected much more thoroughly on the question, and his conception of democratic leadership included not only the president as a popular focal point, but an entire class of administrators as discerners of the public's objective will. It was because, in Wilson's mind, history had overcome the problem of faction and had brought about a unified public mind that the focus of modern government would be on expert administration. Having come together on the broad questions of political justice, the people could now entrust administrators to manage the complex details involved in regulating a modern economy. Empirically, of course, such a claim of political unity may seem to fly in the face of the fierce contention of interests that characterized the Progressive Era as much as any other era of American history. But beneath such contentiousness on the surface of American politics, Wilson argued, was a deeper, implicit will of the people as a whole. This implicit, objective will was one of which the people themselves might be unaware; hence the task of leadership was to see through the superficial clash of subjective interests and to discern the true popular mind. Such a task requires a leader to distinguish between mere majority opinion and the implicit, objective will of society as a whole. Wilson could reconcile expert or elite governance with democratic theory because, for him, elites are able to discern the public's objective mind better than the public itself. The key to the democratic legitimacy of elite governance is the elites' ability to discern what Wilson called the “general” or “objective” will: it is “an assumption, still more curious when subjected to analysis,” that “the will of majorities,—or rather, the concurrence of a majority in a vote,—is the same as the general will.” He argued further that
the will of majorities is not the same as the general will: that a nation is an organic thing, and that its will dwells with those who do the practical thinking and organize the best concert of action: those who hit upon opinions fit to be made prevalent, and have the capacity to make them so. Footnote 55
Under this construction, democratic rule is cast in terms of expert or elite governance. The example Wilson used to illustrate his vision of democratic rule confirms the point: the Civil Service. While administrative agencies might not comport with traditional notions of democracy (their agents are unelected and are drawn from the educated classes), Wilson believed administration was democratic in a much deeper sense: Civil Service experts would not be distracted by special interest contentions in ordinary politics, and would be free instead to discern the true and implicit will of the public as a whole. Administrators would be in the best position to adjust governmental policy to the general will.
In thinking about administration in this way—as a means of reconciling democratization with expert governance—Wilson thought in terms that have proved to be more relevant to contemporary American government than Roosevelt did. Popular presidential leadership, championed by both Wilson and Roosevelt, has proved to be a central feature of American politics. But the delegation of significant policymaking authority to expert administrative agencies, which has also become a staple of American government, was thought through much more comprehensively by Wilson. This is not to suggest that today's administrative governance is fully or even mostly Wilsonian (legislators are far too involved in agency decisionmaking, and politics is still far too dominant, to have satisfied Wilson's model), but that contemporary American governance seems to reflect the dilemma between the democratic impulse and the deference to expertise that Wilson identified and thought it necessary to confront.
