American Public Administration and the Idea of Reform

The conventional wisdom concerning American public administrative thought suggests that a naive orthodoxy in vogue during the first portion of this century, was exposed as ideology a few decades ago and that the demise of the orthodoxy signaled the rise of innumerable perspectives. In this article, however, it is proposed that American public administration has retained an orthodoxy of reform in its continuing series of attempts to reconcile the tensions between democracy and bureaucracy. An analysis of the idea of reform as reflected in several significant administrative writings suggests one reason why the efforts of American administrative theorists have been consistently unsatisfying.