When Woodrow Wilson wrote his essay "The Study of Administration" in 1887, he attempted to square the needs of a complex industrial nation with the demands of a democratic political culture (Felker 1993). With a vision of administration untouched by politics, he prescribed their separation. Frank Goodnow’s book (1900) elaborated on this dichotomy, and Leonard White’s (1926) work made the separation of politics and administration an article of faith in the first textbook on the subject. This is emblematic of a turn public administration made at its inception, a decision paralleled by political science as it embraced the “god†of science and ignored the truth of context, history, values, and, messiest of all, unforeseen, unpredictable exigencies.
Frank Johnson Goodnow