(Originally published Feb., 2020)

In this fourth installment in the epic DHP Villains Woodrow Wilson series, we’re detail-stripping what CJ considers to be perhaps the single most important piece of writing in Woodrow Wilson’s career, the essay “The Study of Administration,” which was published in the July 1887 issue of Political Science Quarterly, when Wilson was only 30 years old and just 2 years into his professional academic career. Wilson never significantly deviated from the ideas laid down in this essay over the remainder of his academic career; he also did quite a lot of implement them as President of the United States, and one can see the influence of these ideas on the growth & development of the US government’s administrative apparatus ever since. (Though the real-world results have been far from the ideal of benevolence, efficiency, and transparency that Wilson described!)

Join CJ as he takes this essay apart with critical analysis, and, near the end, shares the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville who, writing approximately 50 years before Wilson wrote “The Study of Administration,” identified and warned about just the sort of mixture of democracy and bureaucratic despotism that men like Wilson would eventually advocate & usher in.

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