Seeing every day new things which the state ought to do, the next thing is to see clearly how it ought to do them.

This is why there should be a science of administration, which shall seek to straighten the paths of government, to make its business less unbusiness-like, to strengthen and purify its organization, and to crown its duties and dutfulness.

Woodrow Wilson, the study of administration. I'm Greetings and salutations, all you excellent individuals out there in the D.HP audience.

C.J. here. Welcome to episode 197 of the Dangerous History podcast, Woodrow Wilson, Part 4.

And I know I've been saying that this part, part four of the Woodrow Wilson series,

was going to be an overview of Wilson's

intellectual and academic output, all of his writings, his articles and books and things that he did

during his decades as an academic. And I'm still working on that larger episode, but what happened

was that episode was getting so enormous in terms of my notes for it,

and it still is going to be enormous. But one of the things that was happening was that this one

essay that I'm going to be drilling into in this episode called The Study of Administration,

I think this is one of the most important things, perhaps the most

important thing, of Wilson's entire scholarly output, to really understanding both him and how he

thought about modern government, and also in a large extent, understanding the growth and evolution

of the United States government, particularly

in terms of the bureaucratic Leviathan state that regulates and enforces laws and does all that

sort of stuff, the administrative state. My notes just discussing this one essay were getting

so enormous. I said, you know what? This needs to be

detached into its own episode. There's plenty here to make a full D.HP episode all its own. So that's

what I'm doing here. I am digging in to this particular article that was published first all the way

back in 1887 pretty early in Wilson's career. So we are diving deep into this article. We are dissecting it.

And of course, I'll be doing so from quite a hostile critical point of view, as you might imagine.

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