Abstract

Conventional accounts of liberal democracy tend to obscure a basic fact: the phenomenon of administration. The American reception of the administrative state was self-consciously imitative of Continental models of state bureaucracy, as a remedy for the ills of democratic politics, but construed as a means of saving democracy from itself, from populism, and from lawyers and legalism, in the name of efficiency. This produced its own ideology, which pervades the present discussion of populism. This ideology holds that decision-making needs the trust of the people in the wisdom of administrators, rather than their actual participation. The mythic elements of this ideology are discussed.