W. F. Willoughby and the Administrative Universal

Abstract

Perhaps the outstanding feature of William Franklin Willoughby's contribution to American public administration was his systematic insistence that administration is a universal. As such it is as much applicable to the legislative and judicial realms as to the executive departments. No other scholar, to my knowledge, has staked out this position and developed it so rigorously as did Willoughby. I propose to explore the reasons for his taking such a govermentwide view of administration, to say something about his contributions and significance, and to speculate on how his early orientation might serve the interests of the profession and the country today and in the future. Before turning to these matters, however, I should like to set forth the logic of his argument which automatically entailed his regarding administration as a universal of all three branches of government. The main outlines of the thesis are found in The Government of Modern States. In this book, as he did in all his writings, Willoughby favored an analytical rather than a descriptive approach because it does at least two things: it causes one to think clearly and consistently; and secondly, it provides a practical framework for dealing with issues and minutiae which would otherwise soon become distorted and confused. He also distinguished the political state from the government which administers it. The state is a juristic concept relying on sovereignty and lawmaking jurisdiction over its entire domain, external as well as domestic. But since the state is merely a concept, it cannot administer anything itself and must rely upon its government. The government serves common needs that no other institution is competent to undertake. Whether a government is a monarchy or a representative government, its work divides naturally into three parts: the lawmaking function, and the executive and judicial functions, both of which are inextricably related because their intent is to give practical operational effect to the law. Administration is the central ingredient in the whole of governmental operation because all three departments are subject to a common necessity which is to organize, operate, and fulfill distinctive roles which require rationality and cooperation. And since the entire governmental process starts with the legislature, the effectiveness with which the lawmaking branch operates sets inevitable limits to how much the executive and the judiciary may accomplish. The common obligation of all three branches is, therefore, to serve society's needs within the framework of law set down by fundamental documents and juristic agreements. In short, administration is the universal, and its utility consists in the fact that if all three branches are not well-organized and practical, not much of consequence is likely to be achieved by any one of the three. Willoughby's appreciation of this is reflected in his trilogy: Principles of Public Administration (1927), Principles of Judicial Administration (1929), and Principles of Legislative Organization and Administration (1934). It is difficult to say who among his predecessors influenced Willoughby's thinking. His brother, Westel Woodbury Willoughby, clearly did because they were close and thought through their positions together. W. W. Willoughby, reflecting the biases of the time, had little use for the substantiality of public administration as a scholarly field, compared with law; but he was inordinately proud of his brother and applied himself assiduously to understanding this new field, even though it was not his natural bent. W. F. Willoughby, on the other hand, was highly competent in public law and had an interest in fundamental concepts equal to his brother's, although he never made a deep study of general political theory and of oriental theory as his brother did. The only other scholar who influenced Willoughby deeply, so far as I know, was Woodrow Wilson. There were at least two professional links: Wilson had done his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins and had taught there; later they were both to be at Princeton. There is also evidence that Wilson's book, The State, may have influenced him to write The Government of Modern States, although the two are quite dissimilar in their rigorousness. Also influential, because frequently quoted, was Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government and the writings of several British authors, some of whom he got to know when he, his brother, and Samuel McCune Lindsay went to Britain and, in conse-