Abstract
Dwight Waldo’s work on the Administrative State largely neglects sovereignty. In this essay, I address this neglect by connecting Schmitt’s ideas of “the decision” and “the exception” to the work of Herbert Simon on the sciences of the artificial. I introduce a political understanding of the Administrative State that I call the impersonal sovereign. Through the Administrative State, Schmitt’s apparent aporia of the modern state is reconciled by the emergence of the impersonal sovereign, where the very act of decision is increasingly assigned to nobody, by design.
Introduction
When we decide, we cut ourselves off from other future possibilities. 1 It is for this reason that the decision is of central concern to theories of politics. When political theorists speak about the sovereign, they refer to the one with the power of decision because this is the power to shape what will be. A consideration of sovereignty is necessary for a political understanding of the state. The question I address in this essay is one that has been neglected in treatments of the Administrative State: The nature of the sovereign in it. I label it the impersonal sovereign.
Discussions of the administrative state rarely include sovereignty. It is an idea that seems to be out of fashion. In some respects it is, if by “sovereignty” we refer to a power possessed by an absolute monarch. This conception has been made obsolete primarily by the qualification that sovereignty is now popular. But it is far from obvious what this notion of popular sovereignty means. It is, indeed, a positive elocution, a rhetorical self-justification for a democratic culture. But from a modern political standpoint, that is, from the standpoint of the Administrative State, popular sovereignty is an appeal to legitimacy without substance.
An enduring keystone for understanding the Administrative State is Dwight Waldo’s 1948 book on the subject. In this book, however, Waldo ignored sovereignty, and this neglect of the subject must be rectified to understand better what is distinctive about the Administrative State. To understand the issues that Waldo raises, including his concern with politics, values, and the much-maligned idea of the dichotomy between administration and politics, we must develop an understanding of the political and the decision in this arrangement known as the Administrative State.
Resulting from Waldo’s direction, many debates on the Administrative State have focused more upon organizational than political matters. 2 Waldo explored the question of the Administrative State on the terms of those who viewed Administration as bringing an end to the political, which was considered to be necessary for realizing the scientific basis of the democratic state. Bringing an end to the political was also considered to be necessary for progress. In studies of the Administrative State, this line of thought is commonly traced to Wilson, which explains Waldo’s attention to that essay. But Waldo did not question the central premise that undid the political, which is the rise of Administration itself. Instead, he takes Administration as an uncontestable condition of modern politics and the modern state. 3 He makes this point in his 1952 essay “Development of Theory of Democratic Administration,” where he described the possibilities of making administration obey democratic values. Waldo focused his attention on proper organization and the basis upon which an organization functioned, leading him to focus his inquiry and his critique upon efficiency as the central value of administration. This focus on efficiency was a critical error in his critique with lasting effects, as I will discuss.
Nevertheless, Waldo’s Administrative State offered the distinction between an administrative state and the Administrative State. One could even argue that Waldo coined the idea of the Administrative State despite notions of an administrative state (extended executive power in an elected Constitutional system of government) predating him. 4 Considering the Administrative State as a political concept is Waldo’s central contribution, but his treatment is not adequate to the task. The reason for this inadequacy, I suggest, is an intellectual bias. Waldo takes the modern demands of government as a given in his consideration of the political theory of American Public Administration, which is to say that he accepts the premise of Administration itself. I present this as an intellectual bias favoring the Administrative State by prioritizing order and organization because of the increasingly complex demands of governing and governance. This bias concealed from Waldo and his successors the political reality of the Administrative State, leading him and many of his successors to focus critiques on organizational concerns, particularly efficiency, and ignoring matters of the decision. Consequently, decision-making has been seen as a technical procedure based on psychology or forms of behaviorism, which serves, I will argue, to undergird the Administrative State.
To political thinkers of the late 20th century who considered the matter of decision, the Administrative State was a given condition. Consequently, theoretical primacy on matters of decision have focused upon procedures of decision and, to a somewhat lesser extent, how people actually decide. 5 Thus, decision-making as an intellectual concern considered decisions as correctable phenomena. To think in this manner, however, required a radical shift in the political concern of sovereignty. This is the matter taken up by this essay.
The common idea of modern sovereignty is the much-heralded notion of popular sovereignty, a political construction derived from the general unacceptability of a system in which a single head of state possesses the supreme power that Hobbes and Bodin assigned to the sovereign monarch. Traditional authority through a personal sovereign was the power arrangement that popular political revolutions sought to overthrow. The collapse of the traditional sovereign resulted partially in a vacuum of political power but also created a space for the development of popular sovereignty. This development was central to the work of Carl Schmitt, who explored the meaning of sovereignty in the modern state, given the decline of traditional authority. He described the essence of sovereignty as being the matter of decision on the exception, thus positioning sovereignty in contrast to the modern development of impersonal law. Schmitt would describe this modern condition as requiring the reemergence of a personal sovereign.
Schmitt placed the decision central to thinking about the sovereign, and his encounter with fallen structures of monarchy and the rising systems of law prompted him to question what was left of sovereignty in the modern period. Assembling the remnant powers of the sovereign into the abstraction of popular sovereignty left ambiguous the matter of decision, specifically on the bases of legitimacy and authority. 6 Schmitt followed Hobbes not only by viewing the rise of a strong leader to embody the sovereign as essential to order, but he also recognized the historic influence of the democratic revolutions on ideas of the political.
Instead of a Hobbesian strong leader, as Schmitt described, the problem of sovereignty, which is arguably at the heart of what became Public Administration and the Administrative State, led to what I label the impersonal sovereign. This impersonal sovereign is an almost-obvious political extension of the technology of the modern state, bureaucracy. Understanding how the impersonal sovereign operates is central to a political understanding of the Administrative State itself. For Schmitt, a key problem of the impersonal legal order is that it could designate how a decision is made but not who should decide. In other words, an impersonal legal order could produce authority while being silent about to whom authority is granted. This, in Schmitt’s view, made the monarch, or some leader akin to it, essential and necessary for state order because the monarch would be a quite literal embodiment of the state. It was obvious by his time and to him, however, that such a state order had dissolved in the democratic revolutions, leaving open a key question for politics: To whom is authority granted? With the rise of the Administrative State, particularly in the United States, we have an answer of sorts to this question: To whom is authority given for such decisions? The theoretical answer is precisely nobody.
The Administrative State and Public Administration
Fairly little has been written on a political understanding of the administrative state, but what has can largely be traced to the earliest articulation of the Administrative State itself, that of Dwight Waldo’s 1948 book, The Administrative State: A Study of the Political Theory of American Public Administration. In this section, I examine Waldo’s assessment of the Administrative State through this book and, more importantly, his essay on the possibility of democratic administration.
Waldo’s treatment of the Administrative State is important for its focus upon what he calls the public administration movement. 7 This movement is both a practical and intellectual attempt to create particular social and political conditions for the development of American Public Administration, which, one surmises from Waldo’s argument, constitute the Administrative State. This is an important although subtle condition for the development of the Administrative State, as Waldo describes it: It is particular to American Public Administration. In this respect, the Administrative State builds upon an established national identity. This fact is not central to the argument of the book. Instead, Waldo attempts to describe the theoretical basis of the public administration movement as it unfolded in the United States and how it is practically realized in the Administrative State.
In this sense, the importance of Waldo’s study is that it centers Administration on what Waldo views as key concerns of political philosophy (he swaps “theory” and “philosophy” throughout the book). Waldo’s reference to the public administration movement suggests that the ideas and practices constitutive of Public Administration and the Administrative State are not merely academic. This is not a completely novel idea. Early on, the study of public administration was directed at the creation of conditions for governing a modern state at the point of political closure, meaning that the study of administration could proceed once the matters of constituting the state had been settled (Wilson, 1887). Waldo realizes this point but loses its significance in his explication of what became known as the politics–administration dichotomy, or what he more often referred to as the politics–administration formula. This formula has commonly become understood as a practical separation of political matters of decision from administrative matters of execution, and Waldo correctly indicts this formula in his description of the history and theory of American Public Administration. The politics–administration formula, however, was never intended to permit a separate space for politics; it was conceived not as a dichotomy but as a solution: Administration properly executed would solve the political problems presented by democracy, specifically by providing a way to govern what Wilson described as the problematically opinionated “multitudinous monarch” brought about by democracy (Heidelberg, 2019; Wilson, 1887, p. 207).
The distinction between an administrative state and the Administrative State is significant to Waldo’s overall argument, but his emphasis tended toward the organizational rather than the political. In that respect, Waldo committed himself to the terms of the “administrationists,” a group that, to “make democracy work” with government, harbored an intellectual bias for organization in the face of complexity. Waldo noted that critiques of administration as undemocratic or less than democratic were “undoubtedly too severe,” especially because the movement to a more democratic administration was, in his view, already underway and that key figures in early public administration, such as Wilson, Goodnow, and Cleveland, were in Waldo’s words, “ardently seeking a scheme to save [democracy]” (Waldo, 2007, p. 75). From what they were trying to save democracy was unstated. Nevertheless, Waldo did not contest the idea that democracy was under threat and that administration was the instrument for saving it, suggesting that the public administration movement and the resultant Administrative State were essential to the development of democracy.
Waldo did not make that point clearly in his treatment of the Administrative State, the value of which one must now recognize to be a historical survey of ideas as they relate to American public administration. Waldo’s more substantive attempt at working out the political theory of the Administrative State came 4 years after the publication of The Administrative State in an essay written to honor Professor Francis Coker, one of Waldo’s mentors at Yale University. This essay, “Development of Theory of Democratic Administration,” directly addressed the political concerns of authority that The Administrative State neglected.
Waldo’s Manifesto
The debate that followed from and sustained the relevance of this modest essay was between a normative philosophy seeking to place democratic values central to the operations of Administration and a positive philosophy (or positivist in a broad sense) in which reasoning and fact are primary to the operations of Administration. It is with regard to upholding the political value of democracy that Waldo attempted to map out these new areas for exploration in the development of democratic ideas and ideology.
“Development of Theory of Democratic Administration” was a measured synthesis of ideas that proceeded through two central assumptions. One assumption was that administration developed through or was shaped by a specific culture. This applied to both public and private administration, and in the case of the American version, there was an acceptance of a “worship of science and the nineteenth-century urban and machine revolutions” (Waldo, 1952, p. 83). A second assumption, and one that is of particular relevance to the present essay, was that administration was central to modern government, such that it demanded theoretical priority. As Waldo put it, “If administration is indeed ‘the core of modern government’, then a theory of democracy in the twentieth century must embrace administration” (Waldo, 1952, p. 81). 8 It was because of this assumption that Waldo approached administration in an instrumental sense and not in a political one. What he sought in this essay was to mark the place of democratic theory in administrative thought, which would, presumably, reveal a path through which administration could be made democratic.
This assumption, Waldo’s conditional assumption of modern democratic theory, had the curious quality of, by placing administration at the center of modern government, placing democracy on the periphery. Nevertheless, it was difficult to dispute the implicit proposition that centered government on administration. But within this assumption, Waldo revealed a weakness to his reasoning. The fact that administration was the core of modern government, to the extent that this could be called a fact, must be understood as a result of the successes of democratic revolutions and the resultant need to discover a way to govern a democracy. This, of course, was at the very heart of one of Waldo’s own authorities on the subject, from whom he derived much to critique, namely, Wilson’s (1887) “The Study of Administration.” Wilson proceeded from the victory of democracy and the problems that, from a governing standpoint, this presented to the call for a study of administration through which a proper American administration could be developed. Wilson reassured his readers consistently of his republican credentials (or his opposition to monarchy) while also calling for the very system of expertise and reformism characteristic of mid-20th-century American administration. 9 By Waldo’s time, the victory of Public Administration was largely complete. The New Deal policies that sparked so much scholarship in Public Administration were a codification of the study of administration that Wilson urged as well as a codification of the Administrative State itself.
Waldo sought to qualify administration with democracy, but he failed to recognize that administration had developed as a qualification of democracy (Heidelberg, 2019). Without saying so explicitly, he placed practicality and execution at the center of government, such that democracy must conform to administration. In this sense, Waldo was rather conformist on the matter of administration and democracy because of the priority he placed on practicality in governing, so much so that he dismissed socialism because “the part of such writings dealing with administrative arrangements for achieving the Ideal is so loose-textured and naive that it is difficult to take the proffered theory seriously” (Waldo, 1952, p. 97 n38). 10 In tracing the development of theory of democratic administration, however, he himself ventured into the hopeful, seeking to promote new ideological grounds for administration. Rather than an objective development, Waldo’s essay served as a manifesto in which he appears to see the abandonment of notions of political neutrality and efficiency as constitutive of the development of democratic administration. His manifesto called for the rejection of the dogma of exclusivity between politics and administration and a critique, and occasional rejection, of the dogma of efficiency (Waldo, 1952, p. 87) to bring forth democratic administration.
Bringing forth democratic administration was not entirely straightforward, however. Waldo lamented the possibility that the “taproot of American society” had been poisoned by holding efficiency as central to administration and only tolerating a certain amount of democracy (Waldo, 1952, p. 97).
11
The stubbornness of efficiency as a central value was clear in Waldo’s reconsideration of the infamous politics–administration formula as the fact–value formula, which placed efficiency at the center of the orthodoxy of public administration. Waldo stated, The decline of orthodoxy in public administration is far advanced, and makes possible, if not inevitable, development of the theory of democratic administration. Efficiency is, however, a tenet of orthodoxy that has refused to decline. No one now believes in any strict separation of politics and administration; but in the proposition that there are “value decisions” and “factual decisions” and that the latter can be made in terms of efficiency, a logical division of reality is substituted for the previous institutional one. (p. 97)
This is an important point because it directed attention to a fundamental matter of the political: the decision. Waldo, however, failed to follow this thread. Instead, he dismissed the question of sovereignty as a matter of authoritarianism: “In public administration, authoritarianism is based historically on general political theories, particularly the complex of ideas clustered about sovereignty” (Waldo, 1952, p. 98). One could reasonably interpret this remark as suggesting that the development of democratic administration made the question of sovereignty extraneous as it was conceptually linked to the opposite of democracy, namely, authoritarianism. Waldo’s confidence in the inevitability of democratic administration was possible only through his belief in the decline of what he described as the orthodox approach to Public Administration, but this confidence was also buttressed by a misplaced critical emphasis upon efficiency to the neglect of the decision. His inadequate treatment of the decision was not missed by his interlocutors, Herbert Simon and Peter Drucker, however.
The Matter of Efficiency
Readers of Waldo’s essay on democratic administration might conclude that the possibility of democratic administration itself required the collapse of two key dogmas of classical administration, as Waldo conceived it: the politics–administration formula and the principle of efficiency. The former, Waldo claimed, had been addressed insofar as nobody, by his time, maintained a strict separation between the two. When Waldo converged these concerns into a single overarching one—what he designated the fact–value dichotomy—he arguably set the terms of the debate over public administration for much of the following decades. Efficiency became the primary target of critique and motivated scholars to introduce alternative value priorities, such as choice as an economic driver 12 or equity. 13
Despite the clear emphasis that Waldo placed upon efficiency, the responses by Drucker and Simon did not address the matter directly. Instead, Herbert Simon and Peter Drucker focused upon organizational matters of deciding or the decision itself. To be fair, Drucker mentioned the notion of efficiency in an unconventional definition of Federalism as “a principle of the economy and efficiency of group organization,” 14 but he did not emphasize efficiency as a value for Administration, as Waldo did. Simon did not even use the term efficiency, despite the fact that it was in the context of critiquing Simon that Waldo conceptually fused efficiency with the fact–value construct.
Simon’s dispute concerned what he regarded as Waldo’s general misunderstanding of logical positivist approaches to knowledge and discussion. 15 Simon focused on Waldo’s fact–value dichotomy and convincingly debunked it. Recall that Waldo had acknowledged the disappearance of the institutional idea that politics and administration were separate and separable, but he claimed that this distinction had been supplanted by an intellectual distinction, or what he called a logical division of reality between the possibility of factual decisions and value decisions. Simon’s response focused on this part of Waldo’s muddled critique. Concisely, Simon pointed out that there simply was no support for the claim that positivism promoted a distinction between factual decisions and value decisions. He defined a “decision” as a statement in imperative form, and because there was no system through which an imperative can be derived exclusively from indicative claims, the derivation of a decision must proceed from at least one other unproven imperative, what Simon called value premises. Simon’s point was that, contra Waldo, there were no factual decisions and value decisions. A decision is a statement of direction to a receiver that derived from a mixture of facts and values. Statements of facts alone cannot lead to a decision. We can distinguish between facts and values in principle but, with regard to decisions, they are intrinsically and necessarily joined.
Drucker’s response was more respectful of the general goal of Waldo’s essay, although he regarded it as having missed an important point that was primary to the question of democracy. In Drucker’s view, Waldo’s exploration of democratic administration led back to the “basic problem: who should be responsible in the large-scale organization and for what decisions?” 16 Drucker was concerned primarily with agency and Simon was concerned with process (of reasoning), but both focused on the decision and considered Waldo’s neglect of it as a problem in his thinking on democracy. It is a somewhat amusing quality of this debate that it took an avowed antagonist of political theorists (Simon) and a management consultant (Drucker) to identify the core political matter by indirectly critiquing the self-declared political theorist of missing the political point. But miss it Waldo did. His focus upon efficiency and the resultant fact–value dichotomy set him off of the path of the political.
A critique of efficiency was a peculiar approach for a scholar focused upon organizational or collective action, such as Waldo. Even acknowledging the limitations of efficiency as a value, given the material conditions of collective life, actions will generally accord with the principles of efficiency. Even if we place equity at the center of our actions, we will pursue it only to the extent that our material capacity allows, which is to say, we will be equitable to the extent that in doing so we can act with reasonable efficiency. Waldo’s critique seemed to be based upon a concern with efficiency as an end in itself, and his focus centered upon a specific notion of efficiency in economic reasoning. But even the narrowly conceived version of efficiency adopted from economics does not place efficiency as an end. Efficiency is a concept in which something is made to be what it is, which entails the power to bring forth such potential. It refers to the power to bring about what is intended. 17 The key, then, is how such intents come about, from where we derive them. This is why the decision is the primary concern for political matters, particularly sovereignty. Waldo’s focus upon efficiency revealed how deeply the ideology of Administration was ingrained. By placing Administration central and asking the question of how to make it democratic, as Waldo did, the question of the political had already been ceded to the organizational, for the matter of Administration proceeded on a premise of a conception of sovereignty that was itself a solution to what was considered the political problem of our time, namely, organizing democracy.
With the development of the Administrative State, principles of organization were made central to the conception of the state. The idea of Public Administration developed through attempts to reconcile the political principles and values of modern democracy with the organizational requirements of government. This reconciliation tended to favor organizational requirements, such that Public Administration, as a study and a practice, functioned as a solution to the problems presented by the conceptual victory of democracy (and, as will be discussed later, popular sovereignty). In other words, Public Administration as a study is one that is definitionally bound by its telos. 18 This end, the goal of Public Administration, is the Administrative State itself. Public Administration as a study is one that seeks to create an object of study: the Administrative State.
Initially, popular sovereignty was viewed through Public Administration as an organizational matter solved through the Administrative State. This solution is achieved through the collection of the remnants of sovereignty left behind by the popular revolutions into a kind of decision-making premised on rejecting the classical sovereign type: the impersonal. The political basis of the Administrative State is the development and organization of the impersonal sovereign, but this is concealed in most treatments of it. The problems solved by the Administrative State have to do with those identified by Simon and Drucker: the problems of decision and authority.
Sovereign Remnants
Turning to matters of the decision for understanding the potential of democratic administration brings us to the matter of sovereignty properly speaking and to the work of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. The position of Waldo and many who have followed his intellectual trailblazing on matters of democracy and administration is that efficiency and false notions of political neutrality infringe on the possibility of democracy. This position, however, accepts the premises of Administration and makes democracy an organizational concern to which Administration itself serves as a potential solution.
I will not attempt to define democracy here. Democracy is a concept of such regard as to be essentially contested. 19 Suffice to say that modern democracy includes the ascendance of popular sovereignty. Democracy and popular sovereignty are not synonymous nor are they necessary correlates. I will focus upon popular sovereignty to consider the political substance of Public Administration. Moreover, I have referred frequently to the idea of “Administration.” By formalizing the word, I am alluding to the ideological notion described at the end of the previous section as adopted by Waldo, among others. Otherwise, I have used and will use “administration” in reference to basic organizational operations.
Put simply, Administration conditions the political, and so it is imperative to explore how. Waldo attempted just this, but his political theory was primarily organizational theory, a product of his acceptance of the centrality of administration, thus adopting Administration. The political reality in which this ideology of Administration fits is what Sheldon Wolin (2004, p. 385) called the sublimation of politics in the Age of Organization. The cultural center of the 20th century shifted to matters of organizing and the problem-centered logics therein.
20
Democracy, to the extent that it was a successful political realization, was considered by consequence a problem of organization. This problem was acknowledged from the nascence of the rise of mass democracy in a nation-state, articulated clearly by Tocqueville, who declared that The organization and establishment of democracy among Christians is the great political problem of our time. To be sure, the Americans have not solved this problem, but they offer useful instruction to those who wish to do so.
21
Tocqueville could see this as the central problem of the modern age while also considering the ascendance of democracy and the democratic state to be inevitable. Roughly half a century after Tocqueville published his musings on the American experiment, Wilson would express a similar concern. For Wilson (1887), the victory of democracy had been achieved, and now the problem was one of governing, or as Wilson framed it, organizing. At the heart of the political problem is the shattering of the traditional sense of a sovereign into the sovereign masses, or popular sovereignty. No longer was there a sense of order achieved from the conservative stability of tradition and heritage in which a single person would embody the singular power of the state, a framework for sovereignty that Hobbes or Bodin would recognize. The sovereignty of the 19th century would be unrecognizable to these early theorists, perhaps not even sovereignty at all. In the wake of the democratic revolutions came the collapse of sovereignty, and the problem that Tocqueville describes as organizing democracy is the recollection of the remnants of sovereignty into something that could fulfill the political requirements of it, namely, the matter of decision.
Sovereignty and the Matter of Decision
Schmitt (2005) defined sovereignty in terms of what he called the exception: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (p. 4). The exception, then, is critical to understanding sovereignty as a power, and it is based upon authority. It is through the exception that rules are made complete, for it is not the rule that defines itself but the exception that defines the rule. The problem, as Schmitt demonstrates in the second essay on sovereignty, is the conceptual incompleteness of all laws and rules. All law is fundamentally situational, but it is the sovereign who produces the concrete situation because the sovereign “has the monopoly over this last decision” by deciding whether the situation is normal (Schmitt, 2005, p. 13). It is this monopoly to decide that separates authority from law itself. A decision on the exception is a decision in the most proper sense of the word because it is underived from the rules or laws themselves. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception because all imperatives, all actions, proceed through rules only under normal situations, but the designation of a situation as not normal, as an exception to the rule, completes the frame in which a rule applies.
Given all of this, I return to the question that Drucker proposes and that is at the heart of most theoretical discussions of democracy, including the essays of Schmitt, which is, “Who decides in a democracy?” Schmitt sees this as a component of the problem of sovereignty. One of Schmitt’s implicit interlocutors is Hugo Krabbe (1927), whose The Modern Idea of the State proposed a replacement of personal force and authority with the norms of spiritual forces as the quintessence of the modern idea of the state. He described this as the significant idea of the modern state, that spiritual power has replaced personal authority (Krabbe, 1927, pp. 8–9). It is the law, not the state, that is supposed to have power, and the task of the state, as Krabbe explains, is to make the law. 22
The problem that Schmitt perceives in Krabbe’s idea is that the state, left only to create law, could do nothing to promote the content of the law. The reason in part is that the elimination of personal authority means that there is no remaining agency for completing the rule through the exception. The consequences for sovereignty are intentional to those who would place the law over the state as sovereign: It is the negation of sovereignty, the radical repression of it that corresponds with what Schmitt calls the “liberal negation of the state vis-a-vis law and the disregard of the independent problem of the realization of law” (Schmitt, 2005, p. 21). In other words, notions of the liberal state were preoccupied with designing rules and laws to constrain the classical sovereigns and failed to see how such laws would be implemented. 23 The takeaway from this is that the emergence of self-government, or democracy, is in fact the dissolution of sovereignty itself. Schmitt emphasizes this point when he interprets Rousseau’s general will as being identical with the will of the sovereign, but being made general it is emptied of meaning, such that the decisionistic and the personalistic elements of the concept of sovereignty were lost when the people became sovereign. 24
The Impersonal Sovereign
The question of who decides has been the historical question of democracy and the issue that is used often to qualify its applicability to state functions and governing. What appears to have been missed by Drucker in his response to Waldo with his question about who should be responsible in large organizations and for what decisions is that an answer is implicit in the operations of the Administrative State. The answer is found within the reconstruction of the remnants of sovereignty into the impersonal sovereign in which emphasis shifted from the sovereign to sovereignty, an abstraction that in modern form connotes a dehumanized power.
To fully grasp the importance of this shift to the impersonal, consider Simon’s response to Waldo. He targeted Waldo’s misunderstanding of how values fit into the process of decision. As mentioned above, Simon pointed out that all decisions, which are nothing more than imperative statements, must be premised upon at least one value statement. The question is how this corresponds to political matters, and Schmitt’s exploration of sovereignty offers a connection. Schmitt says that “the basis for the validity of a norm can only be a norm,” an elementary point of reasoning that corresponds with Simon, but he follows this remark with a description of the modern juristic state: “In juristic terms the state is therefore identical with its constitution, with the uniform basic norm” (Schmitt, 2005, p. 19). This apparent unity, Schmitt is quick to point out, is actually based upon a tautology because the constitution creates the state but does not legitimize decisions deriving from it. Every concrete juristic decision is based ultimately upon an indifference to a uniform basic norm—in the case of liberal democracy, the constitution—so that the decision ultimately requires an independent determination or judgment about its applicability (Schmitt, 2005, p. 30). A connection might be made here between the realization of a state through the constitution and the corresponding and ongoing concerns that follow and demand decisions, what might be called governing, and the idea at the birth of American public administration when Wilson calls for closure of constitutional concerns so that the concerns of governing might be addressed (political closure). This closure, however, moves beyond the juristic theorists of the state, who sought to construct a state that was impersonal in the sense of not being monarchical (the kind of juristic thinking that Schmitt aligns with liberalism) and into the practical matters of Administration. The solution to the political problem of our time is not the dissolution of sovereignty as a result of the impersonal state, as suggested by the juristic theorists whom Schmitt discussed and criticized, but the development of an impersonal sovereign for the impersonal state. In other words, to the extent that democracy is understood as a problem to be solved, the solution negates itself: The collapse of the personal sovereign realized in the 19th century led not to popular sovereignty (for such an idea is conceptually and practically incoherent, as Schmitt showed, as it lacks the dimension of the decision) but to the impersonal sovereign, something achieved through the Administrative State.
The impersonal sovereign was not a prerequisite for the Administrative State. It developed as a solution to the problems presented across states where sovereignty, as Schmitt demonstrated, collapsed into conceptual confusion. Thus, it was the Administrative State itself that helped to create conditions sufficient for the development of the impersonal sovereign.
What Schmitt did not anticipate is that the elimination of the personal qualities of the state was not simply a story of subtraction. It was an event of positive action in which the impersonal qualities of the modern idea of the state (as Krabbe described it) would be radically instituted into the impersonal sovereign, marked by artificial intelligence and algorithmic reasoning. The idea is that the nobody at the center of the decision in the modern state, which Schmitt thought presented conceptual and practical difficulties, would in fact become real through the rules themselves. This political moment is only possible through the Administrative State. For Schmitt, the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception, but in the modern Administrative State, the purpose of sovereignty, of the impersonal sovereign, is to confine the exception to the greatest extent possible, to make explicit all decisions. As all decisions are made explicit, the limitations of the decision rules are made increasingly apparent, which leads to a proliferation of rules as the decision system develops increasing levels of comprehensiveness. Underlying this process of comprehension (in the sense of “command over”) is the requirement to discover the undiscovered in the logic of practice by persons and to reduce that action to the logic of the impersonal practice. In a commonplace sense, the goal is for there to be no exceptions to the rule, a radical necessitarianism brought forth by the pursuit of that unattainable goal. Unattainability notwithstanding, the goal itself drives the design of systems that constitute the Administrative State. A consequence is the regulation of the exception itself. Who decides on the application of a rule? The answer is nobody. This is one face of that quality of dehumanization that Weber identified in the formally rational type of organization that he called bureaucracy, 25 but its role goes far deeper than that organizational ideal type. It is the condition of not only our social but also our political existence, one in which the political, in the sense of contest about the good in public life, itself is compromised.
One will reasonably ask how the political is compromised, and the answer depends upon understanding the political in the sense of contestation. With the dehumanization of the decision, which is the singular achievement of the impersonal sovereign, the potential for contest is constantly mitigated by design. This point is best illustrated by example. Many cities have employed a red-light enforcement program through which cameras monitor certain intersections. The enforcement of the law that drivers of automobiles must stop at red lights is now achieved in those cases through high-resolution photography. In early implementations of these designs, there was a single photograph taken at the point when the light was red, which would show an automobile in the intersection with a clear red light. Some of the accused violators, however, would challenge this by saying that when they last saw the light, it was a yellow (or orange), which means proceed with caution. Without any other support, the dispute would sometimes lead to a dropped charge. The response to this has been to take two photographs: one which shows the automobile clearly behind the white line designating the intersection with a clear red light and another that shows the automobile in the intersection with a clear red light. The point is that the design has been improved so that the situation is made incrementally less contestable, with an objective of making it entirely incontestable. Moreover, the information used for this citation never requires interaction with a human being, other than a signature from an officer, who is still formally required to issue a citation. But the person who violates the law learns about the violation through a letter (never having been personally accused) and then has the option to pay the fine by mail or credit card. The conditions of the decision are still human fabrications (in the sense that there is a construction of the law), but these conditions are simply functions of design, and when designs are translated from the abstract to the practical through use, it is not unusual for the original design to undergo iterative and incremental change. The point is that through these supposed improvements, the situation is made decreasingly contestable. To explain this, let us return to the matter of decision as it is put forward by Herbert Simon.
Simon was a scholar of myriad interests, including economics, public administration, computer science, and artificial intelligence, but he reportedly, in answering how one could manage such varied interests, described himself as a “monomaniac of decision making.” 26 His contributions to the field of public administration began with his book Administrative Behavior, 27 which, along with his 1957 Models of Man, 28 explored the question of rationality and adaptation in administrative decision-making. It is not to these works that I now turn, however, but to Simon’s later work in which his interest in decision-making shifts to the artificial, specifically the book that developed out of Simon’s Compton Lectures, The Sciences of the Artificial, 29 a book that explores the potential of, and need for, a science based upon design through human artifacts.
Simon helpfully defines two key terms. He defines artificial as that which is man-made, as opposed to natural which refers to things that do not exist by virtue of human implements (Simon, 1969, p. 4). In this definition, Simon echoes the ancient Greek distinction between nomô and physei, the former referring to those things that come about or originate in the deeds of humans and the latter those whose origins do not and thus are what they are through themselves. 30
Second, Simon defines design, although it would be more accurate to say that he derives a meaning of design from the activity: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, 1969, p. 55). The artificial is brought into being through design, and so it is through a study of design that one can come to understand the artificial. Indeed, it is design that creates the artificial.
To achieve a design of an artificial system of decision-making, as is necessary in the radical success of an impersonal sovereign, requires some model of human decision-making itself. Using a now frequently cited story of the complex path of an ant in its voyage back to its hill, Simon hypothesizes how the ant’s decision-making is quite simple but appears complex due to the environment in which it must act. The same principle he holds for humans: A man, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The apparent complexity of his behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself. (Simon, 1969, p. 25)
Simon proceeds to explore this thesis 31 through the science of psychology (one of the sciences of the artificial) and functional memory. He describes an experiment from which he concludes that humans are limited in their memory storage, but that this limitation is most acute in their short-term memory capacity, or what Simon calls rapid access storage. The matter of decision-making is only, in Simon’s assessment, a matter of information processing. But to firmly appreciate this “thinking” process, it is important also to understand the qualities of behavior that function within the system that we might designate “the environment.” Simon’s other thesis places the notion of adaptation central to our understanding of behavior. He concludes that behavior is adapted to goals, which are human constructs; hence, behavior is artificial. Moreover, the adaptation of behavior is dependent on the interrelationship of the inner environment (how it is designed based upon its goal orientation) and the outer environment (the conditions in which the behavior is enacted). And as Simon shows with the ant, simple behaviors appear complex in large part because of the environment. Thus, a system of behavior reveals those aspects of itself that limit adaptation (Simon, 1969, p. 52). Put simply, the behavior shows what must be improved in order for the system to persist. Adaptation logically entails the exposure of behavioral limits that require alteration. Thus, behavior and decision-making are fundamentally problems of design, where adaptation is accommodated by the constant process of searching the environment for complexities through simple behavioral schemes. Simon concludes that the theory of design corresponds with the general theory of search in which a problem encountered that is at the limits of adaptable behavior is made subject to design, which by definition converts that/a situation into a more preferred one. This idea of search parallels Schmitt’s idea of the exception in the sense that each is an exploration of the existing limits of a given system of rules. But the point of design and search, in Simon’s sense, is the discovery of the exception for the purpose of mitigating it. It is a constantly improving system where every revealed exception leads to new rules of behavior. These are the conditions for the development of the impersonal sovereign, a political world of design and artifice where the decision on the exception is itself subject to the boundaries and logics of design.
Simon explains the conditions through which decision-making itself can be made artificial, where it is the product of design, the product of human ingenuity. By definition, then, there is always a human element behind the creation of the object (in this case the decision), but once the object is created, its conditions are no longer reliant on its human creator. The development of artificial intelligence, put into political discourse, is the achievement of the impersonal sovereign. It is to be expected that the complex environment will present challenges to the decision-making artifice, but to the extent that the system is designed in adaptable ways, it requires minimal human interference.
Consider a clockmaker. A clock is artificial, an object that consists of gears and weights properly measured against each other to keep a consistent rhythm and display this rhythm on a face marked with designations that signify markers of time. The clockmaker, in creating the clock, is not a creator of time, but it is through this artifice that something we call time can be made known. Once created, the clock may require some upkeep, but only to the extent that its purpose, its goal, remains the display of time. Nobody would reasonably consider the clockmaker responsible for time. Eventually, the clockmaker is forgotten entirely and what remains is the clock alone.
To the question of who decides in the modern state, the theoretical answer is, by design, no one. If we were to answer the question of who is responsible for decisions, as Drucker proposes, we might find ourselves with some rather difficult conceptual questions regarding modern notions of accountability, but as pertains the impersonal sovereign, the answer remains, fundamentally, no one. The decisions are made by the system designed to make them, and it is to this system that we look for adapting and adaptation.
Conclusion
The ascendance of the impersonal sovereign corresponds with the success of Public Administration to bring forth the Administrative State. To understand this, we must ignore the distractions of efficiency, which have monopolized much of the critical space in our attempts to understand the Administrative State. Waldo was not wrong to focus upon efficiency, but his critique requires some rather important correcting because Waldo approached the political in public administration with a prejudice for administration. It is not that efficiency is the central value of administration that should somehow be replaced with something akin to democracy; the issue is how efficiency came to mean something so restrictive. This is what must be understood. It is through the project of Public Administration that we have adopted the impoverished notion of efficiency as economic efficiency and ceded its broader meaning of an agent that brings forth in something what it is.
What are the conditions through which we understand efficiency without agency, where it conceptually presides through strictly calculative reasoning? The conditions for this have much to do with understanding Public Administration as a project to bring about the Administrative State in its specific form, such that Waldo’s critique of efficiency while maintaining or upholding the values of Administration appears wholly incoherent. Administration is efficiency in the sense of the nonperson agent through which the modern conditions of the political as nonpolitical are brought into being, brought forth as they are. The impoverished idea of efficiency in the economic sense is the simplest expression of the nonpolitical, impersonal conditions that prevail in the Administrative State, and among the notable achievements of this type of state is the abstraction of sovereignty. Efficiency in its impoverished sense is a consequence of the rise of the impersonal sovereign.
The opening for thinking about the political in the Administrative State is provided not by Waldo, then, but by Herbert Simon. Simon’s scholarship, while not concerned with sovereignty, shows the condition through which sovereignty, understood in terms of the decision, is achievable as an impersonal arrangement. The fact that decision and behavior are, in Simon’s assessment, artificial makes them subject to design. In this way, the problems of sovereignty that trouble the modern state, so well detailed by Schmitt, are rendered obsolete through the achievement of impersonality in a radical sense, and the idea of Administration subsumes the political, much in the way that Wolin’s notion of organization fully supplanted the political.
The ascendance of democracy provoked its negation. The achievement of what we call popular sovereignty produced the most impersonal kind of authority: not simply natural as was originally feared in the sense of necessity, but artificial, a reality created by humans to rule over themselves premised on a political victory in which no human can claim adequate authority. The impersonal sovereign emerged in the 20th century not only as a result of the success of the idea of Administration, but also the possibilities created by computers and technology. But it was the development of the idea of the artificial as a science and modality toward constructing decision-making that cemented its rise. Decision-making could be seen as a human-made construct, something to be made and existing independent of its maker. Thus, the very idea of the sovereign, becoming fragmented with the rise of democracy in the 19th century, could be reassembled through Administration for the purposes of order. It is through the impersonal sovereign that we, in the collective-inclusive sense necessary for the political, operate. This is why it is important to recognize the question of the decision and the impersonal sovereign to gain a political understanding of the Administrative State: To oppose any specific decision is not an opposition at all because it exposes potential improvements of the (impersonal) decision rules, which leads to greater levels of administration. What remains for the political, for contest and opposition in a shared world? The only meaningful opposition that remains is to oppose the fact of decision, which in the modern state of positive law means to oppose the state itself, or anarchy. It is for this reason that Schmitt can say that “every claim of a decision must be evil to the anarchist” (Schmitt, 2005, p. 66), and it is also for this reason that anarchism is the constitutive outside of the Administrative State, the only remaining ideology with qualities of the political.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
