The unassailable principle: why luther gulick searched for a science of administration

Luther Gulick's two contributions to the Papers on the Science of Administration are often regarded as a statement of the “orthodoxy” in the field of public administration in the pre-war period. This paper challenges this view. It argues that the two basic claims in Gulick's work--the notion that public administration could be considered as a science, and that field could be studied without regard to politics--were widely contested throughout the 1920's and 1930's. Gulick adhered to these claims in part because they were useful in protecting a young and weakly-institutionalized field against powerful critics. By the late 1930's, academics in public administration may have confronted a dilemma: the position staked out by Gulick and others, while essential to the development of the field, was regarded by many within the field as being intellectually untenable.