Part II Political Science, Ch.13 The Administrative State: Law, Democracy, and Knowledge

The administrative state is the central and unavoidable topic of modern constitutional theorizing. The single most striking difference between the constitutional arrangements of the late eighteenth century and today—“constitutional” in the sense of actually obtaining structures and practices of government1—is that the modern state is, by any conceivable measure, largely an administrative state. The institutions envisioned by classical constitutional theory—legislature, executive, and judiciary—have been pushed toward the sidelines by the growth of a vast and...