Both dynamics work in tandem to reduce the number of issues properly left to political deliberation and to increase the number that should be decided and administered by trained experts: the scope of politics radically constricts. In Engels’s famous formula, “[t]he government of persons is replaced by the administration of things.” Except that Engels expected “the administration of things” to lead to the withering away of the state, whereas the wiser Progressives knew it would require a state larger and more powerful than any hitherto imagined.
