Abstract
In his provocative book, Fabricating the People, Thomas J. Catlaw (2007) seeks to explain the "rising tide of hostility toward government" in the past thirty years and the (in his view) related "crisis of legitimacy" in the field of public administration. Catlaw traces these problems, not to the deep and growing corruption, corporatism, militarism, and hypocrisy of America's political class, but to a sort of conceptual mistake at the heart of modern representative government. Public administration has as a result been likewise fabricated, according to Catlaw, made into an enterprise committed fundamentally and inexorably to "a diagnosis in a historical narrative of disjuncture" between the fictive People conjured through the circuits of the state on the one hand, and what the constituent individuals of this fictive People would otherwise wish to become. This paper challenges Catlaw's analysis empirically and, on this basis, critiques his account of popular hostility to government and scholarly anxiety about the legitimacy of public administration.