Summary
In the Public Administration and the State book, the author argued, firstly, that much of Americans literature in public administration, notwithstanding its frequent pretensions to political and ideological neutrality, articulates a vision of the state as a purposive association, that is to say, a state as an organization driven by some coherent set of substantive ends and organized and managed by a powerful teleocratic or purpose-driven government in pursuit of these ends. Moreover, he also argued that, because of the seriously fragmented character of their postmodern political culture, encouraging public administrators to pursue a vision of the state as a purposive association is potentially harmful in that it invites divisive administrative actions that sometimes ignore or trample on ends or values that are seen as important by particular groups or subcultures. Moreover, since writing his book, he has come to see more clearly their constitutional practices, in particular, as encouraging them to resolve conflicts among their rival values or conceptions of the good by means of politics and adversary argument rather than force.
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Extract
Further Reflections On Public Administration and the State
I want to thank Jennifer Eagan for organizing this symposium and also Peter Bogason, R. McGreggor Cawley, Hugh Miller, Patricia Mooney Nickel, Christine Reed, and Mark Rutgers [and Sebastiaan Tijsterman in this issue], all of whom were gracious enough to read and comment on the ideas I laid out in Public Administration and the State some seven years ago. So as to engage more effectively the variety of comments raised by my colleagues here, I would like to use this short essay to explore further the meaning of the state, the nature of governmentality, the practice of critical theory and pluralism, and the usefulness of our habits or traditions of civil association and constitutionalism in thinking about and practicing American public administration. Before doing this, however, I will review briefly the arguments that I advanced in the book. Such an exercise may be helpful to those scholars who have not read the book and also to those who have, but, like myself, cannot quite recall what it was all about.
Specifically, in this book, I argued, firstly, that much of our literature in public administration, notwithstanding its frequent pretensions to political and ideological neutralit...See the full content of this document
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