An Essay on Comparative Administration

• Date: 01 January 2000
• Published date: 01 January 2000
• Author: Krishna K. Tummala
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/0033-3352.00065

Book Reviews 75

An Essay on Comparative Administration

Krishna K. Tummala, Kansas State University

Krishna K. Tummala is a professor and the director of the graduate program in public administration at Kansas State University,

Manhattan. He is past chair of SICA, and past president of the Kansas chapter, both of ASPA. He was a Senior Fulbright Fellow, and

the recipient of the first prize in an international competition for his essay “Reservations in the Indian Public Service,” held by the Indian

Institute of Public Administration, Government of India, New Delhi, India.

This is a book comparing the

French system with the American,

written by someone who claims rather

ironically that he is not a

comparativist. While part of the book

is an in-depth examination of the

French constitutional system, there is

a copious discussion of the American

as well. And the comparison is ex-

pected to yield important lessons. The

author describes the task thus: “I hope

to deepen … knowledge of the rela-

tionship between constitutionalism

and administration in the United States

by examining the same relationship in

France” (xii). In other words, what

Alexis de Tocqueville did with De-

mocracy in America, Rohr wants to do

here—a challenging task indeed. The

former meant to educate the French;

the latter writes for the edification of

Americans. In fact, Rohr considers de

Tocqueville his “patron saint.”

It is a sobering thought that we in

America have some things to learn

from others. In the words of one very

observant foreign scholar—a French

one to boot—only recently have we

begun “to understand the errors of ap-

preciation that were engendered by …

believing too easily in the universal-

istic value of American experiences”

(Crozier 1970, 210-11). Long gone are

the days when comparative study

claimed the attention of many a

scholar in the United States. The Sec-

tion on International and Comparative

Administration is the oldest Section of

the American Society for Public Ad-

ministration and last year quietly

marked its silver anniversary. After its

heyday in the 1960s, however, inter-

est in comparative study has declined.

For that matter, the international part

of this study and its comparative as-

pect have never yet been well inte-

grated, as Fred Riggs and Ferrel Heady

have shown recently.1

Neither France nor any other nation

conducts its business for the benefit of

someone else. There are not many

colonies left in the world to satisfy the

many needs of the masters either. But

as the world shrank—and continues to

shrink as we tread Cyberspace—na-

tions’ interdependency and mutuality

of interests proliferate. No country can

remain an island unto itself: All belong

to the “global village.” Thus, under-

standing others is not only necessary

for transacting business and coexisting

with them; it is also essential for un-

derstanding ourselves—a theme which

Fred Riggs has made his own. And here

is a book by Rohr meant to satisfy the

need for mutual understanding.

As a scholar, Rohr needs no intro-

duction, since his previous works are

well known. In fact, his current book

was engendered by the previous one,

John A. Rohr, Founding Republics in France and America: A Study in Consti-

tutional Governance. (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995)

370 pp.; $45.00 hard; $19.95 paper.

To Run a Constitution: The Legiti-

macy of the Administrative State. Af-

ter completing the earlier work, which

dealt with the problem of legitimiz-

ing the contemporary U.S. adminis-

trative state with reference to the

founding fathers, Rohr found himself

wondering what happens “in a coun-

try whose normative foundations

were the opposite of those of the

United States—that is, a country in

which administrative institutions

embodied the abiding norms while

constitutions were unstable” (252).

France, with as many as 15 constitu-

tions since the 1789 Revolution (de-

pending on the definition of a consti-

tution) but with a stable administra-

tion, would of course be the best ex-

ample. And Rohr, having studied the

U.S. Constitution and with an exper-

tise in legal studies (he chaired the

ASPA’s Public Law section) is well

suited to such an undertaking. More-

over, he has a command of French,

which of course is crucial to the un-

derstanding the country’s constitu-

tional, administrative, and cultural

nuances. He also spent 14 months

(over a span of five years) living in

France, and was a Fulbright Research

Scholar there. Fortunately, Rohr also

had access to the massive three-vol-

ume collection of documents on the

1958 founding of the Fifth Republic