Book Review: M. W. Spicer In Defense of Politics in Public Administration: A Value Pluralist Perspective. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010

• Author: Christine M. Reed
• Published date: 01 May 2011
• Date: 01 May 2011
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0275074010382572
• Subject Matter: Articles

Book Reviews

The American Review of Public Administration

41(3) 348 –351

© The Author(s) 2011

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M. W. Spicer

In Defense of Politics in Public Administration: A Value Pluralist Perspective. Tuscaloosa:

The University of Alabama Press, 2010.

Reviewed by: Christine M. Reed, University of Nebraska at Omaha

DOI: 10.1177/0275074010382572

In recent years, studies of governance, networks, and collaboration have replaced the field’s

traditional focus on administering large public organizations. More to the point, measures of

success are often tied to social processes that promote consensus and avoid the need for pro-

tracted litigation in solving complex policy issues. The jury is out on the empirical claims asso-

ciated with much of this research; however, it is time to seriously question the underlying

normative assumption that adversarial politics stand in the way of legitimate governance.

Michael Spicer’s penetrating analysis and defense of politics takes up that challenge. His latest

work builds on arguments developed in his 1995 book, The Founders, the Constitution and

Public Administration. As the title of that earlier book suggests, his arguments are based primar-

ily on the concepts and practices of American constitutionalism, in particular its system of checks

and balances.

The subtitle points to the underpinning of Spicer’s defense of adversarial politics. “The central

argument is that politics play a crucial role in helping societies manage conflicts among different

values or conceptions of the good” (p. 18). Conflicts among values are a result of our diverse

practical activities as well as the interests they serve. Moral theory appealing to a harmony of

values is inconsistent with our ordinary experience of making tough moral decisions. Value

conflicts pervade our private lives as well as our work in government and public administration.

Quoting Isaiah Berlin, “The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious

equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices”

(p. 35). Spicer concludes that compromise among conflicting values relies on politics. The

alternative is force.

The arguments in this book do more than defend politics as a method of settling value conflicts.

They are a forceful rejection of value monism, or resolution of apparent value conflict by an

appeal to some higher principle, such as the utilitarian calculus. Following Stuart Hampshire,

Spicer warns of the dangers associated with promoting a unitary idea of the good, such as maximum

human happiness. Politics should encourage officials to respond to the views of different groups

in society and to reflect the different ideas of the good held by those groups when making

decisions. Governance, on the other hand, aims to identify significant causal connections between

a clear mission or policy objective and performance through networks to achieve collective

purposes. The correctness of action as the extent to which it promotes a given mission trumps

value pluralism and conflicting conceptions of the good.

Spicer’s book is a wake-up call that alerts us to the ways in which collaboration limits the

scope of conflict resolution to technical matters on which multiple stakeholders can potentially

agree. Recent studies of governance, networks, and collaboration advance the argument that

adversarial politics can hamper collaborative solutions to complex policy problems. Collaboration