Mourning Administrative Generosity in a Postgenerous Time

Date01 January 2002
Published date01 January 2002
DOI10.1177/0095399702033006001
Subject MatterArticles
ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / January 2002Howe / MOURNING ADMINISTRATIVE GENEROSITY
This article examines the roleof generosity in public administration from a peculiar literary
perspective, that of Wallace Shawn’s play, The Designated Mourner. In the recent past,
deontologists in the discipline, such as Emette Redford, articulated rich theories of demo-
cratic responsiveness, but today these theories no longer command a scholarlyconsensus.
This collapse, or “death,”of deontology has led to a scramble for a new philosophical foun-
dation to animate the study and practiceof administration, with various candidates self-pro-
claiming themselves to be deontology’s designated mourner. This article examines three
candidates: neo-Lockean naturallaw, neo-Habermassean communicative competence, and
neo-Nietzschean receptive generosity. Only the third contains a strong enough commitment
to democratic generosityto resist the temptations of self-effacement represented by Shawn’s
designated mourner.
MOURNING ADMINISTRATIVE
GENEROSITY IN A
POSTGENEROUS TIME
Lessons From Wallace Shawn’s
The Designated Mourner
LOUIS E. HOWE
University of West Georgia
I went to the park, sat on a bench...anditsuddenly hit me that everyoneon
earth who could read John Donne was nowdead. . . . I realized that I was the
only one left who would evenbe aware of the passing of this peculiar group,
this group which was so special, at least in their own eyes. . . . The remem-
berers were gone, except for me, and I was forgetting.
—Shawn (1996, pp. 99-101)
This article examines the question of democracy in future administra-
tive practice from a peculiar literary perspective, that of the designated
583
AUTHOR’SNOTE: The author is indebted to Romand Coles, Cynthia McSwain, Hugh Miller,
PatriciaPatterson, and Camilla Stivers for their thoughtful comments and kind encourage-
ment on earlier drafts of this article.
ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY, Vol. 33 No. 6, January 2002 583-609
© 2002 Sage Publications
mourner.The term is borrowed from a recent play of that name by Wallace
Shawn (Shawn, 1996). Shawn’s title is based on an old myth involving a
tribal culture and what happened when an entire clan died out. In such a
case, someone from outside the clan had to be designated as its official
mourner. The corpus of the clan in my own appropriation will be the
administrative ethic associated with the philosophy of deontology, here
arbitrarily represented in the work of Emmette Redford (Redford, 1969;
also Rawls, 1971; Sandel, 1982). Deontology sought to institute a demo-
cratic culture that would recognize everyone’s right to pursue their own
good while refusing to legislate any particular conception of a good life to
any of the participants. Few today would enthusiastically endorse this
notion in its pure form. This collapse, or death, of deontology has led to a
scramble for a new philosophic foundation to animate the study of admin-
istration, with various candidates self-proclaiming themselves to be, in
effect, deontology’s designated mourner. Although there are many such
candidates, this article will examine only three: neo-Lockean natural law,
neo-Habermassean communicative competence, and neo-Nietzschean
receptive generosity. Although each of these fulfills important require-
ments of democracy, I will arguethat only the third holds open the possi-
bility of an effectivelydemocratic future. This is because the temptation is
to respond to the loss of deontology and to postmodernity’s tightening
webs of economic, professional, and administrative disciplines by, first,
shrinking the horizon within which one expects to be politically effica-
cious and, second, by thinning the hopes, desires, and emotions connected
with citizenship to include only those demands that offer no threat to an
increasingly fragile order.
THE DESIGNATED MOURNER
The designation designated mourner indicates a relation to the past.
That relation is ambiguous, agonistic, and discontinuous. A mourner
acknowledges a loss and must even admit that her or his joy depends cru-
cially on something or someone that is missing. A mourner has lost her or
his joy and searches for a new one. The goal of mourning is to learn to seek
out, cultivate, and appreciate those qualities in the world that made the
missing one so sustaining, so beloved. Thus, one possibility of mourning
is that it might acknowledge loss by celebrating the world. It might en-joy
584 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / January 2002

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