Toward a New Public Administration: The Minnowbrook ... · PDF fileDEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 259 The foregoing considerations suggest the need for taking a critical look

DEMOCRACY, ETHICS, AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION:A REVIEW OF SOME RECENT LITERATURE*

Toward a New Public Administration: The MinnowbrookPerspective, Frank Marini, ed. New York: Chandler, 1971.

The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, by VincentOstrom. Revised edition. Alabama: University of Alabama Press,1974.

Ethics for Bureaucrats: An Essay on Law and Values, by John A.Rohr. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1978.*

I

In contrast to the economic difficulties facing American highereducation as a whole, as budgets tighten and student enrollmentthreatens to decline, the discipline of public administration continuesto prosper.' A multitude of students, motivated by the evidentlyjustified belief that a public administration degree promises access toan interesting and reasonably well paid career, continue to flock tosuch programs. Judged by the standards of economic demand andorganizational survival, therefore, the teaching of public adminstra-tion in this country in recent years has been highly successful. But arethe public administration curricula successful by a more substantivestandard? How successfully, that is, do they prepare their students todo the job of a public servant?

No method exists, of course, of tangibly measuring the quality ofpublic administration instruction or of demonstrating a correlationbetween the training of civil servants and the quality of their career

1. See A. Lee Frischler and A.J. Mackelprang, "Graduate Education in Public Af-fairs/Public Administration: Results of the 1975 Survey," Public AdministrationReview, vol. 37, no. 5 (September-October, 1977), pp. 488-494. Although the survey onwhich this study was based is now four years old, our impression is that public ad-ministration programs have continued subsequently to maintain high levels of enroll-ment.

*We acknowledge with gratitude the support of the Earhart Foundation and Holy CrossCollege. The three works under consideraton will be cited parenthetically in the text,respectively, as "Marini," "Ostrom," and "Rohr."

258 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

performance. But one cannot help noting that the current mood of theAmerican public is severely critical of the quality of government"bureaucrats," particularly those employed by the Federal govern-ment. The current "tax revolt" appears to be motivated, as severalobservers have noted, not only by ire at the growing costs of govern-ment, but also by a feeling that the taxpayers aren't really getting theirmoney's worth.' Moreover, above and beyond the traditional suspi-cions that civil servants seldom work as hard as their counterparts inthe private sphere—suspicions made more irritating by the steadily ris-ing Federal pay scale—there is a more troubling feeling that the hardergovernment bureaucrats work, the more harm they are likely to do.The popular image of a civil servant is increasingly that of a meddling,petty tyrant, interfering mindlessly with the everyday activities of hisfellow citizens in the name of safety, nondiscrimination, or the furbishlousewort.

As a citizen one finds it difficult to avoid sharing these concerns andfears. But as a student of politics, one must also be wary of the over-simplified diagnoses and solutions to which the anti-bureaucracymovement threatens to give rise. There is surely no reason to assumethat the average civil servant is morally or intellectually inferior to hisprivate-sector counterpart. Indeed, it is likely that a considerable ele-ment in motivating many college-educated people to seek governmentcareers is a relatively high degree of public spiritedness and concernfor justice. The deficiencies of the government bureaucracy, troublingas they are, do not result from a kind of natural-selection-in-reverse.Moreover, it would be harmful to be misled by current concerns withreducing government waste and overregulation into thinking thatthese are the only criteria by which governmental administrationshould be judged. The movements towards tax reduction and"deregulation" may enhance the security of the individual citizen'sliberty and his pocketbook against the reach of arbitrary government,but they will not insure that the government's legitimate activities arecarried out well in a positive sense. We are reminded by the authors ofthe Federalist that a considerable measure of the goodness of agovernment is its conduciveness to good administration; and that astrong (but properly constituted) government is an essential prereq-uisite of, rather than an enemy to, liberty.'

2. See, for instance, Irving Kristol, "Of Populism and Taxes," The Public Interest,no. 28 (Summer, 1972), pp. 10-11.

3. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York:New American Library, 1961), no. 1, p. 35; no. 68, p. 414.

DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 259

The foregoing considerations suggest the need for taking a criticallook at the principles underlying the contemporary education ofAmerican public administrators. We are not concerned here with the"technical" aspects of that education, involving such instrumentalskills or pseudo-skills as budgeting or "personnel management."Rather, we wish to focus attention on the understanding conveyed bycontemporary administrative scholars of the essential nature of thecivil servant's job, and of his role in the American system of govern-ment. We suspect that the present deficiencies of the governmentbureaucracy stem in part from a defect in this element of ad-ministrative training. By examining three representative works typify-ing various approaches to the study of public administration, we hopeto identify the defectiveness of the dominant approaches, and to sug-gest the need for serious reconsideration of an older understanding ex-emplified by the Federalist, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, andSir Henry Taylor's The Statesman. As we shall observe, the most re-cent of the three works to be examined represents a promising movetowards reapplying that older understanding to the contemporarytraining of future civil servants.

II

The emergence of public administration as a distinct branch ofpolitical science (or even, as some would argue, a wholly independentdiscipline) is traceable to certain developments in modern politicalthought and practice that preceded this emergence. Modern liberalregimes like the United States rest on an express denial of theAristotelian contention that political life—involving not only associa-tion with other men, but also the experience of ruling and beingruled—is natural to man. By deriving government from a "state ofnature" in which human beings exist independently of any externalauthority, the "social contract" thinkers who laid down the fun-damental principles of liberalism aimed to limit the scope and purposeof government to the achievement of the one fundamental good ofwhich all individuals stand in need, but which is lacking in the naturalstate. That good, of course, is security (of life, liberty, and property),which depends for its establishment on a settled system of law en-forced by a recognized government with the power to enforce the law.

If the purpose of political authority is understood in this way, it isno longer appropriate to equate governing men with "ruling" them,as classical and medieval thinkers had done. The sovereign's function


is not to mold men's lives in accordance with some objective standardof human excellence or divine will, but rather to do for the citizenrywhat is manifestly in their individual interests as they conceive them.Rather than ruling men, government "represents" them: it carries outwhat can be presumed to be the intention of all individuals to live in astable and secure environment' (a moment's reflection on the state ofnature as described by Hobbes, or in chapter nine of Locke's SecondTreatise, suffices to demonstrate that no rational man would wish tolive there).

In limiting the purpose of government to ministering to men's wantsrather than forming their souls, however, the liberal philosphers werefar from being advocates of "do-nothing" government. Hobbes urgesthe sovereign diligently to take notice of "the general informations,and complaints of the people" regarding their wants, since his pur-pose is to secure not only the "bare preservation" of his subjects' livesbut also "all other contentments of life" that they may lawfully andharmlessly acquire for themselves.' Locke similarly grants the ex-ecutive a broad "prerogative" to act "for the good of society," sub-ject only to a check by the legislature that is unlikely to be exercised ef-fectively unless the executive's deeds are manifestly harmful to thepeople's interests. 6 And the authors of the Federalist urge that "thesecurity of liberty" requires a government that is vigorous rather thanweak: although the "first object" of government is the protection ofindividual property rights, its "principal task" is to regulate men's"various and interfering" economic interests, rather than merelytrusting to the operation of a Smithean invisible hand.'

Modern, "representative" governments are distinguished frompremodern ones, then, not by the extent of their activity, but rather bytheir purpose. But in order to make this activity acceptable to peoplewho have been taught that no one naturally has the right to rule them,it becomes necessary to speak of it in a new way. Governmental activi-ty is legitimate on liberal grounds only so long as it ministers to the

4. See Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier Books, 1962),chap. 17, p. 132; Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., "Impartial Representation," in Robert A.Goldwin (ed.), Representation and Misrepresentation (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1968),pp. 91-114.

5. Leviathan, chap 30, pp. 259, 245.6. Locke, Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New

York: New American Library, 1965), chap. 14, secs. 159-161, pp. 421-22.7. Federalist, #1, p. 35; no. 10, pp. 78-79. Cf. Morton J. Frisch, "Hamilton's

Report on Manufactures and Political Philosophy," Publius, vol. 8, no. 3 (Summer,1978), p. 139.


people's wants, rather than imposing on them in the name of someopinion about what their wants should be. Hence the principalbusiness of liberal governments comes to be identified as "administra-tion."'

In this light, the subject of "public administration" comes into itsown only after the essential political question—the question of thepurpose of government—has been settled. So long as the latter issueremained in dispute, it was necessarily the subject commanding thepredominant attention of serious political thinkers. But once it seemedto be settled, attention could be shifted from the "end" question tothe "means" question: given the dependence of just government onthe active consent of the governed and its subordination to the goal ofsecuring their individual rights, how might their will best be effectedand their rights most effectively secured?' Even the choice amongregimes—for Aristotle, the fundamental "end" question ofpolitics—now is transmuted into a "means" issue, since all legitimateforms of government are presumed to aim at the same goal.' Hence,according to the Federalist, "the true test of a good government is itsaptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.""

The theme of public administration is discussed at some length inthe Federalist, but predominantly in the context of its treatment of thePresidency. "The administration of government" is defined as com-prising "in its largest sense...all the operations of the body politic,"but "in its most usual and perhaps in its most precise signification,"as "limited to executive details" such as fall "within the province ofthe executive department," supervised by the President. These"details," however, are of manifestly broad scope: "the actual con-

8. The Marxian notion that government will wither away entirely, leaving only thetask of "administration," represents a radicalization of the liberal view. See FriedrichEngels, "On Authority," in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (secondedition, New York: Norton, 1978), p. 732.

9. Cf. Woodrow Wilson, "The Study of Administration," Political ScienceQuarterly, vol. 56 (December 1941), pp. 482-84 (originally published in 1887). Hereaftercited parenthetically in the text as "Wilson."

10.Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 19, p. 143, and chap. 21, p. 163; also, the sectionheaded "The Decay of Rational Statesmanship" in Herbert J. Storing, "AmericanStatesmanship: Old and New," in Robert A. Goldwin (ed.), Statesmen, Bureaucrats,and Policy Scientists: Who's in Charge? (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise In-stitute, forthcoming, 1980).

11.Federalist, #68, p. 414; cf. also #76, p. 455; Harvey Flaumenhaft, "Hamilton onthe Foundation of Government," The Political Science Reviewer, vol. 6 (1976), pp.211-14.


duct of foreign negotiations, the preparatory plans of finance, the ap-plication and disbursement of the public moneys in conformity to thegeneral appropriations of the legislature, the arrangement of the armyand navy, the direction of the operations of war,...and other mattersof a like nature."" The central aim of the Federalist's discussion ofthe Presidency is to show that the Constitution adequately combinesthe elements of "energy in the executive" ("unity; duration [inoffice]; an adequate provision for its support; and competentpowers"), with those of "safety in the republican sense" ("a duedependence on the people, and a due responsibility")."

The Federalist's treatment of public administration embodies, asone scholar has observed, a "prudential distinction between politicsand administration," rather than a sharp dichotomy between the two.While in its first, provisional definition, the Federalist reproduces themodern, liberal equation of the overall function of government with"administration" (as distinguished from "ruling"), its narrowerdefinition of administration reflects a distinction between two levelsof liberal politics: that dealing with broad issues of policy, on the onehand, and that concerned with the execution of the agreed uponpolicy, on the other."

So long as public administration was understood in this-way--as akind of subordinate-level governing—its study was seen, of necessity,as a part of political science. (A classic example of this kind of ap-proach to public administration is Tocqueville's treatment of thedecentralized character of American administration and its politicaleffects, in Democracy in America)." The notion of public administra-tion as a distinct subject of study, separable from politics, owes itsorigin in this country above all to a profoundly influential essaypublished by Woodrow Wilson in 1887, entitled "The Study of Ad-ministration."" a Wilson's endeavor to sever "administration" from"politics" not only gave impetus to the movement to develop anAmerican "science" of administration, but also laid down criticalassumptions that have been the key focus of dispute among thescience's practitioners in recent decades. An understanding of theissues raised by the recent literature in public administration requires a

12.Federalist, #72, pp. 435-36 (emphasis added).13.Ibid., no. 70, p. 424.14. Kent Aiken Kirwan, "The Crisis of Identity in the Study of Public Administra-

tion: Woodrow Wilson," Polity, vol. 9, no. 3 (Spring 1977), p. 337.15a. See note 9, supra.

15. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, transl. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols.(New York: Random House—Vintage Books, 1945), I, v, 89-101; I, xvi, 281-82.


preliminary look at Wilson's argument.Wilson's central concern in "The Study of Administration" was to

bring about the application of "impartial scientific method" to thestudy of administrative practices in the United States, with a view tothe practical improvement of American public administration.(Wilson, 485). Writing in the heyday of the civil service reform move-ment, whose efforts culminated in the replacement of the notorious"spoils" system for filling subordinate governmental offices with thenow familiar "merit" system, Wilson saw that movement as "but aprelude," a "moral preparation," for "a fuller administrativereform": once the civil service had been made "unpartisan," it couldthen be made "businesslike" (494).

Wilson's desire to make public administration businesslike reflectshis assumption that "[t]he field of administration is a field ofbusiness," rather than—as was formerly thought—part of politics,law, or "the debatable ground of constitutional study" (493-4). Theseverance of the study of administration from that of political, legal,and constitutional questions is essential if democratic America is togain from the advances made in the countries where administrativescience has been developed the furthest—the despotic regimes of theEuropean continent, notably Prussia and Napoleonic France (486-9).Wilson is confident that the United States can apply the lessons ofEuropean administrative science to itself without having in any way toimbibe the obnoxious political principles to which Europeanbureaucracies have been rendered subject (504). Different as thoseforeign political principles may be from our own, Wilson nonethelessasserts that there is "but one rule of good administration for allgovernments alike," since "[m]onarchies and democracies, radicallydifferent as they are in other respects, have in reality much the samebusiness to look to." In other words, "for all governments alike thelegitimate ends of administration are the same..." (502). Hence it ispossible for Wilson, as a good democrat, to learn and apply a monar-chist's "business methods without changing one of my republicanspots" (504). It is necessary, however, to "Americanize" the monar-chist's method in order to adapt it "to a complex and multiform" and"decentralized" system of government such as we enjoy: "[i]t mustlearn our constitutions by heart; must get the bureaucratic fever out ofits veins; must inhale much free American air" (486).

The disjunction between politics and administration not only sup-plies the theoretical ground necessary for applying a transpoliticalscience of administration to the American situation; such a disjunc-tion is also the key practical consequence of this science, as Wilson ar-


ticulates it. He urges the necessity for a democracy like ours "[t]odiscover the best principle for the distribution of authority," in orderthat the people may be able unmistakably to identify the person(s)responsible for any particular government policy. Only then may their"suspicion" of government authority be replaced by "wise vigilance"over those who execute it. Such a principle of "clear-cut responsibili-ty" requires, however, that the persons holding responsibility for apolicy have been given "large powers and unhampered discretion" forits execution: otherwise the people would wrongly be holding them toaccount for actions (or inaction) that the relevant official had no realpower to bring about or prevent. (497-8) The achievement of this goalhas been hampered in the United States by the popular reluctance toallocate adequate authority to those who have responsibility for carry-ing out the functions of government, a reluctance that reflects the peo-ple's inability thus far to separate the "essentials" of civil liberty"from its accidents" (498). Believing that their sovereignty entitlesthem to criticize and interfere with "the daily details and...the choiceof the daily means of government," the American people havemadetheir criticism of government operations (Wilson suggests) "a clumsynuisance," like the interference of "a rustic handling delicatemachinery." Thus, contrary to their intention, the citizenry frustratethe accomplishment of their own will, as conveyed (by elections) to theelected government. The effective implementation of the people's will,and hence the ultimate future of popular government, depends on thepeople's being "instructed" in the proper scope of their political ac-tivities. They need, in sum, to learn the distinction between "politics"and "administration," limiting their criticism to "the greater forcesof formative policy" while leaving the choice of particular ad-ministrative methods to the elected government (498-9) 16 . Wilson isconfident that the fear that such a restriction of American public opi-nion would result in "the creation of a domineering, illiberal of-ficialdom" as is sometimes seen in Europe is groundless, since theAmerican administrative system he is proposing "must be at all pointssensitive to public opinion." Such sensitivity is best insured, however,not by popular interference in the everyday business of administra-tion—which only obscures responsibility—but rather by requiring allcivil servants to exhibit "hearty allegiance to the policy of the govern-ment they serve," which in turn derives its mandate from, anddepends for its continuance on, the will of the people (500):

16. Wilson himself blurs his distinction at p. 499 by assigning to "public criticism" alegitimate role in "superintending the greater forces of formative policy alike in politicsand administration..." (emphasis added). See the discussion in the next paragraph ofthe text supra, and the sources cited in note 17.


The ideal for us is a civil service cultured and self-sufficient enough to act withsense and vigor, and yet so intimately connected with the popular thought, by-means of elections and constant public counsel, as to find arbitrariness or classspirit quite out of the question (501).

As the reference in the preceding quotation to "constant publiccounsel" in addition to elections as a way of holding the civil serviceaccountable indicates, Wilson's advocacy of the politics/administra-tion dichotomy was by no means unambiguous; the entire thrust of hisargument is in fact fraught with ambiguity and even contradiction, assome recent scholarship has emphasized." As John Rohr observes,however, these difficulties were largely overlooked by readers at thetime "The Study of Administration" was originally published,because of the immediate practical utility of Wilson's argument to theadvocates of civil service reform (Rohr, p. 26). By seeminglydemonstrating how the severance of administration from politics ac-tually served the cause of democracy, understood as the efficient im-plementation of the popular will, Wilson provided the reformers withan answer to those critics who charged that the proposed merit systemwas "undemocratic." Thus the dichotomy, as Rohr observes, rapidly"gained wide acceptance among political scientists" (Rohr, 22),especially as it was elaborated by Frank Goodnow's "two-pyramid"theory in his influential Politics and Administration." A furtherreason for the popularity of the dichotomy, Rohr notes, was that it

harmonized nicely with the scientific management movement that dominatedprivate industry in the early decades of the twentieth century. Thus, industrialmanagement and public administration coalesced to form a "science" of ad-ministration—a "business-like" approach to government based on "principles"common to any type of organization and designed to promote "economy and ef-ficiency" [Wilson's terms] in executing policies determined by theadministrator's political (that is, elected) superiors (Rohr, 22).

Despite its early popularity, the politics/administration dichotomyhas for several decades been the object of attack by political scientists,the major thrust of their attack being the model's lack of cor-respondence to how the civil service in the United States, or in anyother country, actually operates. As a wide literature now attests, it isimpossible in practice to separate "political" from "administrative"tasks as Wilson and his followers wished to do: "means" and "ends"are inevitably so intertwined that the "technical" or instrumentaldecisions made by administrators have, in all interesting cases, an im-portant political dimension as well. Indeed, Theodore Lowi has

17. See Kirwan, "The Crisis of Identity"; Rohr, pp. 25-26; Richard J. Stillman, II,"Woodrow Wilson and the Study of Administration: A New Look at an Old Essay,"American Political Science Review, vol. 67, no. 2 (June, 1973), p. 586.

18. (New York: Macmillan, 1900).


stressed the tendency of Congress in recent years to frame legislationin increasingly broad terms, thus expanding still further the discre-tion—and hence the "political" authority—of bureaucrats chargedwith implementing the legislation."

So powerful has been the evidence proffered to refute thepolitics/administration dichotomy as an account of the reality ofgovernment that there appears to be little likelihood of its revivifica-tion. As one public administration scholar remarked several yearsago, the proposition that "administration is a part of the political pro-cess" is "now certainly 'established' in the theology" of thediscipline. 20 But through a kind of cultural lag, the implications of therefutation of the politics/administration dichotomy for the practice ofpublic administration have never adequately been grasped by the ma-jority of American civil servants, or by those who teach them. AsRohr observes, "the old Wilsonian world view still appears to be theprevailing ideology among practicing bureaucrats" (Rohr, 26). Theresult is an absence of awareness on the part of many bureaucrats oftheir policy-making role, which in turn tends to weaken their capacityto carry out that role in an adequately reflective manner (Rohr,39-40). Moreover, as Rohr puts it, "among academics themselvesthere has been a surprising reluctance to address the serious normativequestions that arise from their own insights" into "the politicalcharacter of public administration." (Rohr, 26-7). In other words,having rediscovered the policy-making power of bureaucrats, mostscholars could still not figure out what to do with it. Their responseuntil recently was to re-emphasize the need to strengthen the controlexercised over the civil service by elected officials; or, alternatively, tostress the "representative" character of the bureaucracy as a means ofinsuring the correspondence of its values to those of the electorate.2'Thus there was a continuing failure on the part of the scholars andteachers of public administration to educate administrators for the ex-ercise of discretion involving political or "value" questions. Theyconcentrated rather on continuing to refine the neutral "techniques"

19. Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the UnitedStates (second edition, New York: Norton, 1979), especially chap. 5.

20. York Willbern, "Is the New Public Administration Still With Us?", Public Ad-ministration Review, vol. 33, no. 4 (July-August, 1973), p. 377.

21. For representative statements of these two points of view, see, respectively, Her-man Finer, "Administrative Responsibility in Democratic Government," Public Ad-ministration Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer, 1941), pp. 335-350; Norton E. Long,"Bureaucracy and Constitutionalism," American Political Science Review, vol. 46, no.3 (September, 1952), pp. 808-18.


of administration, hoping that their pupils would use these techniquesfor good ends rather than bad ones once they achieved positions of in-fluence.

As one might expect, the political events of the late 1960's made adent in the value-neutrality of public administration scholarship, justas in other areas of the social sciences. The immediate result of thoseevents in the field of administration was the rise of a self-proclaimed"New Public Administration" movement, peopled predominantly byyounger scholars and championing the banners of "a commitment tosocial equity" and the "democratization" of public organizations. Afew years later, the Watergate "crisis" provided a further stimulus toethical reflection by administrative scholars, provoking in some casesa striking, if not surprising, rejection of traditional administrativedoctrines stressing the need for executive leadership and centraliza-tion.22

We shall be concerned, in the next two sections of this essay, withexamining two documents of the response by administrative scholarsto the recent crisis in "values": the volume resulting from the 1968Minnowbrook Conference at Syracuse University entitled Toward aNew Public Administration, edited by Frank Marini; and the lecturespresented by an influential senior scholar, Vincent Ostrom, at theUniversity of Alabama, published under the title The IntellectualCrisis in American Public Administration. While applauding theseauthors' concern with issues of value and their reopening of importantquestions, we shall suggest that each volume embodies serious dif-ficulties and fails to resolve the issues it raises in an adequate manner.We shall then examine a more recent, and we believe more promising,approach to some of these same ethical issues, as embodied in JohnRohr's Ethics for Bureaucrats.

Ill

The Minnowbrook Conference is described by its organizer, DwightWaldo (one of the most widely respected scholars in the public ad-ministration field), as having originated in two concerns: first, the in-adequacy of the response of both the study and the practice of publicadministration "to mounting turbulence and critical problems" inAmerican society; and second, the need to recruit younger scholars in-

22. See, for instance, James L. Sundquist, "Reflections on Watergate: Lessons forPublic Administration," Public Administration Review, vol. 34, no. 5 (September-October, 1974), pp. 453-461; Ostrom, pp. 134-46.


to the mainstream of public administration, so as "to encourage newthinking, enlist new energies, and attract more and better talent to thetask of dealing with public problems" (Waldo, "Introduction," inMarini, pp. xiii-xiv). Thus the Minnowbrook meeting was expresslydesigned as "a 'youth' conference," bringing together youngerscholars in the field "to discuss whatever seemed important to them."(p. xiv; emphasis in original). While in looking back on the conferencethree years later Waldo (perhaps too modestly) regarded as still anopen question "Wile extent to which the conference reflected andhelped to catalyze a 'new' Public Administration" (p. xv), a subse-quent reviewer remarked that "[b]y all accounts," the conference"must have had a great impact" not only in "the intellectual lives" ofthe participants, but "through them on many others."" Even thoughthe reviewer also commented that "the fervor of the protagonists ofthe 'new Public Administration' " seemed to have subsided somewhatin subsequent years,' there is indeed good reason to suspect that themovement has had a lasting impact on the thought of many youngerteachers of public administration, and through them—for good orill—on the latest generation of practicing administrators. It is for thisreason that the book, although suffering from the defects of mostconference volumes and reflecting, at least in retrospect, a rathernaive view of the political world, still merits our attention.

The 13 essays comprising Toward a New Public Administration(three of which were composed after the conference itself) reflect aconsiderable disparity of views of the field of public administrationand the direction it should take. Most notable is a difference betweenthose scholars who still adhere to the model of a "science" of ad-ministration, aimed (in Carl Hempel's words) at "attainment of a sim-ple, systematically unified account of empirical phenomena" (cited byPhilip S. Kronenberg, in Marini, 205), and those, on the other hand,who believe it is necessary to question at least "some aspects of thepositivist philosophical tradition" on which such a conception ofscience rests (Larry Kirkhart, in Marini, 133), or even forecast, and

23. Willbern, "Is the New Public Administration Still With Us?," p. 374. Otherworks discussed by Willbern as representative of the "New Public Administration"movement include Public Administration in a Time of Turbulence, edited by DwightWaldo (Chandler, 1971); Organizational Frontiers and Human Values, edited by War-ren H. Schmidt (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1970); and The Administrative Revolu-tion, by George E. Berkley (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971). However,Willbern singles out the Marini volume as "probably, the most significant" of the four(ibid.).

24. Ibid., p. 378.


hope, that "[t]he days of a positivistic philosophy of research arenumbered" (Marini, "The Minnowbrook Perspective and the Futureof Public Administration," in Marini, 363-64). 2 ' Despite this dispari-ty, however, one commentator seems to be correct when he identifiesthe essence of the "new public administration" as "a break fromvalue-free or value-neutral empirical research" and "a desire to makethe academic study of the social universe directly concerned with ques-tions of social justice," so that—in opposition to "the traditionalpositivist stance"—the "new" public administration scholar, like hisreformist colleagues in the other social sciences, "will make valuejudgments" in his professional capacity (Bob Zimring, in Marini,230). We shall consequently focus our analysis on the essays thatdevelop this point of view. Following the suggestion of one scholarwho summarized the results of the Minnowbrook conference shortlyafter it ended, we shall examine the essays by Todd LaPorte, OrionWhite, Robert Biller, and Larry Kirkhart, which seemed to thatscholar "particularly valuable, both in documenting some difficultieswith traditional ideas in the field and in pointing the way towardviable new concepts. 726 We shall also consider Michael Harmon'scontribution on "Normative Theory and Public Administration"because of its relevance to the central issues under discussion.

At the outset of his essay on "The Recovery of Relevance in theStudy of Public Administration," Todd LaPorte remarks the "greatconceptual confusion" characterizing contemporary public ad-ministration studies (Marini, 17). He traces this confusion to the factthat while public organizations are judged by a variety of partialcriteria such as "[e]fficiency, public interest, representativeness, or[organizational] survival," the ultimate goal or "for what" in light ofwhich these criteria should be measured "is scantily emphasized" (18;emphasis in original). As a result, LaPorte charges, "the literature inPublic Administration has contributed almost nothing to major ad

25. Not all of the contributors seem to be aware of the tension between these twopoints of view. Todd LaPorte, for instance, demands that theoretical statements aboutadministration "be made in propositional form" so that their truth or falsity can be em-pirically tested, but goes on a page later to assert the anti-positivist thesis that atheorist's "[a]nalytical concepts" are derived from his "underlying normative presup-positions" (LaPorte, "The Recovery of Relevance in the Study of PublicOrganization," in Marini, pp. 28-30. If the latter assertion is accepted, it seems toundermine the possibility of a scientifically objective testing of theoretical propositions.Cf. Eugene Miller, "Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry," AmericanPolitical Science Review, vol. 66, no. 3 (September, 1972), pp. 796-817.

26. Richard S. Page, "A New Public Administration?" Public AdministrationReview, vol. 34, no. 3 (May-June, 1969), p. 303.


vances in either the analysis or the normative understanding of com-plex public organizations" (19).

An adequate approach to the study of public organizations,LaPorte argues, must begin from awareness and acceptance of thefact that "public organizations are becoming the major arena ofpolitical action, increasingly taking the place of legislative bodies asthe source of creative political solutions and the definition of impor-tant political problems." Such awareness "suggests that the vacuumof political philosophical analysis within which we study Public Ad-ministration" at present "is a serious, perhaps disastrous, situation"(19-20; emphasis in original). Lamenting the confusingly "astonishingvariety in concepts, theories, and unconnected propositions" to befound in the public administration literature (23-4), LaPorte suggeststhat a greater degree of "conceptual convergence" could be broughtabout by recognizing that "[a]nalytical concepts are most often de-rived from the major conceptual questions asked about thephenomenon" being studied, and that these questions "in turn arerooted in underlying normative presuppositions held by the theorist(often implicitly) to be important reasons for asking his set of ques-tions" (28, 30). In order to promote such convergence and therebypromote "relevance" in public administration studies, LaPorte pro-poses that the authors of such studies should accept as their "primarynormative premise" that "the purpose of public organization is thereduction of economic, social, and psychic suffering and the enhance-ment of life opportunities for those inside and outside the organiza-tion" (32; emphasis in original). He elaborates the practical implica-tions of this premise as follows:

...this statement means that public organizations should be assessed in terms oftheir effect on the production and distribution of material abundance, in effortsto free all people from economic deprivation and want. Furthermore, it meansthat public organizations have a responsibility to enhance social justice by free-ing their participants and the citizenry to decide their own way by increasing theprobability of shared political and social privilege. Finally, it means that thequality of personal encounter and increasing possibilities of personal growthshould be elevated to major criteria of organizational assessment. (32)

As a loose statement of desirable political goals, LaPorte's pro-posed "normative premise" and its elaboration could probably com-mand widespread assent among contemporary Americans. The state-ment appears more problematic, however, once one tries to probe themeaning of its particular terms, and their specific implications for theconduct of public administration. What, more precisely, are the


criteria of "social justice" and "personal growth"? In what sense ispolitical privilege to be "shared," and to what extent is the kind ofsharing desired by LaPorte compatible or in conflict with the alreadyexisting American constitutional order? And what, specifically, is therole of the public administrator, in relation to that of the elected of-ficials (and the electorate itself) to whom he is in some sense subor-dinate, in defining these goals and choosing the means of promotingthem?

LaPorte, regrettably, makes no attempt to answer such questions.Instead, having laid down his "normative premise," he devotes the re-mainder of his essay to advocating that it be used "to select and in-tegrate theories applicable to public organizations" in order to deter-mine "who decides matters of resource allocation, the bases andcharacter of the authority systems within administered organizations,and the consequences of administrative action for the economic andsocial conditions of the society" (33). Apparently unaware of thedegree to which his normative premise is problematic, he wishes to seeit used as the basis for critical evaluations of various public organiza-tions based on the degree to which they conform to it. Yet if thepremise itself is vague, its application would seem likely to reflect thevariety of its appliers' biases, and hardly promises, therefore, to pro-mote the "conceptual convergence" desired by LaPorte. Nor—moresignificantly, perhaps—has the premise been elaborated in such a wayas to provide practical guidance to public administrators who wish toact upon "normative" concerns.

The root problem in LaPorte's analysis—which, as we shall see, iscommon to the arguments of other advocates of the "new" public ad-ministration—is that, while stressing the need to include "normativepremises" in the analysis of public administration, the author doesnot treat norms as themselves the proper objects of analysis. Instead,norms are simply "values" (32) which one chooses for no otherreason, it seems, than their intuitive appeal; they reflect, as a sym-pathetic commentator on LaPorte's essay observes, the analyst's"normative predisposition" (Edward Friedland, in Marini, 51). Butthe insufficiency of LaPorte's loose standard of "self-actualization"is aptly indicated by the same commentator, who reminds us that

...in this century the regimes of Hitler and Stalin give evidence of some of theways in which man's potential can be made manifest. Consequently, our interestin seeing that each individual has the opportunity to become all that he is capableof being ought to be qualified appropriately (Edward Friedland, "Comment,"in Marini, 55).

What is needed, in sum, is some objective and rationally derivedstandard of human excellence by which one could distinguish personal"growth" from decay. LaPorte, unfortunately, does not seem to


recognize this problem as one requiring investigation.The next essay in the Marini volume, Orion White's "Social Change

and Administrative Adaptation," gives even more evidence thanLaPorte's of the qualities that caused some participants in the Min-nowbrook conference "to characterize it as a New Left caucus in ac-tion" (Frank Marini, in Marini, 6). Stressing the need for publicorganizations to respond to the "rising demand for the equalization ofpower" as well as "increasing awareness and sensitivity" to the defi-ciencies of the American "ideological framework" (64), White arguesthat pressures from "both the new left and the new far right" willcompel the replacement of traditional American political and ad-ministrative practices by what he calls a "purified politics" (75-6).Such a politics will reject "the traditional form of administrativeadaptation" to political changes: "avoidance of basic value questions,qualified honesty, institutionalism, and deference to the existingdistribution of power" (77). Instead, it will demand that people be"completely honest" with one another; that all parties "be placed inequal positions," with authority divided functionally rather thanhierarchically; and that there be agreement on "an explicit frameworkof principles based on a specification of what man is and what his pur-poses are" as a basis for administrative decision, largely supplantingthe traditional practice of making decisions "by compromise,reasonableness, tolerance, or balance of interest" (79). The purifica-tion of administrative practice will thus require "a reorientationtoward basic philosophical education for administrators" whichwould inculcate, "if not an ideology itself, at least a process by whichideological (or ethical) discourse can be fruitfully carried out" (79-80).

The deficiency in White's notion of "philosophical education" ismanifest in his equation of "ethical" with "ideological" discourse.Ideology ought properly to be distinguished from philosophy in thesense that the former constitutes a set of popularly appealing dogmasrather than a rational inquiry into the nature of truth. White's ownfailure to recognize such a distinction is reflected in his failure (likeLaPorte's) to propose a serious philosophic questioning of currentlypopular "values." Instead, his argument for the reform of public ad-ministration amounts to the proposition that the civil service ought toembody and promote whatever ideological movement has gained in-tellectual ascendancy at a given historical moment. His advocacy ofwhat seems perilously like a kind of ideological indoctrination, cou-pled with his denigration of compromise, reasonableness, tolerance,and the balancing of interests, amply justifies Frank Marini's soberwarning that the New Public Administration movement "has the


potential for arrogant fanaticism" if the values it embodies and thecircumstances in which they are to be applied "are not continuallyscrutinized." (Marini, 356). White can hardly be said to have provideda basis for such scrutiny.

The theme of the need for public organizations to adapt to contem-porary changes in their societal "environment," which underliesWhite's argument, is more explicitly the theme of Robert Biller's essayon "Adaptation Capacity and Organizational Development." Con-cerned about the "risk" public administrationists run "of increasingdisengagement from the most basic social facts of our time" (94),Biller goes so far as to redefine democracy "as that process by whichthe adaptation capacity of any unit [of organization] is increased."(111; emphasis in original). He asserts the need for such a "process-oriented" rather than "content-oriented" definition of agrees upon"values" like freedom and democracy, on the ground of a qualifiedepistemological skepticism:

At least with our present knowledge [the ideas of freedom and democracy] repre-sent explorational avenues rather than finitely definable end-states. In this senseone could not be free, but one could be becoming free. While it is impossible toknow with absolute certitude that one is free (that is, "Am I bound in ways I can-not now comprehend?"), one can on the basis of finite judgments determine theliberating or binding consequences of particular events or conditions (109-10,emphasis in original).

The logic of this argument is less than compelling. Biller fails torecognize that it is impossible to perceive that a phenomenon is ap-proaching a particular end-state (e.g., democracy) except to the degreethat one knows the nature of that end-state itself. His assertion thatwe can know more certainly "that it is not democratic to deny deci-sional access to the governed" than "that it is democratic to provide acertain specified amount of influence on any particular decision"(110), if true, would simply demonstrate a degree of uncertainty aboutwhat democracy is and consequently about the extent to which par-ticular policies are or are not democratic in their tendency.

We infer that there is scant reason for discarding more traditionaland substantive definitions of democracy for the one proffered byBiller. Biller, however, uses his definition to justify a new mode ofconduct for public administrators which scarcely seems compatiblewith such traditional and sensible standards as administrative respon-sibility, the balancing of conflicting citizen claims, and the applicationof due process of law. In place of balancing, Biller looks to the


dissolution of political disagreement in the name of some as-yet-to-be-discovered standard; in place of conventional administrative respon-sibility, he suggests that we consider "responsible anarchy" as apossibly workable model (111). Rather than owing loyalty to thesubstantive principles of the regime under which he lives, the ad-ministrator is simply to understand himself as a "change agent" (118).Biller has practically nothing to say about the substantive goals ofsuch change, or how the administrator (or the citizenry) maydistinguish beneficial change from corruption and decay.

Like Biller, Larry Kirkhart in his "Toward a Theory of Public Ad-ministration" sees the central problem of administrative organizationas one of "organizing for adaptability and changefulness" (164).Partly as a means to making administrative organizations "as suscep-tible to change as possible" (162-3), he proposes to replace theWeberian ideal-type of "monocratic," hierarchical bureaucracy withan alternative labeled "the consociated model." The salient featuresof the latter include an absence of "permanent hierarchy" in theorganization; "direct, authentic personal styles"; and the acceptanceof "ambiguity" in "problem solving" (160-61). This model was sin-gled out by Frank Marini in his concluding summary as "a quite ap-propriate concept for gathering together and organizing many of thechief analyses and recommendations of other Minnowbrook papers."(352).

It is useful to consider Kirkhart's proposal in conjunction with thepaper by Michael Harmon entitled "Normative Theory and PublicAdministration: Some Suggestions for a Redefinition of Ad-ministrative Responsibility." Like Kirkhart, Harmon aspires to amodel of administrative organization that will facilitate "self-actualizing behavior" on the part of its members (142-3, 177-8). Rely-ing on the work of the psychologist Abraham Maslow, Kirkhart ex-presses the hope or expectation that self-actualizing administratorswill be motivated by "the metaneeds of beauty, truth, mean-ingfulness, perfection and the like," rather than the more mundaneconcerns with security, income, and status (143). Harmon, however,faces more squarely the issue raised elsewhere by Frederick Mosher ofhow far such "individual self-actualization" on the administrator'spart is compatible with the "methods of administrative accountabili-ty" normally applied in a democracy: to what extent is it compatiblewith the principles of democracy; in other words, for civil servants tomodify the desired goals of a regime and electorate they serve in orderbetter to secure their own particular ends? But Harmon's resolution of


this issue is rather lame. While conceding "that evidence is lacking tosupport the belief that individual self-actualization through par-ticipative decision making in public agencies will meet the test ofresponsible behavior in a political democracy," he argues "that theopposite assumption—that public administrators will act irresponsiblyunless otherwise checked—is similarly devoid of empirical support."Given the uncertainty of the issue, Harmon suggests we bear in mind"that the lack of trust in public administrators implied by a strictseparation of policy formulation and implementation may, in someinstances, be a self-fulfilling prophecy": "the literature and researchabout human motivation" indicates that people in whom insufficienttrust is placed will as a result behave in a less trustworthy manner(178-9).

With Kirkhart's and Harmon's recommendation that we trust civilservants with enormous discretion to choose modes of official conductthat they find to be "self-actualizing," we have clearly moved a longway from the Federalist's emphasis on the need for institutionalchecks among the branches of government in order to prevent theabuse of power. While conceding that such devices may represent anegative "reflection on human nature," the Federalist responds that"government itself" is "but the greatest of all reflections on humannature [.] If men were angels, no government would be necessary."27In sum, given the very uncertainty of how particular individuals willbehave in office, it is safer—given the importance of the issue in-volved—to make a less sanguine assumption than the one advocatedby Kirkhart and Harmon.

Although the salutariness of the policy recommended by Kirkhartand Harmon is doubtful we should, however, also note that Harmonmakes an important point about the defect of the way that ad-ministrative discretion has been dealt with in most academic discus-sions of public administration. Despite the rejection of the Wilsonianpolitics/administration dichotomy, he points out, "leadership by ad-ministrators in the formulation of policy is still grudgingly regarded asa pragmatic necessity rather than as a positive and integral part of thatprocess." Such a treatment is not only demoralizing to the ad-ministrators themselves, but is also politically unrealistic, since"relatively little activity in government is actually subject to the voteor scrutiny of elected officials" (174-5). In other words, "internal"standards of conduct may constitute the only efficacious source of

27. Federalist, #51, p. 322.


guidance for public administrators in many instances; but the develop-ment of such standards has been sadly neglected by the literature,because of its grudging attitude towards the fact of administrativediscretion.

The "New Public Administration" movement is best understood asa well-meant, but seriously deficient, endeavor to fill this gap. Each ofthe authors we have discussed makes a serious attempt to develop nor-mative standards that can guide administrators in their role in policyformation and implementation; but each such endeavor fails, aboveall on account of the authors' relativistic or subjectivistic approach toquestions of "value." To the extent that an administrator were in-fluenced by the recommendations of the "new" public administra-tionists, he would be encouraged simply to pursue his idiosyncratic"values," with relatively little regard for their compatibility with thewishes of his constituents and political superiors, the constitutionalprinciples of the regime he serves, or the questionable coherence of his"values" considered in themselves. It would be surprising if therewere not some connection between the teachings of the "new publicadministration" movement and the arbitrariness exhibited in practiceby some Federal civil servants in recent years in pursuit of suchfashionable goals as "affirmative action," environmental protection,and occupational safety.

Not only is the program of the "New Public Administration"movement of doubtful compatibility with the principles of constitu-tional democracy; its advocates' denigration, in the name of their par-ticular understanding of the requirements of democracy and "self-actualization," of the need for economy and efficiency in public ad-ministration—to the point of H. George Fredrickson's recommenda-tion that we should have "great tolerance for the possibilities of ineffi-ciency and diseconomy" ("Toward a New Public Administration," inMarini, 322)—places too great a strain on the "tolerance" of thecitizenry who pay for all this." "Responsive" as -the scorn for merelyeconomic considerations may have been to the political concerns ofactivist groups in the 1960's, the more recent "tax revolt" makes itevident that the majority of the citizenry are unlikely to continuefinancing admittedly inefficient and uneconomic activities, such as the"maximum feasible participation" component of the poverty pro-gram, merely because they conform to some administrative theorists'

28. Cf. Dwight Waldo's comment, in Marini, p. xvi, on the lack of concern amongthe Minnowbrook conferees for problems of "efficiency and economy."


notion of "democracy.'"'As the considerations raised by Harmon indicate, however, the

problems of bureaucratic arbitrariness and inefficiency are not unlike-ly to be resolved merely by renewed emphasis on the need for institu-tional/political controls over the discretion exercised by bureaucrats.As he suggests, even if we could be confident that such controls wouldpoint the civil servant in the proper direction, their efficacy would stillbe limited, and the problem of employee morale would remainunresolved. But Harmon and his co-conferees do not succeed any bet-ter than their neo-Wilsonian predecessors in reconciling the fact of ad-ministrative discretion with the principles of a constitutional-democratic order. As John Paynter observes in his excellent commen-tary on Harmon's paper:

Unless the conditions which make such [policy-influencing] administrative ac-tion necessary are to be drastically changed, the American polity will continue tobe not simply democratic, but a "mixed" regime; two qualitatively differentprinciples of rule will operate in it simultaneously. Perhaps what we most need,therefore, is not further efforts to redefine democratic administrative respon-sibility, but thought about the proper ends and forms of that mixture (Marini,188-9).

Paynter's remarks suggest the need to re-examine the problem ofadministrative discretion regarding policy in the light of the originalprinciples of the American constitutional regime, rather than theirWilsonian modification. Such a return to the principles of theFounders is precisely what is proposed by Vincent Ostrom in hisresponse to what he describes in the title of his volume as The Intellec-tual Crisis in American Public Administration.

IV

29. Cf. Frederickson's praise of the "maximum-feasible-participation notion"despite the fact that it "did not enhance the efficiency or economy of 0E0 activities,"on the ground that "it gave the residents of the ghetto at least the impression that theyhad the capacity to influence publicly made decisions that affected their well-being"(Marini, 325-6). It is also interesting to note that while Frederickson, like some of theother Minnowbrook conferees, expresses the expectation that the "new" public ad-ministration will be more honest in practice than the old one was, challenging such prac-tices as "[budget] padding, over-staffing, and suppressed records" (320), Fredericksonhimself recommends that reform-minded administrators seek to "enhance the reelec-tion probabilities of supporting incumbents" in the legislatures by the use of old-fashioned pork-barrel techniques (326).


Ostrom's book, first published in 1973 and then reissued with apostscript on "Watergate and the Constitutional Crisis of the 1970's"in 1974, is specifically aimed at responding to an "identity crisis" inthe study of public administration previously identified by DwightWaldo—a "failure to know what we are...or how we should proceed"(Ostrom, 11). This theoretical crisis is directly related to a practicalone: the "question of whether the bodies of knowledge used by thosewho practice public administration will lead toward an improvementor an erosion of human welfare" (4). Suggesting "that the contem-porary malaise in American society may have been derived, in part,from the teachings of public administration," Ostrom infers the need"to lay new foundations for the study of public administration" (4-5,113).

Like the theorists of the "New Public Administration," Ostromidentifies the central deficiency of American public administrationstudy as its rootedness in the Wilsonian politics/administrationdichotomy and the corollary model of the properly organizedbureaucracy as centralized and hierarchical. Ostrom stresses the factthat the Wilsonian model represents a considerable departure from theconstitutional understanding of the American Founders. WhereasWilson, partly influenced by Walter Bagehot's account of the Englishconstitution, thought the American principles of separation of powersand federalism to represent an anomalous and unfortunate in-terference with the efficient implementation of the popular will,Ostrom suggests we "consider the possibility that the designers of theAmerican constitution knew what they were doing and deliberatelysought to base their political experiment upon an alternative design [tothe British one]" (77). He relies on the Federalist as the source of whathe calls a "theory of democratic administration."

As Ostrom acknowledges, the Federalist actually stresses the needfor centralized control of the national executive establishment by thePresident. But he observes that "if we do not confine American publicadministration to the national executive department, we discover adifferent approach to problems of public administration in other por-tions of The Federalist" (82, emphasis in original). The Federalist'streatment of national defense, for instance, relies on "a combinationof forces maintained by the coordinated actions of the states and na-tional governments," as a superior alternative to a national standingarmy (85). More generally, the Federalist sees advantages to liberty ina federal system in which authority is divided between national andstate authorities, since it enables the people to defend their rights


against possible abuses by one authority by "mak[ing] use of the otheras the instrument of redress" (Federalist #28, cited by Ostrom, p. 87).Furthermore, as Ostrom reminds us, the general principles of separa-tion of powers and checks and balances, as well as "the presumptionthat the exercise of all governmental authority is limited by the termsand conditions specified in constitutional law," serves to limitbureaucratic authority and assure its subservience to the popular will(90). By alluding to Tocqueville's account of the advantages of decen-tralized administration as practiced in America, and the dangers of a"democratic despotism" that would rely on a highly centralizedsystem, Ostrom seeks further to demonstrate the connectedness ofissues of administrative organization in America with the politicalprinciples of the regime, thus refuting Wilson's belief "that there isbut one rule of good administration for all governments alike" (96).

From his account of the Founders' thought, Ostrom derives a cri-tique of such conventional public administration doctrines as the needfor "unity of command" and consequently the avoidance of"fragmentation of authority and overlapping jurisdictions" (36, 70,120). He attempts to elaborate the implications of the Founders'thought for present-day public administration by reference to "thework of the contemporary political economists," notably suchscholars as Gordon Tullock, James Buchanan, and Elinor Ostrom,associated with the Public Choice Society (48, 152). Starting from apremise of "methodological individualism," these scholars infer that"[n]o single form or organization [can be] presumed to be 'good' forall circumstances" (50,55). Rather, their analysis demonstrates thatthe economic provision of services in response to consumer/citizenpreferences "will require a complex of agencies of many differentsizes" (118). Tullock's investigation of "the politics of bureaucracy"refutes the assumption that large, centralized bureaucratic structuresconstitute the most efficient organizations for dealing with publicproblems, by showing how that assumption ignores the problem of"diseconomies of scale" in such structures: the "distortion of infor-mation" resulting from subordinates' desire to please their superiors;"goal displacement and risk avoidance motivated by individual self-interest" of the bureaucrat; and so on (59-60). Above all, Ostromstresses, excessive centralization of public agencies is incompatiblewith democracy because it does not give individual citizens sufficient"opportunities to express their preferences or values" to the govern-ment (62).

The specific political lesson Ostrom infers from these analyses is the


need to "tak[e] advantage of the overlapping jurisdiction andfragmentation of authority inherent in the American politicalsystem," a principle which represents "the antithesis of that proposedin the classical public administration tradition" (70). Far from beingan object of lament, the fact that "public service systems are operatedby thousands of enterprises functioning at different levels of govern-ment" makes it possible to serve "diverse communities of interest"(71). To the extent that a problem of "balkanization in local govern-ment" results, it can adequately "be resolved by an appropriateoverlapping of local governmental jurisdictions so that significant in-terdependencies or a regional character can be handled by regionalauthorities," rather than supplanting the local units entirely by the im-position of a higher central authority (120). The problem with the ex-isting practice of public administration in America is too much, nottoo little, centralization: Ostrom attributes the failure to solve suchdiverse problems as street sanitation in New York, cockroaches in LosAngeles schools, urban crime, and police corruption, and theWatergate crisis, to the extensive concentration of executive authorityover large areas (117,121, 134-46).

Thanks in part to the work of the economists cited by Ostrom, theadministrative inefficiencies produced by excessive centralization havelong been familiar lessons, and Ostrom is far from being the first ad-ministrative scholar to suggest the advantages of a degree of "com-munity control" over some services within large cities." On the otherhand, it is doubtful that Ostrom establishes his claim that the majorfailings of American public institutions in recent years are due to theirlack of sufficient administrative decentralization (the results of themuch-publicized effort at "community control' in the New Yorkschool system were, at best, mixed; how much is proved by the studiesOstrom cites to show the advantages of decentralization in otherpolicy areas remains a matter of doubt). 3 ' Still less does Ostrom prove

30. On the recognition by previous administrative theorists that decentralization issometimes advantageous, see Robert T. Golembiewski, "A Critique of 'DemocraticAdministration' and Its Supporting Ideation," American Political Science Review, vol.71, no. 4 (December, 1977), pp. 1489, 1499-1500.

31. On New York, see Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars (New York: BasicBooks, 1974), pp. 251-398. Ravitch concludes that school decentralization "proved tobe neither the disaster that its enemies had feared nor the panacea that its proponentshad anticipated" (pp. 397-98). On the broader issue, see Golembiewski, pp. 1502-4,with Ostrom, "Some Problems in Doing Political Theory: A Response to Golem-biewski's 'Critique' ", American Political Science Review, vol. 71, no. 4 (December,


his claim that "the contemporary malaise in American society" issignificantly attributable to "the teachings of public administration"regarding such matters. To the extent that the difficulties confrontingAmerican society are indeed related to deficiencies in the currently ac-cepted principles of administration, we suggest that these deficiencieslie at a deeper level than the centralization/decentralization issue, andare in fact embodied at least as much in the doctrine set forth byOstrom and the "public choice economists" as in the teachings ofWoodrow Wilson. The crux of the difficulty lies in Ostrom'sunderstanding of the central purpose of government as the satisfac-tion of consumer preferences. Ostrom's conception of constitutionaldemocracy as a regime in which government activity conforms asclosely as possible to the expressed "preferences or values" of thecitizenry, the constitution itself being reduced to a set of "decisionrules assigning decision-making capabilities among a community ofpeople for making future decisions in the conduct of an organizationor enterprise" (62,66), is in fact considerably different—contrary tohis claim—from the thought of the American Founders, and is actual-ly much closer to Wilson's understanding of the function of public ad-ministration than he realizes.

By comparison with the thought of the Founders, both Wilson'sand Ostrom's understandings of the function of government are lack-ing in two things: a conception of the substantive end of government,independent of what a majority of the people may will at a given mo-ment; and a conception of the role of the governmental official as onewho seeks to guide both public sentiment and public policy towardsthat substantive end. For the Founders, of course, the true end ofgovernment is the securing to all the citizenry of the natural rightsspecified in the Declaration of Independence: while governments"derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," theground of the natural rights themselves does not derive from the con-sent of a particular body of men, but from nature." It is this dif-ference between the legitimate end of government, and the choice of

1977), pp. 1518-20; and Golembiewski, "Observations on 'Doing Political Theory': ARejoinder," ibid., p. 1529. For a forceful statement of the dangers of excessivefragmentation of administrative authority, see George F. Kennan, "America's Ad-ministrative Response to Its World Problems," Daedalus, vol. 87, no. 2 (Spring, 1958),pp. 5-24.

32. On the relation between the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution,cf. Martin Diamond, "The Revolution of Sober Expectations" (Washington, D.C.:American Enterprise Institute Bicentennial Lecture Series, 1974).


popular or democratic government as a means to that end, thatenables Hamilton, in Federalist #71, to make an important distinctionregarding the function of the Chief Executive. Defending the Presi-dent's four-year term of office, Hamilton rejects the views of thosewho "regard the servile pliancy of the executive to a prevailing cur-rent, either in the community or in the legislature, as its best recom-mendation." While "[t]he republican principle demands that thedeliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of thoseto whom they intrust the management of their affairs," Hamiltonargues, "it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sud-den breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the peoplemay receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices tobetray their interests." Thus "[w]hen occasions present themselves inwhich the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations,it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guar-dians of those interests to withstand the temporary delusion in orderto give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedatereflection.'33

Hamilton's distinction between "the deliberate sense of the com-munity" and the passing "breeze[s] of passion" to which the peoplemay at times fall subject underlies the Federalist's justification, notonly of the President's tenure of office, but of the entire system ofchecks and balances embodied in the Constitution. Starting from thepremise that the major threat to the rights of individuals under anyregime comes from the most powerful element in that regime, theauthors of the Federalist infer that the most likely source of such athreat under the essentially popular American regime will come fromthe people themselves: that is, from a tyrannous majority "faction"moved by "some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverseto the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate in-terests of the community.' 34 Not because they are hostile to populargovernment, but because they are thoughtful friends of constitutionaldemocracy who wish it to succeed yet perceive the dangers to which itis prone, the authors of the Federalist try to show that the Constitu-tional checks that moderate and refine the direct expression of thepopular will are necessary in order to make that will correspondreasonably well with justice and the common good.

Wilson's own desire to institute a hierarchical and politically

33. Federalist #71, p. 432.34. Ibid., #10, p. 78; cf. also #63, pp. 384-86; #78, pp. 469-70; Storing, "American

Statesmanship: Old and Ne•."


"neutral" civil service, responsive only to the "will" of the people asexpressed through the administrator's elected superiors, can beunderstood only in the light of his more general hostility to the prin-ciples of separation of powers and checks and balances, embodied inthe Constitution by the Founders." This hostility is in turn rooted inhis implicit denial of an objective standard of natural right, derivingits authority from a standard transcending the changing will of themajority, and setting fixed limits to the proper scope of government.For Wilson, unlike the Founders, the purpose of government is not torefine the popular will, but rather to be as "responsive" as possible tothat will in its primary, electoral expression, thus facilitating "pro-gress" on behalf of the advancing "spirit of the age.'36

It may seem difficult, on its face, to reconcile the Wilsonian com-mitment to the pliant service of the popular "will" with his emphasis,in "The Study of Administration," on the need to "instruct" the peo-ple in the proper limits of their authority. But this is precisely Wilson'spoint: only by leaving "instrumental" questions of administrativeorganization and method to the determination of elected officials whoare then to be held responsible for the fruits of their policies can thepeople be sure of enforcing their will on matters of substance. Thecritical premise of his argument is that "responsibility" to the people,in and of itself, is the sole and sufficient check on the abuses ofgovernment. Wilson affirmed as his "deepest conviction" that "thecommon people, by which I mean all of us, are to be absolutelytrusted.' 37 Hence "good" government as Wilson understands it isthat which is "amenable from day to day to public opinion""—to

35.Cf. "The Study of Administration," p. 497; Wilson, Congressional Government(New York: Meridian Books, 1956; originally published in 1885), pp. 30-31, 200-206;Ostrom, pp. 24-26, 75-77; Paul Eidelberg, A Discourse on Statesmanship (Urbana, Ill.:University of Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 293-97, 309-11, 349-54; David E. Marion(Hampden-Sydney College), "Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson on the Spiritand Form of a Responsible Republican Government" (paper presented at the 1978 An-nual Conference of Virginia Political Scientists).

36. See Wilson, Congressional Government, pp. 29-30, 54; idem, ConstitutionalGovernment in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961;originally published in 1908), pp. 21-24; Marion, op. cit.; Eidelberg, pp. 299-304,358-60; Christopher Wolfe, "Woodrow Wilson: Interpreting the Constitution,"Review of Politics, vol. 41, no. 1 (January 1979), pp. 121-42.

37. Wilson, The New Freedom (New. York: Doubleday, Page, 1919), p. 109, cited inMarion, p. 12.

38. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press), vol. 4, p. 62; cited in Marion, p. 13.


precisely those "transient impulse[s]," it would seem, the wisdom ofwhich Hamilton doubted!

In questioning the desirability of the Wilsonian model of public ad-ministration, Ostrom has done well to cite Tocqueville's warningsagainst the dangers of a democratic despotism in which "an immenseand tutelary power," acting in the name of the principle of equality asWilson himself understood it, makes use of an enormous bureaucracyso as to destroy liberty and reduce the people "to nothing better than aflock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is theshepherd" (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, cited in Ostrom,95-96). Unfortunately, Ostrom has not adequately taken the implica-tions of Tocqueville's warning to heart. Thus the criterion by which hejudges the adequacy of a system of public administration—its subser-vience to the people's "preferences or values"—is essentially the samecriterion on which Wilson relied. Indeed, to the extent that there is adifference between Ostrom and Wilson on this issue, Ostrom'scriterion of "democratic" administration is considerably the lesssatisfactory of the two. Wilson conceived democratic government assubordinate to public opinion; this opinion was to be the product ofpolitical controversy about the common good that required some sortof popular deliberation and hence reasoning." Ostrom's substitutionof the economists' notion of "preferences" for opinions, on the otherhand, leaves no room for reasoning about ends; his acceptance of An-thony Downs' purely instrumental definition of rationality (51) im-plies the consignment of reason to the role of serving whatever ar-bitrary desires the citizenry may happen to experience." Such a stan-dard hardly promises to provide the bulwark against despotism ofwhich Tocqueville saw the need, or the security for minority rightsthat the Founders aimed to provide. (Natural rights are things objec-tively meriting protection against alternative claims; but why shouldone man's "preference" for a life of comfort be ranked higher thananother man's desire to tyrannize over him?)

We conclude that Ostrom's "theory of democratic administration"is not the return to the principles of the Founders that he asserts it to

39. See Wilson, Congressional Government, "Conclusion," pp. 193-215.40. Cf. Golembiewski, "A Critique...", p. 1493; on instrumental rationality,

Herbert J. Storing, "The Science of Administration: Herbert A. Simon," in Storing(ed.), Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart, andWinston, 1962), pp. 63-150. Steven E. Rhoads sets forth a penetrating critique of the"economic" approach to public policy analysis in "Economists and Policy Analysis,"Public Administration Review, vol. 38, no. 2 (March/April, 1978), pp. 112-20.


be. In his account of the Founders' theory of administration, Ostromfundamentally misreads the intentions underlying the American con-stitutional system because he fails to apprehend that that system wasintended to moderate and refine the people's demands, rather thanimplementing them in the most efficient manner possible. Along withWilson, he fails to appreciate the Founders' lesson (and Tocqueville's)that the most likely source of despotism under a popular regime is thepushing of the democratic principle to an immoderate extreme.

Once we recognize the overall agreement between Ostrom andWilson—in contrast to the Founders—regarding the ultimate test ofgood government, we are led to wonder even about the real extent oftheir disagreement over the issue of decentralization. There is noreason to think that Wilson would quarrel with Ostrom's propositionthat "Democratic administration cannot be separated from the pro-cesses of popular control inherent in democratic politics" (97, em-phasis in original); or with his stress on elections as the primary meansby which the people insure political responsibility (92-93). Nor is it atall clear that Wilson would contradict Ostrom's praise of the advan-tages of a federal system over a unitary government.' Ostrom's nar-rowly economic standard for the size of public organizations, after all,provides only an ambiguous defense of decentralization: "In respon-ding to problems of diverse economies of scale, elements of centraliza-tion and decentralization must exist simultaneously" (Ostrom, 73;emphasis in original). There is no reason to assume that Wilson wouldhave disagreed with Ostrom by advocating the institution of cen-tralization where it was inefficient to do so!

The essential defect in Ostrom's putative defense of the principlesof separation of powers, federalism, and decentralization is that it isapolitical. Although Ostrom describes the purpose of constitutionallaw as the limitation of governmental authority for the sake of protec-ting individuals' inalienable rights (103), he never articulates whatthose rights are, and consequently fails to provide any true justifica-tion for limiting the power of government. Ostrom's own account ofthe proper scope of public authority, drawn from the economists'theory of "public goods," is entirely open-ended (64-65), and recallsthe amorphous standards of Wilson and John Dewey, rather than theprinciple of natural, inalienable rights.' Ostrom's defense of separa-

41. See Wilson, Constitutional Government, chap. 7; Wolfe, pp. 137-38; but cf.Eidelberg, p. 330, n. 22.

42. Cf. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927),chaps. 1-2, especially pp. 64, 70-71.


tion of powers and constitutionalism thus is undermined by his equa-tion of good government with conformity to consumer preferences: itis left to the electorate (the consumerate?) to decide the limits ofpublic regulation, and the people can do no wrong." Ostrom's purelyeconomic, and therefore narrowly instrumental, case for decentraliza-tion is far weaker than Tocqueville's political argument, which sees indecentralized administration a means of retarding the decay of thedemocratic principle into an abstract, homogenizing egalitarianism.'"On the other hand, Ostrom's advocacy of "the fragmentation ofauthority" (97) needs to be contrasted not only with Tocqueville'sargument on behalf of the centralization of political authority, butalso with the Federalist's emphasis on the need for "energy in the ex-

43. In an earlier study of The Federalist, entitled The Political Theory of a Com-pound Republic (Blacksburg, Va.: Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Center for Study ofPublic Choice, 1971), Ostrom does allude to Publius' concern to avert the danger ofmajority faction by extending the sphere of the republic (pp. 63-7). Here too, however,Ostrom's analysis tends to be abstract and apolitical, in that he stresses the sheermechanical device of "alternative decision-making arrangements" (p. 65) as the remedyfor this danger, rather than appreciating the degree to which Publius's argument isaimed at breaking up majorities composed of the poor who would otherwise trample onthe rights of those of superior "faculties of acquiring property," thus promoting classconflict and ultimately undermining liberty. (See Martin Diamond, Winston Fisk, andHerbert Garfinkel, The Democratic Republic (First edition, Chicago: Rand McNally,1966), pp. 75-78; William B. Allen, "Federal Representation: The Design of the Thirty-Fifth Federalist Paper," Publius, vol. 6, no. 3 (Summer, 1976), pp. 61-71; PaulEidelberg, The Philosophy of the American Constitution (New York: Free Press, 1968),pp. 148-55. More generally, Ostrom's failure to recognize popular majorities as embo-dying the most serious threat to individual rights in a democratic regime causes him tooveremphasize the importance of federalism, as compared with the principles of themultiplicity of interests, representation, and checks and balances, as the major securityfor such rights; and to criticize Publius for not advocating a Bill of Rights, thus ignoringPublius's point that the Constitution itself—by virtue of its structuring of the politicalforces upon which all rights depend—provides the only meaningful security for rights(The Political Theory...,p. 117; Federalist #84, p. 515; cf. Herbert J. Storing, "TheConstitution and the Bill of Rights," in M. Judd Harmon (ed.), Essays on the Constitu-tion of the United States (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978), pp. 32-48.

44. See Tocqueville, loc. cit.; John C. Koritansky, "Decentralization and Civic Vir-tue in Tocqueville's 'New Science of Politics,' " Publius, vol. 5, no. 3 (Summer, 1975),pp. 63-81; Delba Winthrop, "Tocqueville on Federalism," ibid., vol. 6, no. 3 (Summer,1976), pp. 93-115. Both Koritansky and Winthrop stress Tocqueville's advocacy ofdecentralization as a means to checking the effects of radical egalitarian doctrines towhich popular majorities might easily fall prone; despite the recent popularity of suchdoctrines in the United States, this danger is not discussed by Ostrom. On the politicalreasons for decentralization and its relation to federalism, see also Martin Diamond,


ecutive." Although Ostrom rightly observes that Hamilton's elabora-tion of Presidential authority is balanced by an argument forfederalism elsewhere in the Federalist, he never is able to explain whythe Founders were concerned to promote an energetic executive at all.The explanation of this deficiency is that Ostrom does not really seethe need for government to govern: he has taken too literally theliberal dogma that government is to be replaced by "administration,"without recognizing how liberal governments use "administration" asthe vehicle for governing." Ostrom fails to appreciate the genius ofthe Founders' accomplishment in combining an energetic executivewith "republican safety": limiting the scope of government authoritythrough the separation of powers and checks and balances, whileenabling the executive to act purposefully and decisively within thatscope. Ostrom's principles, by contrast, threaten to give us the worstof both worlds: a totally socialized community, in which all fixedboundaries to "public" authority have evaporated; and a severelyfragmented government, reduced to the status of an instrument forserving fluctuating consumer preferences, and unable effectively tosecure either private rights or the public good.

Ostrom's praise of "overlapping jurisdictions and fragmentation ofauthority" (73) represents an overreaction to the Wilsonian"paradigm" of a centralized and strictly hierarchical bureaucracy. Inrecommending the fragmentation of administrative authority, Ostromdeparts from the teaching of the Federalist, which favors division ofpolitical authority (through the separation of powers) precisely inorder to reconcile an energetic and efficient executive with the needfor "republican safety." And despite the passage Ostrom cites fromFederalist #28 regarding the utility of the state governments as ameans to checking usurpations of liberty by the national regime, theFederalist relies primarily on the structure of the national government,rather than on federalism, to provide the security of liberty: the Con-stitution, after all, assigns to the national government predominanceover the states within its sphere, and the federal Supreme Court re-mains the ultimate judge of the boundary between federal and state

"On the Relationship of Federalism and Decentralization," in Daniel J. E1az2r, et al.,Cooperation and Conflict (Itasca, Peacock, 1969), pp. 72-81; idem, "The Ends ofFederalism," Publius, vol. 3, no. 2 (Fall, 1973), pp. 129-52.

45. Cf. Flaumenhaft, loc. cit.


authority." There is indeed a case to be made for administrativedecentralization, as we learn from Tocqueville; but that case does notrest on maximizing jurisdictional overlapping and the fragmentationof executive authority.'

We conclude that Ostrom has not succeeded any better than the"New Public Administration" movement in overcoming the dilem-mas posed by the Wilsonian understanding of public administration.At one extreme, the New Public Administrationists seek to liberate theadministrator from the chains of Wilsonian "neutrality" by turninghim into a kind of ideologue, dedicated to actualizing himself by pur-suing whatever policies he happens to prefer, with little concern forthe Constitution, the law, or the will of the electorate. Ostrom, on theother hand, while professing to overthrow Wilson's hierarchicalmodel of public administration, reduces the administrator still furtherto a tool for satisfying whatever "preferences" the people happen tohold; his job differs only in magnitude, not in essence, from that of adoor-to-door salesman. Neither Ostrom nor the New Public Ad-ministrationists have given adequate thought to how the governmentofficial—elected or appointed—can give effect to the fundamentalrole intended for the government by the Founders: to guide the publicwill, while serving it, in a direction conducive to the long-range com-mon good, and to the continued security of individual rights.

46. Cf. Federalist #46, p. 295, which intimates the possibility that the people will"become more partial to the federal than to the state governments" if the former is bet-ter administered than the latter, with #27, p. 174, which asserts the "probability that thegeneral government will be better administered than the particular governments." Theseparation of these two statements exemplifies Publius's rhetoric, which one needs tobear in mind in assessing the depth of the Federalist's commitment to federalism: theauthors were, after all, seeking to persuade an audience which included many whofeared the threat that a powerful national government might represent to liberty; thataudience might not adequately appreciate the security that an extended sphere and asystem of checks and balances in the national government gave to liberty, in and ofthemselves. Cf. Herbert J. Storing, "The Problem of Big Government," in Robert A.Goldwin (ed.), A Nation of States (Second edition, Chicago: Rand McNally, 1974), pp.80-85; Martin Diamond, "What the Framers Meant by Federalism," ibid., pp. 32-38.

47. In "The Ends of Federalism," Martin Diamond carefully distinguishes "ad-ministration," as Tocqueville used the term, from "execution," and argues persuasive-ly that what Tocqueville favored was a division of political authority between nationaland local governments based on the distinction between national and local policy con-cerns, rather than the fragmentation of the execution of policy. This is not to say, ofcourse, that Tocqueville would have favored the isolation of policy formation frompolicy execution towards which Wilson seems to point. Cf. also Koritansky, pp. 75-81:Kennan, op. cit.


V

Fortunately, a more recent book on public administration, JohnRohr's Ethics for Bureaucrats: An Essay on Law and Values, doesdeal with this problem in a considerably more satisfactory way.Despite his loose use in the title of the term "values," Rohr really hasin mind, not idiosyncratic preferences, but opinions about the goodand the just. He recognizes that such opinions can be reasoned about,and is concerned to promote such reasoning on the part of members ofthe civil service, since their work (contrary to Wilson) necessarily in-volves, at least at the levels where they enjoy significant responsibility,making decisions (explicit or implicit) about such issues. Rohr's bookis really a combination of an "essay" and a textbook: he makes anargument about the political role of the civil servant, proposes amethod for preparing him better to meet the needs of that role, andthen provides matter and guidance for the actualization of thatmethod.

As indicated in our earlier quotations from his work, Rohr—likethe New Public Administrationists—takes as his starting point the in-adequacy of the Wilsonian politics/administration dichtomy, and theconsequent need to reflect on how the administrator may responsiblyand benefically carry out his "policy-making" role. He properlyavoids the New Public Administrationists' inference, however, thatthe civil servant should seek to actualize himself by using his office topursue whatever "values" seem intuitively appealing to him. Instead,Rohr stresses that the American civil servant takes an oath to supportthe Constitution and laws of the regime (in the broad sense ofAristotelian politeia) that employs him. This oath implies an agree-ment on the administrator's part with the fundamental purposes ofthat regime: a belief that the regime as a whole (albeit not necessarilyeach of its current particular policies or leaders) is fundamentally justand hence deserving of his allegiance (Rohr, 60-61). It follows,therefore, that he is not free to advance whatever "values" he likes,but is duty bound to work for the sake of what Rohr calls "regimevalues"—the broad view of justice and the common good that is em-bodied in American public law (59).

To state the civil servant's responsibility in these terms, of course, isby no means to decide that he should work for or against any par-ticular policy. As Rohr observes, "classical moral doctrine has alwaysrecognized that reasoned judgments by the practical intellect becomeless certain as they become more specific" (64): even assuming an


agreement on what the American "regime values" are, the question ofwhat specific policies they ordain in particular circumstances remainsa matter for individual judgment. Moreover, the changes that the fun-damental spirit and beliefs of the American people have undergone inthe centuries since the Founding make it much more difficult than itonce might have seemed to specify in a meaningful way just what our"regime values" are.

Rohr attempts to deal with the latter problem by defining Americanregime values in only the most general way: despite considerable dif-ferences in the interpretation of these principles, he asserts, plausibly,that "freedom, property, and equality" are three of the chief "valuesof the American people" (66). Given the fact that even "[e]minentscholars after years of research reach very different conclusions"regarding the specific implications of these values, however, the civilservant is still faced with an enormous problem in deciding "which ofthe many interpretations" of them to rely on. There are, moreover,severe limitations on the amount of time that prospective or alreadypracticing bureaucrats can be expected to devote to the study of suchissues. In contrast to several of the contributors to the Marini volume,who recommend the study of such current philosophical fads asphenomenology and existentialism as the basis for ethical reflection bythe civil servant, Rohr wisely notes that the proper study of politicalphilosophy is far too demanding an enterprise for it to serve such afunction in the public administration curriculum (with its necessaryemphasis on more "practical" studies)."

As an alternative to such broad-based philosophical speculation,Rohr recommends as "a method for encouraging bureaucrats toreflect on American values in a disciplined and systematic manner"the study of major Supreme Court opinions dealing with such "salientvalues" as freedom, property, and equality. He singles out four

48. As evidence of the need for caution in this regard, Rohe cites David Hart'srecommendation that John Rawls's A Theory of Justice be used as the foundation forteaching ethics to public administrators (56, 78n.). Hart's proposal is contained in hiscontribution to a symposium on "Social Equity, Justice, and the Equitable Ad-ministrator" (Public Administration Review, vol. 34, no. 1 (January, February, 19741,pp. 1-51), in which nearly all the participants share Hart's naively uncritical acceptanceof Rawls's principles. Cf. also the loose way in which terms like "phenomenology" and"existentialism" are thrown about by several of the contributors to the Marinivolume—e.g., the claim that phenomenology represents "the supreme philosophy ofrelativism" and therefore justifies the pursuit of "a 'new reality' " through non-linguistic means such as "feeling" (Frank McGee, "Comment, Phenomenological Ad-ministration—A New Reality," in Marini, p. 166).


characteristics of such opinions that make them eminently suitable forpromoting such reflection. In the first place, because they are "institu-tional," rather than merely reflecting the idiosyncratic beliefs ofprivate individuals, they help the bureaucrat to "distinguish betweenstable principles and passing whims." Even though Supreme Courtjustices, like other human beings, are to some extent limited by the"vision" of the time in which they live, their major opinions aregenerally concerned with perennial issues, and therefore lendthemselves to fruitful comparison with opinions rendered by earlierCourts on the same problems. By comparing relatively recent Courtopinions with older ones, and taking seriously the reasoning underly-ing the latter as well as the former, the bureaucrat may thus "avoidbecoming imprisoned" by his own "historical circumstances." Fur-thermore, in interpreting such Constitutional clauses as those ordain-ing "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws," theCourt is constantly compelled to "reconsider the original meaning ofthe phrases as well as its own precedents," thus insuring "some kindof continuity with the past." Hence it furnishes the bureaucrat with amodel of how "to address new problems without sacrificing thestability and continuity that come from invoking familiar principles"(67-69).

The other reasons marshaled by Rohr as reasons for studyingSupreme Court opinions as a way of access to American regime valuesare their dialectical character, their concreteness, and their pertinence.Supreme Court decisions are dialectical because of the frequency ofconcurring and dissenting opinions with which the majority opinioncan be compared (as well as the existence of earlier opinions on thesame subject). Their "concreteness"—the fact that they are concernedwith applying general principles to a specific, practical issue—makesthem a more useful model for "bureaucrats who are constantly calledupon to perform similar tasks themselves" than the study of broadphilosophical treatises would be. And they are "pertinent" in thatthey clearly demonstrate the relevance of fundamental regime valuesto contemporary issues (70-72).

Rohr emphasizes, in concluding what one might call the "essay"portion of his book, that his purpose in advocating that bureaucratsstudy regime values is not to make them "march in lock-step" byfollowing one particular interpretation of those values, but rather topromote acceptance of their "moral obligation to put themselves intouch with the values of the American people through the values ofthe American regime." Such study is intended to help bureaucrats


"refine the content of their deepest political beliefs," so that they mayact "with informed consciences" rather than merely aiming to " 'dotheir own thing.' " At the same time, Rohr argues, the recognitionthat civil servants inevitably do have to make critical policy decisionsdemonstrates the need for the American people, "at least to , somedegree [to] trust the bureaucrats who govern us." Institutionsdesigned to insure the responsiveness of the bureaucracy to thepopular will, however necessary, are insufficient for achieving thepurposes of our constitutional democracy. Rather, we need torecognize the "obvious (and healthy) tension" between our desire "tobe governed by persons responsive to our values" and our desire "tobe governed by persons who are imaginative, creative, and free." Torecognize that well educated bureaucrats, by their independent reflec-tion on the practical meaning of American values, make a non-democratic contribution to the well being of democracy is to affirm"the rich complexity of the mixed character of the American regimeitself"" (74-76).

The remainder of Rohr's book, with the exception of the con-cluding chapter, consists of a questioning analysis of Supreme Courtopinions dealing (in successive chapters) with the regime values ofequality, freedom, and property, designed to put into effect thepedagogical principles the author has previously justified. To discussthis analysis in detail would take us too far outside the theme of thepresent essay. We would, however, affirm Herbert Storing's commentin the foreword that Rohr's "judicious comment and questions" dosucceed in guiding the reader through the opinions he cites and to theirbroader implications regarding salient regime values; and that theypromise to "sharpen and deepen" American public administrators'"practical grasp on the complex and sometimes ambiguous politicalprinciples that provide most of the ethical ground and substance oftheir work..." (p. vi). Rohr is particularly adept at making use of thedialectical character of Court opinions to expose—and promotereflection on—contradictions that are likely to exist in thebureaucrat's own "values." He asks the reader to consider, for in-stance, the connection "between 'legislating morality' in race rela-tions"—which many contemporary bureaucrats are likely to

49. Cf. John Paynter's reference to the same point in the Marini book, quotedearlier. Note that although Rohr seems to echo Michael Harmon's recommendationthat we "trust" administrators with considerable discretion, he renders this trust morejustifiable by emphasizing that the administrator's discretion must be subservient to theestablished Constitution, laws, and "regime values."


favor—"and in other areas of human behavior such as abortion, por-nography, sexism and the use of alcoholic beverages and marijuana"(with the exception of "sexism," a much less popular position) (98).Similarly, he points out that "President Nixon's refusal to surrenderhis tapes to the grand jury rested on a position not altogetherdissimilar from that of the reporters" who refused to reveal the identi-ty of a confidential source in Branzburg v. Hayes (1972), thus invitingthe reader to try to work out a consistent standard for determining theboundaries of individual rights in this area (144).

Despite the general excellence of his analysis and questions, thereare instances where Rohr—perhaps out of eagerness to demonstratethe relevance of Supreme Court opinions to current concerns andvalues—seems to deprive his analysis of its fullest value by failing ade-quately to question some widely admired, but nonetheless seriouslyquestionable, decisions. Thus, in the area of racial segregation, Rohrrather too quickly dismisses the reasoning of the majority opinion inPlessy v. Ferguson, which accepted the legitimacy of the "separate butequal" formula (95), and then neglects to mention certain questionsthat ought to be raised regarding the Court's reasoning in Brown v.Board of Education, which overthrew the Plessy formula. (The mostnotable issue here is whether—granting the rightness of the Browndecision—what made school desegregation wrong was the fact that ithad been legally imposed, and hence treated blacks as an inferior race;or, as the Court implied, the principle that separation of the races isinherently harmful. The latter claim, while contrary to the claims ofthe subsequent "Black Power" movement, opened the way to the re-cent, and highly controversial, push for busing to overcome "de fac-to" segregation). Similarly, in an effort "to redeem the reactionaryconnotations" of the idea of property (74), Rohr appears too un-critically to accept the notion, originally propagated by Charles Reich,of a "new property" in welfare benefits, Social Security payments,and other so-called "property of the poor" (Rohr's statement of theissue in these terms at p. 218 seems somewhat one-sided)." Again,many thoughtful students of the Constitution would challenge Rohr'sblanket statement that the Court's "extension of First Amendmentprotection to nontheistic beliefs seemed, like the principle of stateneutrality between religion and non-religion, to be quite fair and sensi-

50. On one kind of difficulty to which the "new property" doctrine has given rise,see Robert M. Kaus, "How the Supreme Court Sabotaged Civil Service Reform,"Washington Monthly, vol. 10, no. 9 (December, 1978), pp. 38-44.


ble" (150)—although the author does allude to some of the difficultiesthe doctrine raises."

We raise these particular questions about Rohr's analysis, not inorder to deny its usually very high quality, but to suggest a deficiencyin the use of Supreme Court opinions, taken by themselves, as ameans of promoting the study of American "regime values." Theproblem is that the proneness of successive Courts to be influenced intheir opinions and decisions by passing political, social, and intellec-tual currents makes them too fluid a source, in and of themselves, ofaccess to the fundamental principles of the regime. The disposition ofrecent Courts in particular to reverse past precedents rather readily (infact if not in name), or to read somewhat farfetched meanings into theclauses of the Constitution (e.g., in the abortion rulings) threatens toteach the student that the words of the Constitution and the valuesthey embody have no fixed meaning, that they are a mere instrumentequally usable to advance any end (for instance, as Justice Holmeshad it, the goal of "proletarian dictatorship"). 52 If this is the lessonthe prospective administrator learns, little will have been done to pro-mote his dedication to the specific principles of the American regime.

This deficiency of Supreme Court opinions as the sole source ofmaterial for study of American regime values suggests the need to sup-plement them with study of some of the writings of the greatestAmerican statesmen, particularly those of the authors of the Constitu-tion. The serious consideration of the Constitutional Conventiondebates, the Federalist, Jefferson's writings, and speeches byWashington and Lincoln (along with, be it noted, the opinions ofJohn Marshall) would serve to "flesh out" the original words of theConstitution and to demonstrate the lasting merit and "relevance" ofthe substantive principles they embody. The notion of private proper-ty would seem less "reactionary," for instance, to the student who haslearned its essential connectedness with political freedom, as ar-ticulated by Lincoln, Jefferson, and the Federalist; whileWashington's Farewell Address provides a powerful argument againstreading the First Amendment to ordain strict governmental neutrality

51. Cf., for instance, Walter Berns, The First Amendment and the Future ofAmericn Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 11-15, 31-2, 45-55.

52. There is an analogous problem in the way that constitutional law is usuallystudied in law schools: the subject is treated almost entirely through the study of judicialdecisions interpreting the Constitution, with little attention being paid to the principles,reasoning, and intentions of the men who originally wrote it. This tends further toenhance the attitude that "the Constitution is whatever judges say it is," and thus toundermine respect for constitutional, limited government as such. Cf. Wolfe, p. 142.


between religion and irreligion. The study of these arguments does not(and should not) insure their acceptance; but the danger nowadays isthat they will be dismissed without ever having been heard.

Let us turn away from this pedagogical issue, however, to return tothe centrally significant and valuable aspect of Rohr's book: hisunderstanding of the political role of the civil servant within theAmerican constitutional framework. Resuming this theme in his con-clusion, Rohr points out that even though the Constitution does notassign a specific political role to the bureaucracy, the very fact that itdivides the power of appointment to executive offices between Con-gress and the President suggests that the Founders intended to grantexecutive officials a degree of independence from each of these institu-tions. Elaborating an argument previously set forth by Herbert Stor-ing, Rohr goes on to justify such independence in the context ofpresent-day American politics by suggesting that the bureaucracymight fulfill a function originally assigned to, but no longer fulfilledby, the Senate: "to protect the people against their rulers [and] to pro-tect the people against the transient impressions into which they mightbe led."" By virtue of their frequently long tenure in office, their con-sequent "expertise" and sense of identification with (and responsibili-ty for) the government, and their relative freedom from direct elec-toral control, the members of the civil service may infuse a neededwisdom, deliberateness, and concern for long-term consequences intothe policymaking process. Thus the fact emphasized by Lowi that, inRohr's words, "contemporary legislation is rife with discretionarylanguage," need not be regarded as a failing in our politics. Rather, ininterpreting the broad mandates embodied in legislation,

...the bureaucracy rescues Congress from the necessity of speaking in a moreprecise way than its limited expertise would reasonably allow and therebydelivers the Congress from taking unwarranted risks in betraying public con-fidence through unwise legislation. A bureaucracy attuned to regime values cansupply that "cool and deliberate sense of the community" that was originally tobe the contribution of the Senate (241).

It is easy—particularly in recent years—to cite instances where the

53. James Madison, speech to the Constitutional Convention, June 26, 1787; citedin Rohr, p. 240. Cf. Herbert J. Storing, "Political Parties and the Bureaucracy," inRobert A. Goldwin (ed.), Political Parties, U.S.A. (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), pp.137-58; idem, "American Statesmanship: Old and New "; Roberta Rubel Schaefer,"Democracy and Leadership," Southern Review of Public Administration, vol. 2, no.3 (December, 1978), pp. 345-374; Henry Taylor, The Statesman (Cambridge, England:W. Heffer and Sons, 1957; originally published in 1836), especially chaps. 22-24, 34.


behavior of civil servants falls far short of this standard, and comesmuch closer to the negative stereotype of the bureaucrat as as of-ficious, narrow-minded, legalistic boob. Rohr does not deny suchfacts, but he rightly denies that we should expect to remedy them byfocusing primarily on trying to limit administrative discretion as nar-rowly as possible (legalism, it should be noted, may be the result ofallowing bureaucrats too little such discretion in interpreting the law).For the most part, the over-regulation of American life of which manycitizens rightly complain is the product of excessive demands by Con-gress and the President (and the electorate) for such regulation, ratherthan the doing of the bureaucracy itself. But after the deregulationmovement has done its good work, few seriously doubt that there willremain plenty of governing, and hence plenty of administering, to bedone. Rohr rightly urges, therefore, that we focus attention onteaching our civil servants to understand their role and responsibilityas participants in the policymaking process, and promoting anunderstanding on their part of the Constitutional principles that deter-mine the proper ends of that process."

To treat the office of the civil servant in this manner is to under-stand public administration, at least in its higher reaches, as a kind ofstatesmanship. Recognizing this fact, in turn, implies understandingpublic administration as something essentially different from businessadministration, because the goals of the two are fundamentally dif-ferent. Contrary to Woodrow Wilson's claim, the "principles" ofpublic administration cannot be made independent of the principles ofthe regime the administrator serves. While certain techniques likebudgeting and economic analysis may be common to both governmentand business, the most interesting and important elements of publicadministration study are really a part of political science in the oldsense: not the "value-free" analysis of modes of behavior, but thepractical science concerned with ways of advancing justice and thecommon good. With an improved understanding of this fact byteachers and scholars of public administration, we might hope for animprovement in the practice of public administration in the UnitedStates.

54. We suggest that the pedagogical function of Rohr's book might have beenenhanced in this regard if he had included an entire section of Supreme Court casesdealing with the rights and responsibilities of civil servants, including such questions asthe political "neutralization" of the bureaucracy by the Hatch Act; loyalty and securityprograms; and the rights of public employees to unionize and strike. As it is, Rohrcovers only the issue of "property" in public employment (pp. 225-32).


The introduction into the public administration curriculum ofcourses embodying the approach of Rohr's book would represent avaluable step towards equipping american civil servants to meet theirhighest tasks. But the full accomplishment of that broader goal re-quires more than the addition of courses on "ethics for bureaucrats";it necessitates a restructuring of the entire public administration cur-riculum, with a view to training future civil servants in the process ofpolitical deliberation. The recognition of the political character ofpublic administration dictates a much greater emphasis than at presenton the study of the principles and practice of democratic statesman-ship, in place of abstract "administrative science" and of narrowlytechnical "nuts and bolts. ' "55

Assumption College ROBERTA SCHAEFERHoly Cross College DAVID SCHAEFER

55. For evidence of dissatisfaction on the part of practicing public administratorswith the latter sorts of emphasis in their training, see John Honey, "A Report: HigherEducation for Public Service," Public Administration Review, vol. 27, no. 4(November, 1967), pp. 301-2. For some reflections relevant to the broader restructuringof public administration education, see the works by Storing, Schaefer, and Taylorcited in note 53 supra.

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Toward a New Public Administration: The Minnowbrook ... · PDF fileDEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 259 The foregoing considerations suggest the need for taking a critical look