ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to consider some of the works of political philosophy which have contributed to our understanding of ideas of public service as understood in British central administration. It is not an exhaustive survey, which is not necessary for the intentions of this book. Rather, it is the presentation of ideas of some of the key contributors to the canon of philosophy on this particular subject. It is not meant to be uncritical, though this book is sympathetic to ideas of public service. It is rather meant to bring together those strands of political philosophy relevant to the study of a particular aspect of public administration, to present them in an accessible manner and to deal with criticisms of them. To these ends the chapter is divided into three sections. The section on Public duty and the ancients deals with the most relevant works of the two most notable of the ancients, Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics. It also considers the observations of the latter’s most important mediaeval commentator, St Thomas Aquinas. The section on Public duty and the moderns examines the work of the ‘moderns’, concentrating largely on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, some of whose work may be seen as being an advanced criticism of later writers on Group Theory, Pluralism, Public Choice Theory, Network Theory and Partnership Theory, and on the most important English Idealist, Thomas Hill Green. It also briefly assesses the work of others who have made contributions to the ideas considered here, for example, Kant and Hegel. The section on Critics of the ideal of public service presents criticisms of the ideal, and considers the work of those who first began to explore pluralism and laid the foundations for the later public choice, network and partnership theorists, Arthur Bentley and David Truman. These works and others have been chosen because they present the essence both of the public service ethos and of criticisms of it.
