ABSTRACT
A comparison of public administration with Utilitarianism and with so-called "legal realism" reveals some significant parallels. According to the vagaries of time and events, Utilitarians found themselves concerned chiefly with the legislative branch, legal realists with the judicial branch, administrative students with the executive or administrative branch. Utilitarianism and positivism are quite distinguishable, but they are much similar in spirit: utilitarianism is positivist, positivism is utilitarian. The abstract validity of theories of government or of human rights— whether they may be called moral, legal, or natural—is from a strictly engineering point of view wholly impossible to determine. The sources of Charles A. Beard's criteria for evaluating a city administration are derived "from a study of administrative law", experimentation, "actual municipal organizations", and from the "methods employed by private corporations in organizing and directing their administrative forces".
