ABSTRACT
From the earliest times, people have been seeking better ways to manage large-scale human activities and provide good governance. In ancient Greece, both Socrates and Plato considered questions anticipating the development of the managerial sciences some 2,400 years ago. Socrates noted that the basic concepts of organizing an army and staging a chorus for a play required similar managerial talents. Plato asked rhetorical questions about the training and selection of the ideal “guardians” for society, and offered answers he attributed to Socrates. About 2,000 years ago Romans created a standing army and established outposts across Europe where the soldiers were based and imperial governors managed the Roman colonies for another 400 years. The Byzantines carried on their practices for another thousand years. Concurrently, the Roman Catholic Church established a system of church self-governance parallel to the Roman and Byzantine civil authorities. A thousand years ago the Chinese were developing a professional civil service and the institution we now call a bureaucracy. Yet these developments also faced setbacks as these empires fell and the church underwent a schism. As a result, both governance and criminal justice suffered in Europe until the Enlightenment.
