ABSTRACT
The dilemma posed by health policy is typical of a broad spectrum of public policy problems endemic in the advanced welfare states of late capitalist societies. It is not merely coincidental, I think, that the argumentative turn in policy studies should occur at just the moment when the field of public policy analysis is forced to confront public policy problems that raise basic normative questions about the fundamental ends and purposes of our society-questions about how a viable political and social consensus can be formed around issues of economic and social welfare redistribution. The time when policy analysis could don the mantle of value neutrality and scientific objectivity and could merely oversee the instrumental administrative functioning of growth-oriented bureaucratic fine tuning, is now over.
