ABSTRACT
As John A. Rohr noted in his Prologue to this selection, it is perplexing that the field of public administration has largely neglected Herbert J. Storing’s work. Was Storing an anachronistic voice calling for nobility in and a central constitutional role for public administration at a time when “bureaucracy bashing” was becoming ever more prevalent? Alternatively, was he prescient in addressing the “big questions” of public administration before the field sought to define them in the 1990s? (Behn, 1995; Kerlin, 1996; see also Agranoff & McGuire, 2001; Denhardt, 2001). Or perhaps, his questions were too big for a field that since his day has increasingly turned its attention to narrower concerns (Durant & Rosenbloom, 2016). Or maybe still, it has taken decades for the Constitutional School of U.S. Public Administration, of which Storing was a founder, to develop into an identifiable intellectual current within the field. Whatever the reasons for Storing’s relative obscurity today, we have included this analysis by Douglas Morgan, et al. in an effort to bring his big questions to the forefront of contemporary public administrative thought. The Constitutional School focuses attention on the roles of public
administration and public administrators in the U.S. constitutional regime. Storing was concerned both with “is” and with “ought” questions in this regard. His work helps clarify three enduring, but also contemporary issues in public administration: the relationship between politics and administration, the so-called identity crisis of public administration, and the normative bases of the field.
