ABSTRACT
From: Public Administration Review 70 (July/August, 2010): 621-633. Abridged. Public administration continues to face an “identity crisis” that has been
at the center of the discipline since its inception. The crisis turns on the following question: Are the animating principles of public administration to be discovered in the political foundations of a given regime, or are they to be found in more universal and transcendent principles of scientific management? The debate over the proper connection between politics and administration manifests itself today in numerous ways. According to Dwight Waldo (1968, p. 5), it was Herbert Simon who cre-
ated the discipline’s “identity crisis” in public administration by destroying confidence in the validity of early administrative science. But Simon (1947) resolved that crisis by offering the prospect of a pure science of administration. Herbert J. Storing, by contrast, rejected the prospect of finding the identity of public administration in some kind of science. Instead, he outlined a resolution to the identity crisis by traveling back in time, beyond the field, to the American founding. In doing so, he reframed the identity crisis and transformed the study and practice of public administration into statecraft. Storing argued that the politics-administration dichotomy stems from the efforts of the American founders to create the conditions necessary for securing the long-term vitality of America’s system of ordered liberty. Their efforts resulted in tensions between the administrative and political activities that are necessary to protect American democracy from the inherent dangers to which it is liable. In the process of illuminating the politics-administration dichotomy, Storing made four significant contributions to public administration theory:1 (1) He reframed the politics-administration debate; (2) in doing so, he resolved the “identity crisis” in American public administration by stressing the central governing role of career administrators; (3) he introduced the “judicial approach” to administrative decision making and, in the process, restored prudential judgment as the centerpiece of administrative practice; and (4) through the height, depth, and breadth of his
just the life of the civil servant by clarifying its potential for statesmanship. By sharing his vision, he enabled us all, teachers and practitioners of public administration alike, to better see what we are doing. In this article, we will revisit Storing’s contributions to the study and
practice of public administration. We do so for two reasons. First, as former students, we believe Storing has received inadequate credit for and attention to the significant contributions he has made, largely because his teaching and writings were presented in collections of essays and compilations of writings rather than in a monograph format.2 Second, we believe the unresolved debate over the proper role of administration in governing can benefit from Storing’s insights.
