ABSTRACT
This chapter confronts Americans' ideological discomfort over governance and the legitimacy of bureaucracy in the governance process. It outlines normative concepts appropriate to developing a legitimate role for bureaucracy (the public administration) and bureaucrats (the public administrators) in governance. Serious consideration of a legitimate role for bureaucracy in governance unlocks the door to a host of new concepts and ways of perceiving things about both bureaucracy and democracy. Since governance entails the state's rewarding and depriving in the name of society as a whole, and since politics includes the art of gaining acceptance for those allocations, administration is an inextricable part of both governance and politics. Finding a legitimate role for the public administration in governance also may depend on scholars reaching a new point of resolution of the venerable question of whether there is a politics–administration dichotomy. Like the judicial system, the public administration needs to assert its propriety and legitimacy as an institution.
