Toward a Public Philosophy of Public Administration

What role should public administration play in the development of a public philosophy? At first glance, it seems presumptuous for public administration even to think about developing such a grandiose idea as a public philosophy. However, in an era of fiscal limits and declining confidence in public institutions, the abdication of responsibility for development of a public philosophy adequate to the issues the field faces might result in a political wilderness where there is, to use Richard Pells’s apocalyptical phrase, “action without theory, realism without imagination, movement without vision.” ¹ Even if one dismisses Pells’s phrasing as too overdrawn, the field could surely fall prey to what S.M. Miller aptly referred to as the “blind forces of the factual.” ² To be walled in by the blind forces of the factual runs the serious risk of keeping administrators cloistered in the administrative world of what they think they do best: implementing managerial and procedural reforms. As sufficient as this may appear to some, it ultimately leads to a pedantic public purpose. It becomes pedantic, as Louis Gawthrop points out, because such a cloistered existence divorces public administration from the public it serves and, more critically, it fails “to revive the character of citizenship and the notion of the citizen.” ³