ABSTRACT
In writing about governance and bureaucracy, what should be the relationship between post-traditional Public Administration (PA) consciousness and traditional PA consciousness? This chapter aims to recommend silence as a regulative ideal for the in-between. There are at least three overlapping reasons for embracing silence as a regulative ideal. These are avoiding the shadow, grasping root problems, and liberating the post-traditional imagination. It is legitimate to maintain silence toward a traditional consciousness that fails to emphasize the practical relevance of conscious and unconscious societal urges in producing administrative (mal)formations. To Kill the King probes eighteen features of—or approaches toward—a post-traditional consciousness, and some do include attacking what is pernicious in the traditional. Rather than being sucked too far into the negative discourse of the traditional, more desirable is the positive action of freeing the imagination to explore the possibilities of various post-traditional consciousnesses.
