ABSTRACT
Through un-engineering, the Public Administration (P.A.) community should seek a fresh consciousness that focuses on knowing and embracing administrative love as a regulative ideal. The case for the irrationality of administrative love is deepened, if that love is understood to include both the ideal-focused and individual-focused aspects. Administrative love can relish the embrace of contraries; available is a “coherent enough” account of love that is ideal-focused and individual-focused. The aim of un-engineering is about realizing administrative love as a regulative ideal beckoning toward a being-with, a caring-for and a wanting-to-know-about the individual person as a whole. Un-engineering management and un-engineering the machinery of administration should constitute a major, and an on-going, project in P.A. Un-engineering has the aim not only of knowing but of generating the attitudes and behavior of administrative love. Fortunately for un-engineering, a coherent understanding of administrative love is available, where administrative love is directed toward an ideal and toward whole individual persons.
