Madison's Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution

2 That Old-Time Religion

c h a p t e r t w o That Old-Time Religion The acceptability of public administration principles is dependent upon their consistency with and contribution to those democratic values which the community is determined to preserve at all costs. —Marshall Dimock As the field of public administration has outgrown its youth, generation gaps have opened and widened. The field’s seminal figures and ideas have increasingly been regarded as rustic and naïve, even deluded, rather than insightful and prescient when confronting the enduring challenges of constitutional governance. Though there are exceptions (see for example O’Toole 1984; Moe and Gilmour 1995; Rohr 1986; Svara 1999; Wamsley and Wolf 1996), contemporary commentors have been variously patronizing, contemptuous, or indifferent toward their progenitors. Public administration’s rejection of its past is puzzling. One explanation is the tendency in most critiques of the older credos is to evaluate them as divorced from their historical and institutional context, as if their originators’ reasons for responding as they did to the administrative problems of their day are of no intrinsic intellectual or practical interest. Denuded of context, these older ideas may appear sterile, even foolish, from a contemporary perspective. A more specific explanation is that dismissive attitudes toward the field’s founding contributors appear to reflect the influence of the publication in 1948 of Dwight Waldo’s The Administrative State. Waldo condemned traditional public administration as a collection of outdated credos, an ‘‘old-time religion’’ (also see Peters 1996, 16 m a d i s o n ’ s m a n a g e r s 3). The implication of such condemnation is clear: Why study ideas that have been authoritatively held to be both inconsequential and wrong? We argue in this book that traditional thinking in public administration is of vital importance to understanding contemporary problems of public management. Our intention is not to cavil over the meaning of auld texts, however. As we note in chapter 1, our main purpose in writing this book is theoretical, even philosophical, not historical. But theorizing in public administration needs historical perspective: ideas and arguments in their cultural, intellectual, and institutional contexts.∞ Such perspective enables us to comprehend the fundamental dynamics of American state building, the better to evaluate contemporary prospects for further reform of the administrative state. In this sense, our approach is similar in spirit to that of American political development scholars (see for example Skowronek 1982; Carpenter 2001). Accordingly, in this chapter we exhume and reconsider public administration’s traditional thinking. Our objective is to lay foundations for our argument, elaborated in chapters 5 and 6 and summarized in chapter 7, concerning how to achieve constitutionally responsible public administration and management. In this chapter, through its intellectual history, we review the emergence of the American administrative state and the concomitant rise of a nascent professional field of public administration. We review the first generation of ideals and ideas that constitute the bedrock of what we now know as traditional public administration. We also review the emergence beginning in the 1930s of a maturing academic discourse on governance in America’s rapidly evolving administrative state. We conclude by summarizing the habits of professional reasoning or, in popular parlance, the paradigm that had evolved by the end of the 1930s. In a nutshell, we argue that traditional public administration, as expressed in the ideas and agendas of activist reformers, in the practices of public managers, and in the reflections and conceptualizations of scholars, was, contrary to most contemporary accounts, profound in a republican sense. That is, these ideas were concerned with creating a legitimate role for public administration and management within our constitutional scheme. Early thinking, moreover, converged on ideas and ideals that are essentially Madisonian: concerned with perfecting institutions that control faction and power on behalf of a ‘‘public interest.’’ What better source for insights on public management under the separation of powers than the early literature of traditional public administration? t h a t o l d - t i m e r e l i g i o n 17 ‘‘a steady and quiet development’’ Because later generations of public administration scholars have been, with few exceptions, innocent of active political engagement, they may lack an adequate appreciation of the extent to which their field originated in the reform movements that first took hold in the nation’s large cities and spread within a generation to state...