Handbook of Administrative History (review)

Can administrative science contribute to the writing of administrative history? This is the question that Raadschelders tries to answer in this reference tool. Raadschelders believes that public administrators can learn from the historian’s sensitivity to context and contingency, and that historians can build on the administrative scientist’s quest for general patterns and systematic comparisons.

Raadschelders’ guide includes eleven chapters about the main themes in administrative history. At its core is a 100-page list of historical works about public administration on six continents from antiquity to the present. Raadschelders aspires to be comprehensive, but his bibliography is heavily weighted toward Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States. Throughout, Raadschelders draws inspiration from earlier historically minded students of public administration, such as Waldo and Gladden.¹

Given the gargantuan proportions of Raadschelders’s topic, and the limited resources that he has at at his command, it is hardly surprising that his coverage is uneven. Yet, certain omissions are startling. Missing is any reference to Michael Mann’s magisterial two-volume Sources of Social Power (Cambridge, 1986Cambridge, 1993), surely one of the most suggestive and wide-ranging analytical contributions to the historical literature on public administration in recent years. James Q. Wilson is represented by his essay, “The Rise of the Bureaucratic State,” Public Interest, X (1975), 77–103, but not by his Bureaucracy (New York, 1989). There are eight pages of citations to works about the history of public administration in modern Britain, but no reference to John Brewer’s Sinews of Power (London, 1989). Also overlooked is Theda Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), as well as the influential essays brought together by Skocpol, Peter B. Evans, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985). These omissions are particularly puzzling, given Raadschelders’ interest in the origins of the modern welfare state (258–270).

Additional problems are raised by the manner in which Raadschelders has organized his entries. Rather than arranging them alphabetically—as is customary in works that adopt the social-scientific citation style—he has subdivided them into no fewer than seventy separate lists. The rationale behind this categorization is far from self-evident. For example, though Raadschelders discusses Skocpol and Somers’ essay on comparative analysis in a section on methodology, he groups it not with general studies in administrative history, but, rather, with specialized works on the administrative history of the United States (361).² To complicate matters still further, the citation lists are scattered throughout the work, rather than brought together at the end. A citation like “(Jacoby 1976, 2d ed.)” is intelligible only if one correctly guesses that it refers to “Jacoby, Henry. 1973” (xi, 284). Others, such as “Mansfield 1959),” appear nowhere at all (5).

Although Raadschedlers’s appetite for bibliography is prodigious, one doubts that this book will do much to bridge the gap between administrative history and administrative science. Indeed, Raadschelders’ overview makes it plain that the most imaginative, innovative, and influential theoretical contributions to administrative history have not originated from within school of public administration. Far more important have been sociologists, political scientists, historians, and legal scholars. Business-administration scholars have long made major contributions to the writing of business history. Why, then, have specialists in public administration done so little to promote the historical study of governmental institutions? Raadschelders grapples with this issue, but is unwilling to probe to its implications. It is not hard to see why. After all, the failure of administrative scientists to promote historically oriented scholarship helps explain why Raadchelders’ handbook is, overall, a disappointment.

Specialists in administrative history may find a few useful nuggets in the elaborate list of citations. Newcomers to the field will find Eugene Kamenka’s Bureaucracy (Oxford, 1989) a more stimulating and accessible introduction to the main themes and opportunities for research.