Preface to Public Administration: A Search for Themes and Direction

"The most striking feature of America's public administration thought at the founding of the United States was its absence" (p. 19). In the "Preface to Public Administration" Stillman (1991) presents a very interesting set of explanations about the past of American public administration and the impact of that past on what is happening or not happening in the contemporaneous public administration (despite much efforts) in the country. Stillman (1991) connects the Republican ideals, embedded in the principles such as the elimination of the king, heredity, hierarchy, privilege, noble titles, and tradition as a basis of rule, and above all, elimination of anything that smacks of royal bureaucracy or administration and substitution of an electoral system based on consent of the people (p. 22), to the historical direction and progress of public administration in the United States. That political history matters too much to understand the practice of American public administration with its peculiar tensions and problems echoes in the Preface to Public Administration. A number of American public administration scholars, perhaps the most renowned of whom is Dwight Waldo (1948; 1984), have long attempted to tie the political philosophy and traditions of the United States more intimately to the seemingly politics-free public administration theory and practice in the United States. Stillman is surely one of those scholars that skillfully and convincingly demonstrate to the reader that the "stateless origins" of American public administration have had as much influence on the historical course of public administration.I will try to summarize Stillman's thesis in a very concise way. Stillman (1991) argues that the Founding Fathers of the United States, who were passionate antagonists of a powerful administration that they associated with corrupted power, designed a system of government based on the checks and balances in which no individual, group or institution was much more powerful than each other so as to predominate the political arena to its own interest. The framers of American Constitution lived in an era when government was the power and the bulk of society was made up of simple, frugal, individual businessmen and farmers. They could not envision a country in which massive and competing private sources of power (corporations) came into existence and complex problems of massive urbanization occurred and the two World Wars broke out that all would encourage the emergence of "new American state" largely outside the Constitution, in piecemeal, extra-constitutional fashion. In the Europe, public administration theory and practice was derived from and integrated intimately to the political philosophy of that continent in a more orderly and symmetrical, a more prudent, a more articulate, and a more cohesive fashion. As a result, a more powerful state bureaucracy was created in European continent. What happened in the United States was the quite reverse of Eu

The fine writing style of the author is one of the best recommendations to be made for this book, especially since the subject is one that rarely excites even those who major in or practice it. The coverage is generalist, and the author does a fine job of tracing the origins of American concepts of governing from their Classical, Whig, and Tudor roots through the making of the Constitution and down to the present time. Like the thesis of "Albion's Seed," one can trace the ideas advocated by some schools of thought today back to their origin in traditions brought here by the first American settlers. Among these are the Tudoresque, late medaeval notion of common law and limited government and the classic revival of republican seperation of powers. (Russel Kirk's "The Roots of American Order" takes the thesis further, and would make good supplementary reading.) One of the best parts of the volume is a section near the end in which the four principal streams of thought on public administration are compared side-by-side and tied in to the traditions that have been part of our political life from the beginning. One objection here: in describing the advocates of what the author memorably terms the "Stateless State" crowd, he errs in stating that the Chicago School/Public Choice movement is decended from the Austrian School, which he characterizes as a 19th century school of thought. Stillman is wrong on both counts: Milton Freidman, James Buchannan, George Stigler, et al, of Chicago fame are students of Frank Knight, and come from a different tradition than that which flourished in the 20th century through the efforts of Austrians like Hayek and von Moses, and which is alive and well in our own time. The two schools' adherents are sometimes allies, but their traditions are seperate.The analysis of how our early institutions came to have form beyond the minimal guidance outlined in the Constitution is memorable for the phrase, "chinked in," ad hoc as it were, and for giving name to a distinctly American tradition of doing administration on the fly, filling the details as needed. This runs counter to Woodrow Wilson's admiration for Prussian efficiency and organization, which became a later, dominant theme in public affairs.One other flaw mars an otherwise fine volume: early on, the author states that the Roman Republic did not become the Empire until the mid-second century, A.D. The proper date would by 27, B.C., but hopefully, this typo will be corrected in the next edition of what ought to be a standard work in the field of public administration.-Lloyd A. Conway