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Public Administration and American History: A Century of Professionalism

1976; Wiley; Volume: 36; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/974229

1540-6210

Barry D. Karl,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

assurances that there really is something to celebrate. At the bare minimum, of course, there is always survival; but it isn't easy to make much of a party out of that. For over a decade now historians have been picking at the American past in search of evidences of sin-omission, commission, it makes little difference as long as it is sin. Since we are dealing with human history, it's of course not hard to find. Still, people in search of its past can afford moments of generosity now and again. Public administration, along with many of the social sciences, has recently taken a renewed interest in its own history, not simply in the history of administration, but in the history of the development of the discipline itself. The distinction between the history of practices long associated with the process of government and the history of the modern professionalization of those practices is a difficult and complex one, but an important, perhaps even essential distinction to make. Human beings were governed by one another long before government became a field to be studied. The emergence of schools to train governors is part of that process by which all professions open access to the disciplines upon which they rest by making the knowledge and skill available outside a strictly limited group. While the process is slow and need not be called democratic, its openness depends ultimately on the fact that it is the knowledge which defines the identity of the group, not heredity or membership in a class however much those factors may influence selection. This is only to say that while professionalism is not a democratic process-indeed the hierarchies of knowledge and judgment it is intended to reflect are the essence of elitism-the development of modern democracy would be impossible without professionalism. From the perspective of American history, the professionalization of public administration was a key step in the acknowledgment of the dilemma industrial modernization posed for Americans committed to precepts of their revolution, their formative constitutional years, and, ultimately, the nationalism they saw confirmed in their Civil War. Administration became the way of coping with political problems without actually solving them, a process its defenders labeled pragmatic, or pluralist, but which its critics saw as muddling-and worse. The definition of the field, however, depended upon mediating the relation between an administrative elitism devoted to protecting a science of government and a faith in popular democracy which protected an extraordinary range of political practices. That the social sciences were always in the process of striving to be more scientific and the politics always under pressure to be more democratic often exacerbated differences and threats. The social science disci-