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DE CULTURA
Omar Guerrero-Orozco
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Public Administration in Great Britain Omar Guerrero-Orozco
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue 5
Introduction 7
Part One
THE BRITISH PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Chapter 1
THE BRITISH CULTURE 15
Chapter 2
THE CHARACTER OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE 30
Chapter 3
THE FORMATION OF THE BRITISH ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: INTERNAL
FACTORS 45
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Chapter 4
Chapter 5
THE BRITISH ADMINISTRATIVE CULTURE 64
Administrative Discretion 64
Administrative Law 66
The Civil Service 70
The Public Corporation 74
Local Administration and Centralization 78
Chapter 6
BRITISH ADMINISTRATIVE CULTURE AND THE
NEOMANAGERIAL MENACE 82
Part Two
ADMINISTRATIVE THOUGHT IN GREAT BRITAIN
Chapter 7
THE ORIGIN OF BRITISH ADMINISTRATIVE THOUGHT 89
Chapter 8
THE SCIENCE OF THE BRITISH PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY 96
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Chapter 9
INCORPORATION OF THE BRITISH PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
INTO GLOBAL ACADEMIC CIRCLES 105
Chapter 10
CONTEMPORARY BRITISH ADMINISTRATIVE THOUGHT 120
EPILOGUE 129
BIBLIOGRAPHY 132
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PROLOGUE
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The book is organized in ten chapters, grouped into two parts. Chapter
one introduces the idea of a British administrative culture by studying its Briton,
Saxon, and Roman components. In chapter two we emphasize the insular
aspect of the country through the lens of its language and politics. The purpose
of chapter three is to analyze the formation process of a British state by looking
at internal factors such as the development of a judicial administration and the
industrial revolution. In contrast, chapter studies the external factors that
contributed to the raise of a British state: the British experience in India and the
administrative revolution. In chapter six, we focus on the British administrative
culture, from which its civil service, public enterprises, and local governments
stand out. Moreover, this chapter introduces the public management in Britain,
where it originated and subsequently diffused across the globe. These chapters
integrate the first part of the book, providing a general overview of the public
administration in Britain.
The second part of the book treats the British administrative thought in
depth. It begins with chapter seven, where we explore the early origins of
seminal administrative ideas in the country. Chapter eight carefully studies the
‘London Circle’, a group of remarkable intellectuals who leaded the frontier of
administrative thought in Britain. Some of its most prominent members were
Harold Laski and Herman Finer. Additionally, we restitute the place of an
outstanding forgotten thinker, W. H. Moreland, as the founder of the discipline
of public administration in Britain. In chapter 9 we study the contributions of
Richard Warner, E. N. Gladden, and C. H. Sisson, as part of a worldwide
process in which countries assimilated public administration ideas as part of
their institutions. Finally, chapter ten provides a detailed exposition of
contemporary administrative thought.
Omar Guerrero-Orozco
Autumn, 2014
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INTRODUCTION
I
It was some time ago that the study of public administration first began to
examine administrative culture from development and comparative
methodology points of view. One of the pioneering works in this regard
appeared in the mid-1950s, and stimulated the contributions of further
researchers whose many years of work laid the foundation for a cosmopolitan
vision of public administration. Among them were Lynton Cladwell, Ferrel
Heady, Albert Lepawsky and Fred Riggs (Siffin, 1957). This research, which is
still ongoing, focuses on analyzing the unique aspects of the administrative
culture of each respective country on the basis of its degree of overall
“administrative development” as well as more specific features, such as the
degree of coordination between politics and administration, and the
professionalism of the country’s public servants. The results bring to light truths
that cannot be hidden, such as the relative failure of Western styles of
administration when they are implemented in Asia, Africa and Latin America;
the preeminence of local administrations and the clear limitations of technical
support. An examination of administrative culture reveals traits related to
organizational diversity, in which the contrasts between administrations, not to
mention hybrid specimens, are clearly reflected (Hood, 1998:6–7).
The most surprising result, however, was that the argument about the
universality of the principles of Western public administration –taken for granted
thanks to the globalization visible since the 1960s– was still incomplete and
immature. It should be noted that this theory was endorsed by distinguished
academics with high-flying theories, but whose work in the area was not entirely
fruitful. Some of the most notable of these include Paul Appleby, Albert
Lepawsky and Pedro Muñoz Amato, whose books are required reading in the
public administration curriculum (Appleby, 1949; Lepawsky, 1949, Muñoz
Amato, 1954). The discernable cause was that in Europe and the United States
of the 1960s, a triumphalist spirit –if not arrogance and academic vanity–
prevailed with regard to the development of the theory of public administration,
along with a crass ignorance of administrative realities in Asian, African and
Latin American countries. It was at this point that the science of public
administration lost its innocence.
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II
Administrative culture is not fully universal, since the way public affairs
are managed in other parts of the world is doubtless different from how they are
managed in your country or ours. A first iteration to categorizing administrative
cultures is to distinguish – and contrast – “Western” and “oriental” cultures. Let
us begin by doing so.
I have often retold this personal anecdote: Around the middle of 1998, in
Santiago de Chile, I participated in an international seminar where I heard a
speaker say, more or less, that people should stop using the word
“administration” in its Latin sense, and rather use “management” in its English
sense, since it has a more flexible meaning (sic). This advice, which was
spoken with certain disdain, clearly reflects two problems: first, an attempt to
resolve a complex problem with the simple substitution of a word, not to
mention the incongruity which arises. Secondly, the speaker’s semantical,
conceptual and etymological ignorance of the two words leap out: both
‘management’ and ‘administration’ are from the Latin language.
In other words, in addition to blatant ignorance, prejudice in public
administration can take a number of different forms. As we noted, this was
evident until recently in some academic sectors by their scorn for the
expression “public administration” for being Latin and outdated, and their
glorification of the term “public management” for being English and modern.
This is obviously an issue in the English language, where it can be assumed
that there is a clear distinction between public administration and public
management, the two expressions having dissimilar meanings with respect to
what public servants do. Thus public administration, on one hand, tends to be
considered to be outdated and ineffective, while public management on the
other is exalted as modern and active. It even reaches the point where the
former is pictured as a traditional activity based on the mere passive carrying
out of functions, aimed at defending and perpetuating the status quo, while the
latter has the halo of an action-oriented, problem-solving function performed
with innovation and creativity.
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established in England; the former Church in Wales among the Welsh; the
Episcopal Church of Scotland among the Scots; and the former Church of
Ireland (Ireland in general, not just Northern Ireland) among the Irish. Great
Britain is truly a complicated country (Barker, 1944: 14–15).
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III
Ideas emerge from the activity of the public administrator, because their
originator is advancing and developing while carrying out his work. Authorship
and writing proceed at the same time when the author, in the course of his own
development, conceives the idea emerging from his pen. It often happens that
statesmen do not learn anything new from what they know a ruler did, because
the novelty of an idea stems from what is communicated. Only by their
conception as a principle, in fact, is what lends historical trends their penetrative
force that raises them to what we can call an “idea” (Meinecke, 1998: 39).
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since administrative work was indistinguishable from the state’s other functions.
As Bonnin claims, it never crossed the mind of any legislators of any peoples
that administration might have its own laws, forms, or fixed and invariable rules.
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Part One
THE BRITISH PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
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Chapter 1
The reality is, of course, otherwise, and more recently Western social
scientists have placed great emphasis on the value of Eastern studies on
politics and administration. Particularly notable is their acknowledgment of the
pre-existence of institutions in Eastern countries following independence, since
it has been concluded that the colonial implantation of the concept of the state
and its administration failed because they ignored the actual conditions of these
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languages share the common fate of having an inferior mission compared to the
higher calling that the Anglo-Saxons attribute to themselves.
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characterization does not fit Italy: when Italians receive education, they apply
what they have been taught and use it to prosper.
Finally, the neo-Latin decline has also been attributed to their religious
inferiority, a thesis which begins by making Catholicism a sort of common
property of the neo-Latin peoples. But this is at best relative, because there
Catholics in Belgium, Cologne, Aachen, on the banks of the Rhine, in Bavaria
and in Austria, just as there are in New York and many places more (Fouillee,
1903: 530, 534). In the political sphere, the Latin peoples have been attributed
a congenital quality of suffering voluntary submission to a single power; that is,
an innate need for government protection. In fact, it is not the neo-Latins, but
the Germans who have a reputation for submission and for carrying a passion
for order and discipline in their blood, from which arises their state spirit.
Germany is a serious and hardworking nation, endowed with education, order
and precision, thus superior to other nations when a fighting sprit is required.
But what mainly distinguishes the Germans is that they accept the terms of
compulsion freely and with conviction, because their freedom consists in being
willing to voluntarily submit to authority (Bakounine, 1967: 238). Finally, it is
alleged that there is no nation to rival the Germans in terms of “statist”
organization, which would explain why they seek their life and liberty in the
state.
But it was not the feeling of submission but that of equality that originated
in the nations with Latin culture, due mainly to the fact that Roman law and
institutions had a general and universal quality that erased individual
differences. This is characteristically visible in France, where the love of
uniformity has spread in the opposite way to the tendency among Anglo
Saxons. The purest representation of the universal search for equality is of the
rights of man and of the citizen (Sánchez Viamonte, 1956). But the tendency to
draw a distinction and differentiate hierarchically among occupations does
indeed persist among the Anglo-Saxons (Friedrich, 1946: 29). It is their division
of labor that holds the secret of British prosperity. Indeed, the cornerstone of
Adam Smith’s economic theory lies in the division oftasks (Adam, 1952). Its
politics is also based on the division of work, which puts a dynasty responsible
for the interests of the nation on one side and the House of Lords responsible
for maintaining government traditions on the other. Neither the monarch nor the
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House of Lords nor the House of Commons is entrusted with the whole
government; each has its particular job for the general good. This political
division of the job of government is constitutionalism, one of the contributions of
Great Britain. It is a “divided powers” principle. Nor should we forget that the
division of powers in the modern state was first proposed by John Locke in his
book The Second Treatise of Civil Government (Locke, 1948), while
Montesquieu formulated his interpretation based on Locke’s thinking, given that
the chapter where he develops it is called “The constitution of England”
(Montesquieu, 1961). By dividing power, constitutionalism puts effective limits
on government action, because it consists of a system of norms that ensure fair
play, which holds the government responsible (Friedrich, 1946: 33–34).
Although constitutionalism is not the result of any “mysterious national
character,” it is true that the English-speaking peoples developed their political
traditions by moving steadily in the constitutional direction, thereby becoming
leaders of modern constitutionalism.
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Roman Britannia
Before the Roman conquest, Britannia had no cities or towns, except for
Celtic villages where the local people lived (Bennett, 1988: 7). Rome pulled
Britannia out of its social backwater and changed it from a tribal to an urban
society. If by civilization we understand the transition from an agricultural
existence to an urban society, Rome civilized Britannia, giving her her first cities
(Bagby, 1952: 84). This was how Colchester (Camuludunum or Colonia Claudis
Victrecinsis) was founded, as well as York, Lincoln (Lindum) and Gloucester
(Glevun), as well as London (Londinium). The latter, the capital of Britannia,
began as the seat of one of the four provinces of Britannia (Maxima
Caesariensis), while Cirencer was the capital of Britannia Prima, York of
Britannia Secunda and Carlisle the capital of Velentia. That is, Rome effected
the first territorial division of the island, and its first municipal organization.
Colchester, Lincoln and Gloucester, founded as colonies (coloniae), were
populated by Roman civilians, as well as by licensed veteran soldiers, while the
other towns (civitetes) were occupied by the Britons as in their traditional
settlements, although the Roman invasion caused them to resettle and change
their distribution. Once the town had become a city, it became a supply port, or
its Romanized residents acquired citizenship (Salway, 1984: 23). Military
demobilization was a source of urban development for Lincoln and Gloucester,
whose population was augmented by veterans of the Ninth and Second
Legions, as well as their families and servants (Birley, 1964: 22, 61). All the
Roman cities of Britannia were doubly new because, being located in previously
unsettled country, they were not built on top of existing construction, and each
of them was situated for specific purposes. In other words, they emerged from a
general country-wide urban development plan. For this reason, they must be
distinguished from military forts and sites, which are generally considered as the
main cities (Morris, 2005: 6).
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John Morris claims that “London is a Roman city.” It was founded by the
Roman government to serve a variety of purposes, for it was established
expressly for this reason: what brought the city into being was the government
and administration of Britannia. Being located in a potentially troublesome
territory, the choice of the site of the city was geopolitical; it must be a natural
center that connected with the rest of the territory in order to govern it and
stimulate its economic activity. And the choice was astute, because of the many
great cities founded by Rome, London stands out among them. It was in
London that the overall government of Britannia was installed, where all the
main roads carrying the imperial mail set out from, and where the fiscal, judicial
and administrative offices were located. The history of London is thus not the
biography of just any British city, but the history of the government and
economy of Britannia (Morris, 2005: 6–7). Rome also built Paris, Cologne,
Vienna and Belgrade, but none of them grew as London did, nor were any of
them such a dominant political center from the time of their foundation, as
London’s history from its beginning to the present day has shown. This
important fact is due to the location of the capital of Britannia having been
chosen deliberately.
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that served as the core of public life (basilica) and the municipal government.
Planning included the construction and management of public utilities, mainly
the drinking water supply and sewage. The first city of Britannia, Colchester,
and the first capital reached a population of three thousand after being
populated by the influx of demobilized veterans (Bennett, 1988: 59, 72–73).
Rome can be credited with the original urbanization of Great Britain. As a
consequence of municipal life, Rome operated the first public utilities. In
addition to the water and sewage mentioned above, the Romans built baths and
aqueducts, as well as theaters – in Saint Albans and Canterbury – and a
racetrack in Lincoln.
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As in their other provinces, in Britannia the Romans did not spare effort
or resources to make the island government viable, setting up what can be
called government infrastructure; that is, the public mails (cursus publicus). As
famous as their aqueduct water system was, the cursus publicus was one of the
public services on an imperial scale most sought for its cascading effects, since
it involved not only the top-level government information system but a complex
network of public works that in Britannia meant not only constructing roads, but
also the “mansiones” (night quarters) and “mutationes” (relay stations) (Black
1995: 13). Thanks to the cursus publicus, a carriage could comfortably cover 25
kilometers or more in a day and its occupants enjoy suitable lodging. The
mansiones often became the seeds that gave birth to small towns that
multiplied throughout the island.
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Germanic migration
Prior to their migration to Britannia, the Angles and the Saxons lived
along parts of the coast of what today are Denmark and Germany, and on both
sides of the mouth of the Elbe River. The differences in language and customs
between the two peoples were slight. Some historians think that the Anglo
Saxons were, in essence, a single people, while others maintain a distinction
between them (Breeze, 2002: 31). Both peoples settled in most parts of
Britannia, from the Forth to the far reaches of Cornwall, while the Jutes settled
in Kent and the Isle of Wight. The latter were a smaller tribe, related to the
Angles and Saxons, but more diverse. They came to Britannia directly from
Jutland, in northern Denmark, or perhaps from their more recent settlements in
Frisia and the lower Rhine.
Many of the invaders were farmers who sought soil richer than that of the
dunes, marshes and forests of the northern coast of Europe where they lived.
Others were fishermen, experienced in surviving sea storms and pirates – both
frequently encountered in the North Sea, although they, too, were raiders and
buccaneers. These peoples were accustomed to loyally following their leaders
in marauding forays along the coasts between Norway and Frisia. But once
their conquests had been consolidated, the Anglo-Saxon women and children
migrated with their menfolk. The flow of population was so copious that their
lands of origin were virtually emptied. Even the royal family emigrated from the
Angle kingdom in Schleswig. It was then that the Danes spread from what is
today Swedish territory into modern Denmark which had been depopulated
following the emigration of its former inhabitants who crossed the sea to found a
new Engle-land.
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(Haverfield, 2007: 10). The destruction of the roads was deliberate and
complete, as was the elimination of the Roman names. Gradually, the paving
stones of the unmaintained roads sunk, and later the roads were dismantled to
quarry the materials when the Medieval English, having used up much of their
lumber, began to build houses of stone. Having degenerated into bridle paths,
the highways eventually disappeared under marshes and fields. Recently some
sections have been repaired and modernized, and “the motor car now shoots
along the path of the legions” (Trevelyan, 1976: 52). Other vestiges of the
Roman roads are still walked by English trekkers, although these paths set out
from nowhere and end up nowhere, “walking miles and miles” through the
English countryside. Many of these roads are not identified so much by their
visibility as by exploration of the ground and by air, enabling them to be
rediscovered.
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War, invasion and bloodshed, normal in the England of the time, left a
long-lasting stamp on Anglo-Saxon life. But no more is known about the era,
because the Anglo-Saxon period disappeared from the landscape; their wooden
houses left no traces nor lasting traditions. Today, it is traces of the Romans,
more distant in time, that are more visible than those of the people who
destroyed a considerable part of their work. In the absence of written records,
the history of the Anglo-Saxon world was woven into a cloth more mythological
than historical, for the silence of the past is unrelenting. Certainly there are no
authentic accounts of the Anglo-Saxon conquest; the most important page of
our national annals is blank, George Trevelyan has concluded (Trevelyan,
1976: 83–84). Thus the leading figures of this lost period of English history -
such as Arthur– could be real or fictional.
To date, archaeology and history have only revealed the general outlines
of the struggle that destroyed Roman Britannia and eventually delivered the
island to the modern English.
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Chapter 2
However, this perspective gives only a partial view, for we should not
forget the Commonwealth of Nations, the British-influenced territory that
occupies more than a quarter of the world. Thus, from the geographical point of
view, it is not only from its metropolitan territory properly speaking from which
England obtains its greatness; other sources must also be considered
(Siegfried, 1950: 79–80). Some time ago, André Siegfried masterfully
characterized the influence the English people have had on the world: the 45
million men living in the rock have had a decisive effect on the world; they have
contributed more than any other people to the development of Western
civilization. Siegfried points out clearly what is so splendid about the
construction of a great power seated on such a narrow territorial base. But at
the same time as we see its greatness, we also see its fragility. For this nation
to construct its Empire and to maintain it for centuries, the existence of a truly
exceptional set of qualities can be inferred.
As noted by another author, the confusing origins of the British nation
sprung from an isolated, cold, rainy riverine island, freed of its ice cap, gradually
populated by migratory waves of people from the continent with a colonizing
spirit, some as pioneers and others as refugees from oppression (Nicholson,
1967: 5). These migrations brought with them four elements that dominate the
subsequent history of the island: commerce with the continent, budding
ideologies, inclusive religions, and conflicts triggered by the island’s need to
protect itself from new invasions. Thus the fact of its island home had a
determining influence on the destiny and spirit of the English people: reduced to
their essence, they were condensed by a swifter and more complete fusion of
their elements, resulting in a unique, homogenous character. But at the same
time, the isolation of the island hindered communication with the outside which
would have resulted in more social exchange, although the English did voyage
to the continent to try to conquer territory or to trade (Fouillee, 1903: 194–197).
However, something of the ancient Britons’ strong fraternal instinct and
fondness for society and organizations was inherited by the English. Moreover,
the island environment that confined the English also promoted their unity and
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The conclusion that can be drawn is that the destiny of the British nation
has been shaped essentially by isolation as a result of insularity. But separation
did not protect the island from repeated invasions. It is just a little morethan a
thousand years that the North Sea and the English Channel have been able to
preserve England from new incursions; ethnic contact between the English
people and the nations of the continent ceased after 1066. A number of French,
German and Jewish refugees emigrated to the island from the seventeenth to
the nineteenth centuries, but as individuals, not as population migrations. The
British thus have always had trouble considering themselves as Europeans
(Siegfried, 1950: 83–84, 87). We should not fail to note their ethnic youth in
contrast, for example, with the French, because the Latins have been a societal
group for more than two thousand years. There is however a contradiction
between insularity and the internationalism of British trade as its true destiny, a
contradiction that represents its personality. As England by its very
temperament is the most insular country in the world, its interests and
relationships have forced it to make its living from international trade, which
means that every English person embodies this contradiction.
In fact, it is thought that globalization, a process that has encountered
strong national resistance, has come up against one of the most solid defenses
in Great Britain. We must not forget that England led a crusade well into the
1950s whose thesis was that the European Common Market would fail because
it was believed at the time that markets were resistant to the European
temperament and its nationalisms. This led to the United Kingdom’s refusal to
join the Continent in signing the Common Market Treaty. It was the cultural
English insularity that brought about this decision; as one author noted, the
English have not been considered part of Europe because of the separation
between the British Isles and the continent. The English Channel separates the
islands sufficiently from Europe, while a more distant continent has offered it a
sense of North Atlantic community in spite of the thousands of kilometers that
separate them (Rose, 1964: 7). The United States and Canada make a sort of
North Atlantic community, fuzzily and imprecisely defined, with England,
One of the particularly English features that characterize the nation is its
historical relationship with the French, and vice versa. André Siegfried said that
when he crossed the English Channel and came to London, he had the
impression of having landed on another planet. Later, having become
accustomed to the English environment, he no longer understood his own
country. While Siegfried eventually came to be able to understand both the
English and the French points of view, he never managed to do both
simultaneously. From this, he was able to conclude that he knew no peoples
more mutually impenetrable. The English Channel, dividing the port of Dover
from the French coast, is metaphorically as deep and wide as an ocean.
Siegfried claims the right to make such judgments, having known the island of
Great Britain since 1882, when he visited as a child, and because he returned
to it many times (Siegfried, 1932: 8).
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Even to this day, many nations owe the fact of their existence mainly to
their antagonism against other countries. Indeed, Anglican England was
conceived by its hostility to Catholic France, as observed by Johann Gottlieb
Fichte, who explained that since ancient times, the belief has reigned that a
state consisting of an island (especially when other empires still did not have
natural borders separating them, nor could one speak of a balance of powers
between them) does not properly constitute an independent whole. Every such
independent state must have a foot firmly planted on the continent; islands can
only be considered an annex –by this logic, the British Isles belong to the terra
firma of France. Thus it was argued whether the lord of the mainland should
extend his domain to the islands or should the more powerful ruler of the
islands extend his sovereignty over the mainland. Both were attempted in turn.
The French princes took over England, the English kings seized France; the
latter maintain their claims even today, at least by means of their titles (Fichte,
1991: 124). To this was added, in the modern era, another not entirely natural
aspiration to supremacy in world trade and the colonial systems of both
empires, neither very natural. From this sprang the succession of wars that
raged from ancient times to today. And from this sprang the national hatred that
both peoples proffer so generously towards each other, all the more violent by
the fact that the two peoples were destined to be one.
But the English isolation and insularity could have been more radical.
Since France and England could have been a single country, because of the
Norman Conquest, it forever determined the direction of England’s politics and
culture. Geopolitically belonging to the Scandinavian countries, the land
adjacent to Europe during the Anglo-Saxon era, the British Isles were
threatened with remaining in isolation and apart from the great movements of
European life; that is, at risk of drowning in a countercurrent to the flow of
history. The union with Normandy turned England’s sights toward the continent
and plunged England into Europe’s politics, religious turmoil and cultural
influences. England, specifically, became a part of France and, thus entered
wholly into the world to which France belonged. As Charles Haskins points out,
England received from France its language, its literature and its art; its laws
became largely Frenchified; its institutions, almost completely feudal. This
connection with France was effected through Normandy, and the French
influence took a Norman form. All this was true especially in the particular
features that characterized the Norman government: English feudalism was a
Norman feudalism in which the barons were weak and the central government
strong, since it was the iron fist of the Norman reign that converted a weak,
straggling Anglo-Saxon state into the English nation. Being Normandized was
the price England paid for being Europeanized (Haskins, 1915: 82). This
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explains why, both by its immediate result and the eventual outcome, the
conquest of England was the crowning event of Norman history.
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The British
The island of Great Britain being a neighbor of Europe, this proximity has
shaped its ethnic composition through successive waves of immigration. A
series of invasions from the continent superimposed the Britons, Romans,
Anglo-Saxons and Normans onto the indigenous Iberians who were the original
inhabitants. Four main waves stand out; the first is the Britons, from the sixth
century B.C.E. to the arrival of Julius Caesar. These are a people who brought
a language and civilization to the island. The Roman conquest took place in 43
B.C.E., and lasted until the year 410 when the last legions left the island. It must
be emphasized that the effect of the Romans on Britain was not only the small
military occupation, but the seeds of Roman culture that were sown during
those four centuries, and whose traces, in spite of the Anglo-Saxon predation,
remained more visible than might have been expected.
While the Gaels of Scotland were never invaded by the Roman legions,
the south lived under the Roman order, and its effects can still be felt. The next
movement was the Germanic wave, which lasted from the fifth to the eleventh
century. Displacing the Britons westward, Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians
occupied the eastern coast as far as the North Sea and penetrated into the
interior of the island. They would be the dominant element of the British
population, and thus the factor that would leave the deepest imprint (Siegfried,
1950: 81–82). From this arises the claim that the Englishman of today is
essentially an Anglo-Saxon. The last wave came with the Norman Conquest,
which in a certain way was a repeat of the Roman conquest because it too
consisted of a military occupation and political domination by a landed
aristocracy superimposed on the pre-existing population. The Normans brought
their French language, their political order, and a civilization, which, while it was
not Roman, was at least Romanized because these formerly barbarian
“detached Scandinavians” had evolved during their two-century sojourn in
France.
Many peoples successively invaded this small island land. The last
invasion, in 1066, was preceded by successive Nordic incursions. The
Normans, Flemish, Picards and Armorican Bretons, led by William the
Conqueror, were preceded by other northern invaders who renewed the
Germanization of the country. These were the Danes, Norwegians and Swedes,
whose incursions began in the eighth century. Scandinavians even colonized
the North and East of England (ceded by Alfred the Great with the Peace of
Wedmore in 878). Meanwhile, France colonized Normandy after it was
abandoned by Charles the Simple. The Danes eventually conquered and
annexed the whole of England in the early eleventh century (Petit-Dutaillis
1961: 128).
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The Normans were endowed with a spirit of domination and talent for
organization that did not weaken the bonds of subordination. The Anglo-Saxons
rallied together to stand up for their rights and try to resist the invader. This was
what gave rise to the English nation’s spirit of partnership that distinguished it
from the German people. Here, the solid, open organization blocked
individualism from forging a sense of isolation, dispersion or disassociation, with
the result that German unity progressed so slowly as to be only recently
accomplished. When the Normans imposed their practical, utilitarian concerns
on the Anglo-Saxons, the climate and geography of the island favored them.
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and traditions that had populated the island since the fifth century (Warren
Hollister, 1969: 28–30). Indeed, by the time the Normans arrived in England,
the nation and its political system had consolidated on the base laid by the
Germanic peoples. So, from his point of view, the conquest is not important
whether as the beginning or the culmination of these events, but simply a major
point in their course; an illustrious chapter but not the first. At best, it represents
a shift in the process, but not one that changed its direction. It was such
decided opinions that prompted Haskins to say, as Freeman repeated countless
times, that the English of ancient times were as English the English of today.
(Haskins, 1915: 101). Round, in contrast, dismissed Freeman’s version of the
conquest as genealogical and antiquated, mainly because he considered it
unacceptable to credit the origin of the English nation to its ancestral Germanic
labyrinths. Rather, the conquest was a break interrupting the line of history,
which not only moved it from its previous route, but closed off that path forever.
In fact, most British institutions have their immediate origin in the conquest,
since its medium-term cause lies in the societies of Normandy and France, not
in the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The history of the conquest is not a
continuous evolutionary thread, but the vision of an event he judges as
revolutionary.
The element carried by the Britons was not extinguished, unlike the Celts
in France, and was able to maintain a fundamental importance in the social and
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Thus the concept of nation means more than only England. There is an
English nation whose home is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland, for the South and West of Ireland (Eire) became a separate
independent domain in 1922, although still within the British Commonwealth. It
is a nation which also includes Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Ulster).
The British nation is a “multinational nation” containing three different
nationalities: English, Scottish and Welsh (Barker, 1944: 13–13). Some of the
national languages other than English are spoken as a second language, but in
some cases as the only or first language, such as Welsh in Wales and Gaelic in
the Highlands of Scotland. Separate political institutions are preserved in some
of the nations; Northern Ireland has had its Parliament in Belfast since 1922,
but also continues to send its members to the House of Parliament in London.
Scotland, moreover, has its own courts and its own national Presbyterian
Church.
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Politics
When it comes to English political life, individualism and the binding force
of association produced a reign of freedom that is one of the country’s main
claims to fame. But the regard in which freedom was held was not reverence for
the idea, but rather the fact that safeguarding individual and corporate interests
were personified equally. It was thus the barrier posed by the sea that made the
liberal regime possible, fully consistent with national interests. Next to its
constitutional freedoms and parliamentary system, the most significant
development in English history has been its colonial expansion as a result of
advances in industry and trade, which enabled the British to expand their
dominion to the point that the national spirit, which overran the limits of Great
Britain, made the English in particular give birth to the idea that men can build a
homeland anywhere in the world (Fouillee, 1903: 210–211). Finally, the third
main event is the triumph of Protestantism. This took place due to a number of
reasons, but the main factor is political, which explains why the Irish Celts
rejected the Reformation while the Welsh Celts embraced it. However, the
overall correspondence between Anglo-Saxon individualism and a religion
based mainly on the individual conscience must be acknowledged.
In the sphere of politics, Britain has solved problems that other nations
could not overcome. It has taught by example that freedom and authority are
not incompatible, and that the law can be obeyed without sacrificing personal
dignity. That is, freedom implies neither chaos nor tyranny (Siegfried, 1950: 92).
This is a different conception of what on the continent is called power in the
sense of Roman imperium. The government is not a supreme authority whose
orders are imposed on its citizens, but the expression of their common interest;
that is, a delegation of the community. It seeks to administer with the same
simplicity with which an individual or a corporation of individuals would exercise
its administrative functions. Hence, the administration of public affairs does not
imply any mystery, whether stately or evil, and its container does not hold the
mandate of the governed, but rather the reason of state.
Political culture is in a constant state of change, since, as can be seen
from a historical perspective, many different factors influence its development:
the pattern of traditional norms, new historical processes, the behavior of
political leaders, international events, chance happenings, and the coming
together of circumstances. This explains why, in the development of the political
culture of modern Britain, many standards have been preserved from
generation to generation, although in some cases in a modified or tempered
form (Rose, 1964: 37).
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from the Roman experience, precluded the development of a great empire. The
location of European countries within or outside the Carolingian Empire was
instrumental in the degree of feudalization they each developed.
Without studies on the state there was little scope for the development of
a theory of public administration, with the exception of purely practical writing.
Without “crisis,” which is the raw material for ideas on public administration,
there was no place for writing on the subject.
Carlyle tells us that the English in particular are “a nation of mutes.” But
their silence puts them in a relationship and harmony with that which language
does not express (Fouillee, 1903: 207, 208). However, although less sociable
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The Language
From every angle by which Great Britain might be examined, one always
finds a mixture, of which its language is an emblematic case. So, although it is
taken for granted that English is a Germanic language, the reality is that more
than half of its everyday words in the current vocabulary are of Latin origin. It is
a bridge language, a stopcock in the gulf between the Germanic and the
Romance families: it is a language that combines simple and familiar Germanic
words with magnificent Latinisms, capable of including a broad range of fine
nuances of expression in its dual vocabulary (Barker, 1944: 13). The English
language has been under a powerful Franco-Roman influence; its vocabulary
contains twice as many words of French origin as of Germanic origin. For
example, in the nineteenth-century etymological dictionary, Latin etymologies
take up the most space (Fouillee, 1903: 193). This leads Ernest Barker to
propose that his language, thanks to its widespread use in the United States
and the British Commonwealth of Nations, was suited since ancient times to be
a language of international trade and the second language of the world, as
indeed is the case today.
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During the period when English was formed in Anglo-Saxon times, the
language had many regional variations; the main dialects were the versions
spoken in Wessex, Northumbria, and the East and West Midlands. The
language of Wessex was that spoken in Alfred’s court, but the Norman
conquest relegated it forever to the farmhouse and the field (Trevelyan, 1976:
117). It was another dialect, that spoken in the eastern Midlands, which became
the predecessor of modern English, persisting over other dialects mainly
because it was spoken in London, Oxford and Cambridge. It was this language,
in part, that Chaucer used and enriched with many French words, while Wycliffe
expanded it with many words from Vulgar Latin. They founded a school that
also used this same dialect, since their writings and translations circulated
widely in manuscript form. In the late fifteenth century, Caxton’s printing press
was installed at Westminster, which led to the popularization of Chaucer and
the distribution of translations into English of various works.
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Latin is one of the main bases of the British administrative language, not
only through the long-ago Roman history, but through the set of medieval
administrative institutions that conserved their Latin names, such as the desk
(scriptorium), where secretaries and scribes do their work, which dates from the
Norman Conquest (Chrimes, 1952: 26). Another is clerc, from “clericus,”
referring to an educated person, which later transformed into a synonym of
“official.” As found in many letters written before 1066, these writings were often
written in Old English before it was replaced by Latin, although sometimes they
were written bilingually, and increasingly so as French gradually came to be the
official administrative language (Bradley, 1947: 378, 380). This is what caused
Old English to survive as an administrative language, although in a secondary
position, as it continued to conform to the writing style and standards of ministry
officials. Similarly, many of the Latin words adopted by Old English are from the
language spoken by the clergy; that is, not copied from books, since they were
transmitted to German soil by priests from England who went there to
evangelize, and they are still visible in Modern German.
Literary English was dead, and had to be created from the ground up,
while the spoken English which survived lost many of its words to French
synonyms. It was natural, then, that when they wished to express an idea
foreign to the spoken language of the masses, writers found it easier to adopt a
term that already existed in familiar literary languages than to coin a new term,
compound or term derived from native elements (Bradley, 1947: 383). In this
way, a plethora of Latin words entered the English language, first through terms
adopted via the educated French, and later directly, while word endings were
eliminated as in French words. Later, in the Elizabethan era, the formation of
new words from Latin was even more common, and while many of the
neologisms of this period soon disappeared, not a few remained. The heritage
left to the English language by the language of the Romans is undeniable.
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Chapter 3
Contributing to this scenario was the fact that the country’s needs did not
require the centralization or the hierarchy that had been established on the
continent. By the end of the fifteenth century, the modern state had barely
emerged from its inherited feudalism. Most official positions were held by
people from corporations, unions and guilds, as well as by clerks, priests and
lawyers. Significant positions such as that of the chancellor and treasurer, as
well as royal staff, would not become important until later, for at the beginning
their tasks were light and their power did not publicly trouble the parties. When
in the sixteenth century the nation awakened to a consciousness of its internal
and external identity and the House of Tudor raised the power of the Crown to
great heights, the monarchy and its ministers faced a powerful Parliament with
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a prime seat in the administration, as well as two thousand justices of the peace
and thousands of rural parishes that governed around their perimeter. As a
result, plans and aspirations in the center were under effective external control,
something which did not exist in Germany or France at the time. In fact, this
divergence had been in place for a century and a half. It limited the size, the
aspirations and the quality of the central administration at the origin. However,
there was an administrative apparatus available that was already operating in
the towns at little or no cost, which was very convenient for the royal treasury
(Finer, 1934:912). When the state proposed projects intended to expand
industry and commerce, the government trusted this local system. But –as Finer
says– what costs nothing, generally yields nothing when the original momentum
has faded. When the parliamentary drive disappeared, more harm was
produced than good, because the administrative instruments necessary for the
state’s activities had not been planned consciously for their application
according to the law. The desired ends had been duly formulated, but not the
means for obtaining them. Herman Finer explains that the government even
tried to step up enforcement of the Poor Law in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, but their lack of success exposed the structural
weakness of the administration. What is surprising is that despite this failure,
administrative thinkers on the continent expressed their admiration of Great
Britain’s local freedom, although paradoxically their enthusiasm was stimulated
mainly by the work of German author Rudolf Gneist on local administration.
By now there was sufficient awareness among the British of the
uniqueness of their public administration, centered around the concept of local
“self-government,” as pointed out by Joshua Toulmin Smith, whose book was
perhaps among the first to systematically address the topic of self-government
(Smith, 1851:17).
The ancient motives that had given birth to British local administration -
bureaucracy- avoiding and prone to recruiting “amateurs” and bailiffs, operating
since the times of Richard The Lionheart – evolved into a dense swamp that
obstructed the road to industrialization and consolidation of the modern state. It
is both curious and astonishing at the same time how Great Britain opted for
self-government and how this status quo was preserved for centuries.
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Justices of the peace received most of their powers from the sheriffs.
They were also given the task of overseeing the parish administration
established over the Church in the Tudor era, since its courts, which held
sessions every quarter, acted as the authority in the county. Over time, they
became the most important local officials in administrative and judicial affairs.
This system was much more decentralized than the prefecture organization of
sheriffs, as all officers were chosen from the towns where they served
(Goodnow, 1897: I, 33–34). Moreover, if initially most officials were appointed
directly or indirectly by the central government and could be removed from
office, the fact that they did not receive compensation –since they belonged to
the upper classes– and that the service they provided was obligatory and
arduous, meant that over time they increased in independence. Nor did the
threat of removal from office matter much to a justice of the peace, because it
meant relief from a difficult task, not a loss of livelihood. The system ensured a
high degree of local self-government, given that the independence of the
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One of the traditional British institutions, the justice of the peace, was
transplanted to America, where Tocqueville portrayed him as a compromise
between the common man and the judge; imparting justice and administering at
the same time, without necessarily being versed in law (Tocqueville, 1981: I,
139). He is, in Tocqueville’s view, the policeman of society whose role demands
honesty and good sense rather than the domain of science.
The middle class was one of the important factors in shaping the
peculiarly English system of government, as the crown deliberately entrusted
local administration to the middle class and the justices of the peace, rather
than the sheriff. The middle class did not yet carry out its role under the name of
gentry (patricians) but it had already been entrusted the post of coroner (judge)
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to defend the judicial and financial rights of the monarch in the county. An
important fact to keep in mind is that the services entrusted them were
delegated by the central government, not on the initiative of representatives.
This measure was personified in the “public charge,” by which the monarch
persuaded or forced his subjects to acquire a custom of self-government
(Trevelyan, 1976:144). Walter also ordered that applicants before the county
court; that is, the local middle class themselves, should choose four of their
number to serve as coroner. By extension, he also ordered jurors, until then
chosen by the sheriff, to be selected by a committee of four knights chosen by
the county court. This was the origin of the autonomy of the county, which was
not effected by the barons, but by the middle class, by which at the same time
the seeds for the principle of representation were sown. The result of this
process was that in the late twelfth century a rural middle class emerged that
became accustomed to carrying out public business and to electing
representatives. As Trevelyan says, when this political mode reached up as far
the national parliament, there were significant consequences for “England and
for the world.”
As can be observed, self-government did not emerge spontaneously, nor
was it planned by the local areas themselves, but rather as a central policy; yet
this is a paradox. What the crown did, to put it plainly, was to delegate
administrative functions and responsibilities away from the Treasury and onto
the middle class and well-to-do farmers who lived in the towns. It was
essentially the large-scale recruitment of a large portion of the rural population
compelled to take charge, without payment, of their common affairs, largely
abandoned by the crown. Local administration was entrusted to the locals, but
they were not taught the art of managing the affairs of their community. In short,
it was a onerous “public burden” laid on the rural middle class on an
unparalleled scale, but whose eventual result was an autonomous government
in which the British still take pride. This unique and important fact was not
overlooked by the knowledgeable eyes of Otto Hinze, who observed the
crown’s successful effort in the counties to prevent feudalization in exchange for
turning them into public service corporations to which the duties and
responsibilities of state power were delegated (Hintze, 1968c: 149).This
abnegation was worth it, for parliamentarism emerged here from the
administrative responsibilities delegated by the central power of the crown; its
origin lies in the combination of the principle of authority and the corporative
principle.
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in the history of the country (Chrimes, 1952: 42–43). He was, indeed, the great
builder and reformer of British administrative institutions.
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As Finer observed, it was the sea in particular that saved Great Britain
from despotic administrative centralization imposed by the continental states for
the raison d'Etat (Finer, 1934: 758–759). Nor did its legal structure suffer the
papal influence of Rome, either in spirit or in religion, unlike the continent. Free
and liberal in its local administration (“anarchic although efficient, fair or
charitable”), and likewise rejecting excessive activity by the central state, it was
able to enter the industrial age to begin the revolutionary changes that would
enable it to reform the administrative structure and the methods to address new
opportunities and obligations. Also contributing to this was the loss of the
American colonies due to a team that was equally incompetent in its internal
roles and its colonial responsibilities.
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Another incentive for change was rooted in the demand for radical social
reforms. As the poor rate rose dramatically in the years prior to 1832, the
authorities of each locality competed strenuously to shift the burden of
supporting the poor onto neighboring towns. This led to a complicated
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domiciliary law that conflicted altogether with the needs of an industrial society.
The reforms could therefore take place only if a uniform administration was
established, since their enactment would imply a central intervention that had
not existed up to that point. The new Parliament agreed to conduct a thorough
investigation into the administration of subsistence for the poor and the
municipal government. This task began in 1833 with the work of the Royal
Commission into the operation of the Poor Laws (Goodnow, 1897: I, 44–
46).The result, published in 1834, gave the document the reputation of being
the most notable in the entire history of English society, and perhaps of all
social history. The reform plans, enacted in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment
Act, called for a representative local administration for taxpayers, as well as
increased involvement by the central administration. The parishes, which under
the previous system had borne the burden of supporting the poor, were
grouped into unions under the leadership of locally elected boards of guardians,
who administered poor relief. The detailed implementation of administrative
tasks, formerly the responsibility of unremunerated officials –inspectors of the
poor and justices of the peace – was now entrusted to paid, full-time officials.
At that time the idea of a central administration equipped with offices was
new. During the Middle Ages, decentralized forms of government emerged
under a variety of conditions, which largely vanished or changed their nature
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the first half of the
nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill could still claim that what could be done by
the central authorities should be only a small part of national public affairs (Mill,
1958: 212).It was a maxim of English local self-government, which contrasted
sharply with the administrative centralization on the continent. Since there was
no local elected agency to carry out emerging services, new collegial bodies
were created, such as the boards of guardians, local health boards, and school
boards. But from the second half of the nineteenth century on, local self
government had ceased to mean local autonomy; bodies such as the Poor Law
Board had broad powers to set regulations designed to directly manage a
service and subject it to inspection (Mackenzie and Grove, 1957: 263).
Moreover, these powers were augmented when the central government began
to allocate grants on a large scale to level economic conditions between poor
and wealthy areas. The centralization process that had begun due to economic
and political pressure was underscored by principles of efficiency. English
administrative history is full of examples of services started by local
corporations but subsequently taken over by central officials. The New Poor
Law was stigmatized by Joshua Toulmin Smith as one of the leading causes of
the country’s centralization and consequently of loss of freedom (Smith, 1851:
374–375).Furthermore, he held that the law not only concentrated the vices of
centralization, but that bringing back practices from the times of the Roman
Empire would pave the way to the ruin of morality and the greatness of the
state.
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But under the new social conditions, this patronage system was strongly
criticized, although in principle more for political than administrative reasons.
Edmond Burke’s speeches in 1780 heralded the current of reform, which lasted
from Gladstone until the 1850s. Its theme was the economy of the public
service; its epitome a substantial pamphlet on administrative reform signed by
The Liverpool Financial Reform Administration, which aimed not only to define
the reform, but also to show how it should be orchestrated. The association’s
purpose was to use all legal and constitutional means to induce stricter
economy in government spending in order to introduce efficiency into the
departments in charge of public services (The Liverpool Financial Reform
Administration, 1855).
It was at this point that Great Britain entered modernity, the foundations
were laid for the future creation of the civil service, and the principles of its
administration were developed: first, that the compensation for a position should
be related to the work, which meant the abolition of sinecures, of the selling of
offices, and the employment of surrogates. The new system was consolidated
in the 1830s. Secondly, although the crown retained its longstanding right to
dismiss officials at any time without prior notice, without compensation and
without having to provide justification, it had not exercised this right for a long
time. The reform revived this right, but also established the principle of stability
of employment; namely that that officials were not replaced when a new political
party rose to power, because permanence was an old established principle
(Mackenzie and Grove, 1957: 4–5). Third, it was necessary to exercise the right
to dismiss a public servant when justified, causing faithful officials who might
become incapable of working for reasons beyond their control to be left jobless
and without compensation. This motivated the pension system overseen by
Parliament that emerged from the retirement laws which were enacted
beginning in 1810. Fourth, as parliamentary control was limited to finance, the
number and salaries of officials of the crown was submitted annually and
subject to approval within departmental budgets. Lastly, parliamentary oversight
is only exercised by the House of Commons, while also moderated by the
cabinet. Internally, the ultimate responsibility for budget issues fell to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer and his department, the Treasury, which rose to a
prominent position in the central administration. These five principles,
established in the mid-nineteenth century, reflect the successful path of
progress in public administration for the good of the economy. Their essential
data are the 1856 report of the Select Committee on Public Monies, the creation
of the Public Accounts Committee of the House in 1861, and the 1866
Exchequer and Audit Departments Act. This move coincides with the movement
towards centralization to make the public administration more efficient.
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At the same time, the utilitarian school demanded that the continental
type of rational organization be introduced into the public service, a plan which
failed because of the existing antipathy to heavy state intervention. Although
Benthamite principles were successful in some fields, public opinion leaned
towards government action, not through centralization, but through local
autonomy.
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Chapter 4
The first British who arrived in India as members of the East India
Company were merchants, and the name originally given to them was “factors”
because they were agents working in commercial establishments called
“factories” (trading posts). This occurred during the year 1601. It must be
emphasized that these “factories” were not manufacturing facilities, but rather
commercial trading establishments which by 1675 were systematized and
consolidated. British men who were going to follow a commercial career thus
began as factors, later becoming merchants and eventually senior merchants
(O'Malley, 1931: 3–4). At the front of each factory toiled an agent, since all the
main locations were under the purview of a president, assisted by the Council of
Senior Merchants. It is worth noting that the organization of these factories
followed the model established years earlier by the Dutch.
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This explains clearly why Great Britain owes the very term “civil service”
to its Indian experience, for since the era of the East India Company, civil
service was distinguished from military service, as well as from services of a
marine or ecclesiastical type (Blunt, 1937: 2–3, 5). We should not forget that
civil servants were originally commercial officers, and that once the Company
began to acquire territory, it began to transform from a trading corporation into
government, while its commercial agents evolved into public administrators. By
1765, the term “civil servant” was established, as could be observed recorded
not only in legislation but also in everyday correspondence and bulletins issued
by the Indian administration.
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turned East India Company servants into de facto public administrators. This
trend was clearly paving the way to a transformation that would lead to the
formation of an authentic civil service whose members’ primary task was not so
much trade as public administration (O'Malley, 1931: 4–5). This began in 1772,
when Warren Hastings and Lord Cornwallis established the civil service in its
modern form. The former can be credited with reorganizing the financial
administration, reshaping the judicial system, and freeing trade from damaging
impositions. Hastings also instituted a fundamental transformation in 1781 when
he initiated the separation between administration and justice, which,
nevertheless, Great Britain has not yet entirely achieved.
We do not know to what extent Great Britain owes its modern public
administration to the Indian experience, but there is no doubt that the civil
servants who long worked there, besides setting the standard for the British civil
service, were receiving intensive administrative training in a country where they
were required to work in a hyperactive, centralized organization that did not
exist in their homeland. It was there that they could practice that which would
later show them how to modernize the metropolitan administration using the
experience gained in the colonial periphery. John Stuart Mill proposed a way to
interpret this contribution when he noted in 1861 that his country needed to tap
into deeper political ideas, but not those from Europe; rather from the unique
experience of its rule in India –an idea that was already being considered in
British politics (Mill, 1958: 270). It is, in fact, undeniable that the Indian
experience led directly to administrative modernization of Great Britain not only
because the civil service existed there before it did in the metropolitan state, but
also from the experience and wisdom that returning public administrators
brought back to their native soil.
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The British turned the wheel of India’s history: the ascent of the diwan in
Bengal in 1765 marked a turning point in the history of public administration in
India, and by extension that of Great Britain, for it represented a significant
change whereby the administrative tasks performed by the Company’s agents
became more important than their commercial tasks. The original business
purpose of the East India Company moved into the background as the company
effectively and officially became a government organization delegated by the
British crown. In 1813, when its charter was reformed, its trade monopoly was
abolished. The process continued in 1833, when it ceased to be a trading
company and began to focus solely on its political and administrative
responsibilities. This historic process culminated in 1858, when the company’s
powers were fully transferred to the crown. So it was that a trading company
chartered in 1601 was transformed into the Secretary of State for India, and the
posts originally termed factories eventually became the offices of the Indian civil
service (Blunt, 1937: 10–11). This enormously important occurrence, by which
the former traders changed into public administrators, took place in three
stages. The first phase was from 1601 to 1740, when the Company, whose
business in this period was primarily related to trade, carried out only minor
administrative tasks. The second period incorporates the years from 1741 to
1833, when its commercial tasks gradually decreased while administrative work
and its importance increased. The final period, lasting from 1834 to 1858, saw
the final transformation of a commercial corporation to a public service
organization. What was once the “privatization” of the state’s mission in a
distant land now encompassed the complete “publicization” of the government’s
commission which, by reason of state, passed into the hands of the crown. By
publicization, we refer to the process by which private companies become
public corporations through the coordination of public administration, such as by
acquisition of shares or by the authority of the state (Ruiz Massieu, 1980: 237).
Privatization further implies recruiting private resources to improve the
performance of tasks that, in a certain sense, will continue being public
(Donahue, 1989: 7).
Such publicization was a necessary consequence of a prior privatization,
in which, according to British tradition, the first steps were not colonization but
expansion of trade. The way they proceeded was therefore by means of a
commercial enterprise under the direction of commercial companies whose
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brand was the East India Company, starting with the monopoly on tea and the
control of all trade from China to Europe (Marx, 1968: I, 639–640). This strategy
led to such extremes that the director of the company was given a share in
private trade and favored trading partners benefited from lucrative contracts
(Marx, undated, A: 352–359, B: 361–367). We will pass over the abuses
inherent in this system, amply discussed by Karl Marx in two articles about
British rule in India, in which he concluded that England had to fulfill the dual
mission of both destroying and building; that is, to annihilate the ancient Asian
society and in its place lay the foundations of Western society.
How right O’Malley was when he expressed his regret that the civil
service of India, then being part of the British administration, was unknown in
his country. Being, along with his country’s civil service, one of the great British
institutions, he wrote his book to inform his fellow British of the Indo-British
legacy of their nation. This was not only a superb public service operating in a
far-flung foreign land, but one of the most important elite civil service
organizations of the world. In 1930, 1,014 civil servants labored in the Indian
administration for the benefit of the metropole.
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The events described here give a faithful account of the refinement of the
British administrative state, which still allows glimpses of features of ancient
origin, together with those more recently conceived that yet have similarities
with the ancestral traits, and which come together in perfect harmony. Thus an
unambiguous way to observe the characteristics of an administrative culture in
its maturation from a basic pattern to a progressive development is based on
the administrative state. Indeed, its idea successfully contributes to delineating
when and how a country gives prominence to its public administration. This is
because of certain features that occur only under specific historical conditions.
The time of their appearance and the way they are combined directly and
immediately determine at what point in time a country needs to be publicly
administered.
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Chapter 5
Administrative Discretion
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education and national health (Laski, 1923: 93–94). But this was not all, for
once the last word against this evolution in public administration was spoken,
the clear and incontrovertible fact was that Parliament could continue to
legislate, but no longer governed. Parliament enabled the work of government,
but the actual execution of orders in their daily application was outside its
scope. Laski said plainly that the House of Commons was essentially a body of
more or less benevolent amateurs, mainly because the majority of the
administrative work was clearly a question of technical expertise. In addition,
there were times when Parliament was not in session and an overriding
decision was needed, and other times when it was meeting and there was no
emergency. In the event of an epidemic, the problem was not one of calling
Parliament into session but of having the power to issue specific orders to the
Ministry of Health. When there is an emergency, it is clear that the executive
must have sufficient liberty to act, because an emergency calls for action, this
being nothing else than the exercise of administrative discretion. It is particularly
clear that in times of industrial war, when essential public services might be
disrupted, the executive’s obligation to intervene should imply the use of much
broader discretion than in any prior era.
This fact, however, had decisive effects on the political life of the nation
that are not always positive. Thus a critical attitude on the part of the
administrator was essential to the success of the democratic enterprise. He held
in his hands, more thoroughly than in times past, the entire substance of the
state. Every growing suppression of public scrutiny was thus a serious
infringement of its freedoms. And so, while democracy means that the
electorate has immediate and continuous contact with the policy process, this
should imply that the process be simple enough to be intelligible to those who
are interested in learning how it operates (Laski, 1923: 100). The test of
institutional health, in fact, lies in its simplicity; but the growth of administrative
discretion came with a complexity that was generally unnecessary and not
infrequently dangerous.
In summary, discretionary processes tend to be legally personified by the
directives of the executive, aimed at the implementation of its mandates, giving
life to administrative law. In Great Britain this particular point has, to date,
caused heated discussion.
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Administrative Law
Until recently it was usual to claim definitively that Great Britain was
fertile soil for the rule of law, not the administrative law (French droit
administratif) well rooted on the continent, an important point that contributes to
an understanding of its current administrative culture.
Indeed, the latter was a taboo subject, mainly because of the devastating
criticism that A.V. Dicey directed at it in his famous book on the British
Constitution (1886). Since then, administrative law was neglected as part of the
legal framework of the country. Government by the rule of law is a singular and
influential approach that runs counter to the political current in Europe. It
deserves a careful examination that begins with the emergence of the rule of
law. Indeed, the rule of law developed in all countries marked by Western
culture, especially Germany, France, Italy and Spain (Train Cuesta, 1961: 19–
20). In contrast, Great Britain developed a variant similar to the meaning of the
continental expression, but with different characteristics, termed the Rule of
Supremacy of Law. Dicey defined it at its origin as follows: this is a system
unique to Great Britain where there is no person who is above the law; that is,
every human being regardless of his social rank is subject to the ordinary law of
the Kingdom and to the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts (Dicey, 1915: 189).
In fact, there has been a tendency on both sides of the Channel to give
priority to the differences between the two legal systems. The prevailing idea is
that as the rule of law developed, two different paths emerged; the first in Great
Britain, where the law governing public administration is the same law that
holds over individuals; while in France the administration is subject to
administrative law (Entrena Cuesta, 1961: 20–21). As a result, given the
uniqueness of each of the two peoples, as well as their historical evolution, the
former system reduced its scope to the English-speaking countries, while the
latter, developed mainly in France, was implemented in continental Europe.
This led to two ways of submitting the public administration to the law; the rule
of law in Britain and administrative law on the continent.
As the administrative system is characterized by the fact that public
administration is subject to administrative law, while the rule of law is subject to
the same law as individuals, the relationship between this administration and
the citizen is different: in the former, administrative courts were established
where disputes between officials and citizens (court of administrative litigation)
are resolved, and public servants enjoy great prominence and respect, and
enjoy their own legal regime as such. In the latter, civil servants are subject to
the same courts as individuals, enjoy the same reputation as any other worker,
and do not receive any legal privileges deriving from their official role. Despite
these differences, it should be noted that there is a similarity between the two
legal systems, beginning with their abrupt birth and swift growth in France and
Great Britain alike, where the end of absolutism facilitated the rapid
development of the rule of law in two variants. Great Britain was the scene of
the Glorious Revolution in 1689, a century prior to France’s revolution in 1789
(Entrena Cuesta, 1961: 19–20). The result of the two events can be traced to
the same fact; that is, that public administration was subject to the law. This
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calls for a search for a different focus than the usual approach which contrasts
the two legal systems.
As we noted some pages earlier, by the time the eighth edition of Dicey’s
book was published (1925), Britain had changed substantially. The first half of
the twentieth century was marked by development of the judicial power within
administrative departments, and by the creation of administrative courts outside
the judicial bodies involved in civil, judicial and labor matters (Robson, 1951:
XIII–XIV). What is more, the new courts were not only unrelated to any of these
judicial bodies, but also operated outside their control. This substantiates the
fact that the constitution of Great Britain has a body of administrative law, or
administrative justice, as it could be more properly termed. This body of law
reveals a rupture that goes beyond the rule of law formulated by Dicey a long
time ago, since the new phenomenon represents a substantial change in the
pattern of the constitutional system which existed at the time and extended
forward into our time. It also involves a matter of great importance for the
country's government, since it concerns both constitutional law and political
science.
Until recently, Great Britain did not classify law according to the
relationships it governed, with the result that the term administrative law had
little meaning. However, although since the late nineteenth century one could
properly speak of “administration” as a function of government, and of the
executive, there were hardly any British jurists that recognized the existence of
a branch of law called administrative law. This would explain why Dicey claimed
that in Great Britain and the countries whose civilization is derived from its
origins, the system of administrative law is unknown. But he was mistaken, for
he attempted rather to deny the existence of administrative law in its true
continental sense, by wrongly disqualifying what he understood as the French
droit administratif. Thus, what was lacking in Great Britain was not
administrative law but a comprehensive classification of the law, because
administrative law in the genuine continental sense of the word has not only has
always existed in both countries, but had perhaps more influence on Anglo
Saxon political development than did any other branch of English law
(Goodnow, 1897: I, 6–8).
This is the reason why since the late nineteenth century, thanks to a
growing interest in administrative issues in Europe, the term administrative law
(a French expression) has been gradually infiltrating the British legal
vocabulary. Thus, administrative law is that part of the law governing the
relations between the executive and administrative government authorities
(Goodnow, 1897: I, 8). Hence it is a part of public law, its subject being the rules
of law concerning the administrative function. Also, since the fulfillment of this
task depends on the existence of administrative authorities who are collectively
called the “administration,” administrative law refers not only to relations among
the administrative authorities themselves but also to their organization. Finally,
administrative law prescribes the positions that make up the administration and
the relations of those who occupy them.
Dicey took the term droit administratif from France and gave it a wrong,
even deliberately harmful meaning. To this end, he adopted the definition of
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administratif droit from Léon Aucoc. In this sense, it meant the constitution and
the relations between the societal bodies responsible for safeguarding collective
interests which are the object of public administration; and the relationship of
the administrative authorities with respect to citizens and the state (Finer, 1949:
923–924). Although it provides a clear definition of the object it is meant to
define, in Dicey’s work the aim to find a detrimental meaning of droit
administratif can be observed when he claims that definitions of this type
require precision, while despite its vagueness, it is not unimportant (Dicey,
1915: 328).
Dicey next proceeds to reject any comparison between France and
Britain in 1905, the year his book was published, and then insists on distorting
the definition until he has turned droit administratif into a body of rules for the
protection of officials who commit abuses of power against citizens. His
opinions are astonishing: the fourth most despotic characteristic of droit
administratif stems from its tendency to protect from the supervision or control
of the lower court any servant of the state guilty of a potentially illegal act as
long as he was acting in good faith and obeying his superiors, at least in
intention, in the execution of his official duties (Dicey, 1915: 341). At the end of
his discourse, the droit administratif appears only as generalizations of the
judgments laid down in special courts –the tribunaux administratifs– for officials
in their relations with the public.
But obviously this is not the true meaning of administrative law (droit
administratif, derecho administrativo or Verwaltungsrecht). When H. Berthélemy
refers to droit administratif, he attributes the correct meaning to it: administrative
services are all services (except justice itself) that contribute to the execution of
the law, and administrative law is the set of principles by which this activity is
carried out. Administrative law analyzes the mechanism of the governmental
machine; constitutional law shows how the apparatus is constructed. The
subject of administrative law is how the machinery operates; how each of its
parts function (Berthélemy, 1926: 1–2). It can be concluded that this definition
implies no threat whatsoever, and that administrative law is nothing mysterious
or sinister, but merely the law related to public administration.
Since this legal body exists in Great Britain, it can be deduced that where
there are administration and law, there is administrative law, which implies
statutes, conventions, and legal cases of the ordinary and special courts. Like
the German term Verwaltungsrecht, administrative law is the legal order of
relations between the administrative state and its subjects. Taking the
legitimacy of the term from its country of origin as a basis, the meaning of the
term “administrative law” in Great Britain is also consistent with Port’s concept:
administrative law consists of all legal standards –whether expressed formally in
legislation or implied in prerogative– whose ultimate purpose is the enforcement
of public law. It is chiefly Parliament that is responsible for formally expressed
standards; they are generally decreed by that body. The judiciary is then
responsible for the standards (statutes and prerogatives) that govern judicial
acts, which may be in favor of or against the administration, and matters
relating to administrative bodies which sometimes can exercise judicial power.
Thirdly, it is directly related to the practical application of the law (Finer, 1949:
924).
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This topic has been treated in detail to make it clear that Great Britain
does have administrative law, because this is not only a clear manifestation of
public administration as such, but also shows that what it accomplishes is
subject to statutory law as the basis of its discretionary powers.
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His bitter attack on the civil service in his book on freedom (Mill, 1975),
was radically reconsidered two years later, when he changed his mind to view
the British civil service positively (Mill, 1958). He highlighted tenure as one of its
particular advantages, since one of the virtues of popular government lies in the
fact that public officials are not appointed or elected by the voters.
Appointments must be entrusted to people who have the skills required of the
candidates, since it is a question of their professional skills and experience. The
rule, therefore, is that civil servants are appointed by means of public
competitions and those who are not, are freely appointed by government
ministers. The dividends of this system are that these officials are immune to
the virus of political change, remaining in their positions and serving as a
memory and a link to administrative matters for new ministers after a change of
government. The fact that they rise according to their own merits motivates their
performance, and makes it harmful for them to be removed from office, except
for serious cause. Mill explained that it is better to base candidate selection on
merit and open competition than to rely on partiality and self-interest.
Unlike Mill, Walter Bagehot professes a strict and unwavering faith in
liberal thought, noting that there is a tendency towards bureaucracy in his
country, an idea that could thrive even though the people do not consent easily
to shedding their ingrained beliefs. Thus, like any major event in Europe that
temporarily turns it towards other ideas, the success of the Prussian
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Many British thinkers long boasted that their country had freed itself of
bureaucracy. But as the years ran their course, up to the present, a
bureaucracy as typical and representative as any on the continent was
conceived and developed in Britain. This was the British civil service; the
institution and mandate offered by Great Britain to the entire world. So the
proliferation of books devoted specifically to explaining the principal problems
and development of public administration from the bureaucratic angle is not
surprising, because these consider the civil service as the emergence of a
distinct profession regarded as the classic profession; that is, with self
recruitment, self-discipline, self-government, and substantial efforts to prevent
outsiders from intervening in its affairs (Chapman, 1970: 43). An emblematic
text that invokes the “portrait of a profession” rings unequalled adulation of what
in Great Britain eventually came to be one of the most prestigious occupations
and whose gifts enable the conception of its own administrative philosophy. In
its pages, Norman Bridges set out to paint a picture of senior Whitehall officials;
that is, those who handle administration issues in general and formulate policy,
simultaneously portraying the most faithful portrait of British administrative
culture (Bridges, 1971: 50).
The role of the civil service in the modern state consists mainly in
improving government, because without the civil service, government itself
would be impossible. The civil service is a professional body of permanent
officials and employees, created expressly to properly and competently carry
out the function of administration. Their numerical strength is determined by the
activities of the state because it is a sign of its nature and development. Since
the early twentieth century, the number of public employees –including both the
central and local government as well as public corporations– was one in ten
professionals in the United States, and one in five in Britain, France and
Germany. In fact, institutions are neither more nor less than the men
themselves, and no institution can be better than the quality of its personnel
(Finer, 1949: 709, 712). The civil service is, more than other political institutions,
a product of the intellectual factors of Western civilization. This was confirmed in
the nineteenth century, when a massive body of public servants had already
been established, who gradually replaced the untrained, barely literate unpaid
employees. State activities grew enormously, along with a “managerial class”
needed to perform them, although Finer claims to have coined a similar term
some ten years before James Burnham did so (Burnham, 1946).
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the use of experts fully dedicated to public administration. These are mainly civil
servants, a corps of experts granted the authority to implement policy for the
benefit of society. The existence of the civil service, inherent in the modern
state, can be explained simply by the need for gifted people who have the
knowledge that ministers lack, because the latter, whose natural locus is
parliamentary activity, do not have the ability or cognizance of the functioning of
the administrative machinery (Finer, 1927: 14–15). The civil service is a
substantial part of the “gigantic ministrant state,” primarily because the great
quantity of secondary legislation demands timely, daily and immediate
implementation, impossible without a stable professional corporation. The “night
watchman state”, as conceived by Ferdinand Lassalle, has no resemblance to
the ministrant state, which not only guarantees order and imparts justice, but
also takes every sort of measure to provide both social and individual welfare.
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Britain the London School of Economics has opened its doors to a multitude of
students from a variety of social classes, a strategy also followed by the
Administrative Staff College. Preference is given to merit and ability, not to the
social status of the student. It is also necessary to improve the lines of
communication between the governors and the governed in order that they can
participate in exercising control over the bureaucracy. Lastly, it is important to
provide entry to the civil service to people who are not professional politicians or
civil servants, but lay people who can infuse it with qualities and experiences
other than those found in political and public administration circles, particularly
in the administrative departments that oversee education, health, labor and
social security. This is the best way to make the civil service increase its
competence, responsiveness and accountability.
Such ideas were unthinkable a century ago, when Britain was
experiencing the end of its administrative childhood, and the subject of
bureaucracy was taboo. The study of administrative personnel, whether called
civil service or bureaucracy, has not only dominated in Great Britain, but Great
Britain has been the country that has contributed the most to its study around
the world in the past century. Great Britain’s isolation was dissolved forever,
mainly because European modernization gradually assimilated the
administrative cultures of the continental nations. Just as Brian Chapman
observed that the Napoleonic public administration was as strong, cohesive and
connected as the Roman model (Chapman, 1970: 26), today we can say that
the British administration is as strong, cohesive and connected as that of its
neighbors.
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The reason these modern public companies was created lies in the need
of the administration of industrial and business firms to display a high degree of
freedom, initiative and entrepreneurial spirit, liberating them from the inherent
restraint on government departments. Moreover, they were also a large-scale
experiment in the country’s economic and social reform. This consisted of
nationalization of industries and basic services to promote progress in a rapidly
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modernizing country. Their nature is singular, since they are created to fulfill two
aims; to meet the public interest, and to operate efficiently –two often opposed
goals, which government ministers must reconcile (Robson, 1970: 80).
It is useful to examine this significant process, because the names of the
companies point clearly to which industries were nationalized. It took place in
two stages, the first of which was preceded in 1908 by the creation of the Port
of London Authority, which up to that point was the only case prior to World War
I. The following year saw the creation of the Electricity Commission and the
Forestry Commission (Robson, 1960: 48–50). The British Broadcasting
Corporation and the Central Electricity Board were founded in 1926, and two
years later the Racecourse Betting Control Board was created. In 1933 the
London Passenger Transport Board was created, and in 1939 the British
Overseas Airways Corporation.
The second stage was launched with the return of a Labour government
to power in 1945. With the 1946 Bank of England Act, the capital of the Bank of
England became public property and fell under government control. The same
year, the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act nationalized public ownership and
management of the coal industry. To this end, the act established the National
Coal Board to manage coal mining and processing in Britain (Robson, 1960:
50–55). The 1946 Civil Aviation Act established three airlines (in place of the
BOAC) with exclusive rights to cover air passenger services within the UK and
on international routes. It also gave the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation
authority over civilian airports and over building new ones when needed. The
1947 Transport Act nationalized the railways and inland waterways, including
the network of hotels and restaurants owned by the railroads. All passenger
transport in London was placed under ownership and management of the
Transport Commission by the 1933 London Passenger Transport Act. In 1946,
the Commission acquired the long-distance goods transport companies. The
1947 Electricity Act completed the nationalization of electricity (begun in 1926),
through the creation of the Central Electricity Board to oversee the construction
and management of the power system known as the “grid.” The 1948 Gas Act
put the entire gas industry under public ownership, although about a third of it
had already been in the hands of the municipalities and two thirds controlled by
public utility companies. The nationalized industry was placed under the
National Gas Council. The 1946 New Towns Act authorized the Minister of
Housing and local governments to build new urban developments both in
undeveloped areas and in places where there were already small towns or
villages. Fourteen development companies were created under the act. Lastly,
the 1949 Iron and Steel Act restored the Iron and Steel Corporation of Great
Britain, and transferred 96 designated iron and steel companies to the
corporation. The Forestry Commission is a special case; having been created in
1919 it should belong to the first stage, but it is considered under the second
stage because it was in 1945 that it became a public company of the type of the
companies listed above.
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Since then, Great Britain has moved away from the group of nations
characterized by the purity of their market economy to join those who have
established a powerful state capitalism.
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This reform reached such heights that by the last third of the nineteenth
century the word “local self-government” had lost its essence, and one thinker
declared his profound disenchantment with the regime (Chadwick, 2009: 27–
28). It had reached the point where the term local self-government meant direct
individual local knowledge of the affairs of the neighborhood administrative unit
and taxpayer participation in the spending of their own money. From its vital
principle emerged a set of agencies whose basic organization was often the
board, whose foundation is the neighborhood which, in its role of paying taxes
for local spending, delegated it the exercise of expenditure. However, this
apparently simple issue ignores the basic principles of economy and the
meaning of administration as provider of public services, as was evident in
Ireland (but not in the rest of the UK) where the establishment of a central
management institution for the administration was successful. However, the
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What the United Kingdom then required was unity, which is only possible
when the same thing is done the same way throughout the country. This was
precisely what was done in Ireland but not in England, Wales or Scotland.
Hence this successful experience would mean abolishing the position of Lord
Lieutenant –who transmitted royal authority by appointing local officials– due to
the undesirability of the position in a centralized system. Its persistence would
mean the continuation of the old systems of useless legislation, as evidenced
by the opinion of a former commissioner responsible for the implementation of
the Poor Law in England, and who later served as a commissioner of the Local
Government Board for Ireland (Chadwick, 2009: 28, 29–30). The Lord
Lieutenant represented the purest medieval conception of the rule of law, while
centralized direction would have the advantage of being constituted as a
“national government,” since specialized branches based on unity can be
organized, eliminating the disadvantages of the disunity evident in the kingdom.
Such an arrangement could cover the entire United Kingdom, could also be set
up at the local level, where cities would be administered based on that unity, as
well as the county, the medieval administration being abolished forever. An
administrative organization based on boards or commissions implies
unsystematic, chaotic provision of services. It should be replaced by a body of
scientifically competent officials, whose centralized organization operates
synchronously and uniformly.
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The new age was opposed not only to local self-government, but also to
laisser faire, laisser passer, an axiom emanating from economic policy that had
been extended to public administration, whose negative effect was particularly
noticeable in the administration of local services, such as those relating to the
water supply and health. Some of his axioms were declared against
centralization, arguing that public services based on administrative unity violate
natural liberty. However, Chadwick did not find any precise definition of natural
liberty. It is true that this liberal axiom was invoked when it comes to aspects of
the economy, such as those relating to trade and the navy, but the author
considered it inapplicable to public services because it was not a question of
obstructions to the free market nor to trade. In fact, laisser faire, laisser passer
was magnified towards aspects of society that had little or nothing to do with its
assumptions (Chadwick, 2009: 95, 99).
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services in Great Britain, which most people, among them the socialists,
regarded as a substantial part of the country’s identity.
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democratic line. He viewed local life as the polity of the British nation, and
considered that it would remain so forever.
Chapter 6
Between 1945 and 1951, Great Britain was fertile ground for publicization
on a large scale, through the wave of Labour nationalizations that did not
recede until it crested in 1979, as its platform made evident (Vickers and
Yarrow, 1991). However, the Conservative victory in that year initiated a
tsunami in the opposite direction, which constituted a decisive turning point in
the history of British public administration.
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The Conservative party platform did not originally use the term
“privatization” and proposed only the sale of the shipyards, the aerospace
industry and the National Freight Corporation. The process started with a dozen
sections of public companies of which the government successfully divested
itself. Privatization and its techniques, thus, emanate from principles of practice
rather than an ideological victory taken from the “world of ideas” (Pirie, 1988:
10, 14, 255–256). The infant born in Great Britain soon spread throughout the
world to countries at all degrees of development and with all types of regimes.
British privatization left a lesson for the whole world: that there is no corner of
the public sector that can not be invaded, which in Great Britain included health,
education, national defense, and the ports, among others.
The hurricane of privatization had its origin in Great Britain. Great Britain
had led the world in nationalized companies, and now this national sector
formed by Labour governments over almost 50 years was dismantled and 600
thousand workers were transferred to the private sector. So successful was the
policy that even the workers apparently benefited from a generous “people's
capitalism” which included not only the acquisition of entire companies (notably
the National Freight Corporation (a transportation company for which each
worker contributed 500 dollars), but also shares in other companies and the
acquisition of rented dwellings. The sale of British Telecom (BT) enabled 96%
of its employees to acquire shares, but these were probably much less than
those bought by big capitalists, of which there were, however, few, for the
involvement of Japanese capital was required. “Popular capitalism” was one of
the most publicized mottoes in support of privatization and it was not unusual to
see it proclaimed in large headlines that the British government was no longer
the largest landlord in the country, for it had previously owned one out of every
three homes.
The privatization business was so large that the sale of British Telecom
was the largest transaction in history, even though it was at the time only the
sixth largest in the world and no more than a little over half its shares were sold.
But this record did not last; in 1986 British Gas (BG) sold for even more, being
offered at 8 billion dollars. With privatizations like these, the market for the sale
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of public companies was rapidly becoming saturated. The stock market of Great
Britain, the leader in the process, was the world’s third largest. However, doubts
arose that the BT purchase could be completed. Other markets were resorted
to, among them Japan, whose investors bought most of the shares and became
the majority owners (Quek Peck Lim, 1986: 24–27). The sale of BT was the
largest of its day, as mentioned above, but still smaller than Nippon Telegraph
and Telephone(NTT). Its sale was forced by a de-merger and its market
capitalization value was ranked as equivalent to that of General Motors; 21
billion dollars. In 1986 the sale of 10% of the company would produce 2.1
million dollars, about half that of BT when its shares were floated on the global
market two years earlier.
As a practical party platform, privatization was developed primarily as a
set of techniques for disposing of British government assets. The doctrine was
developed after the fact, but neoliberalism, the Conservative Party ideology,
served as the initial momentum through themantra of “public choice” (Pirie,
1988: 58–60, 65, 331). However, the act of privatization itself led to a scaling up
of doctrine to reach beyond that school of thought –concentrated on explaining
why groups act as they do and what effect it has on public programs and
policy– to develop the concept of “micropolitics” to mean the use of policy to
overcome the objections of groups whose interests are threatened. That is, this
strategy improves on the public option which can be summed up as identifying
groups benefiting from government social programs. Micropolitics, in turn, is
involved in the circumstances under which individuals may be motivated to
choose and embrace the alternative of private provision of public goods, in
which people can decide individually and voluntarily about the cumulative
effects of the state of affairs they desire (Pirie, 1985:28–29). Finally, advancing
the idea of the new public management, Pirie notes that privatization provides a
process by which entrepreneurial talent can work in the political system,
providing it with creative input to deal with public problems.
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The managerial reform went through four relatively different but distinctly
overlapping stages; scrutiny, “final reforms,” “next steps” and structural
reorganization. The first phase consisted of many small scrutiny projects carried
out by civil servants under the Efficiency Unit, which involved examining the
work process in particular areas of government departments, locating
deficiencies in managerial performance and recommending improvements, and
obtaining positive results in terms of cost and human effort. The “final reforms”
were objectives for management to fulfill; that is, the institutionalization of
performance values in terms of time and cost. They were aimed at establishing
a basis for British public management into the future, by means of the Financial
Management Initiative launched in May 1982, which consisted of a
comprehensive financial reform program designed to improve control of public
spending (Metcalfe, 1993: 356–360). The third phase of the managerial reforms
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began with the 1988 publication of the Efficiency Unit report entitled Improving
Management in Government: The Next Steps, which evaluated the state of
reform from 1979 up to publication of the report. The fourth stage of the reform
represented a qualitative change from the previous changes, for it called for
large-scale transformations in the main public services delivered at the local
level, as well as in the National Health Service and the education system. The
changes were to be implemented in a scheme of organizational networks rather
than a comprehensive administrative unit.
There is no doubt that the public choice was one of the most powerful
forces within neomanagerial trends directed towards the achievement of two
objectives: the first is the decreased range of the state’s activity through
privatization, deregulation and liberalization. The second objective was to instill
market concepts in the government (Self, 1993: 59, 61–62). At the same time,
these forces developed a set of essential elements of this superior virtual
government that emulated the marketplace. Firstly, it comprises a transparent
system of accounting and accountability. Secondly, an important feature is the
introduction of competition, where customer opinion is central to the provision of
goods and services. Third, it establishes a system of performance incentives for
civil servants based on standards for evaluating their performance. Lastly, it
proposes to fully introduce market mechanisms to government operations,
based on the cost and benefit criteria.
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more than successive episodes of the steps that preceded the changes of the
reform by at least twenty years (Drewry and Butcher, 1988: 211–212). The
result was simply that a world in which officials were called managers “in
charge” and the public was called “clients” returned to how it had been before.
Some countries shared elements of the British reform package, but others did
not, and followed their own path. There were even reform programs that had
profoundly different characteristics from the British model. There are evident
differences in the pace of reform between the “delirium” of the British program
and the punctuated or cautious movement in the majority of European
countries. The Italians made an apprehensive and uncertain approach to
reform, opting to pursue a strategy capable of navigating their huge,
labyrinthine, chaotic government (Wright, 1997: 35–36). Many of the pressures
for reform were common to numerous countries, but others were of different
intensity and in different phases. Great Britain in particular was under budget
pressure earlier than most of its European neighbors, while the administrative
adjustment in the European Union in the 1980s fell much harder on the new
member countries, such as Spain, Portugal and Greece, than on the founding
nations.
Once the neoliberal wave had washed over Great Britain and receded,
affairs returned to normal, and once again the British demonstrated their ability
to return to the onward path after a detour. In fact, not only did it abandon the
new managerial paths that privatized its public administration from the inside,
but public services and corporations were renationalized. Let us take a look,
starting with the railway infrastructure, formerly privatized into one hundred
independent companies, which collapsed in 2005. It was then rescued by the
government and restructured as a private nonprofit organization, and its debts
were underwritten by the British government. The privatized energy service,
too, collapsed in 2002 and was rescued by the government, which then sold its
shares to the private sector. A similar case is the National Air Traffic Services, a
public–private partnership, rescued by the government, which also sold its
shares. Lastly, the London Underground, another public–private partnership,
collapsed and was returned to the city government.
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Part Two
ADMINISTRATIVE THOUGHT IN GREAT BRITAIN
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Chapter 7
Kaspar Bluntschli noted many years ago the enormous contrast between
centralized France and decentralized Great Britain (Bluntschli, 1876: II, 253–
254). However, it does not follow from this that the omnipresence of the
administration in the former is in contrast to its virtual “absence” in the latter. A
first impression would wrongly suggest that there are great theorists of
administration in France, such as Charles-Jean Bonnin, Louis Marie de
Cormenin, Alexandre Vivien and Alexis de Tocqueville, while Britain has not
produced scholars of such stature because the British administration was not
very important. But what occurred, rather, was that the island did not require a
public administration until the mid-twentieth century: until then, it had not faced
the problem of administration. That is, historical conditions will produce the
necessary human minds and talents to study and solve the major problems of
public administration in a country endowed with an administrative organization
that is strategic and decisive for the nation’s development. Marx’s saying that a
problem does not exist until there are means to solve it should not be forgotten.
In France it was in the nineteenth century that the great minds mentioned above
emerged. Their ideas offered solutions to the problems of their time; neither
earlier nor later.
In Great Britain the situation was different: since public administration
served only the needs dictated by historical conditions; that is, it achieved what
could not be done privately, its role was subsidiary. Therefore, in the absence of
major administrative problems, minds that could solve them were also absent.
As The country’s public administration was simple, its administrative thought
was likewise elementary. But it must not be thought that for this reason it was
not important. Tocqueville, in his De la démocratie en Amérique, sufficiently
stressed the virtues inherent in the simple Anglo-American public administration
of his times, contrasting it with the vices of the complex French administration of
the era.
The British people flatter themselves that they are a nation of practical
men, and that this is the reason for their success as a community. This still
holds, it is true, but the practice of administration been undergoing
systematization through general principles for a considerable time. The
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Towards the end of the 1950s, when the future of the public
administration was addressed, everything seemed to indicate that it was the
end of the practical British man in the sense of the person who can do anything
and everything. This was due to his rarity, socially speaking, because he was
increasingly difficult to find. Also, the advance of science and technology, along
with the progress of administrative knowledge, demands not only the skill of this
type of person, but of all people who tackle administrative tasks (Gladden,
1952: 158–159). Nor were practitioners able to develop new methods and
procedures to deal with the emerging situations of the times that had begun to
demand people trained expressly for administration. To the extent that
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However, despite the clarity with which the new era showed a need for
the scientific development of public administration, there was not enough
awareness to give unqualified support to the ongoing efforts, such as the
Institute of Public Administration in 1921, which two decades later was already
being subsidized by the Treasury. Nor was the journal Public Administration,
one of the oldest in the world, the appropriate forum for the discussion of
administrative problems. What is more, there was no lack of practitioners who
tended to favor the idea of public administration as an art rather than a science
(Gladden, 1952: 159–161). In fact, one author points out that paradoxically the
private sector was making faster progress in scientific management principles
through the Institute of Industrial Administration and the British Institute of
Management; while the government was still not able to materialize its plan of
creating an Administrative Staff College.
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shape “their” world; that is, modeling and inventing it, administrators are subject
to a real world that conditions and determines their behavior. In fact, while the
artist is endowed with a singular mind, the administrator’s mindset is universal.
The public administrator may discard some elements of his world, but not many
of them and not those that affect his work, because his existential world is
determined by the principle of effectiveness of his activities. His work operates
in a universe that must be observed comprehensively, taking into account that
ignoring key elements would detract from the quality of his work. This is
because the mind of the official is always searching for what is important and
relevant, for it is the criterion of relevance that primarily defines the nature of his
work (Sisson, 1965: 121–122). For example, the French public administrator
must simultaneously manage his relationship with the minister and the Council
of State, because an essential determinant of his work consists in calculating
the potential effects of his labors; that is, to ensure the smooth operation of the
policy he advocates and the changes in government that might be announced.
The work of the British official, in contrast, is based on the criterion of relevance,
clearly and strongly committed to determining what is necessary and timely to
help the minister navigate the changeable waters of the parliamentary process
and administrative environment.
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was often monotonous and difficult (Laski, 1945: 3–4). Moreover, democracy
does not necessarily mean that the civil service is open to superior talent nor
that “senior” civil servants are “top” public officials. Permanent secretaries take
very little care to equip the work of the minister, the head of his department,
with energy and imagination.
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On this point, Great Britain followed this tradition by taking the path of
administrative teaching. Thus the history of British administrative thinking
begins with Henry Taylor’s famous book on the statesman (Taylor, 1927). In its
pages, knowledge about British public administration is systematized for what is
apparently the first time. With the passage of time, the idea of the simplicity of
the British civil service began to change; the usual focus on complexity by the
degree of organization; that is, differentiation and specialization, gave way to
new perspectives. That is, the emphasis on “impersonal” assessments of the
organization, was not the only one, as the “personal” approach shown by the
civil service was also considered. This perspective, typical of Great Britain, is
due to the elevation of professional public servants and the emblematic book on
the topic, The Statesman, by Taylor.
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political literature (Elyot, 1880). We must add his The Doctrinal of Princes
published in 1533, which contained translations of two speeches by Isocrates
from the fourth century BCE. The two works are titled To Nicocles (Ad
Nicoclem) and Nicocles or the Cyprians (Nicocles vel Cyprius) and were
addressed to the king of Cyprus. The reputation of both speeches has grown,
mainly because they are considered as the original examples of the current of
thought known as the mirror of princes. Also notable is his short treatise The
Image of Governance based on Reloj de Principes by Antonio de Guevara,
which was written by Elyot in 1541 (Elyot, 1967a, 1967b).
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Chapter 8
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Sheldon, Lyndall Urwick and Charles Stamp. It did not include Harold Laski or
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose contributions similar to those of the
members could have enriched the group. In itself, this combination of persons
inherently implies the impossibility of forming a school and an esprit de corps,
inevitably resulting in a fragmented assortment of administrative ideas not
collected into one discipline, but in a variety of fields of knowledge such as
economics, history, engineering, sociology and philosophy. They were a set of
prominent public administration activists whose concepts, besides coming out
of strong academic backgrounds, stemmed from practical exercise. There is,
perhaps, in most of their writing a reluctance to use any theoretical formulation,
but rather an evident practical bent. This lends a certain simplicity to their
writings, which include more description and subjective attitudes than would a
rigorous systematic analysis (Thomas, 1970: 22–23, 27–28). In them, their
activism was expressed in a variety of institutions such as the Civil Servants
Society, British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of
Public Administration; and in the fruitful activism that they carried out in
industrial companies and the Institute of Industrial Administration where the
work of Urwick and Sheldon was particularly notable. In our opinion, it is, rather,
all of them who made up the London Circle.
However, their meeting point was the University of London, where many
of them had professorships. It was from this school that the first texts treating
public administration with the principles of a new discipline were published.
Particularly notable was the work of George Thomas Reid, a graduate of the
University (1906–1908), whose 1916 book on the history of the English public
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administration was perhaps the first in the twentieth century (Reid, 1913). A
degree thesis on public administration in ancient India also stands out among
the new work on public administration; its excellent quality resulted in its
publication in 1916. Its author, Pramathanath Banerjea, was a professor in India
and a member of the Royal Economic Society of Great Britain (Banerjea, 1916).
Among the members of the London Circle, Oliver Sheldon and Lyndal
Urwick are notable for having produced a more extensive and complete body of
work on administration. Although it did not specifically address public
administration, but business management, is nevertheless important, since it
provided significant input to others.
It was Sheldon who systematized the use of the word “management” in
Great Britain and, as mentioned above, wrote the first book on the subject, The
Philosophy of Management, published in 1923 (Sheldon, 1965). Inspired by this
work, from which he took an apt phrase referring to the recent development of
management as a profession, the American administrative thinker Leonard
White coined his famous definition of public administration as “the management
of men and materials in the accomplishment of the purposes of the state”
(White, 1926: 2). White, who in doing so set the path that would be followed by
the American public administration for four decades, said he had deliberately
minimized the legal aspects of public administration, emphasizing the
managerial aspect. Sheldon was a pioneer in understanding a phenomenon
inherent to the industrial revolution, along with Henri Fayol and Frederick
Taylor, and deserves to be recognized alongside them as one of the founders
of the managerial disciplines. His uniqueness and his important contribution
was his observation that industry is not restricted to its mechanical aspect; that
is, that it is not merely a machine, but a complex association of human life. It is
thus accurately represented by the thought, objectives and ideals of the human
being, not by machinery (Sheldon, 1965:28–29).
Industry was created to meet the needs of human life in its physical,
mental and moral aspects, so the purpose of management is in effect to make
the industry human and to personify a type of joint effort among men towards a
common goal, since they are driven by a common impulse. To achieve this
goal, a motive and an ideal are necessary, as well as direction and
coordination, and human effort and cooperation. Management is therefore not
an end or motive in itself; if the motive of industry is primarily profit as a service
to society, management is enshrined and legitimized by this, and the future of
industry rests in its hands. Management, conceived as a social fact with an
economic nature because it operates in and from industrial processes,
influences human life from its locus.
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to control. Employing these ideas, Urwick went beyond Fayol’s cyclical concept
of the administrative process to develop a relational movement of logically
linked paired concepts in which the first element is the cause, and the second
element is the consequence. Forecasting is done in order to plan, organizing to
coordinate, and command to control; in which the plan assumes forecasting,
coordinating assumes organization control assumes command.
No less celebrated was an earlier article based on a talk given in 1933,
which is one of the cornerstones of a 1930 biblical text that carried Urwick’s
influence three decades further. His essay “Organization as a Technical
Problem” is one of the most significant works on organizations from the era
when this field was in its infancy (Urwick, 1937: 75, 83–84). In it, the formulation
of conceptual pairs is formulated in a preliminary, but clear way. Its pages hold
some astute comments on the British public administration, the first dealing with
the posts of private secretary and executive assistant as staff positions. The
essay then goes on to address coordination problems arising from the
proliferation of committees.
As we will soon see, between 1900 and 1939, there was indeed a British
theory of public administration, just as there is one today and will be tomorrow.
We should note that British scientific advances went beyond their own country,
influencing administrative studies in the United States. In the 1930s what was
happening there was followed with interest, which led to an article by Harvey
Walker comparing the study of the discipline between his country and the
United States (Walker, 1933).
We should note that Harold Laski, together with the Webbs, were not
part of the “British administrative philosophy” but diametrically contrasted to it,
due to their “radical” vision as Rosemund Thomas understood it. They were,
however, a prominent part of the London Circle. Nor did Thomas agree with
another notable thinker, Herman Finer, who had an enormous influence on the
study of public administration in both Great Britain and the United States.
Harold Laski was one of the most respected political philosophers of his
time, and remains so even today, many years after his death. One of his major
works examines the state from its most diverse political aspects, without
neglecting a treatment of the economy (Laski, 1929: 368). But it is mainly
notable for its comprehensive, reasoned review of British public administration.
Laski devoted many pages to a treatment of public administration as one of the
problems of the state. On the basis of the fact that Great Britain has a
parliamentary system, he explains that when the cabinet formulates a policy
accepted by Parliament, it must then be immediately implemented. This is the
origin of an executive function; namely to coordinate and inspect the
administration of the state.
On this basis, questions are asked about the same problem that is raised
by every practitioner of public administration of his time; namely, how to
distribute all the issues and tasks among different ministries. Since there is no
rigid system of categories by which issues can be grouped, he proposes,
speaking broadly, to split based on one of two criteria: distribution of issues by
persons or by services. He discards the former, finding that by default, it aims to
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provide every kind of person with a variety of services, which are specialized by
their nature, resulting in duplication of effort in each ministry. Laski painted an
example in which one ministry would handle matters relating to children,
another the unemployed, another one senior citizens, another veterans, and so
on, each ministry occupied with meeting the needs of one social category
(Laski, 1929: 369). He proposes, rather, the latter division, which implies
specialized ministries; that is, one for national defense, another for public
education and another for health, to name three examples. He concludes by
stating that the argument for organizing ministries based on services is evident.
Laski next poses the problem of well-defined orbits for ministries, which
inherently involves the problems of their organization and leadership. With
respect to organization, there are five principles that should be observed. The
first is that there must be a minister accountable to Parliament for the work done
by his department; the second, that should be proper financial controls in every
department (Laski, 1929: 369–370). The third principle requires that each
ministry contain a parliamentary committee by means of which it establishes
ordered, continuous relationships, while the fourth refers to the task of
structuring a well-defined organization of inter-ministerial cooperation to solve
problems they have in common such those shared by the Board of Trade and
the Ministry of Labour. Lastly, the fifth principle entails the need to structure a
research and study system.
It must be emphasized that the majority of treatises on public
administration give more importance to the “administration” aspect, leaving
“public” in second place. Laski does not do so, because he believes it is
important that there be a direct relationship between the public and the
executive power in its administrative performance (Laski, 1929: 375). Being a
far-reaching area that is very open to new experiences, governments have in
this respect been more conservative than in other branches of their activity. In
this area, their attitude envelopes a secret orbit, more typical of an empire than
a bureaucracy, that in a democratic state whose principles are simple, starting
with the suitability of consulting most of the interests affected by their action,
should not hold merely to rules, but interpret the words of those interests.
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process is the formation of a reservoir of social will and power (Finer, 1949: 7–
9). Meanwhile, administration is the use of that reservoir by a suitable public
service, as well as by mechanical means, physical space and methods, in order
to provide government services to those who are under the authority of the
state.
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Moreland was not a “lone wolf” in the Great Britain of his time, when the
active London Circle was also producing administrative ideas such as the effect
of individual and institutional activism, but no scientific work. His writing, in spite
of the British organizational setting where it was conceived, seems like
something from outside the country when it comes to categories. In this sense,
it not only represented an advance over his native land, but over the entire
world, for many of his administrative ideas were developed before they
appeared in the United States or in France. Shortly after the publication of his
crowning article on the science of public administration, F. Merson would follow
his steps closely to raise it up as a field of scientific knowledge.
India was, in short, the original laboratory where Moreland, like many
other British civil servants, experienced and learned public administration, This
fact is significant because it was Moreland who initiated the scientific study of
public administration in Britain, having no background more vital and academic
than India, which was also his favorite subject to write about. As a member of
the civil service, he served as a director of taxes and property registration.
Hence many of his books relate to India, to which he devoted his book India at
the Death of Akbar, in which the second chapter is devoted to public
administration (Moreland, 1920). His reflections, of which a substantial part deal
with economy, especially finance, led him to explore the centralized imperial
administration of public taxes. But what is particularly notable is Chapter II,
which deals with the general administration of the country as well as with
security issues and trade. It is there that he defines administration as the
organization and methods by which a state strives to achieve its objectives.
Hence its nature, in any given era, is rooted in the objectives it proposes.
In the India of Akbar, the two primary objectives were war and domestic
security, stimulating the imperial administration to be configured on the basis of
obtaining revenue (Moreland, 1920: 31). Finance had long been his primary
interest, as can be observed in a work dedicated to the administration of
revenue in the India of his time. Its origins were the courses taught by Moreland
to new civil servants, because in his opinion, financial management is the
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Moreland notes that before beginning his book, he had found practical
studies of administration in his country, but none that treated theory. The
studies he referred to are:
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Chapter 9
Richard Warner
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All indications are that Warner's work did not go unnoticed at the time, as
demonstrated by the literature review published by Norman Wengert in 1947,
which, though short and concise, summarizes the contents of Warner’s book
and shows its importance. Wengert did not ignore the differences between the
American and British administrations, particularly by the scant treatment of
issues such as budget and organization, and the emphasis on civil service
traditions (Wengert, 1948: 998–999). However, Wenger could be criticized for
neglecting the essence of the book; its scientific spirit. Warner’s book also
caught the attention of William Robson, who described it, together with others
by British and American authors, in a brief review. Robson shows respect for
Warner’s work, mainly for its concept of “principle” as well as for its
classification, but he refutes its disaggregation –even with decimals– and the
disorder that results from mixing historical, factual, policy and analytical claims
with constitutional doctrines and legal maxims without distinguishing between
them. However, Robson did not care for the book at all, to the extent that he
claimed it would be dangerous to recommend it to students of politics or public
officials who want to know learn about their respective profession (Robson,
1949: 84–85). I find Robson’s position too extreme, for a reading of Warner’s
book shows it to be much more useful than dangerous. If there is any danger, it
lies rather in dogmatically discrediting books under inquisitorial viewpoints, such
as that as adopted by Robson.
The principles that infuse Warner’s book are political leadership; public
responsibility; social necessity; and the need for efficiency, organization, public
relations, evolution and progress, and research. Warner states that by the mid
twentieth century, after two centuries of debate about a political philosophy
created by the Greeks, it was unlikely that anyone should regard politics and
administration as something new. But, he adds, public administration in its
actual sense is new because it is a subject of study of our own time. By this he
means that the state of affairs relating to government activity has transformed to
an environment in which the British people have a great influence, but at the
same time their life and many of the things they do are determined by the
activities of public officials. This is called “social action,” which must be
distinguished from the limited activities of private individuals as it was practiced
in the nineteenth century (Warner, 1947: VII).
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Nevertheless, Gladden does not ignore the fact that public administration
is outside the formulations made by politicians, legislation and justice, which
make up the broader sphere of politics and government, and of which public
administration is just one part. More precisely, it is only related to the
administrative activities of government, and to managing the affairs of the
people and in their interest. This is because the administrator is a servant, not a
master, and so the study of public administration is associated with a
cooperative activity and not with the use of power. Certainly, public
administration is organized by the community for the fulfillment of its purposes,
for at heart it is public cooperation that joins the state with society (Gladden,
1952: 18). In summary, it is related to those human beings whose job consists
in managing things.
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Twenty years after his first book, Gladden returned to the topic, because
the idea still persisted that administration is an art developed with practice
whose skills are born, not taught. His previous book had been an introductory
text for students about the concepts of public administration. The intent of this
book was to teach those who had no formal education in the field whatsoever;
that is, those who were self-taught in this area. His book Approach to Public
Administration is a teaching aid for public administration. Its purpose is to help a
practicing official perceive what is in sight in his everyday work, but through
constructive and contextual ideas that will not only explain what he does, and
how he does it, but why (Gladden, 1966: 12). Even the definition of public
administration is more grounded, so to speak, for it simply consists of the
management of human affairs. In an immediate way, and no less simply, the
book relates what the self-taught public servant observes around him, an
agenda shaped by the scope of activity of public administration, its resources,
personnel, methods, leadership and control, in addition to awareness of the
need for educating himself as a professional civil servant.
Particularly notable is his idea about the working process of the public
administration by means of three stages; decision, administration and
execution. These must be in different hands: one decides, another administers,
another carries out the action. But Gladden persists in his idea of administration
as a human problem; this is something that deserves to be emphasized,
because it moves away from “managerialism,” which is subordinate in his
version of public administration (Gladden, 1966: 12–14). While it is true that in
general there is an equally universal concept of administration, according to its
existence in organizations of all types, public administration has its own
qualities, different from those of management. Its relationship with the
government, to which is subordinate, determines its character and nature
because it is up to public administration to lead or manage public affairs. Public
administration is a tool of the government, of which it is part.
The title of the book starts with the word “approach” because it proposes
one of the many ways public administration can be visualized; it does not claim
unanimity (Gladden, 1966: 20). It is, however, a focus that seeks to paint public
administration as a universal activity, rather than one inherent to a particular
administrative system –even the British– because otherwise readers of the
book would have no more than an operational and organizational manual, not a
book that aims to educate. Administrative ideas can, in any case, only
transcend personal experiences with the strength of their ideas, abstracting
from practical exercise, and reaching beyond. Gladden does not hope or expect
that the British should lose their reputation for being practical in public
administration, but rather that they also gradually begin to be theoretical.
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activity universal in time and space (Gladden, 1953: 3–4). The result is that the
two books taken together form what Gladden called A Prime in Public
Administration.
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C.H. Sisson
By 1959, when C.H. Sisson’s comparative study on the spirit of the
British administration was published, the science of British public administration
had advanced substantially. The book originated with an article by Sisson which
had appeared years earlier in The Cambridge Journal and is reproduced almost
entirely in Chapter One. Sisson had also served as a civil servant since 1936,
culminating his career as an elite member of the civil service: the administrative
class. It was here that his interest in administrative problems emerged.
However, like Moreland and Gladden, he was more interested in observing the
public administration from a theoretical angle, and the article reflected this. As
he states in the second edition of his book, the essay was not only written by a
civil servant interested in the events of administrative processes, on which he
has something to say, but for a student of government attracted by the practical
angles of administration.
During his sabbatical from the civil service, Sisson toured several
European countries and observed directly how they managed their public
services and the experience of their public administrators as practitioners. This
led him to Paris, Bonn, Vienna, Stockholm and Madrid. In France, for example,
his studies focused on the Council of State, Napoleon’s master work. Six years
since the publication of the first edition of the book, the text underwent a few
changes in emphasis, but its principles remained intact. It is without doubt one
of the most important books of many that were written in postwar Great Britain.
Together with Gladden’s book, it is one of the most important achievements of
British administrative thought of the 1950s, which is worth examining in a more
general context of the science of public administration (Sisson, 1965: 11, 13).
Two chapters are of particular interest for our study; the first concerns the
definition of public administration, which the author says refers more to what a
minister does than to what he thinks he should do. The minister has cabinet
meetings, conversations to persuade representatives, discussions with senior
officials, and other items which are related to his departmental responsibilities.
His activities, thus, take place between the Chamber and his ministerial offices,
including a close relationship with the civil service. In sum, the activities of a
minister are extremely varied, which is why he does not only require assistance,
but also counsel.
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When the minister carries out his characteristic work, which is to make
decisions, this implies a proper understanding of the nature of public
administration. The essential character of government, and by extension of
public administration, is the pursuit of effectiveness and maintaining the unity of
the group, a truth that includes both complex and simple administration. Sisson
used a surprising example to personify the public administrator, for he did not
single out a person from his own time, but the celebrated Sextus Julius
Frontinus, a prominent Roman official who was responsible for the
administration of the water supply in Rome (which was a stepping stone to his
later position as governor of Britania). The other notable chapter discusses the
intellect of the administrator, a very important section of the book because here
Sisson uniquely contributes to an understanding of the mental processes
inherent to the work of public servants. When Sisson begins to address the
issue in a comparative vein, he notes that this methodology does not only
involve a contrast between techniques but, more importantly, a confrontation
between cultures (Sisson, 1965: 14–15, 19–20). And what better contrast to
draw than between British and French cultures, both enjoying a reputation for
their singular features? In fact, as he notes, the British official speaks in the
language of Shakespeare, while the French official speaks in the language of
Racine. Indeed, if the administrative culture of each nation exists as a unique,
singular reference in itself, it is the language of each nation that not only
conveys its thought but its way of life perpetuated from the past to the present.
This is what Robert Catherine termed administrative style. The French
reference is important because it comes from a pioneering text on the subject,
which emphasizes how essential the style of written communications in public
offices is, as these represent officials’ way of thinking, as well as the language
of the public function as a professional corporation (Catherine, 1969: 10–14). In
itself, style enhanced the reports by Colbert’s intendants as the clearest
antecedent of a nascent administrative culture.
It is style, considered as a unique configuration of the government
network, that explains why one administration is in itself hierarchical and
centralized, while another is infused with self-managed systems and is highly
decentralized, when each one considered alone is effective in its social and
historical context.
The publication of the works of Warner, Gladden and Sisson left fertile
ground for scientific cultivation of a British civil service which had achieved
respectability on the world scale. At that time, their reputation was as high as
the administrative studies being conducted on both sides of the Atlantic.
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However, the work that most interests us is not a book but an article
which is an unvarnished look at the reasons for the delay in academic study of
the British public administration in the past. Suggestively titled “Public
administration: Cause for Discontent,” the article is dominated by the spirit of
the British administrative political thought of its time. Ridley, a professor of
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political theory and institutions at the University of Liverpool, also draws on the
traditions of the past science of administration on the continent, based on which
he refers to an “absent tradition” in Great Britain. Moreover, with a harshness
that an objective exposure of reality sometimes requires, he states that Great
Britain is an underdeveloped country when it comes to the establishment of
public administration as an academic subject (Ridley, 1972: 65). In fact, it was
only during the period when he wrote his work that a chair of public
administration was created. It was originally held by William Robson, who had
been teaching administrative law at the London School of Economics since
1947. The chair was subsequently held by Peter Self. Ridley mentions the prior
case of the Gladstone Chair at Oxford, which was renamed the Chair of Theory
and Institutions of Government and Public Administration in 1941.
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passed. That skepticism even caused some authors of books about public
administration to chose to title them with other terms. With a conservative mood
prevailing, they continued to prefer writing semi-professional teaching and
training texts, rather than treatises of the theory of public administration, when
what was needed was the latter type of text. This was why Ridley persevered in
his effort to make administrative science influential, which would eventually free
Britain from academic underdevelopment (Ridley, 1972: 69). In this way, the
British public administration became no longer an object of study based on art
instead of science.
It was a difficult road to travel. Not only must the scarcity of British
universities be considered, in contrast to the colossal educational resources in
the United States, but also the fact that in the latter country its superiority is not
due so much to its enormous institutional massas to the fact that public
administration is treated there as a science and is called a science. In the
United States there are more professors and less practising writing books on
public administration, and when practitioners write them it is because they are
also professors. It was in the United States, not in Great Britain that Max
Weber, who greatly influenced the progress of the discipline, was translated;
there fruitful and original theoretical work was developed because intensive
research programs were already in place. This explains why there is a Herbert
Simon and a Fred Riggs in the United States and not in Great Britain (Ridley,
1972: 72).
But throughout the twentieth century, Great Britain was the country that
was best at learning administrative lessons from abroad, in addition to making a
supreme effort and successfully meeting the challenge of climbing through the
era of art to reach the era of science. Thus Ridley’s generation and those that
follow were, as mentioned earlier, not only a whole new generation in their
country, but the leading edge of administrative thought in the world. Among
British thinkers in the 1970s, J.S. Cross is particularly notable. He wrote a book
specifically intended for the British public administration. It should also be
mentioned that in addition to giving a panoramic view of the public service of his
country, he took care to conceptually place it within an overall concept of
administration, which he defines on the basis of the concept of “cooperative
human effort” (Cross, 1970: 1). The clear influence from the thought of Herbert
Simon should not be underestimated. Cross adds that administration
conceptualized this way is observable in a variety of institutional arrangements;
for example, a business, a union, a church, or a school, not to mention the
family. What interests him, however, is to focus on public administration as the
proper management of a political organization. By this, he draws a substantial
distinction between public and private administration, as well as others; and on
this account characterizes the uniqueness of public administration by its interest
in the formulation and implementation of public policy. It should be noted that
Cross also produced a review of the administrative literature then in vogue.
Among his references are cited the work of Luther Gulick and Fred Riggs, as
well as contemporary compatriots, particularly Brian Chapman and Max
Nicholson.
Cross noted that most of the material he consulted in the study of public
administration had its source in the experience of developed countries, and the
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Equally notable is the work of R.G.S. Brown and D.R. Steel, a pioneering
text on the study of public administration in Great Britain. Originally published in
1971, the second edition appeared nearly a decade later (1979), after which a
reprint was issued (1983), which is the version we cite. Brown (d. 1978) is noted
for his dedicated administrative career in the public service, while Steel came
from the ranks of academia. Their book is a detailed, comprehensive work on
the organization and functioning of the British public administration, highlighting,
of course, the civil service examination. Significantly influenced by the theory of
organizations, especially by Herbert Simon, the authors enter into a detailed
study of decision-making procedures and processes in the heart of the public
administration. While in the first edition they focused on the theoretical aspects
of public administration in order to more fully understand its functioning, in the
second edition they put more emphasis on information from organizational
studies (Brown, 1983: 11–15). Thus their academic concern focused on an
examination of decision-making, particularly decisions made by senior public
administrators who not only set policy, but also implement it. Among the set of
topics treated in the book, of which a considerable part is devoted to a study of
the civil service, an examination of the problems of management is notable. The
authors made pioneering contributions to this subject.
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Andrew Dunsire, one of the most eminent British thinkers, is the author of
one of the milestones in British administrative thought, mainly because he goes
deeply into topics not often treated by his colleagues. His 1973 book is one of
the best treatments of the semantic problems of the word “administration,” as
well as a state-of-the-art account of the discipline in the United States and his
country. It notably includes an extensive bibliography, listing not only commonly
known authors, such as Luther Gulick, Henri Fayol, Paul Appleby and Herbert
Simon, but great figures from the broader spectrum of academic work such as
Lorenz von Stain, Henri de Saint-Simon, Herbert Spencer, Gustav Schmoeller
and Max Weber.
Dunsire is aware that in the past his country had made contributions to
the study of public administration, as is evident in the books by Walter Bagehot
and Jeremy Bentham, which contribute to knowledge of government,
management, centralization and decentralization (Dunsire, 1973: 76). These
works are not, however, classified as administrative science in the sense in
which the term is used in the continent, because they do not come from the
pens of academics or nor do they conform to the academic style that prevails in
the thought of academics. Certainly, the majority of books on public
administration are written by those who are not practitioners; that is, teachers
and academics with little interest in the practice of civil service officials.
Obviously these types of books are not administrative training manuals,
although they could be used for that purpose; instead their design reflects more
general educational goals, which include an equally general readership, within
which the practitioners themselves could be counted.
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persons, or animals. He also discusses the word “policy,” which Baker relates to
government, or a decision of what is to be done, and “administration,” for doing
so. As can be observed, administration is related to the idea of serving and
assisting in the making of policy. This being said, he notes that administration is
related to forms and structures, functions, tasks and processes in public affairs
(Baker, 1973: 12, 17). Having come this far, he does not merely decide to stop,
but goes backwards, stating that since all science is based on the formulation of
systematic hypotheses and that thought is subject to proof by experiment and
observation, it is not visible in the object of public administration, which is
constantly flowing, often observable only from within, and sometimes at a
distance.
The most notable part of the book, despite what he writes at the end, is
its spirit of scientific inquiry, something which the British have sparingly but to
which they have a right, for which they deserve credit. This speaks of the
indisputable possibility that an experienced person; that is, a person shaped in
the practice of the daily affairs of public administration, can certainly contribute
to a conceptual way not only of enriching activities in daily life, but of a complex
conceptualization of the theory of public administration.
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Chapter 10
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Few British thinkers from before the 1980s are known outside their
country, even those whose works were translated from English to other
languages. One is Christopher Hood, author of a book translated into Spanish
some time ago, which has not received the attention it deserves (Hood, 1979).
This book is a favorite of its author, to the extent that much later in one of his
more famous works, he revisited topics that merit reconsideration (Hood, 1998).
The latter, which includes the “art of the state” in an overall analysis and
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consists of topics discussed several years earlier, is one of the great books of
contemporary public administration.
Hood is definitely one of the most important British thinkers today, being
not only responsible for the most important critical work on the new public
management in Great Britain, but also contemporary contributions on the theory
of public administration on the basis of the humanities. In a book coauthored
with Michael Jackson, he noted that one of the central problems in the theory of
contemporary public administration arises because the emergence of the new
managerial paradigms have raised doubts about its value and usefulness, and
that the potential supremacy these paradigms could acquire can not be
discounted (Hood and Jackson, 1991: 157–158). However, the biggest problem
is not so much that these paradigms could prevail but that their dominance is
based on fiction, not truth, which generates a double epistemological problem of
displacing the theory of public administration but without filling the resulting gap.
Therefore, the dangers underlying the myths in public administration can never
be overemphasized, for they are precisely the source of the econocrats’ and the
new managerial consultocrats’ power. Their preeminence stems from their use
of metaphor and fiction as weapons of communication, which explains the
number of neoclassical economists recruited as persuaders in the
administrative debate through the use of fiction rather than truth. Hence the
need to again study the use of rhetoric and metaphor in public administration as
effective vehicles for persuasion. This could explain the persuasiveness of
neoclassical economics in the administrative debate: because of its fictions
rather than its truths.
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A vision like this warns of the current state of the science of public
administration as it is universally considered because, as pointed out by Hood
and Jackson, a public administration that consistently fails in exploring the link
between argument and acceptance is negligent to the core (Hood and Jackson,
1991: 485).
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Therefore, the problem of government is not its size, but the effect it can
cause in terms of the quality of public services provided. The direct and
immediate causes of the size of government are the public goods it provides to
society, particularly education, health and social security; the scale of their
quantities may exceed the management capacity of government, producing
deficiencies. The harmful nature of the government’s deficiencies by reason of
its magnitude lie in the political consequences they produce, mainly in the
degree of administrative efficiency and political consensus.
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and democracy have grown hand in hand. The size of the government is in
direct proportion to its duties towards society. Lastly, size and growth should not
be confused. Size is determined by growth, which gives it its degree and scope,
and explains the suitable proportions favorable to public administration. In great
measure, size represents a stage of the growth process, as can be observed in
Western countries, whose governments experienced their highest growth rates
in the 1930s. Because size is a fluid state which is determined by growth, the
rate of progression was lower from the 1980s on, and resulted in a change in
the size of government, as we now know.
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raises troublesome issues because they operate with conflicting values, such
as equality and efficiency. However, much of the new managerial reform
strategy of the state has been clouded by the efficiency, and is based on a
simplistic view of bureaucracy, a hallucinatory adulation of the market, an
idealized view of the private sector, the ignoring of unexpected costs of the
reform, excessive optimism about the practical results, and most importantly, a
wrong view of the state (Wright, 1997: 39–40). This is the reason why the public
sector is more disoriented from the effect of the changes stemming from the
administrative reforms. Moreover, dismantling the administrative system is risky,
especially if it is identified with the Weberian model, which is an ideal type
whose characteristics are fictitious or are absent in some countries while other
attributes remain important, and in other countries they configure a regulatory
public administration.
The result of the new managerial reform that Wright was able to observe
at the start of the twenty-first century was that in Europe the state is defined
more in terms of its duties, and so the leaders, like the Crusaders in the Middle
Ages seeking the Holy Grail of the core of the state, managed to adjust the
public administration to that essential core. The state finds itself to be more
divided as a result of internal competition for funds, and more disaggregated
following decentralization and deconcentration. It is also farther from the citizen
because the implementation was transferred to non-state actors, more
deregulated through a variety of formulas, and more denationalized by the dual
effects of globalization and regionalization.
It is perhaps a paradox that the director of the European School of Public
Administration is a Briton; that is, a citizen of the country most resistant to full
incorporation into the European Union, but whose eventual incorporation into
the continent seems inescapable. Les Metcalfe became, obviously, the expert
on the topic of integration of European public administrations, whose central
problem has been precisely the extent of the sphere of action of each
respective nation-state in the Union.
In the 1990s, a period during which European integration advanced
towards consolidation, the outcome was different (Metcalfe, 1997: 45). When
the Treaty on European Union was signed in early 1992, it left undecided how
the political regime common to long-standing states would be configured when
they had different political cultures and uncertain borders left over from past
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This being the case, the issue changes to one of developing institutional
flexibility, which, however, has a purely operational characterization, and
involves the separation of politics and administration. Moreover, flexibility has
resulted a distancing from the essential principle of the process of European
union, that all members must participate equally (Metcalfe, 1997: 50). One
option proposed is a parallel reform of the national public administrations and
the EU administration. Another option is adopting the new managerial paradigm
from the corporate world as an organization–network model to provide the
adaptive capacity to make organizations more sensitive to change. But since
this concerns the design of the European Commission, the administrative body
of the EU, Metcalfe assumes it involves a potential organization–network based
on a tradition different from that derived from business experience, since its
concern is to enhance the cooperation skills of the organizations involved in
joint management. The role of an organization–network as visualized in this
context is therefore to define the obstacles to effective collaboration, and
promote joint activity to overcome them (Metcalfe, 1995: 26–27). This last
option, which is opposite to the business perspective, makes it imperative to
thoroughly reconsider the managerial proposals that emphasize short-term
results and are subject to financial returns, since ongoing policies require
methods very different from short-term pragmatic solutions.
Since it fell to him to design the organization–network, Metcalfe opted for
a deeply rooted notion: the healthy prevailing system of European politics that
described the formal scheme of public procurement contracts,
telecommunications, and common agricultural policy and social policy. As
defined, the system is a set of values, standards, principles and practices that
guide the behavior of the actors involved in it (Metcalfe, 1995: 26–27).
Moreover, their new meanings transcend purely political concepts, and involve
economic concepts in which the standards are not based on coercive threats.
The interpretation of system within this view goes beyond conventional
definitions of standards because it includes both standards and ability to
implement them. The idea of organization–networks endowed with flexibility
facilitates a functional definition of each national state, with its regime, as well
as the common system within an idea of federalism where each state
perpetuates itself, giving a life of its own to a European Union that is not merely
the sum of its parts.
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research publications may be an indicator of the state of the art, reflecting the
relationship between the old and new paradigms and establishing which of the
two predominates (Kuhn, 1970). In Great Britain, publications such as Public
Administration (PA) and Public Policy and Administration (PPA), are public
administration research journals. Public Money and Management (PMM) and
International Journal of Public Sector Management (IJPSM), in turn, represent
the new public management paradigm. As one administrative thinkers claimed,
the fact that there are two journals about the new public management is not a
coup d’état against public administration, but a parallel development (Boyne,
1996: 688–691). Also, PMM and IJPSM do not have the prestige of Public
Administration, and so they have not shaken the foundations, only caused a
small tremor. An analysis of issues of Public Administration and Public Policy
and Administration published from 1976 to 1995 divided the articles into three
types; policy, public management (public choice, management, markets,
purchasing, human resources management and information management), and
miscellaneous. The result of the study showed that the new public management
made advances, but at the expense of disciplines other than political science.
Political science articles were largely unchanged between 1970 and 1990.
The conclusion that can be observed from this analysis suggests that
public management presented a challenge, but did not institute a scientific
revolution. Moreover, public administration did not suffer an “identity crisis,” as
some academics claim. This has been confirmed by comparing the number of
academic degree programs in public administration in the British university
system, where they are dominant; in fact, only two public administration
programs were transferred to business schools. The main research programs
are carried out in public administration schools, not business schools, where
they are an endogenous development. In short, there is no direct feud between
public administration and the new public management nor a war between
hostile paradigms or between the old and the new paradigm.
Perhaps the best example of this is Christopher Hood’s book on the art
of the state, which retains the classicism of discipline when he recalls the
contributions of distinguished scholars of the field, and the reincorporation of
ancient subjects such as rhetoric. The book, which was published at the end of
the twentieth century, runs parallel to much-cited public management studies,
on which Hood is an expert, but also public administration studies, with the
names of their main topics changed to fit them into public management. On a
basis that builds on the administrative tradition, he defines public management
as the problem of designing and operating public services, and itemizing the
implementation of government tasks relating to the executive (Hood, 1998: 3).
The book does not propose to give last word in this respect; rather, it offers
constructive ideas and proposals on public administration, which attest to the
degree of health it enjoyed even when the new public management was in its
heyday.
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EPILOGUE
Great Britain may appear to be a still pond, motionless from the effect of
long-standing conventions which all seem to date from a distant past. But such
is not the case.
One can say, rather, to paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, that the life
force of Great Britain, with its center in England, is “creative destruction.” The
relative proportions of creation and destruction are not always balanced, and
one or another tends to predominate in a given era. So it was with the Anglo
Saxon “predation” that so completely dismantled Roman civilization on the
island, which not only leaves the impression that Roman culture had little depth
in Britania, but the fact that its traces are so faint paints a misleading picture of
the legacy left by the Romans. The Anglo-Saxons were left with so little creative
leeway that they never established a nation during all their centuries, nor did
they defend their island or establish a civilization. Destruction is also evident in
the migration and settlement of the Anglo-Saxons, who pushed the Britons back
to less civilized regions, where coexistence with primitive Celts led to their
regression.
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At that time, the scholarly pen of John Stuart Mill confirms that the
Crown, through the Lord Lieutenant, continued to appoint mainly from among
those who already occupied the posts as local officials, with the exception of
those who did not carry out their duty adequately, or who were of a different
political stripe than the monarch, in which case they were removed from office.
They were wealthy people, an oligarchy tolerated by the king, but which lost its
appeal over time, exacerbating the main flaw of self-government, which has
been the caliber of its officials (Mill, 1861: 215, 227, 254). New recruits were
trained by means of apprenticeship, but self-government as a political training
school yielded ever less competent graduates. When the rural oligarchy lost its
ability to provide suitable candidates for public service, the middle class made
an inadequate substitute as a recruitment pool. In the end, Mill preferred
reforms that would departmentalize local government, similar to the central
regime. The minimum of tasks related to the nation having been left to the
center, local government, itself in decline, at least should retain the simple
administrative tasks, a difficult distribution of tasks to accomplish. Given that
local government is similar to the central government, and its performance is
declining, it is hard to imagine that local government can limit itself to a few
tasks of national interest.
Great Britain is also a country in which the parts of its regime have been
able to be function in response to the era in question. Decentralization, then
centralization worked effectively at different times in the same country. Self
government, the seed of the parliamentary constitution and the locus of
individual and communal freedom, functional in times past, today has survived
although worn down by the administrative centralization of local life, municipal
corporations and bureaucratization, all of which are functional in the present
day.
Great Britain is also a country of paradoxes: its history has followed not only
different routes but opposite directions to those of the European continent.
While the lands across the Channel centralized, Great Britain decentralized;
when they bureaucratized, the island de-bureaucratized. While absolutism
flourished on the continent, Great Britain cultivated its self-government; when
continental professional civil servants were trained and even educated in
special schools, here the public administration entrusted its positions to
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