Editorial
| Date | 01 January 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/001955612016010v |
| Published date | 01 January 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
EDITORIAL
Public Administration has
come
a long
way
since
Max
Weber (1864-
1920)
and
Woodrow
Wilson
(1856-1924) laid
the
foundations
of
this
discipline
in
the
modem
mould
in
Germany
and
in
the
United
States
of
America.
Weber's
theory
of
state
and
bureaucracy
was
an
exercise
in democratising the
German
state founded
on
staple diet
of
Hegelian
Idealism and Bismarckian bureaucratic state
in
the backdrop
of
comparative
historical sociology
of
bureaucracy, whereas Wilson's notion
of
Public
Administration was propositioned
in
the context
of
critiquing the working
of
the first written federal democratic Constitution
of
the
modem
world
based
on
the combination
of
the theories
of
separation
of
powers between
the Congress, Presidency,
and
Supreme Court,
on
the
one
hand; and the
theory
of
division
of
powers between federal and state governments and
the Bill
of
Rights
of
citizens,
on
the other.
Both
these theorists wrote
in
the
decades around the turn
of
the nineteenth century into the twentieth.
In
his
study
of
bureaucratisation
of
state, Weber theorised in his seminal
work
Economy and Society (1922) that legal-rational bureaucracy is superior to
agrarian
or
patrimonial bureaucracy in terms
of
efficiency
and
effectiveness.
Weber considered bureaucracy as
an
instrument
of
'rationalisation',
yet
he
was cautious enough to warn
us
against the negative tendency
of
the
'iron
cage
of
bureaucracy'.
Wilson
in
his article
'The
Study
of
Administration', Political Science
Quarterly,
July
1887, writing a century
after
the
enactment
of
the
US
Constitution
by
the Philadelphia Convention (1787) and the enforcement
of
the Constitution
in
1789, observed:
'There
is scarcely a single duty
of
government which was once simple which is
not
now
complex; government
once
had
but
a few masters. Majorities formerly only underwent government,
they
now
conduct government. Where government once
might
follow the
whims
of
a court, it
must
now
follow the views
of
a
nation'.
The
seminal
views expressed in this early article, when he taught
in
Bryn
Mawr
College,
were subsequently developed
by
the future 28th President
of
the United
States (1913-1921) Woodrow Wilson, into his critique
of
tlie working
of
the government
based
on
institutional checks and balances, often leading
to
deviations
from
the
founding
constitutional
principles,
chaos,
and
deadlocks
in
his
book
Congressional Government in the United States
(1908). Introducing a distinction between politics and administration, Wilson
defends a meritocratic
and
trained bureaucratic organisation
that
would
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