‘No philosophy,please,we are managers’. Public Management and the common good: Euro-Atlantic convergences

Abstract

Public management, as an academic discipline, has been, up to now, inspired by a managerialist approach, axiologically neutral, which cast aside the great questions regarding the ends of public life, those of the common good and of the ‘good life’ that were at the very basis of classical political philosophy. Governing has been reduced to ‘governancing’, relying on the presupposition that good means automatically leading to good ends. Based on critiques of this drift, we witness on both sides of the Atlantic the renewal of the old republicanism that makes the common good the aim of public administration. This debate has been at the very foundation of the modern democracies since the 17th century in England, to the foundation of the United States and the republican tradition stemming from the French Revolution. This article envisages how public management could rejuvenate itself to mend the broken link between the managerial and the political, putting emphasis on what would be the consequences on the training of public managers.

Points for practitioners

Practitioners are often stuck in a false alternative: either a state bureaucracy or the adoption of a neoliberal solution represented by the bundle of the new public management tools based on the search for efficiency. This article goes back to the roots of the debate on the role of the state in economic growth since the Renaissance and shows that the issue is not one of chosing between state or no state but to articulate appropriately the political role of the state as an institution maker and end the initiatives of the market. By drawing a comparison between the first financial crisis (the 1720 South Sea crisis) and the current crisis, it points out the central role of polity against the current predominance of economics in the mainstream ideology, and rehabilitates the role of civic virtues in ruling public affairs. A comparison is made between classical Europe and the history of the US that shows this debate has been constant in nation-building and the the present period of turbulence calls for a renewal of the role of the politics, far from the NPM hype that dominated the field of public administration for the past twenty years.