Download pdf - The "Public Interest:" What We Are Not Leaving Our Posterity

The "Public Interest:" What We Are Not Leaving Our PosterityAuthor(s): N. Dale Wright and David Kirkwood HartSource: Administrative Theory & Praxis, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1996), pp. 14-28Published by: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25611173 .

Accessed: 18/06/2014 18:25

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

M.E. Sharpe, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Administrative Theory&Praxis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 18:25:42 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mes

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25611173?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


K Bide Wright Brigham Young University

and David Kirkwood Hart

Brigham Young University

THE "PUBLIC INTEREST:" WHAT WE ARE NOT

LEAVING OUR POSTERITY

Administrative Theory and Praxis, 18(2): 14-28, 1996.

We find ourselves under the

government of a system of political institutions, conducing more

essentially to the ends of civil and

religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.

We, when mounting the stage of

existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental

blessings. We toiled not in the

acquirement or establishment of them ?

they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their's was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a

political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours only, to transmit

these, the former, unprofaned by the

foot of an invader; the latter,

undecayed by the lapse of time, and untorn by usurpation

~ to the latest

generation that fate shall permit the

world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves,

duty to posterity, and love for our

species in general, all imperatively

require us faithfully to perform

(Fehrenbacher, 1989, p. 28).

- Abraham Lincoln (1838)

THE NECESSITY FOR A CONCEPTION OF THE PUBLIC INTEREST

This article focuses upon six propositions concerning the concept of the public interest. It is the first of a pair of articles about the subject: this piece addresses the pervasive loss of concern about the notion of the public interest in contemporary public administration. The second article will present a civic humanist interpretation of the public interest.

Concerning the public apathy about the subject, we do not suggest that public administrators are

antagonistic to the issue of the public interest in

formulating policies, programs, and processes. Rather, most of them have little interest in presenting a

substantive explication of the content of the public interest. This is, in our opinion, the major problem confronting contemporary public administration since,

explicitly or implicitly, some notion of the public interest will always under gird every public action of every public servant}

The debate over both the importance, and the

substance, of the public interest has been rolling along since the inception of political philosophy and, in

particular, since the 18th Century. Traditionally, scholars of the public interest have given most of their

attention to the substance of the public interest.

However, since World War II, the focus of attention

has shifted away from those substantive arguments over

to the function the plays in the processes of governance. That latter theme received its most thorough explication

by the political scientist Richard Flathman who wrote, "At a minimum, then, we can say that "public interest"

is used to express approval or commendation of policies

adopted or proposed by government" (Flathman, 1966,

p. 4).

14



In other words, it is not only a term of high approbation, it performs the essential function, in all debates over public policy, of setting the criterion for

"good" public policy. But as more and more attention is given to the function of the term, we are left in the awkward situation of understanding more about the function than the content. This leads to the first

proposition:

PROPOSITION T. some conception of the public interest will underlie

every public law, policy, program, and process, and that conception will

legitimize such public acts.

This points to the fundamental importance for public servants to be able to ground

~ and, thus, to legitimize

~ their beliefs about the Tightness of public decisions in a set of accepted (and acceptable) values, about which there is a consensus. That means that the primary obligation of all public servants (as well as citizens) is to comprehend the essential function performed by the

concept of the public interest and, even more, to

comprehend the substance of the values that constitute the public interest.

But if we only understand the function of the

term, while settling for a partial understanding of its

content, we are in the vulnerable situation of being governed by principles we can neither articulate nor defend. Further, even though we are only partially familiar with the content of the public interest, nonetheless we will be governed by it. Flathman described the problems that such a situation creates:

... I must be prepared to offer warrants in defense of the legislation which exists (or which I contend should exist). If I am not prepared to do so, I place myself in the position of seeking benefits under a law which I tacitly concede to be indefensible. Since this law has a marked impact upon others, the warrants I offer must take that impact into account; they

must be normative warrants

(Flathman, 1966, p. 6).

Obviously, then, an understanding of the

function and the substance of the public interest is the

single most important issue in public administration.

Unfortunately, in recent years public administration has

abandoned the study of the public interest as being methodologically "uninteresting" and scientifically "unprovable." Thus, both as a profession and as a

nation, we are in the dangerous position of being influenced by substantive values that we can neither

adequately articulate nor defend.

It was not always like this, of course. Public administration emerged as a distinctive field in the 1880s (Chandler, 1977), out of a primordial soup

composed of the creation of the modern organization, the invention of modern business administration, the Pendleton Civil Service Act, and - as catalyst

~ the

extraordinarily influential 1887 article by Woodrow

Wilson, calling for a more "scientific" approach to its

theory and practice (Wilson, W., 1887). Nonetheless, even though it was a distinctive field, public administration also began as a subfield of political science, an association that continued well into the 1960s.

The most significant aspect of that association was the emphasis placed upon political philosophy, which was correctly considered the sine qua non of both disciplines. Thus, everyone majoring or minoring in public administration was required to take classes in

political philosophy. That meant that all students in

public administration were introduced to the fundamental normative questions at the root of all

public organizations and actions through a reading of the great classics of political philosophy. The study of those classics was considered essential for both good citizenship and good public service.

Have we ever, for instance, transcended the discourses of Plato on justice, Cicero on civic virtue, St. Thomas Aquinas on natural law, Francis Hutcheson on

benevolence, or James Madison and Montesquieu on the

separation of powers? For public administration, this

profound familiarity with political philosophy is nowhere better exemplified than in the person of the most respected public administration scholar of the 20th

Century, Dwight Waldo - especially in his classic

book, The Administrative State (1948). That intellectual

quality can also be seen in other scholars, such as John A. Rohr, H. George Frederickson, Charles Goodsell, Frank Sherwood, and Camilla Stivers, among others.

It is quite important to remember that a

grounding in moral and political philosophy is not just a handsome adornment the possessor's conversation.

Rather, it means that such scholars will usually have a

knowledge of, an appreciation for, and an ability to use

15



those disciplines in their considerations of the public interest. Previous generations of public administrators understood that since every public organization must rest upon some conception of the public interest ~

which provides the necessary criteria for public decisions, processes, and policies

? there is no subject of greater importance to public administration than the

public interest. As Leo Strauss wrote in his criticism of the "new" political science (i.e., a discipline that placed greater emphasis upon the noun, rather than upon its

adjective),

[The new political science] implies that there cannot be a common good. According to the old political science, there is necessarily a common good, and the common good in its fullness is the good society and what is

required for the good society (Strauss, 1962, p. 323, emphasis added).

The thrust of his argument was that the

conception of the common good (or, in our case, the

public interest) was the most essential element in the creation and maintenance of the good society. This leads to our second proposition:

PROPOSITION 2: since the prevalent concept of the public interest will

always consist of specific value

statements, which will, in turn, affect both the substance and the legitimacy of the laws, rights, policies, and

processes it legitimizes, the first

responsibility of the public servant is to understand and believe in those values.

For the United States, the public interest must

be derived from the Founding values,2 even though they were themselves the product of ideas derived from

specific philosophers in the history of Western political

philosophy. Since our entire system of government, our

legal system, and our claims for rights rest upon those

Founding values ("the intent of the founders"), it is

obvious that public administration scholars and

practitioners must be intimately familiar with those

Founding values.

That was recognized by most of the early scholars of public administration. In virtually all of

their early writings, there was an implicit assumption about the nature of the public interest: rooted in the

Founding values, and reflected in the moral character of the citizens, it was the sine qua non of our democratic

society. To remain free, we had to constantly return to the original sources, as Mercy Otis Warren wrote in her fine contemporary account of the American Revolution:

The declaration of independence, which has done so much honor to the then existing congress, to the inhabitants of the United States, and to the genius and heart of the

gentleman who drew it, in the belief, and under the awe, of the Divine

Providence, ought to be frequently read by the rising youth of the American states, as a palladium of which they should never lose sight, so

long as they wish to continue a free and independent people (Warren, 1805, p. 631).

To illustrate, those specific value assumptions are

implicit in Chester I. Barnard's classic, The Functions

of the Executive (1938), and provide the basis for his

conception of the public interest.

It is also both significant and sad that it is

nearly impossible to name a book that deals specifically with those Founding values ? it was just assumed that

"everyone knew" what they were. A few books touch

upon the primal importance of those values, but no

single volume has attempted to articulate and defend them. Nonetheless, the early conceptions of the public interest in America were firmly rooted in those

Founding values (and a good understanding of that can be obtained by reading the following: Bailyn, 1992; Richard, 1994; Koch, 1943; Brookhiser, 1996; Wood, 1969; and Wood, 1991).

This leads to a third proposition:

PROPOSITION 3: the early conceptions of the public interest centered upon the substance of the

Founding values of the Republic, as

they are summarized in our enabling documents and amplified in the decisions of the Supreme Court, and it is the duty of all public servants to

guarantee those Founding values to all citizens.

16



For that reason, we argue that a clearly articulated conception of the public interest, rooted in the Founding values, is the single most important legacy that we can and should leave to our posterity. Further, because times have changed so dramatically, there must be new interpretations and considerations of those Founding values. Yet, tragically, most of the

discipline of public administration now ignores the content of the public interest, when it is not actually discrediting it. As a result, we are not leaving our

posterity its most important legacy.

Before we can begin the task of articulating the substance of the public interest, it is necessary to understand why the study of the public interest has fallen from fashion in this last half of the 20th Century.

THE LOSS OF THE PUBLIC INTEREST

When modern public administration scholars and practitioners go searching for contemporary definitions of the substance of the public interest, they hit a dry hole. The blunt fact is that a couple of

generations of academics (with a few notable

exceptions) have accepted the notion that the public interest is a simply a chimera: for them, since it is

incapable of empirical validation, it is as meaningful as our preference between strawberry and vanilla ice

cream, to paraphrase a British logical positivist (see, for

instance, Weldon, 1953).

There are a number of reasons ? excuses,

really ?

why public administration's belief in an all

encompassing public interest fell from grace. What follows is not a complete list, but a few of the more

important reasons, stated in an ascending order of

importance.

Spiritual Exhaustion

After World War II, the American citizens

believed, and rightly so, that they had fulfilled their moral obligations to democracy by defeating the Axis nations. American military personnel returned home after a long and exhausting war, more than ready to return to the familiarity of their homes and their lives, that had for so long been interrupted. In Max Lerner's

poignant words, "The American soldier, wandering like

Odysseus over the far places of the world, always

turning by a sure instinct back to the home of his remembrance" (Lerner, 1957). Further, the folks that remained at home had endured major curtailments in their aspirations as they made the necessary sacrifices to produce the arsenal necessary for the war.

But World War II was not the only interruption. We tend to forget that the many of the individuals who served in leadership positions in the

political, economic, and military systems had witnessed

(and even participated in) the senseless butchery of World War I: an appalling, brutal, and senseless war

that shouldn't have happened (Gilbert, 1994). The men who fought in the senseless abattoir returned home

thoroughly disillusioned.3

While there was a brief pause for financial foolishness in the 1920s, in 1929 the roof caved in, and the nation nearly foundered in the Great Depression: jobs vanished, businesses folded up, and the government seemed but an exercise in impotence. Unfortunately,

most of the studies of the Depression concentrate upon the economic and political problems, to the neglect of the alienation of the people

? but even a cursory study reveals a thoroughly alienated citizenry that was rapidly losing faith in its government (Shannon, 1960). Thus,

when World War II finally slammed into the United

States, it was an already spiritually wearied population that was called upon to win the war.

There was a vast upsurge in patriotism as the

recruiting offices were swamped by volunteers. Jobs came back in such abundance that there were not

enough workers to do the work. The United States

pulled off one of the greatest productive miracles in

history: the creation of a huge citizen military force almost overnight; then supplying it (and all of our

allies) with an incredible flow of weapons and

materials; and then watching it turn into one of the

greatest armies in history. (For an excellent summary of the development of the U.S. Army, see Perrett, 1991 and 1993.) But when the war came to an end in August of 1945, the Americans were an even more wearied

people, more than ready for "normalcy."

That spiritual weariness was only partially caused by actual warfare. Much of it was the result of the unending tension brought about by the insecurity of the future: from 1929 on down to the present day, our national future has been threatened in one way or another. There has been no time for us to rest and

regroup.

17



Certainly, we were allowed no breathing space after World War II as the reality of Communist

imperialism became clear: Eastern Europe disappeared behind the Iron Curtain; China ended its "long march" with the tyranny of Mao Ze-dong; and the USSR became a belligerent thermonuclear power. Perhaps the American people might have ignored those threatening events, but the Korean War made the conflict personal as, once again, families were made to bear the human losses of all-out warfare. Korea burst upon us, scarcely five years after the "big war," and unprepared American soldiers were rushed into battle. The war shortly degenerated into a contentious stalemate, but only after

50,000 Americans had lost their lives (Fehrenbach, 1963).

To state that we were a spiritually weary people is, then, a serious understatement, and politicians rushed to prey upon that weariness. The public demand was for a return to "normalcy," and there was no

imperative public urge to deal with the new entailments of the public interest. Our spiritual weariness caused us to close our eyes to the obscene domestic abuses of the civil rights of many of our citizens, and the realities of the new thermonuclear age forced us, reluctant and

unwilling, out onto the international stage.

One of the greatest casualties of this spiritual weariness combined with urgent, perhaps lethal, economic and political problems was the concept of the

public interest: we had seemingly lost faith in the

reality of a transcendent moral truth that would provide the basis for an all-encompassing public interest.

The Public Interest Defined by Reaction

But, as we have argued, some conception of the public interest will always be present in the

processes of governance, and if people do not choose it

explicitly, it will turn up implicitly - which is what

happened to us. Suddenly we were confronted by a

"Red Menace," and we were assured by the likes of

Senator Joseph McCarthy and Director J. Edgar Hoover

that there were legions of Communists moled away behind every filing cabinet in the government (except for the FBI, of course). Furthermore, every university, every newspaper, every television station, every

publishing house, and every movie studio was staffed

by Svengalian "Pinkos" whose mission was to corrupt

good Americans. Sadly, a wearied people began to give credence to those accusations.

Hindsight tells us that, even though a thermonuclear exchange with the Russians was a reality, we gave too much credence to the self-proclaimed "patriots" of Anti-Communism. Communism became evil incarnate, and the public interest ~ almost by default - became anything that supposedly opposed its

spread. Too many Americans believed that we could entrust the public interest to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and get on with our normal lives. It was a public interest of reaction.

But the situation was much more complex than domestic anti-communism. Too often we hear the uninformed refer to the "bland" and peaceful 1950s ~

the Eisenhower years, years of normalcy, happy materialism, and "I Love Lucy." But it was, in fact, a

very scary decade, filled with wars and rumors of wars. It began with the savagery of the Korean War and the

possibility of an American involvement in Indochina in

support of the French who were losing their colony to the Viet Minh. There was a brief respite around 1955 and early 1956, then in the Fall of 1956 we were hit by the Hungarian Revolution and the seizure of the Suez Canal by the British, French, and Israeli forces. Right on the heels of all that came Sputnik, Castro's victory in Cuba, and the crisis in Berlin that led to the Wall.

Given all of that, the tendency to define the public interest in terms of our opposition to Communist

expansion does not seem quite so irrational.

Obviously, public administration should have been actively involved in articulating the substantive content of the public interest in terms of the newly urgent domestic and international realities, but the fears of the times were compelling enough to cause many people to accept a reactionary public interest.

The Automatism of the Public Interest

As government organizations, at all levels, have become increasingly more sophisticated and have

adopted the principles of "modern organization" (Scott & Hart, 1989; Chandler, 1977), greater amounts of time have had to be given to the care and feeding of the

organization. Along with that increased attention, there has come an implicit belief that, when properly fed and cared for, such organizations will automatically produce good outcomes, including the improvement of the

personnel: after all, "good organizations produce good people." Thus, the conventional wisdom has it that if individuals will give full time, commitment, and attention to achieving organizational success, a

18



managerial variant of the "invisible hand" will

automatically produce outcomes -- from attitudes and behaviors to products and services -- that will define the public interest.

This belief rests upon two unstated

assumptions. First, it is believed that if management theory and practice is informed by humanistic

psychology ~ a psychology of "niceness" ?, then all

individuals using those theories and practices would

automatically become "nice." Second, it is assumed that if organizations serve "good" causes, then the members of the organization will themselves be made good. For

instance, in the mid-1970s, an exceptionally bright MBA student, who had majored in marketing, came by the office to discuss her career. She was adamant that she did not want to put her talents into the service of

something unworthy (dubious limited partnerships) or

trivial (hula-hoops). Therefore, she was going to seek

employment with either the Girl Scouts, the United

Way, or a hospital. In other words, since the ends of the organizations were good, she would automatically be guaranteed that her talents would be employed in a

good cause. In other words, the "goodness" was an

automatic by-product of the organization's mission.

Experience tells us, however, that is not always the case. Honor and integrity are the result of an intentional and voluntary individual choice to be a man or woman of good character. Many poltroons hide behind the facade of noble purpose.

To conclude, the automatism of the public interest is a belief that good outcomes will

automatically emerge from well-designed organizations. In other words, we needn't worry about articulating (and believing in) the public interest: it will be an automatic by-product of the "goodness" of the

organization's humane management procedures and its decent mission. Thus, we only have to intensify our

managerial skills for the system to work. Certainly we don't need to waste valuable time in moral discourse about such a "blue-sky" item as the public interest: that comes automatically from increased organizational effectiveness and efficiency.

Moral Sanitization Through Methodology

The most serious blow to the articulation of the public interest, however, was the defection of the

academics, to whom the task had been traditionally entrusted. This defection came along with our

increasing obsession with "methodology" and was

justified by the possibilities of the abuse of concept of the public interest by self-seeking men and women.

Soon after the end of World War II, a number of noted political scientists and public administration scholars began to aggressively attack the notion that there might be an all-encompassing conception of the

public interest ~ a conception based upon such things as a "natural law" or a common, cross-cultural, and

trans-temporal human nature. In justification, they pointed to the claims of the totalitarian ~ from Hitler and Mussolini to Lenin and Stalin ~ that because they possessed a knowledge of absolute moral truth, they were justified in imposing the most villainous regimes. To counteract such dangerous tendencies, the new

methodologists proposed a moral sanitization of the

public interest through the application of methods untainted by human idiosyncrasies.

Thus, as early as 1951, David Truman ? in

developing a Bentleyan theory of the group basis of

politics (Bentley, 1908) - dismissed the traditional

conceptions of the public interest. He replaced those traditional orientations with a group theory of politics and with the importance of interest-group competition. The public interest, then, was a temporary thing consisting of the victorious compromises among competing interest-groups. This led him to conclude that the public interest as a moral whole was a fantasy. Reality was the aggregation of the various interests of the competing groups: "In developing a group interpretation of politics, therefore, we do not need to account for a totally inclusive [public] interest, because one does not exist" (Truman, 1951, pp. 50-51).

However, once group interest competition was

accepted as the foundation of the public interest, the most important question became: what specific methodology will enable us to ascertain the winners and losers in the interest group battles? Empiricism was an

early contender, and it still has its adherents. More

sophisticated methodologists pushed for the

mathematizing of the various group articulations, with success determined by equation. More recently, significant numbers of public administrators, influenced

by post-modernist thought, have become enamored with the techniques of a "science of multiculturalism," which rests upon moral relativism (for an overview, see Fox and Miller, 1995).

Whatever the methods, however, the important point is that the public interest is "sanitized" by

19



methodology: it will emerge with a Spockian clarity because it will be untainted by human opinion or emotion.

The methodologists rejection of a normatively valid public interest captured the fancy of many academicians, since it relieved them of the burden of

having to "do" moral philosophy, and having to defend

positions by virtue of empirically improvable assertions. In other words, it relieved them of having to risk their

reputations upon their ability to persuade through metaethical arguments

? simply by asserting that if you

can't measure it, it doesn't exist. Thus, there grew a

disciplinary consensus that the whole business of moral discourse as the basis for the public interest was a great waste of time, since the new methodological approaches were so much more tidy and clear. Granted, most

methodologists have honorable intentions and yet the

suspicion still lurks that many are converts because

methodology has become the fashion.

The position of the methodologists was clearly stated by Glendon Schubert who dismissed the traditional approaches to the public interest with a flick of the hand: "I ... argue ... that if the public-interest concept makes no operational sense, notwithstanding the efforts of a generation of capable scholars, then

political scientists might better spend their time

nurturing concepts that offer greater promise of

becoming useful tools in the scientific study of political responsibility" (Schubert, 1960, p. 224, emphasis added). The public interest function (of legitimizing public actions) will become a by-product of the

unrelenting application of scientific methods to public issues. What the methodologists have been saying is that in the area of values, the only way to validate one's assertions is to submit them to the test of science: if they pass, they are acceptable

- not morally true, of

course, but at least morally sanitary.

Fear of the Bad Guys

More recently, the arguments about the validity of an all-encompassing public interest have taken

another, and quite conservative turn. Many public administration scholars reject the notion of an all

encompassing public interest because "bad guys," as

they have in the past, might use the concept for their own nefarious ends. To illustrate, the recent

"Blacksburg Manifesto" ? written by six distinguished scholars in the orbit of the Center for Public

Administration and Policy at Virginia Polytechnic

Institute ~ acknowledges the importance of the primary function of the public interest for public administration.

However, they also note that self-serving and even bad individuals will try to legitimize their noxious ideas and actions as serving the public interest. Thus they conclude: "Any posture of certainty about the public interest is a dubious and dangerous one. Should anyone doubt this he or she needs only to be reminded that

many of those involved in the Watergate affair were certain the public interest was represented in the President's position" (Wamsley, et al, 1987, p. 305).

But that is an unacceptable position, since almost anything praiseworthy can be used by designing men and women for evil or self-serving purposes. For

instance, in recent years, the chief executive of a huge charitable organization, which funds many excellent

programs, misused contributions to create and maintain an ostentatious and luxurious life-style. Thus, the

argument can be made that people should therefore

reject all charitable organizations because some of them have been misused. Obviously, that is an over-reaction.

Or, of more significance, for a century ~ from the Civil

War and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th

Amendments, on down to the 1960s - most southern states enacted despicable Jim Crow laws to keep African-American citizens in a servile condition. Should we therefore reject the concept of law because it was misused by the bad guys?

Obviously, those examples are aberrations, and

they should not sully the value of charities or laws ?

but many public administration scholars, with a nearly obsessive fear of the bad guys, come close to

advocating just such a thing. They caution us against the notion of an all-encompassing conception of the

public interest because it can be abused by those of evil intention. As our grandparents would have said, they've thrown out the baby with the bathwater. The problem is not the public interest but, rather, the abuse of the

public interest by a few. Their warnings should direct our attention to the abusers, but such abuse should not be sufficient reason to abandon one of the most

important characteristics of traditional public administration scholarship.

To conclude, we have arrived at:

PROPOSITION 4: even though contemporary public administration

ignores the public interest, its primary function of approbation of public acts

20



and actions still takes place, but that

approbation is based upon implicit values that have been accepted by default.

A PUBLIC INTEREST BY DEFAULT

Since no organization can perform properly without an underlying set of foundational values, so

public administration cannot perform properly without a conception of the public interest. As with any organization, when the foundation values are not

explicit, a set of implicit values will evolve to provide that essential, normative function.

Thus, a surrogate public interest has, by default, come to predominate. It is a surrogate because a true public interest must be intentionally thought out, articulated, and accepted by a majority of the citizens. The dilemma was well-described by Flathman:

The problems associated with "public interest" are among the crucial

problems of politics. Determining justifiable governmental policy in the face of conflict and diversity is central to the political order; it is a

problem which is never solved in any final sense but which we are

constantly trying to solve. The much discussed difficulties with the concept are difficulties with morals and

politics. We are free to abandon the

concept, but if we do so we will

simply have to wrestle with the

problems under some other heading (Flathman, 1966, p. 13).

His point is that, regardless of the name used, all policy decisions will be decisively affected by the dominant

conception of the public interest ? whether true or

surrogate ~ else government will never be able to

function (see also Cassinelli, 1962).

But common sense tells us that when public decisions are made, they should be made on the basis of a clearly articulated, explicit conception of the public interest, rather than upon the implicit assumptions of a

surrogate public interest. To illustrate, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in the early 1960s, put into

words his dream of the peaceful resolution to our racial

problems in a series of addresses that rank with the finest rhetoric in our history. Yet in contemporary America, those words have been forgotten, forcing us to rely upon formulaic quotas and racial ideologies. Thus, racial disharmony is metastasizing as we struggle with problems that could have been solved thirty years ago.

No small part of the national normative

gridlock comes from our collective failure to treat the ideals of the public interest seriously. Furthermore,

what is happening in civil rights is being duplicated in

everything from downsizing, the dumbing down of

education, the disregard of the environment, and the trivialization of the family. The resolution of problems begins with our ability to articulate, and believe in, the values that are used to make public choices. But we

have allowed a surrogate public interest to dominate the

political agenda of the nation.

We argue that from the early 1960s to the

present ~ and in lieu of a true public interest ~ four

notions have become the foundation of the surrogate public interest: measurement, narcissism, therapy, and cultural relativism.

The Utility of Measurement

It is not necessary to repeat the many arguments concerning the impact of science, and the scientific method, upon the social sciences. From the

inception of the scientific revolution to the present, many scholars have advocated the application of scientific methods to the study of social, economic, and

political problems. The assumption was that this would create a new breed of social "scientists" who would be able to predict the course of human events and, thus, to take pre-emptive corrective action. That dream began with the French philosopher Saint-Simon (1760-1825), who envisioned a pyramidal society, with social scientists at the apex. Such social scientists would be able to predict:

A scientist, my friends, is a man who

predicts. It is because science has the means of prediction that it is useful, and it makes the scientist superior to all other men ... To grasp the cause of the order of events which has

preceded us in the past is of great

21



value since it enables us to predict what will happen in the future

(Markham, 1952, pp. 6, 22; Manuel, 1956; Hart, 1964).

No public administrator today would admit to

believing in such a simplistic formula. However, Saint Simon's vision has evolved into a parallel and

equivalent belief in the efficacy of measurement, rather than in the efficacy of social scientists. As a profession, we have come to believe that it is possible to measure almost all of the truly important aspects of human life, giving us the ability then to predict what people will do ?

and, quite dangerously, what they should do. Thus it is argued that the most important moral dimensions of life are measurable, and those that aren't are irrelevant.

We have come to place our faith in method, unsullied

by the purely human.

To illustrate, note the obsession of most universities with purely numeric evaluations of human abilities and potentials. In spite of evidence to the

contrary, most university administrators still cling fanatically to standardized entrance examinations, from the ACT and the GRE, to the GMAT and the LSAT -

hoping that measurement will sort out the good students so that they will not have to risk personal judgment (Crouse & Trusheim, 1988). However, many teachers in the non-quantitative fields have long known that high gatekeeper scores quite often do not correlate with the students' abilities to think, to create, to make humane

moral judgments, and to understand the great bodies of

non-quantitative literature.

But the problem of an unrealistic belief in the

efficacy of numeric measurement extends beyond university admissions. That overconfidence crops up all over the place: in management, it begins with the often

uttered slogan, "if you can't measure it, you can't

manage it." Therefore, organizations try to put a

number to every evaluation, from individual

performance reviews to the quantification of success

factors in program results, on to the evaluation of

military officers and the belief that, in the classroom, numeric popularity somehow equates with good

teaching (Eberstadt, 1995).

This is not to say that all exams and

evaluations are useless - to the contrary, in fact.

Rather, it is to state that we must not place so much

reliance upon measurability that we begin to measure

the immeasurable. We would do well to remember Aristotle's advice that "the educated person seeks exactness in each area to the extent that the nature of the subject allows; for apparently it is just as mistaken to demand demonstrations from a rhetorician as to

accept [merely] persuasive arguments from a mathematician" (Aristotle, 1985, p. 4).

Nonetheless, the utility of measurement is now a prominent part of the contemporary surrogate public interest.

Narcissism as Utility Maximization

As a nation, we believe our individual human nature is self-interested: the innate desire to minimize

pain and to maximize pleasure. The economists have

glamorized this by using the much more scientific

sounding "utility maximization." Nonetheless, the fact remains that innate self-interestedness is considered a fundamental a priori in contemporary organizational

America. Thus, not only economic theories are constructed upon that assumption, so also are most

contemporary theories of management ?

and,

unfortunately, so are our assumptions about the public interest. Thus, many argue that the public interest is

nothing more than the amalgamation of all of our

individual self-interests: there is no grand, over-riding public interest.

Certainly, there are powerful arguments defending the conception of innate utility maximization. But what is of concern here is the transformation of our

primary obligation as citizens to our society. John Kenneth Galbraith summarized that transformation

succinctly:

The individual serves the [economic] system not by supplying it with

savings and the resulting capital; he serves it far more by consuming its

products. On no other activity, religious, political or moral, is he so

elaborately, skillfully and expensively instructed (Galbraith, 1978, p. 39).

What Galbraith makes clear is that those who accept

utility maximization state that it is our primary patriotic

duty to serve the economic system, and that we do it

best by consumption ~ to the extent of our incomes and

22



then, through credit, beyond. There is nothing sinister nor secretive about this duty

~ in fact, it is considered to be the foundation of human happiness (Collier, 1991).

The problem is that consumption has implicitly become an essential part of the surrogate public interest.

In other words, one of the major obligations of

government is to assist all citizens to increase their rates

of consumption on the premise that increased

consumption means increased happiness. But such an

assumption about the nature of human happiness is based upon a the notion that happiness comes from the narcissism of arrested development (Fine, 1986). This

guarantees that citizens will be constant and unthinking consumers, a trend which was well-analyzed by the late

Christopher Lasch. If the population is kept in perpetual adolescence, where conspicuous consumption and narcissistic satisfaction dominate, then a strange form of

public morality begins to emerge (Lasch, 1979).

To illustrate, an action is moral if it yields satisfactory levels of pleasure, a point made clear by the father of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). In his day, there was a silly, but popular, game called

"push-pin." In 1838, John Stuart Mill wrote that Bentham "says, somewhere in his works, that, 'quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry'" (Harrison, 1983, p. 5). In short, then, the surrogate public interest promotes the ideal of egalitarianism in

consumption ~ an "ignorant omnivorousness" (Norton,

1976, pp. 316, 327).

Thus, both political liberals and conservatives

join hands in assuring their fellow citizens that they serve their nation best through incessant consumption.

Social Therapy as a Civic Obligation

Another highly significant feature of the

contemporary surrogate public interest is the notion that

public institutions and policies are morally legitimized when they provide a "social therapy" for students, employees, or unfortunate victims of whatever. The literature on this subject is both huge and fiercely debated. Recently Charles Sykes provided a useful, if

one-sided, summary (Sykes, 1992, pp. 33-62) of this

phenomenon. However, its most significant explanation is still in Philip Rieff s early book The Triumph of the

Therapeutic (1966).

To simplify a very complex argument, Rieff believes that a healthy culture is one that "releases" rather th?n "controls" individuals, which is an

admirable goal. As he wrote about contemporary society: "What culture has ever attempted to see to it that no ego is hurt?" (Rieff, 1966, p. 27). By the later

1990s, it appeared that many public administration scholars and practitioners (as well as academics,

professional educators, and a host of others) had taken his admonition to heart. But, unfortunately, even the best of intentions go astray, and the attempt to build an

ideologically-correct, social therapy into governmental (as well as educational) policies, programs, and

processes has actually created more injustice (see, for

instance, Bernstein, 1994; Fox-Genovese, 1991). Nonetheless, the belief that the public interest should include a constant attention to social therapy is one of the most obvious aspects of the surrogate public interest.

As a result, the notion of therapy has taken on a quasi-legitimacy, almost as if it redeems all

governmental policies, programs, and processes by its

very presence. We strongly disagree with that premise, but this is not the place to fight that battle. Suffice it to

say, therapy has become a major part of the surrogate public interest. Regardless of their good intentions, its advocates have too often failed to understand the enormous amount of preparation and training that is

required to make therapy successful: just offering a course in self-esteem is insufficient to create self-esteem

among the students. But the advocates of a therapeutic government

~ like middle aged adults who love the idea of running a marathon but are unwilling to train -

the attempt most often ends in failure: psychic tendons can be as easily pulled as the real ones.

Cultural Relativism Rampant

One of the more Orwellian twists in the

surrogate public interest is the advocacy of

"multiculturalism," which refers to the argument that all values are relative - the product of their unique cultures ~ and that there are no absolute values that stem from our common humanity. In other words, all values are moral equivalents and should be treated as

such, in order to promote "diversity." Such diversity is assumed to be beneficial, but that evaluation is most often accepted as true without any real investigation into its actual impact. Suffice it to say that the

proponents of multiculturalism are advocating a cultural

23



variant of the popular phrase, "I'm OK; you're OK." That means that it is an arrogant presupposition for

anyone to argue that some moral values are better than others or that some moral values may be absolute. The end result of such relativism has been the balkanization of America into hostile and hating groups. We are

losing touch with those common values that tied us

together into one nation (Schlesinger, 1992).

As a part of this trend, one of the most

incomprehensible aspects has been the disparagement of the values of the Enlightenment by the politically correct. Ironically, however, those are precisely the

values that have given the correct the freedom to attack the status quo. They are also the values which serve as

the foundation for the rights demanded by the correct.

Rephrasing a cautionary tale from childhood, we are a

people who are foolishly slaughtering the golden goose in order to get a good supply of plastic eggs.

This has led to one of the most tragic and

dangerous trends in contemporary society: the scrapping of the idea that there is an essential body of great works

that constitute the highest legacy of civilization and

from which we learn of the necessary conditions for a

fully human life. In the past, Americans have assumed that it was a primary function of education to transmit to future generations our intellectual and moral heritage.

Now we see formerly great universities, ivied and

prestigious, abandoning both the traditional curriculum and the moral obligation to pass it on. In its place, we now teach subjects that are chic and trendy but are

essentially trivial (Bloom, 1994). Granted, the basic

"canon" of the university curriculum must be expanded, but not at the cost of scrapping all that has gone before.

Somewhere, Sigmund Freud wrote that if one

generation fails to teach the next generation, the third

generation will begin in the caves. We are perilously close to fulfilling Freud's prophecy.

We Are Many Peoples, Not One

We have referred to the balkanization of

America in the previous section, but we need to be

more specific about it because it represents more than

group animosities ~ it represents a revolutionary

redrawing of the American compact. To begin, there

has been a tradition in American thought to praise the

fact that America encourages the flourishing of various

groups and group identities. We called it pluralism. But

along with pluralism was an overriding belief that,

pluralistic as we were, the most important characteristic of the American character was that we were one people, living in one nation.

But diversity is not pluralism. What is afoot in America today is the radical idea that we are not, and should not, be one people. As early as The Federalist

#70, we dealt with the fact of group identities. But the bases of groupness were most often located in economic and functional identities. Thus, activism centered around such things as the economic demands of farmers ? and it didn't much matter if the farmers were of

Scandinavian, German, English, or Scottish origin. They organized around their profession as farmers.

Today, however, group-ness is based upon a

different set of characteristics, such as ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and such. The former groups tended to be inclusive, when it came to such personal identities, while the modern groups have become exclusive. Thus, in the past, as Scottish-Americans we

could join the farmers group. Today, it is literally

impossible for Scottish-Americans to join up with African-Americans.

The political significance of this is enormous

because the demands of these new groups include items ? such as the protection of ethnic identity or the

possibility of same-sex marriages ~ that are virtually

impossible to satisfy in the normal course of

government.

Thus, explicitly or implicitly, the multiculturalists want a revolution. They want to

abandon the fact of "one nation" which is "indivisible" and make their special group identities more important than their national identity. What they want is a

confederation of diverse groups who are not tied

together by a common core of values, but exist as

discrete entities. When cooperative endeavors are

required, emissaries of the different groups,

proportionately represented, will meet together to effect some compromise solution. That constitutes a

fundamental revision of American government.

In summary, nothing is more important to the

contemporary surrogate public interest than what is

loosely termed the "political correctness" (or PC) movement. Its many causes ? such as affirmative

action, ethnic and gender quotas, and the demand for a

24



multilingual nation ~ have created widespread controversy. Nonetheless, the PC movement pushes ahead with its unique agenda which is increasingly balkanizing the American people.

The categories could be continued, but those

listed above should give the reader an idea of what we

perceive as the major ? and too often, contradictory

?

components of the contemporary surrogate public interest. We perceive that surrogate public interest, as

opposed to a true public interest, to be our greatest national problem.

This brings us to

PROPOSITION 5: because of our

failure to articulate the substantive

aspects of the public interest, a

surrogate public interest has risen, by default, and it is causing dissension and alienation among, and the

fragmentation of, the American

public.

A RETURN TO A PUBLIC INTEREST ROOTED IN THE FOUNDING VALUES

PROPOSITION 6: The articulation and promulgation of the values of the

public interest, rooted in the

Founding values and adapted to

contemporary realities, is the single most important issue that confronts

public administration.

To overcome the malaise of a nation rapidly breaking down into groups of distrustful, xenophobic individuals, we must return to a conception of a public interest that is based upon our common humanity

? a

public interest of brotherhood and sisterhood (as those terms were used in the 18th Century) of citizens united

by virtue. That was the vision at the founding of the

Republic, and it was to be the identifying characteristic of the American people.

However, Donald Meyer correctly observes that a "nation, like a person, develops an identity that

may be as seriously threatened as that of an individual"

(Meyer, 1976, p. 167). He argues that this nation, resting upon the presumption of extensive citizen virtue,

must always take great care to insure that citizens are

carefully instructed in ~ and constantly refreshed by ~

the necessary conditions of virtue. If we fail in that

task, then we risk the loss of the moral identity of our

nation, which is precisely what is happening to us

today.

An awareness of our plight returns us to a

political reality, long recognized in political philosophy. As Machiavelli described it: "... it is necessary to

provide against this [dissolution], by bringing the

government back to its first principles" (Machiavelli, 1950, p. 400). In returning to our first principles, we

will discover that the Founders believed that our

collective strength began in individual civic virtue based

upon the great civic obligation to become men and women of great good character. The key to our national

identity lies in what we conceived ourselves to be at the outset.

In his fine study of pluralism (which is not

multiculturalism), Henry Kariel argues that the first

obligation of the political community was the education of all citizens in civic virtue:

To ... make constitutionalism

operative and durable ? the education of leadership must be conceived as not merely private business. The formation of character, in the best constitutional order, must be a public concern (Kariel, 1961, p. 245).

This means that a conscious, continuous effort must be made by the state to educate all citizens in the nature of civic virtue and then to persuade them to make that virtue the center of their personal character. Out of the virtuous community will come virtuous leaders.

This has a very particular meaning for public administrators, for no small part of their jobs will be to rise above particular interests in order to serve the

public interest. The need is for public servants who can "do" moral philosophy: who can, through unending study and moral discourse, constantly articulate that

general public interest. Thus, "Ultimately, we must make government service attractive to those

intellectually able and temperamentally inclined to move beyond the lowest common denominator of interests" (Kariel, 1961, p. 283).

25



In the article which follows this one in a later edition of Administrative Theory and Praxis, we will

present a civic humanist interpretation of the public interest. We believe that this was the intent of the

Founders and that civic humanism is the best means we have to solve our contemporary problems as a free and honorable people.

NOTES

1 At this point, we offer a caveat. In this article, we will use the term "the public interest," since it has become the conventional usage. However, the word "interest" suggests Utilitarian assumptions which we

reject. There are older usages, from "the commonweal" and "the common good" on to "the public good"

? any

of which would be more satisfactory than "the public interest." But the latter term is so commonplace and familiar that to unseat it would cause confusions we are not prepared to handle in this article. However, in the next article defining the term, we will deal with the

problem of the most appropriate phraseology. Suffice it to say here that our preference would be "the public good," but, unfortunately, that term now has a very

specific meaning in economics, especially public choice economics.

2 Instead of "the Founding values," Rohr uses the term

"regime values," but they refer to the same thing. He concludes his first book with a reference to a previous chapter, wherein he discussed the substance of the

regime values, emphasizing the indivudual rights therein. But he acknowledges that does not cover the field: "Thus, according to the Declaration of

Independence, the very purpose of government is to secure indivudual rights. This principle is the taproot of the American poltical cutlure ... [However, the

emphasis upon indivudual rights] tells only part of the

story. [It] is told at the expense of the republican tradition which emphasizes community and civic virtue rather than individualism and individual rights" (Rohr, 1989, p. 285; see also Rohr, 1986).

3 James Q. Wilson's essay "Liberalism, Modernism, and the Good Life."

REFERENCES

Aristotle. (1985). Nicomachean Ethics. Terence Irwin

(Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Bailyn, Bernard. (1992). The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (2nd edition). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Barnard, Chester I. (1938). The Functions of the Execu

tive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bentley, Arthur F. (1908). The Process of Government.

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Richard. (1994). Dictatorship of Virtue:

Multiculturalism and the Battle for America 's

Future. New York, NY: Knopf. Bloom, Harold. (1994). The Western Canon: The Books

and School of the Ages. New York, NY:

Harcourt Brace.

Brookhiser, Richard. (1996). Founding Father: Redis

covering George Washington. New York, NY:

The Free Press.

Cassinelli, C.W. (1962). The public interest in political ethics. In Friedrich, Carl J. (Ed.), The Public Interest. Nomos V; New York, NY: Atherton Press.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. (1977). The Visible Hand: The

Managerial Revolution in American Business.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Collier, James Lincoln. (1991). The Rise of Selfishness in America. New York, NY: Oxford

University Press.

Crouse, James, & Trusheim, Dale. (1988). The Case

Against the SAT. Chicago, IL: University of

Chicago Press.

Eberstadt, Nicholas. (1995). The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule. Washington, DC: The AEI Press.

Fehrenbach, T.R. (1963). This Kind of War: The

Classic Korean War History. Washington, DC:

Brassey's.

26



Fehrenbacher, Don E. (Ed.). (1989). Abraham Lincoln:

Speeches and Writings, 1832-1858 (volume I). New York, NY: Library of America.

Fine, Reuben. (1986). Narcissism, The Self, and Society. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Flathman, Richard E. (1966). The Public Interest. New

York, NY: John Wiley. Fox, Charles, & Miller, Hugh T. (1995). Postmodern

Public Administration. Thousand Oaks, CA:

Sage.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. (1991). Feminism Without Illusions. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. (1978). The New Industrial State (3rd edition). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Gilbert, Martin. (1994). The First World War. New

York, NY: Henry Holt.

Harrison, Ross. (1983). Bentham. London: Routledge& Kegan Paul.

Hart, David Kirkwood. (1964, September). Saint-Simon and the role of the elite. Western Political

Quarterly, 17, 423-431.

Kariel, Henry S. (1961). The Decline of American Pluralism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Koch, Adrienne. (1943). The Philosophy of Thomas

Jefferson. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.

Lasch, Christopher. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York, NY: Norton.

Lerner, Max. (1957). America As A Civilization. New

York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. (1950). The Discourses, Third

Book, Chapter 1, To insure a long existence to

religious sects or republics, it is necessary frequently to bring them back to their original principles. In Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses. New York, NY: The

Modern Library. Manuel, Frank E. (1956). The New World of Henri

Saint-Simon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Markham, F.M. (Ed./Trans.). (1952.) Henri Comte de Saint-Simon: Selected Writings. Oxford: Blackwell.

Meyer, Donald H. (1976). The Democratic Enlighten ment. New York, NY: Putnam's.

Norton, David L. (1976). Personal Destinies: A Philos

ophy of Ethical Individualism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Perrett, Geoffrey. (1993). Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II. New York, NY: Random House.

_. (1991). There's A War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II. New York, NY: Random House.

Richard, Carl J. (1994). The Founders and the Classics:

Greece, Rome, and the American

Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Rieff, Philip. (1966). The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Rohr, John A. (1989). Ethics for Bureaucrats (2nd edition). New York, NY: Marcel Dekker.

_. (1986). To Run A Constitution: The Legitimacy of the Administrative State. Lawrence, KS:

University Press of Kansas.

Schubert, Glendon. (1960). The Public Interest: A

Critique of the Theory of A Political Concept. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

Schlesinger, Arthur M, Jr. (1992). The Disuniting of America. New York, NY: Norton.

Scott, William G. & Hart, David Kirkwood. (1989).

Organizational Values in America. New

Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Shannon, David A. (Ed.). (1960). The Great De

pression. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Strauss, Leo. (1962). Epilogue. In Herbert J. Storing (Ed.), Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics. New York, NY: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston.

Sykes, Charles J. (1992). A Nation of Victims: The

Decay of American Character. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.

Truman, David B. (1951). The Governmental Process. New York, NY: Knopf.

Waldo, Dwight. (1948, 1984). The Administrative State

(2nd edition). New York, NY: Holmes & Meier.

Wamsley, Gary L., Goodsell, Charles T., Rohr, John

A., Stivers, Camilla M., White, Orion F., &

Wolf, James F. (1987). The public administration and the governance process: Refocusing the American dialogue. In Chandler (Ed.), A Centennial History of the American Administrative State. New York, NY: The Free Press, pp. 294-317.

27



Warren, Mercy Otis, Mrs. (1805; 1988). History of the

Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution ?

interspersed with

Biographical, Political and Moral Observations. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics.

Weldon, T.D. (1953). The Vocabulary of Politics.

Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Wilson, James Q. (1995). Liberalism, modernism, and

the good life. In Mary Ann Glendon and David Blankenborn (Eds.), Seedbeds of Virtue. New York, NY: Madison Books.

Wilson, Woodrow. (1887, June). The study of public administration.Po/zY/ctf/ Science Quarterly, 2, 197-222.

Wood, Gordon S. (1991). The Radicalism of the Amer ican Revolution. New York, NY: Knopf.

_. (1969). The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

David Kirkwood Hart is the BYU Alumni Professor in the Institute of Public Management, Marriott School of

Management, Brigham Young University. His interests are in the moral foundations of leadership, public and business

ethics, and organizational theory. He is the author of numerous articles and a few books in these areas. He is a

graduate of Claremont Graduate School.

N. Dale Wright is professor of public management at Brigham Young University. His primary research interests are in organization theory and values. He was the editor of Papers on the Ethics of Administration (Brigham Young

University Press, 1988) and the co-editor with Terry L. Cooper, of Exemplary Public Administrators: Character and

Leadership in Government. He has written numerous articles in these areas. He is a graduate of the University of

Southern California.

28

