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194 W. J. M. Mackenzie
administration and other forms of administration, and it can seriously be
maintained that there exists a separate discipline, that of ‘administrative sci-
ence’. Yet one of the main themes of politics now, East and West, is that of the
management and control of large organizations and of their position in relation
to plans made in the public interest. Indeed, it might be possible to frame the
study of highly developed industrial societies in terms of decision-making in
large organizations37 rather than in terms of traditional theories of politics.
That question is at present unresolved, and it has seemed best to base the
organization of this chapter primarily on categories based on old political tra-
ditions. But it is appropriate to treat separately, and emphatically, the problems
of administrative organization.
I. Diverse traditions
Public administration could once have been discussed in relatively simple terms
as the discharge of the executive functions of the state; excluding the actual
conduct of war and foreign policy, and other functions of decision reserved to
‘majesty’, but including the preparation of material for policy decisions, the
maintenance of armed forces fit to fight, and in general good husbandry of the
State’s resources. In the eighteenth century Kameralwissenschafi, the training
of the king’s councillors, broadened the customary legal curriculum to include
the rudiments of what would now be called political economy and political
science. Indeed, this was one seed-bed of the modern social sciences.
To this were added in the nineteenth century great national schools of science
and technology, and the development of the French, German and Austrian sys-
tems of administrative law. The structure was dignified and imposing, some-
times intellectually distinguished, and it was firmly rooted in social structure.
It is not surprising that in the administration of the European State Max Weber38
perceived the structure of bureaucracy as a specific form of society.
But his framework could not then be stretched to cover the cases of the
United States of America and the British dominions of settlement, in which
administration was fragmented, pluralistic, and subject to the vagaries of
electoral politics. England was in an intermediate state: it possessed a great
imperial bureaucracy in India, but at home administrative rationalization
never quite had the upper hand over pluralism and politics.
Movements for administrative reform began in the United States of America
in the 1880s, proclaiming a debt to English experience; and similar efforts
were made in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But these reforms were
concerned with financial honesty and with office management, not with the
rBle of the administrator as ‘grand commis’ or proconsul.
The result was that if one looked at the academic literature of public adrninis-
tration in the 1930s one found that it assumed quite a different character in
the ‘continental’ and the ‘oceanic’ countries. In both, it naturally included a
great deal of tedious but necessary description of institutions and procedures.
In continental countries the subject was given an intellectual structure by the
developed ‘normative science’ of administrative law, which indicated with
precision and subtlety how points of administrative law could be brought into