“The Public Interest” in Administrative Decision-Making: Theorem, Theosophy, or Theory?

Abstract

Textbooks in public administration customarily conclude with a section on administrative responsibility. The charitable inference is that this location betokens the saving of the best till last, rather than the appendage of an afterthought. Herbert Kaufman might explain it as the preoccupation of the past generation of political scientists with the legitimation of the efficient exercise of administrative power to subserve the goals of the social state, with a consequent sublimation of the emerging problem of the control of large, professionalized bureaucracies. However that may be, it does seem clear that, with the exception of administrative decisions which adversely affect “civil liberties,” most political scientists have been content to let lawyers and defenders of the free enterprise system worry about the restraint of administrative action.

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