Deja Vu: French Antecedents of American Public Administration

Abstract

The birth of public administration is well established in American academic folklore. Many scholars agree that public administration for the most part an American invention, indigenous, and sui generis. ' Many accept that the self-aware study of the field began with Woodrow Wilson's 1887 article.2 A somewhat smaller group would argue that academic training for government service was similarly created at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University in 1924. On reflection, such boundaries stretch credibility. They suggest that in a world that has been subjected to governmental administration for millenia, most of what has been written about the subject was printed in this language, was devised in this country, and is almost exclusively from this century. If that were a correct summation of our species' curiosity, it would be unsettling. This article adds to studies by Dwight Waldo and others which show that that is not the case. More specifically, virtually every significant concept that existed in American public administration literature by 1937 (half the history of the field since Wilson's essay) had already been published in France by 1859. Most had been published by 1812. However, the early French literature has virtually disappeared, and its demise offers some clues as to the limited role that public administration can play in assuring its own survival. Its rediscovery also provides some interesting data on the structural nature of bureaucracy. The first part of this article presents a brief introduction to nineteenth-century French public administration literature. To aid in the comparison, that literature is described using many of the same concepts that were critical in the formation of American public administration. The degree of duplication and divergence between the two traditions is noted. The next section speculates why the French literature disappeared, and what that disappearance suggests as future directions for the field in the United States.