'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 that 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 the classical political philosophy. Governing has been reduced to governancing, relying on the presupposition that good means automatically lead 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 XVII° century in England, to the foundation of the United States and the republican tradition stemming from the French Revolution. This paper 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.