Public Administration as a Menetype B: Re-discovering Trichotomies

Abstract

The call to arms and claims for pre-eminence of The Public Administration is argued in the so-called Blacksburg Manifesto (Wamsley et al., 1990: 43; 47—italics in original).

The US governance system is constitutionally founded on the trinity of governance menetypes encapsulated within Montesquieu’s (1952/1748) trichotomous doctrine of the separation of powers; namely, the executive, judicial and legislative powers. There would seem to be some validity and integrity in pursuing an analysis of constitutional governance within the same cognitive framework and logic upon which it was founded.

The US constitutional definition of the separation of the three powers is interpreted in terms of its genesis as the trinity of cognitive menetypes. Such analysis makes The Public Administration clearly a second-order participant in the governance authority of the nation—there is a first-grade contest of political power and then there is the second-grade curtain raiser in which The Public Administration plays.

There has been much debate and equivocation over many years about the existence and nature of a politics/administration dichotomy, but clarifying the inter-relationship has proved to be intractable (Waldo, 1984b: 219ff). This issue can be resolved only by moving outside the paradigm that has informed the study of public administration and governance in the United States since Wilson’s (1966/1887) first big step in the modern phase of the discipline. There is no dichotomy—rather, it is a trichotomy. The politics/administration dichotomy should be really re-thought of as the politics/administration/entrepreneurship trichotomy.