A Philosophy of Government

This blog is aimed at creating interest and discussion in a field of philosophy that doesn’t really exist, the philosophy of public policy and public administration. It is a bit bold to announce a new field of study within philosophy. After, all, if the discipline has gotten by without a careful study of the workings of government and public administration for 2,500 years, how pressing can the need be?

One response proceeds by noting that new fields of philosophy come along fairly often. One day there is no such thing as the philosophy of technology, environment, or business, and the next thing we know there are journals and dedicated chairs in the field. Philosophy is not timeless; rather, philosophers focus on issues that seem important in their own times. When the world changes, philosophy does as well.

So what changes have occurred within the hardware of the political order itself that would create a need for a philosophy of public administration? Certainly the bureaucratic state has changed greatly in the past century, and plays a much larger role in everyday life. In a sense the subject matter simply didn’t exist at all in the Greek world of Plato and Aristotle. There was no “public administration” in the polis. (The same cannot be said of the Roman Empire, where there were clear divisions of bureaucratic responsibility and accountability (link), but I am not aware of any philosophers who studied the functions and dysfunctions of Roman administration.) So the fact of a deeply ramified and bureaucratized state is a fairly modern phenomenon that it makes sense for philosophers to attempt to address.

Another important change that has occurred in the past fifty years is the emergence of a much more well-defined area of sociological research aimed at understanding the workings of organizations better than we have in the past. Organizational sociology and organizational studies have progressed rapidly since the 1960s, and these new areas of social-science research provide new theories and questions on the basis of which to try to understand the workings of governments and their agencies.

The emergence of a more insightful field of organizational studies over the past fifty years is suggestive for philosophy. The philosophy of public policy and administration should have a component of the methods and problems of the philosophy of science; the philosophy of public administration is concerned with the theories we have about public administration, even as it is concerned with the substantive nature of government action and its constituents.

Another large area of potential research is in the domain of ethics and normative philosophy. Are there specific kinds of ethical issues and dilemmas that arise in the creation and administration of public policy? This dimension of philosophical interest would bring the philosophy of public policy into a degree of alignment with business ethics and the philosophy of technology.

I think of this new field in analogy with several other fields that already have standing in the architecture of philosophy. For example, there is an analogy with the philosophy of action. Philosophers in the philosophy of action ask questions about the rationality and purposiveness of the individual, the materiality of the acting individual, the connections that exist between mental reasoning and bodily skill and habit, and other intriguing questions about how humans and other organisms can be said to “act”. These questions are similar in form to the questions that create my own interest in government: how does an ensemble of separate organizations of government come to function in some limited way as a “collective actor”? How are the individual actors within government brought into some degree of coordination and collaboration in pursuit of common purposes? What is the substrate underlying action in the two realms (neurophysiology and organizational functioning)?

Here is another suggestive analogy — that between study of the workings of government organizations and study of the evolution of species. In both cases there is a focus on a real set of phenomena to be found in the world, and an interest in uncovering some of the problems these phenomena pose for our understanding. And there is the question of how to distinguish between the empirical study of the phenomenon (biology, organizational theory) and the philosophical study of some of the same puzzles and questions. This analogy is helpful as well because it sheds some light on how philosophers and empirical scientists can work together to address important intellectual challenges, whether in biology or in sociology.

A good start for thinking about the philosophy of public policy is to ask, how does government work? What are the constituent processes of government through which governments “think” and “act”? What kinds of dysfunctions and surprises are embedded in the processes that appear to constitute the workings of government? And what hidden assumptions do we make when we think about the workings of government?

Here is a preliminary list of interesting questions:

• How is authority conveyed through the multiple levels and organizations of government?
• How are principal-agent problems solved within governments?
• How can governments handle problems of conflict of interest in its agents?
• How can governments address the issues raised by conflicting assumptions and priorities driving the actions of a range of sub-units of government?
• How are purposes and goals embodied in agencies and departments?
• Do agencies serve “functions”?
• How can governments achieve a degree of unity of purpose and action?
• And what makes these questions philosophical rather than sociological?

These questions focus primarily on the “social ontology” of government — the constituents of governments as concrete human institutions and the logic of interaction that these constituents produce.

I am coming to realize that the study of these kinds of problems is not completely unknown within the traditions of philosophy. Future posts will excavate some of the thinking about governments as concrete human institutions by philosophers such as Mill, Tocqueville, and Hegel.