Sunday 11 September 2011

Calling Woodrow Wilson, the father of Public Administration is doing injustice to equally or even more eminent contributions made prior to him.


The concept of public administration as an activity is very novel. Until the birth of nation-state the rollers principel mainly emphasised on the morals. But the nation-states required a professional body of people to run the government properly. They have to ensure the stability through the law, security with military and a measure of equity through taxation. For such professional rule it required civil servants. In 18th century, Frederick William I of Prussia creates professorates called Cameralists who are now called as Bureaucrats. It was ettiquational path for the civil servants of Royal Chamber. The name Cameralism is a German science of administration which is the predecessor of public administration.

It is the great professor of public administration from Germany Lorentz Von Stein (1855) considered as father of public administration in many parts of the world. It was he, who taught us that ‘public administration depends on many other disciplines such as sociology, political science, administrative law, finance.’ He is the one to depict ‘interlink between the theory and practice, to name public administration as science because it is generated, evaluated according to the scientific methods.

In USA, Woodrow Wilson is considered as ‘father of public administration.’ He wrote in his article ‘the study of administration (1887) as ‘it is the objective of administration study to discover what government can do properly and successfully in the first phase and then deal with ‘how’ factor ie how can it implement those theoretical explanation with at most efficiency and economically too. Through his article, he stimulated interest in and stressed the need for a scientific study of administration. Therefore, it is one of the reasons to call him as father of public administration. Moreover, English being mostly widely spoke, comprehended language and anything that is put efficiently in English is going to be famous as it is globally acceptable he became famous. So in most of the places he is considered as ‘father of public administration’ though several intellectuals have contributed o this evolution prior to him in which we can also place ancient most Kautilya, Plato, Machiavelli too.

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