Special Issue: Citizenship and Public Administration || The Public in Practice and Theory

The Public in Practice and TheoryAuthor(s): David MathewsSource: Public Administration Review, Vol. 44, Special Issue: Citizenship and PublicAdministration (Mar., 1984), pp. 120-125Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Society for Public AdministrationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/975551 .

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120 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW

a fine sense of and strict allegiance to what is due or right.... 34. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 353-354. 35. See David K. Hart, "The Honorable Bureaucrat in a Philistine

Regime," Administration and Society 15 (May 1983), pp. 43-48. 36. Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 363. 37. See Rawls, ibid., chapter 6, "Duty and Obligation," and his dis-

cussion of "civil disobedience" and "conscientious refusal." Unfortunately, there is virtually no discussion about the obligations of public administrators in such situations.

38. Perhaps the most ennobling (but overlooked) example was the conduct of the Danish bureaucracy toward the Jews when the Nazis tried to send them to the camps. See Aage Bertelsen, Oc- tober '43, M. Lindholm and W. Agtby, trans. (New York: Put- nam, 1954) and Harold Flender, Rescue in Denmark (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).

39. Too many misinterpret Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) because they have not understood The Theory of Moral Senti- ments (1759). See A. L. Macfie, "Adam Smith's Moral Senti-

ments as Foundation for His Wealth of Nations," in A. L. Mac- fie, ed., The Individual in Society (London: George Allen & Un- win, 1967), pp. 59-81.

40. John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty," in Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (New York: Everyman's Library, Dutton, 1950), p. 178.

41. "On the one hand, the love of mankind shows itself in advancing the common good in ways that go well beyond our natural duties and obligations. This morality is not one for ordinary persons, and its peculiar virtue are those of benevolence, a heightened sensitivity to the feelings and wants of others, and a proper humility and unconcern with self." Rawls, Theory of Justice, pp. 478-479. These are, it seems to me, prized qualities for the honorable bureaucrat.

42. Norton, Personal Destinies, p. 320n. 43. Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 14. 44. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 387.

The Public in Practice and Theory* David Mathews, Charles F. Kettering Foundation

The first part of this essay consists of reflections on the practice of public administration at the federal level. It is, admittedly, personal and subjective. I deal with government as it operates in relation to the public (the citizenry). The second section is philosophic and obtuse- ly abstract. It may seem full of semantic antics and fran- tic pedantics. In that section I deal with "public" not as a practice, but as an idea.

The objective of both is to get at the root causes of some of our current difficulties. What happens to governing when the public is not available as a matter of practice? That is the first question. What happens to governing (and all common endeavors) when the public is not available as an idea? That is the second question.

In all, this essay reports on "wrestling" with the idea of "public." "Wrestling with" is an inelegant but accurate description of the paper's tenor. That is to say, the report is not complete. It does not end with a flour- ish. There is no grand conclusion. It simply stops. It is progress to date. Most of all, this paper is an invitation. It is for those who are wrestling with similar problems. It suggests that we talk more to each other about what we are doing and what we have learned.

The Public as Seen from Government

I did not enter the federal government with any strong ideological bent or preconceptions about what I would

*Adapted from a lecture for the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, June 30, 1983, and printed with their permission.

find. My values were basically democratic. I do admit to having come from a populist political tradition, but I do not think the populist tradition is hereditary-there is no such thing as a populist gene. I am sure I had my biases; I did say some intemperate things about the in- herent unmanageability of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. But beyond that, I was open to learn from what I saw.

The way government operated in relation to the people and to democratic precepts was disquieting. It was not that bureaucrats were "bad" people whose values differ from ours. It was not that the government was in the hands of bunglers. The problem went deeper. It had to do with what happened to the public in public administration. The public was, for the most part, unavailable.

For some officials and bureaucrats, the public was unavailable because it was an abstraction. The abstraction was to be honored in principle, to be recognized rhetorically, but in practice, the real public was not essential in the operation of government. The view was that ours was a representative democracy; therefore it was not necessary to deal with the public directly in ways other than through elections.

For those who believed that the public was essential in the governing and not restricted to voting, there were other obstacles that made the public still unavailable. In the view of these officials, the public was "unreach- able," that is, there seemed no efficient way to get at the whole of the public. All you could do was to get in touch with part of the public-then only at great expense. And letting in part of the public-some special interest within the public-was thought worse than doing nothing at all.

MARCH 1984



CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES 121

Others found the public unavailable because it was not understandable. "Why talk to the public?" "You can hear anything you want." The bureaucrats making those statements did not mean to be derogatory, only candid. The public appeared as a conglomeration of factions with no common language and no common purposes-beyond those in the broadest of platitudes. The public spoke in a myriad of languages about a myriad of objectives, confused and conflicting. The public was unintelligible.

Others found the public unavailable because they were convinced that the public was uninformed. The general public simply did not, in fact could not, know enough to comprehend the issues government had to address. The detailed, often technical, knowledge that was necessary for government's decisions was considered more than you could reasonably expect even an educated public to master. In the Jefferson Lectures two years ago, Gerald Holton made this problem clear, even for the most ardent advocates of popular sovereignty, when he noted that nearly half of all policy decisions are now scientific and technical in nature.I That is a very important observation for those who are mindful that this is still a democracy in which everyone is to par- ticipate. Scientific and technical matters, by their very nature, are the province of a few, while a democratic government is the province of the many. The dilemma is obvious and acute.

It also has to be said that new governmental processes (i.e., those instituted in the late 19th century) often work against the public, regardless of the point of view of the bureaucrat-and in spite of laws requiring public participation. Henry Steele Commager2 has well described the blurring of the distinctions between the exec- utive, legislative, and judicial functions that led to the new practices.

Regulatory or rule-making activities are good exam- ples. Regulations are ostensibly only administrative actions. In fact they are also legislative and judicial.

The problem is that regulation as legislation does not conform to our standards for democratic legislative processes. Its agents are not elected, and its debates occur largely in administrative offices. The devices for involving the public are crude. A notice, which nobody reads, appears in the Federal Register. Individuals may comment on the proposed regulation by writing letters, but these letters are received by the agency, reduced to ciphers, and entered in the appropriate column. And where are these figures reported? In the Federal Register.

And as for adjudication, regulations certainly have the force of law. You may be found guilty of not con- forming to a particular regulation and sentenced accordingly. The difficulty is that "innocent unless proven guilty" is not the canon for regulation as it is for adjudication. It is superseded by an administrataive canon where the burden of proof is on you, not the agency. The net result of these practices is not only to raise serious questions about democratic values, but also to impede public access to government.

MARCH 1984

The Question of Public Competence and Civic Literacy

I do not take any of these reservations about public participation lightly. But when I left government service, I was drawn to the issue of the public's competence and to the imperatives of civic literacy. In the last five years, I have found the company of others concerned about the public's knowing and participating in our kind of bureaucratic, professional, technical, scientific democracy. That concern led to the establishment of the National Consortium for Public Policy Education as an informal council for the discussion of public policy education. Out of those discussions came a new organization, the Domestic Policy Association (DPA).3 (I must apologize for the name, because it inaccurately im- plies a disinterest in foreign policy. The name's only virtue was to suggest that the DPA was an organization somewhat like the more recognizable Foreign Policy Association.)

No one believes that the country needs more forums or conferences. The purpose of the Domestic Policy Association is not to promote more meetings or to dispense more information on given issues; it is rather to increase the ability of people to see the whole of things and their interrelationships. The objective is to help the country find common ground by devising the kinds of forums where individual interests can come together into shared interests.

For those reasons, the model of public learning that the Domestic Policy Association is using is different. One of the partners in the association and one of America's best public philosophers, Daniel Yankelo- vich, insists that the present model of public learning is terribly flawed.4 We proceed, he says, on the assump- tion that if 22 minutes of news will not do it, then maybe 44 will. Our approach to public learning is to dispense facts. The problem, he contends, is that facts do not automatically turn themselves into meaning. Yankelo- vich argues that instant reaction to events or even facts is not half so valid as the thoughtful process of reflec- tion and conversation ("digestion," he would say) that has to go on to turn a multitude of unrelated bits of information into public wisdom. The Domestic Policy Association, therefore, is about perfecting new models of public learning-aiding "digestion," if you will.

The method that the association is using for its national issues forums is very simple. There are millions of "stations" (institutions) that "produce" (convene) public conferences. I would guess that the number of people who attend public issues forums at this university number in the tens of thousands. There are other public and private universities, community colleges, and libraries and museums, and a variety of community organizations that are all convening institutions for public forums. There is not, however, any network that links the programs of these producing stations or convening institutions together.

Happily, there is no regimentation on what is to be discussed in the country. But if there were a limited




number of problems discussed in common by a representative number of all of these hundreds of convening institutions, two things would happen that are not hap- pening now. First, we could accelerate the development of new methods or models of public learning. Second, we could build stronger ties between the public forums and the policy community. It is difficult for a policy maker to read the public if policy conferences occur in an entirely random fashion. It is next to impossible for the policy community to do anything about this gap if no one is building networks of public forums on common topics. I The Domestic Policy Association is proceeding, in this its pilot year, with three common topics that will be discussed in some 45 different communities across the country. A new kind of guide to interpreting issue discussions has been prepared by the Public Agenda Foun- dation. And the policy community will assemble at the end of those conferences to listen. They will meet the DPA participants at the Ford Library at the University of Michigan for a capstone conference to be presided over by former Presidents Ford and Carter.

The Domestic Policy Association has now been at work for over a year getting ready for this program. A number of educational institutions, community organizations, foundations, and governmental bodies have been willing to collaborate to create the DPA.

Our problem, quite frankly, has been with the con- cepts we use. Those interested in public policy education and civic literacy, in citizenship education, in citizenship participation, have often met with reactions that range somewhere between a polite yawn and genuine puzzle- met. It is difficult to develop programs in public policy education when the term "public" is one of non- meaning. So I have been revisiting the uses (or disuses) of "public" as an idea.

Wrestling with the "Public" as an Idea

Public policy education can be no more important than the public is. Education for public ends can be no more instructive than public as an idea allows. And the policy options available to use can be no richer than our understanding of the nature and function of "public." Those are the reasons I would trouble you with the fol- lowing disquisition on what "public" means-or can mean.

The public may be unavailable in ideas in a fashion roughly analogous to the way it is unavailable in governmental practice. The obstacles to its availability are:

* "Public" is too ambiguous a term to be useful. A best, it suggests the masses, the vulgar, the ordinary.

* "Public" is not consonant with our cherished indi- vidualism; it seems anti-private and has the pinkish tint of collectivism.

* "Public," as in "the public good," is a hopelessly romantic concept of uniformity and consensus that is incompatible with our pluralistic pragmatism.

* "Public" is a synonym for "politics" or "govern-

ment" and hence not available as an independent idea.

"Public," as one would judge from the way we use it, is a term of very ambiguous meanings. "Public" means a restroom that is rather dirty. "Public" means trans- portation used by those too poor to own a car. "Public" is also a school. But is "public," as in trans- portation, the same "public" as in school? No, most would say, not because of a clear notion of what "public" means, but because of a habit of hearing it used to describe life at its lowest common denominator. "Public" has become the most public of terms-open to almost any definition.

Understanding the public poses difficult conceptual problems. The first is to understand public in relation to private or individual, on the one hand, and common or collective, on the other. Is thinking about public a danger to our individuality? Is it just one step away from an insidious collectivism? Second, it is imperative to look at "public" in comparison with "political" or "governmental." Can we use the one term interchange- ably for the other two? What is the public's relationship to all of the instruments of the polity, the state itself, the processes and institutions of politics, and the government?

In The Company of Strangers, Parker J. Palmer argues that "public" is not legitimately a synonym for either political processes or the government itself. "Public" is, he argues, pregovernmental, even pre- political.5

In my own work, I found it useful to begin with the classical roots of "public."6 There are two. The word "public" is rooted in pubes, the term for maturity, im- plying the ability to understand the consequences of individual actions on others, the ability to see beyond our- selves. The other origin of the word "public" is in the Greek word for "common" which itself derives from the expression for "caring with." It is a useful reminder that there is an indispensable emotional connotation to public; it is what we recall in the phrase "public spirit."

Public life is well-defined as life lived in recognition of the consequences of, and potential in, our relations with others, both direct and indirect, over extended time. But the public is not simply a thing; it is a capacity. Perhaps it is even useful to think of public as if it were a verb so that we could talk about the ability "to public. "

With that clue in hand- "public" as capacity, "public" as maturity-we can proceed to answer the second question: are "public" and "private" antitheti- cal? I think not. The public is not the antithesis of private; it is more its corollary. Richard Sennett's sense of public and private as alternate, but not contradic- tory, modes of expression is useful.7 The Greeks had two words for private. One word described an individual who was able to understand only his or her own perspective. The Greek word for that kind of private person has become our word "idiot." The other term for private, though, is not at all negative, quite the con- trary. The second word derives from the Greek oikos

MARCH 1984




for family or household. There is nothing wrong in attending to one's own household, nor does it preclude attending to public matters. To think of "public" and "private" as antagonistic is to fail to understand the necessary interrelationship between the two. Pericles, you may recall, said that the Greeks properly had both private (household) and public duties.8 "Public" and "private" are more corollaries than antitheses.

But what about "public" and "common"? At first, I was not inclined to report that "public" had a Greek root in the word koinon, "common." Concentrating on the Latin, I could have made my case much stronger. But "common" and "mature" states have similarities. Both are predicated on an appreciation for, or a recognition of, the importance of relationships. Recall that koinon derives from kom-ois, meaning to "care with." What an important leap of mind and spirit it was when people could see in looking at others, not just those in their family or kinship group, a bond, a relationship. That recognition is the basis for the idea of common as it is at the root of public.

The idea of "common," though admittedly on the same continuum as "collective," is a very different idea indeed. Parker points out in his book that when a government imposes collectivism on a state, it not only destroys private life, it destroys public life as well. "Common" has no meaning for the collective mental- ity. It is simply not necessary because the task of dis- tinguishing between what is private and individual, between what is one's own and what is somebody else's, is not necessary.

The notion that the public is "public good," a single, uniform definition that we all agree to, is subject to the same kind of criticism as is the idea that "public" and "collective" are synonymous. Appreciating the range of consequences and potential in relationships, in a hetero- geneous society of individuals all with their idiosyncra- sies, will not result in monolithic definitions of what is good.9 At the other extreme, the pluralism of our society does not impose on us an insipid relativism nor the conclusion that the public good is simply the mean of self-interests.

Finally, there is the problem of the relationship between public and political and governmental. Is the public the same as the polity? Going back to an earlier reference to public, as in public schools, many would say that a public school is a school supported by government funds. In fact, a United States senator said to me not long ago, "The public schools are not really the 'public's' schools; they are the government's schools." The most consistent use of "public" today is as a synonym for government or political. What is a "public" official? Most would say that a public official is one who spends his or her life in politics or in an elected office in government. But is that easy substitu- tion of terms justified?

There is probably no better place to start than with Dewey's excellent The Public and Its Problems.10 Dewey understood the public well; he understood it as the capacity to understand relationships. But it is common in the literature now to see "the organized public,"

MARCH 1984

the government, or state substituted for the "public." We talk of a "private" and a "public" sector, but we usually mean the for-profit business sector in the first instance and the governmental sector in the second. The real public sector is awkwardly classed as the not-for- profit private sector. Actually, the public is a complete idea in itself, apart from the idea of the organized public. The root words for "public" are not the same as the root words for the "polity," the state, the government. The public consists of those people who act together with an understanding of their relationship to each other. The "polity," coming from the Greek polis, is the public organized to carry on the functions of the "city" (an association to pursue the good life not just city government). 1I The concept of government is a very distant cousin of public. "Government" comes from the Greek kybernan (to steer). It consists of institutions established by the public for the control or direction of certain, usually very limited, activities.

Perhaps it would be better if we understood the public's relation to the polity, or the state, much in the same way we understand hydrogen's relationship to water. Hydrogen is most certainly a part of water, but at the time, hydrogen is most certainly not water. So, the public is vital to the creation of government but still not the government. There is a public life apart from governmental life. The public is the base atom from which we construct the molecule of government. It is the yarn from which we weave the cloth of politics.

If the Public Were Available ...

It follows that if the quality of the public, or the public life, is not good, or not as good as it could be, then the quality of the things that depend upon it are in jeopardy.

It is often remarked that we live in a time when governments cannot govern and leaders cannot lead. Our common endeavors fall asunder because of an absence of common purpose and will. You can see it in our schools, our churches, our criminal justice system. Our political processes may be failing us because they are immobilized by a myriad of special interests. Fac- tions seem to have the upper hand. The Deadlock of Democracy is the way James MacGregor Burns charac- terized our situation. 12 Committees, such as the ones for a Responsible Federal Budget, the proposed Third Hoover Commission, and the like, attest to a wide- spread conviction that the political system is not able to address the really tough policy issues and that broad- based, public coalitions have to be formed either to force action or redesign the system. The sense is that we have to get back in control somehow.

There can be no vital political life, no viable institutions of government, no sense of mastery over our shared fate, no effective common endeavors of any kind without there being a foundation of public awareness and spirit. What we may be groping for in commissions and in domestic policy associations may be the recon- stitution of a public. Certainly if there were a public sphere, we would have more choices in solving our




problems. Now we are limited to two options in making corrections. We can increase the responsibilities of the private (i.e., business) sector or we can improve the per- formance of government. But if the public sphere were once again real and available, we might not only have a third set of options, but we might also have options that would get us closer to the problems behind the problems.

If the idea of the public were available to us, the question of who is attending to giving us the healthiest, the richest, and the best public life possible would become important. Perhaps it is not exactly accurate to say that the public has to be created. But if the public is in some way like maturity, then it is correct to say that the quality of the public is, by definition, unassured, just as the degree of maturity is unassured. The question who and what creates public has everything to do with all that depends on public life-all political processes, all governmental institutions, all agencies of our common endeavor.

Absent public awareness and spirit, absent the ability to translate individual concerns into larger common concerns, absent the people's ability to understand not just the particulars, but the relationships of the whole, there is no capacity "to public." And with relations of the sort that we have in a country as diverse as ours, with issues as intertwined as they are, with trade-offs and hard choices as inevitable as they are, the task of "publicking"-of understanding both consequences and potential in relationships, over time-is no small task.

Educating for public life, educating the civic self takes on new meaning when the public is recognized for what it really is."3 Civic literacy, the capacity of people to think about the whole of things, of consequences and potential, becomes education of the most crucial kind. Public policy education becomes imperative in light of what the public can and must do; indeed what it can alone do.

We have had civics and civic education, the disci- plines of political science and public administration, but we need to go further to re-examine the relations of the civic enterprise to the whole of education-even to the liberal arts-where we could begin by recalling that the liberal arts were "invented" to make our kind of civic order possible.'4 We have attended somewhat to the education of the civic self, but we also need to think about the way the community is educated, about the way it, like an individual, comes to know itself."5 We need to think about the quality of the places where the public is formed, about the quality of the forums and conferences and conversations where we come to know each other-about whether those forums reinforce our penchant for special issues and special interests or whether they promote our finding common interests. We have public information from all kinds of news media, but we need to go further to ask what models of public learning we are using and whether those models protect us from informed meaninglessness.

Most basic of all, we need to talk to each other more about what the public has meant, does mean, can mean.

Darkness at Noon, Arthur J. Koestler's book about the Moscow trials, is not a scholarly work, but one of the characters speaks to the consequences of not caring what the public (the people) really means:

A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people-one does not work out X, but operates with it as if one knew it. In our case, X stands for the anonymous masses, the people. Poli- tics mean operating with this X without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is to recognize X for what it stands for in the equation. 16

There are those in other generations who have written about what the public is and is not-Lippman, Dewey, Arendt. The topic is a rich one for us, too. My sugges- tion is that our public philosophy begin with "public" itself. 1 7

Notes

1. Gerald Holton, "Where Is Science Taking Us?" Jefferson Lec- ture, National Endowment for the Humanities, May 11-13, 1981.

2. Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpreta- tion of American Thought and Character Since the 1880's (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 339.

3. For further information, contact the Domestic Policy Associa- tion, 5335 Far Hills Avenue, Suite 300, Dayton, Ohio 45429.

4. Daniel Yankelovich, "The Public Agenda Foundation," unpub- lished speech to a national public affairs group, Washington, D.C., January 1980.

5. Parker J. Palmer, The Company of Strangers (New York: Cross- road, 1981).

6. For this and other words cited from the Greek and Latin, see Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).

7. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977). Also see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958).

8. The funeral oration of Pericles, 432 B.C. 9. On a related topic, "the public interest," see: Glendon A. Schu-

bert, The Public Interest: A Critique of the Theory of a Political Concept (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960).

10. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1954).

11. "As Aristotle put it, the polis was an association for the pursuit of the good life; as such it was not much like what we know as a state, a government, an organization; it was first and foremost something that we would recognize as an involvement, a thoroughgoing involvement, in which the basic quality of life each experienced was felt to be continuously at stake. To be a citizen was to be involved with others in the shared effort to live well." Robert McClintock, "The Dynamics of Decline: Why Education Can No Longer Be Liberal," Phi Delta Kappan 60 (1979), p. 636.

12. James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy: Four- Party Politics in America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, 1963).

13. I am indebted to William F. May, The Humanities and the Civic Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), for the phrase "civic self."

14. Freeman Butts, The Revival of Civic Learning: A Rationale for Citizenship Education in American Schools (Bloomington, Ind.: Phi Delta Kappa, 1980).

15. Christopher C. Harmon, "Liberal Education Should Do More

MARCH 1984




Than Just Liberate," The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 14, 1981, p. 24, discusses the community, saying, "The community, no less than the individual, must come to know itself."

16. Arthur J. Koestler, Darkness at Noon (New York: MacMillan,

MARCH 1984

1941), p. 84. 17. A selective, annotated bibliography on books dealing with what

"public" means, prepared by the Kettering Foundation research interns, is available through the foundation.



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