Laurent Dobuzinskis

Modernist and postmodernist metaphors of the policy process: Control and stability vs. chaos and reflexive understanding

The complexity of the policy process is such that analysts often resort to metaphorical representations of its most salient aspects. Sometimes these metaphors are used deliberately but, in most cases, they are implicitly built into their theoretical frameworks. This article argues that commonly used metaphors based on the paradigmatic notion of ‘control’ have ceased to be relevant to the analysis of contemporary policy dilemmas. Two new conceptions of the policy process have emerged from the new sciences of complexity. Both chaos theory and models based on the concept of ‘organizational closure’ clearly reveal the self-organizing logic inherent in the problems confronting managers and policy-makers today. The main focus here is on examining the rationales for, and the potentials of, metaphors derived from these paradigmatic innovations - innovations which can be situated within an emerging postmodern culture insofar as they emphasize indeterminacy and the role played by social actors in constructing the social situations in which they find themselves. It is also argued, however, that within very specific contexts the notion of control may still be valid.

Historical and epistemological trends in public administration

Begins with a brief overview of how public administration emerged as the positivist theory and technocratic practice of the modern administrative state. The question then becomes: To what extent has public administration been affected by the societal shift toward postmodernism? The author argues that public administration has moved some distance away from its positivist origins; however, the transformation of public administration is still incomplete. The author concludes that public administration should pay more attention to the recent developments of post‐positivist methods of analysis rather than attempting to adopt all the tenets of postmodernism. Large bureaucratic organizations remain typically modern, but they should not be either conceptualized or managed as small machines.

Global Instability: Uncertainty and New Visions in Political Economy

Unprecedented levels of instability and uncertainty have been generated by the complexity of events and trends in the contemporary global political economy. To a large extent, at the crux of this instability is the growing political salience of various forces and activities that appear to transcend and impinge not only upon existing political boundaries and forms of economic production and distribution, but also on the values that underpin social institutions and existing modes of social and cultural differentiation. These activities include, but are not limited to, the phenomenal growth in global trade and private capital flows, increased pressures for financial liberalization and the growing instability of national currencies, increased cross-border flows of people and ideas, and the growth of transnational social movements as well as in various illicit activities associated with transnational organized crime.

Defenders of Liberal Individualism, Republican Virtues and Solidarity The Forgotten Intellectual Founding Fathers of the French Third Republic

The intellectual founding fathers of the French Third Republic were innovative thinkers who achieved an original synthesis of republican and liberal principles. This becomes evident when one examines the works of four philosophers who played a crucial role in the French intellectual and political life of the period extending from the 1870s to the early 1900s: Emile Littre, Charles Renouvier, Henry Michel and Alfred Fouillee. Among their many contributions to moral and political philosophy, I highlight two themes: a) a conception of political liberty that grants a pre-eminent place to civic education as a means to free citizens from domination by dogmatic religious authorities, sectarian political movements or unexamined beliefs of any kind; b) the need to implement reasonable social reforms in order to ensure that the many and complex relations of functional interdependence constitutive of modern societies are equitable and realize an ideal of national solidarity. I suggest that these ideas ought to be carefully examined by contemporary proponents of civic republicanism.

Is progressive environmentalism an oxymoron

Environmentalism has been a part of the ideological landscape of liberal societies for nearly three decades. Classical liberals have not yet succeeded, however, in articulating a coherent response that would be relevant to politically active environmentalists, as well as to liberals receptive to postmodern ideas. Robert C. Paehlke argues that, conservative liberals being in fact hostile to environmental thinking, moderate progressivism and environmentalism should enter into a close alliance. This paper challenges both assertions. Admittedly, not all currents within contemporary conservative liberalism could play a part in the development of a neoliberal environmentalist movement. One current, however, the skeptical tradition, whose origin can be traced back to the Scottish Englightenment, is remarkably well suited to this task. Progressivism, on the other hand, could end up smothering the environmental movement under the weight of its own certainties.

Adam Smith and French Political Economy: Parallels and Differences

As is well known, Adam Smith spent about two years in Europe, most of it in France. It was in fact during his stay in Toulouse that he began to work on what became The Wealth of Nations (WN);1 but what proved decisive for the deepening of his understanding of market processes were his encounters in Paris with Paul-Henri Thiry (Baron d’Holbach), Claude Helvetius, Jean d’Alembert, Andre Morellet, Jacques Necker, and especially his discussions with Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and Franc;ois Quesnay.2 (Quesnay was universally regarded as the leader of the so-called Physiocrats, who also included Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Riviere, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, and Turgot — but the latter did not rigidly subscribe to the core dogmas of that school.) Although no one denies that Smith was profoundly influenced by these encounters, the question of precisely what debt Smith owed to these thinkers is not central to my purpose here. It is, indeed, a controversial one. Roberts (1935), for example, argued that Smith drew heavily from the writings of Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert whom he would have known through later writers; Du Pont de Nemours and the Marquis de Condorcet, on the other hand, suggested that anything of value in Smith’s WN could be found in what Turgot had written (Groenewegen, 1968, p. 271). But this question is probably impossible to answer categorically, partly because Smith’s manuscript notes were destroyed after his death. To talk about an intellectual debt is to put the matter in terms that are too narrow and could be of interest only to erudite biographers.3

Old Wine in New Bottles? Civic Republicanism and the Challenges of the Global Era

Modern liberal democracies have been shaped by several currents of thought. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it has become commonplace to underline the liberal half of the liberal democratic hybrid. The globalization of trade and financial transactions has superimposed upon political liberalism, with its emphasis on the discourse of rights, a neoliberal (i.e., market-oriented) economic dimension. However, the democratic half has also been the subject of much attention recently. In several countries, notably France and the United States, the democratic ideal has been reframed in explicitly republican terms. But civic republicanism is given a very prominent place in political and intellectual debates on the future of the nation-state taking place in several other countries, including Australia, Ireland, and Germany.2 (The qualifier “civic” adds little to the meaning of republicanism but it distinguishes it from the ideology of today’s Republican party in the United States with which it has little in common.) Republicanism is a somewhat elusive notion but it can be defined rather succinctly in terms of a commitment to the common good (res publica) and to a particular way of reaching that goal, namely, self-government. Self-government implies equal access by all citizens to public institutions, and participation in deliberative politics. However, these simple words are subject to a wide variety of interpretations, some of which reflect concerns with the effects of globalization.3

Science, technology and bureaucracy: From the discourse of power to the power of discourse

Abstract What happened to the positivist vision according to which the natural and social sciences could become the source of verifiable knowledge that could serve to subjugate nature to the imperatives of an ever expanding economy, and to guide society toward a rational order such that politics would give way to the administration of things? This discourse of power and control can still be heard coming from the scientific, technological and bureaucratic systems which are central to the practices of advanced industrial societies. However, severe tensions within these systems, as well as among them, point to an emerging evolutionary vision that reveals the complexity of the processes whereby autonomous communities determine their own paths toward reflexive understanding, innovative experimentation and participatory democracy.