On the one hand I will present contextual-historical research on the original reformist objectives of the political thinkers who ‘invented’ modern administration; by studying for instance the reception of German ‘state-socialism’ and European constitutional texts by American late 19th-century political scientists. My paper will include the beginnings of a reconstruction of the source materials, scholarly and associational platforms and (European) reference points of American public administration theorists, who, precisely around the time in which Political Science was institutionalised, came to see public administration as the next frontier in state development.
On the other hand, I would like to present some tentative ideas on a project engaging with European administrative reforms in the 1920s/1930s. In this period the first chairs in Public Administration were established in growing industrial cities in Europe (parallel to what took place in America). Rotterdam is a case in point. What precisely were the ambitions of European administrative reformers in the 1920s/ 1930s and was there actually a European movement that might be seen as a beginning of a shared administrative identity? The problems that these first professors of Public Administration dealt with often seem remarkably similar to challenges that Public Administration confronts at present. Yes, the scholarly discourses and theoretical concepts that are deployed appear strangely archaic. How best to understand this intriguing duality? I will suggest, based mainly on textual and contextual research, that these European professors whose appointments had unusually direct connections to the social and political realities in which they acted were operating within a long intellectual tradition. A tradition that can be traced back to nineteenth-century solutions to the eighteenth-century problem of the domestic management of property and inequality as the key to creating a stable system of international trade and politics.
