Political philosophy and public governance: the quest for justification in common good and in social contract arguments and their significance for the debate on the organisation of the public sector

Abstract

Following up on the previous chapter centred on issues of ontology, this chapter turns to explore political philosophical issues. We focus the issue of the legitimacy of public governance, which we consider to be a theme of central significance – a perennial issue, and yet possibly nowadays even further accentuated by the multiple ‘crises of legitimacy’ affecting various jurisdictions and redefining the relation between (public) administrators and those who are administered – and one distinctively philosophical (leaving to other books, by other authors, to explore other entry points for bridging political philosophy and PA – amongst these: the topic of comparative political regimes and PA, first introduced by Aristotle, the notion of regime change, whose initial conception may be ascribed to Polybius, and the relevance for PA of the political thought of key philosophers like Christian Wolff – see Chapter 2 – and Georg Hegel – Chapter 3). This chapter then tackles the key question of ‘justification’ – that is, what grounds the legitimacy of a political system1 – to then delve into how political philosophical thought may shed light on a number of contemporary debates in public governance and management about how the public sector and public services ‘ought to’ be organised. The puzzle of ‘justification’ – what justifies a political order and makes it ‘just’ – is a very old issue in philosophy and poses formidable questions to whichever set of doctrines is proposed to change PA (which is not the entirety of a political system, but an important part of it). Justification, roughly speaking, is concerned with ‘giving reasons to value something’, notably to value