For Public Service

"Despite its sober title, this book makes a vivid intervention into contemporary debates over the nature and justification of the state’s public authority and the role played by public officials in its exercise. To do so, it launches a series of daring raids on early modern political thought, recovering a series of key concepts—state, sovereignty, office, and reason of state—in support of a crucial practical and political objective. This is nothing less than to deliver into the hands of contemporary statesmen and officials an almost lost ethical and political vocabulary, one that is vital for understanding and defending their roles in the face of a widespread and multi-faceted anti-statism. Paul du Gay and Thomas Lopdrup-Hjorth have thus written a tract for the times in the manner of their exemplars Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf. By turns learned and passionate, historically informed and politically attuned, For Public Service delivers classical tools for thinking about public authority in a form suited to their immediate use by all those engaged in its exercise or dependent on it."

Ian Hunter, Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia

“For Public Service is an important book. In the authors’ view a widespread anti-étatism has neglected the requirements inherent to acting on behalf of the state in an official capacity. Instead, the authors want to offer a positive account of the state while emphasizing structural elements. Praising public service the book provides an articulate critique of New Public Management, a proper acknowledgement of the relevance of thought by late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century political theorists, as well as a due ethics approach to what it – normatively – takes to work as a public servant in the public service.”

Peter Hupe, Visiting Professor, Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium, in dms - der moderne staat.

"This is a timely, scholarly, compelling and important book which defends the role of the public service as an essential institution for preserving liberty and protecting our common life against populist politicians from both the left and the right. Exercising the objective, critical detachment they seek to reinvigorate in the idea of public service itself, the authors remind us of the ethics of office and the importance of duty and responsibility, as distinct from the predominantly individualistic ethics of contemporary times. They explain the value of public bureaucracy as a crucial cornerstone of constitutional rule."

Janet McLean KC, Professor of Law, University of Auckland, New Zealand

"This book is very compelling. It exhibits a critical ethical dimension in its defense of the plurality of value-spheres, and its resistance to sweeping, 'epochal' critiques of modernity that suggest that there is nothing those of us who regret the decline of state service and its ethic can do but bemoan the misfortunes of our era. In providing a useable set of early modern 'classics' by whose lights we can rehabilitate key concepts of state, office, and reason of state, and thus escape both the post-1970s enervation of the state throughout the West and the unhelpfully totalizing (and thus paralyzing) critiques of the former by theorists of the left and right, it strikes me as a vital help to overcoming our collective impasse."

Blake Smith, Harper Schmidt Fellow at University of Chicago Society of Fellows, USA

"What du Gay and Lopdrup-Hjorth have done in this book is to provide a genuine public service. Their sober assessment of the present state of disarray in the public sector and the arguments for how this might be addressed represent a real contribution to current debates about re-establishing some sense of stabilised order in the public domain."

Grahame Thompson, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy, Open University, UK

"Impersonality, reason of state, prudence, ethics of office: if someone had told me that one of the most spirited and penetrating arguments for the ideal of public service would come from such a tired repertoire, I would have wished them good luck. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Resourcing themselves in the history of political thought, Paul Du Gay and Thomas Lopdrup-Hjorth breathe new life into a dusty constellation of concepts to remind us what there is to love about the state at a time when everyone seems eager to dismiss it. They argue that public service is not just about acting diligently in the public interest, but also about constituting and safeguarding the authority of the state, and they explain under what conditions such authority warrants our respect. Criss-crossing the fields of international relations, political sociology, intellectual history, public administration, and organizational theory, this brilliant book is a feast of erudition. Above all, it is a moving paean to the impersonal structure of offices we have inherited and to the civil servants whose vocation it is to keep it afloat, and whose primary merit is—against the incantations of new managerialism—to think well within the box."

Bernardo Zacka, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

"Sociologist Paul du Gay and his co-author, Thomas Lopdrup-Hjorth, seek to recover our appreciation for the state and its bureaucratic servants. Over the last few decades, they argue, it has become particularly difficult for observers in the West to understand security as the essential function of the state and bureaucracy as the indispensable means to this end. The state, the authors insist, must be seen as critically different from both the government—the group of elected leaders who at any given time set policy—and the public whose will elections are intended to express. The state, rather, is a set of administrative institutions imagined to constitute a sui generis collective personhood, which endures across changes in leadership. The state’s primary, constant obligation is to ensure its own survival and the security of the citizenry—and only secondarily to translate into policy the desires of the government and people.

Bringing forth insights from political theorists of early modernity like Thomas Hobbes and Samuel von Pufendorf, and from contemporary scholars like Quentin Skinner and Ian Hunter, du Gay and Lopdrup-Hjorth argue that the state must be neutral—but also absolute. These adjectives together express the distinctiveness of the modern state as it emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries out of the chaos of Europe’s wars of religion. To escape confessional conflicts, in which large, opposing sections of the population saw themselves as morally bound to impose their own way of life on their fellow citizens, political theorists elaborated on the concept of "reason of state," the overriding obligation of the public administration to ensure peace and order by restraining these conflicts. To do so, the state—crucially distinct from the individual monarch or party that might be ruling at any given moment—had to overawe the armed religious leagues and factions and show itself as indifferent to their claims to transcendent moral authority.

This was the only way the state in that earlier era could bring peace to a society still divided by religious difference centuries ago. But this forgotten history bears important lessons for our own turbulent moment. Social peace might never be restored in the West until the absolute power of bureaucracy, in the sense conveyed by this history, is restored as well."

Foreign Policy