They define evil as ‘knowingly and deliberately inflicting pain and suffering on other human beings’ (p. xix). Administrative evil is a new form of evil unique to our modern age, which is characterized by technical rationality, a culture ‘that emphasizes the scientific-analytic mind-set and the belief in technological progress.’ What makes administrative evil so different is both the lack of evil intent and its ability to appear masked. As perpetrators, ordinary people suffer moral inversion, engaging in acts of administrative evil while believing that they are not only acting correctly but are even doing good.

The authors treat evil as inherent to the human condition and summarize psychological theory to explain our need to find a source of evil to combat and our tendency to create organizations that define that source of evil and mobilize us against it. They argue that our modern social roles and structures obstruct individual morality. Technical rationality, professionalism and bureaucracy often re-define ethics out of the picture.

To counter these tendencies, they would include greater historical awareness as an educational goal in public administration programs. Because technical rationality is fundamentally atemporal, an impoverished historical consciousness plagues the professions and academic disciplines and is deeply embedded in the culture at large. The discipline of public administration has little sense of its historical circumstances and constantly re-issues ‘new’ calls for science and rigour. Instead, we must focus more research on critical, historically-based studies.

For their first such study, the authors describe the Holocaust and summarize the debate among intentionalist and functionalist scholars. To fully understand how the Holocaust occurred, they argue for a synthesis. It resulted from ‘the confluence of historical and political forces, racist ideology and anti-Semitism, organizational competition and the bureaucratic processes of a highly developed modern society’ (p. 59). The civil servants of Germany, who were essential to both conception and execution, were so susceptible to their roles because existing ethical standards and professional training were inadequate to help them resist.

Their story of the Holocaust flows into a case study of masked administrative evil, the importation of the German rocket engineering team to serve the United States. From the most guilty, like Kurt Debus, first director of the Kennedy Space Center, and Arthur Rudolph, project manager in charge of the Saturn V Program, through Werner Von Braun, first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, many had varying degrees of complicity in the use of slave labour at Mittelbau-Dora, where about 20,000 died while building the underground factory and its V-2 rockets. The practical goal of securing their technical expertise superseded ethical and legal considerations as the War Department fudged security reports to get around State Department barriers to the entry of war criminals. Once in America, the German team created a mythology to whitewash their pasts. ‘It was American public policy and our own public servants, however, who placed the mask on this administrative evil ...’ (p. 105).

After the retirement of Von Braun, the Marshall Space Flight Center’s place in the history of masked administrative evil becomes more difficult to see. There, an increasingly unacceptable level of risk to the lives of astronauts guaranteed an accident like the Challenger explosion. That increasing risk grew out of a complex combination. Inter-agency competition and pressures generated by federal budgeting processes were compounded by ‘a persecutory organizational identity’ at Marshall that resulted from the unfortunate managerial style of William Lucas. That style required camouflaging one’s mistakes and reduced the possibility that Marshall could make a decision to delay a launch. ‘Whatever administrative evil can be legitimately attributed to Marshall is of the typical organizational variety in our time and in our culture. It is opaque and complex and no one can be identified with evil intentions’ (p. 133f).

Yet the authors emphasize the capacity of contemporary public policy for re-creating administrative evil on the scale of the Holocaust. For the technocratic elite, the past cannot have resulted from a failure to apply rational problem solving, so they ignore the past and focus on a pristine future of new rational systems. This ‘lack of historical consciousness is virtually an open invitation to administrative evil. ...To the extent that ‘good’ is expected to result from rational solutions to perceived problems, obstacles to these programs cannot be tolerated. This approach invokes metaphors of removal or elimination, like ...ridding an organism of a disease’. Today’s fixations – crime, illegal drug trafficking, illegal immigration – produce public policies that move in dangerous directions, though not yet dramatically. For example, the US has generally been saved from going off the deep end by ‘an “uneasy balance” between competing values rather than an unambiguous pursuit of final, and potentially inhumane, solutions to social problems’. However, ‘[t]his equilibrium becomes most tenuous when the problem involves “surplus populations,” that is, defined groups of people who are made to appear “useless,” or worse, ...detrimental to the well-being of everyone else ...’ (pp. 141–3). Modern societies already have a well-established track record for eliminating such surplus populations. That history, especially the Holocaust, shows the ‘historical link between the search for permanent solutions to problems and eliminationist policy’ (p. 144f).

In the technical-rational tradition, professionalism supposedly provides the safeguard. We assume that to be professional is to be ethical. The authors’ case studies demonstrate otherwise. The responsible administrator or professional subordinates his/her personal conscience because it is ‘subjective’ and ‘personal’. The structures of authority, characterized as ‘objective’ and ‘public’, prevail. Consequently, current ethical standards do little to keep the individual conscience from being too weak.

The perversity of our ethical system of public administration, which allows a ‘good’ administrator to commit acts of evil, requires that we reconstruct a public ethics. The current marriage between an over-emphasis on individualism and technical rationality is the primary roadblock. Unless we develop a greater social cohesion, the centripetal forces of our society, such as racism, may drive us to exclusionist and eliminationist public policies like those generated by the Nazi search for a Volksgemeinschaft. The authors propose a communitarian approach: an ethics, focused on an inclusive community rather than in the autonomous individual; a more inclusively representative and participatory democracy that balances responsibilities against rights, and that finds ‘ways to accord citizens more information and more say, more often’.

This little book concisely synthesizes the extant body of theory and secondary literature, for which there is a thorough bibliography. It will broaden and enrich the perspective of specialists in many fields while offering them, their students and the general reading public an enlightening insight into the most fatal moral traps that we create for ourselves in modern societies.