Book Reviews: A Mini Symposium on
We are grateful to Professors Browder and Perrow for their careful reading of Unmasking Administrative Evil and for their thoughtful reviews. Both deserve more of a response than we can offer here, but we attempt to address at least some of the key issues they have raised. Our compliments to Professor Browder who has summarized the book’s argument as succinctly and accurately as we can imagine it being done. We would recommend his review for any potential reader to determine whether the book might be of interest to them. As public administration scholars who have crossed the boundary into historical analysis and argument, we are especially pleased with a thorough review by an historian that offers the implicit compliment of finding no fault with the historical elements of our argument.
We are appreciative as well of Professor Perrow’s review, and in particular his assessment of our book as ‘courageous’. We regret that our argument was sufficiently unclear that Professor Perrow would read it as an ‘...undiscriminating attack on technical rationality’. We agree fully with Professor Perrow that technical rationality has brought much good to society, and we certainly did not mean to have our argument construed as suggesting that bureaucracy and professionalism are inherently or essentially evil. However, in spite of the many benefits of technical rationality, it also enables the creation of the varied masks of administrative evil.
One of the enduring questions of the Holocaust is: How could it have been perpetrated by one of the most modern, civilized nations in the world? More than half a century later, we can now see that it could only have happened in such a society. The Holocaust warns us that modern civilization is uniquely capable both of great advances in science and culture, and of destroying the lives of millions of innocents behind the mask of rational, administrative processes. While mass murder is not unique to the Holocaust, the use of modern industrial methods and organizational skill enabled a hitherto unknown scale of killing. Thousands of people contributed to the process in ways that allowed them to do so without acknowledging their complicity.
While technical rationality and the concept of administrative evil do not explain all of what happened in the Holocaust or the other examples cited in our book and by Professor Perrow, they do help us to understand how so many could have been involved while claiming ignorance or innocence in the face of great evil. A key lesson from the NASA case is how the considerable achievements of the space program appear to have fostered the masking of its tainted foundation in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Thus, one of our central concerns is how the predominance of technical rationality in the modern age so narrows the purview of professional (and even personal) ethics that individuals and organizations can act with disregard – even complete disregard – for the human consequences of their actions.
While we proffer no easy solutions to this dilemma, the book does argue that one has to be able to transcend the technical-rational mindset, if there is to be any hope of avoiding administrative evil. The alternative to technical rationality is not irrationality, but other modes of reasoning – particularly historical consciousness and critical reflexivity – that enable an ear for other voices in administrative and policy processes.
