At issue is the method used to define values in the discipline. For 
            example, when we discuss ethics, we base our inquiry on "regime 
            values" and ignore the broader established literature concerning the 
            "common spiritual values of mankind. "Like much of western culture, 
            secularization as a value strongly influences public administration. 
            This article examines the history of values in public administration 
            research and questions secularization with its removal of linkage 
            between spiritual wisdom and public values. Research in public 
            administration evolved from a value-neutral basis immortalized in 
            Woodrow Wilson's political/administrative dichotomy, to a logical 
            positivism basis advanced by Herbert Simon, to a call for the return 
            to value-based traditions. Recent research in the field, including 
            research on ethics for public administrators, has acknowledged that 
            values do play an integral role and that the value-free neutrality 
            approach was invalid. This article makes the case that public 
            administration should not narrow its choice of values to only 
            secularization but should use the full range of human inquiry 
            available to us, including the various Holy Scriptures from not only 
            the Jewish and Christian traditions but other traditions as well, 
            such as the Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic. 
            Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 University of Kansas 
            The excitement and meaning of our very existence--indeed, the future 
            of life itself on this planet--is linked to the administrative 
            process. Theory, values and practice are inexorably interwoven and 
            enmeshed. It is this complex net which is the center of attention in 
            the study of public administration. (Simmons and Dvorin 1977, 3-4) 
            In their book Public Administration Values, Policy, and Change 
            (1977), Robert Simmons and Eugene Dvorin make a strong argument (as 
            noted above) for the importance that values play in public 
            administration. They note the existence of a current, so-called, 
            value-free neutrality approach that has been so long and assiduously 
            cultivated within public administration. The authors state that 
            public administration was not and is not now value free, but value 
            full. They assert that any other assumptions are "out of touch with 
            the value conflicts of the broader society" (p. xiii). Moreover, 
            according to Simmons and Dvorin, public administrators should not ". 
            . . hide behind the guises of `scientific objectivity' or scholarly 
            remoteness" (p. xiii). Adding to this discussion, a section from a 
            recent essay by Robert Berne, dean of the Wagner School of Public 
            Service at New York University, further highlights our point. 
            According to Berne: 
            Just as there is no way to separate policy from administration, 
            there is no such thing as value free work in public service. Like it 
            or not, the public sector is all about values and I believe that 
            some of our current problems (in public administration) stem from 
            our inability (as academics) to address the role that values play. 
            (1995, 82) 
            The role and treatment of values in public administration is a 
            debatable issue which is often focused on how to define the idea of 
            values themselves (e.g., Denhardt 1991). 
            John Rohr, in his book Ethics for Bureaucrats, An Essay on Law and 
            Values (1978, 65), broadly defined values as the "beliefs, passions, 
            and principles that have been held for several generations by the 
            overwhelming majority of the American people." Rohr suggests that 
            the use of the more specific concept regime values is the most 
            appropriate approach to define ethics in public administration (p. 
            59). He defined regime values as "the values of that political 
            entity that was brought into being by the ratification of the 
            Constitution that created the American republic. 
            Rohr noted that the method of regime values rests on the following 
            three considerations: 
            * Ethical norms should be derived from the salient values of the 
            regime. 
            * These values are normative for bureaucrats because they have taken 
            an oath to uphold the regime. 
            * These values can be discovered in the public law of the regime (p. 
            59). 
            As a conceptual tool, regime values have been used to determine what 
            is acceptable in terms of discourse in values discussions in public 
            administration theory. However, some do question the use of regime 
            values. For example, Robert T. Golembiewski, in his 1965 work Men, 
            Management, and Morality, raised the issue. He noted that the 
            failure of formal theories of organization to address the question 
            of individual freedom reveals an insensitivity to the moral posture 
            of the individual worker. He listed five values, associated with 
            economic life, that follow the Judeo-Christian ethic: 
            * Work must be psychologically acceptable to the individual. 
            * Work must allow individuals to develop their own faculties. 
            * The work task must allow the individual considerable room for 
            self-determination. The worker must have the possibility of 
            controlling, in a meaningful way, the environment within which the 
            task is to be performed. 
            * The organization should not be the sole and final arbiter of 
            behavior; both the organization and the individual must be subject 
            to an external moral order (R. Denhardt 1984, 102). 
            The fifth point indicates a disagreement with the idea that regime 
            values should be used to define the generic term values. The 
            question is: What should be used to form the basis for defining 
            values in public administration theory? Notwithstanding the problems 
            illustrated by the religious persecution of scientists prior to Rene 
            Descartes, perhaps values found in religious traditions would 
            provide a better basis. 
            The thesis of this article is that we have allowed public service to 
            be secularized and have largely removed the moral and spiritual 
            wisdom of civilization from what we teach, research, and do in 
            public administration (e.g., McCurdy and Cleary 1984; Adams and 
            White 1994). We are losing our focus due to our so-called objective 
            commitment, our lessened concern for social purpose, and our nonuse 
            of spiritual wisdom--for example, regime values as a foundation for 
            ethics is not adequate, as noted by Golembiewski (R. Denhardt 1984). 
            Limiting research on values in public administration to those 
            associated with a regime ignores the accumulated spiritual wisdom 
            developed over centuries of human experience. Similar and recurring 
            themes of values and morals are found in the literature of all the 
            major religions. Thus, it provides an alternative basis upon which 
            to examine the values of the profession, apart from the use of 
            regime values. 
            The roots of American public administration as a profession and 
            inquiry were closely linked and motivated by spiritual concerns. For 
            example, at the beginning of the twentieth century and the beginning 
            of the formal study of public administration in America, Luther 
            Gulick brought his background as the son and grandson of 
            missionaries to his work and work style in promoting and even 
            creating what we now call public administration. He stated that, in 
            selecting the first students in public administration he and the 
            other founders sought sons and daughters of civil servants, but they 
            also sought those with strong religious backgrounds. In the 1950s, 
            Paul Appleby, a dean at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, 
            wrote a stream of articles and books on morality and public 
            administration. Also in the 1950s, Dwight Waldo, at the height of 
            logical positivism's dominance in public administration, attempted 
            to force the discipline away from a total reliance on Simon's 
            value-free perspective (Waldo 1955). In the 1970s, the New Public 
            Administration brought morality again to the literature of public 
            administration (e.g., Marini 1971). Even today we have researchers 
            and practitioners who address ethics in government in their 
            teaching, research, and practice. (Lynch and Lynch 1995, 3). 
            Nevertheless, many of us feel uncomfortable about linking spiritual 
            and moral wisdom with public administration. 
            This article argues that we have inappropriately secularized public 
            administration. The first section addresses epistemology and its 
            impact on public administration. The next section argues that public 
            administration has largely been secularized and is ignoring the 
            spiritual wisdom over recorded history. The conclusion suggests how 
            to bring that wisdom into public administration. 
            EPISTEMOLOGY AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 
            A Definition and Redefinition of Focus 
            Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory 
            of knowledge. Traditionally, central issues in epistemology are the 
            nature and derivation of knowledge, the scope of knowledge, and the 
            reliability of claims to knowledge (Edwards 1967). Students and 
            academics interested in exploring the major epistemological views in 
            public administration might typically ask: 
            How does each view largely define accepted knowledge? 
            What are the implications to public administration? 
            Are any of the views dysfunctional? 
            In what ways? 
            What are the implications to the development of the field or 
            discipline? 
            Philosophers frequently have been divided over epistemology. For 
            example, rationalists such as Plato and Rene Descartes argued that 
            ideas of reason intrinsic to the mind are the only source of 
            knowledge. Empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume argued that 
            sensory experience is the primary source of our ideas and therefore 
            of knowledge. The debate between the rationalists and empiricists 
            continued for quite some time and later took a significant turn with 
            Immanuel Kant. He asked whether there could be synthetic a priori 
            knowledge, that is, knowledge not based on experience but which is a 
            condition of the comprehensibility of experience (Popkin and Stroll 
            1990). Kant, although antiempiricist in the derivation-of-knowledge 
            question, agreed with the empiricists regarding the 
            scope-of-knowledge question, in that knowledge is limited to the 
            world of experience (Popkin and Stroll 1990; Beck 1966). 
            On the reliability of knowledge, the skeptics were a significant 
            influence in the history of epistemology. They questioned whether 
            any claim to knowledge can be upheld against the possibility of 
            doubt. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) focused his inquiry on the 
            elimination of doubt. This role of the skeptic was to increase the 
            level of rigor and precision necessary to posit what should be 
            considered as knowledge (Edwards 1967). In contemporary 
            epistemology, the role of the skeptic is diminished. George Edward 
            Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others have redirected 
            epistemological attention from concern about claims of knowledge due 
            to doubt toward analysis of their linguistic meaning. 
            Empiricism and Modern Science 
            An understanding of the empiricist perspective can be determined 
            from the word empiricist itself. The term comes from the Greek word, 
            emdeiria, which means experience. The basic tenet of empiricism is 
            that legitimate human knowledge arises from what is provided to the 
            mind of the individual by introspective awareness gained by 
            experience. Empirism is 
            a rejection of other doctrines such as the view that when the human 
            mind first encounters the world it is already furnished with a range 
            
            of ideas or concepts that have nothing to do with experience; and 
            an acceptance of the idea that, at birth, the mind is a tabula rasa, 
            or 
            white paper, void of all characters, and that only experience 
            can provide it with ideas (Edwards 1967). 
            Empiricism has taken many forms. However, one common feature is that 
            it starts from experimental science as a basis for defining human 
            knowledge (Edwards 1967). This is opposed to the rationalist 
            approach, which starts from pure mathematics as the basis for 
            understanding human knowledge. Empiricism and its major proponents 
            developed during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It 
            arose directly from the growing success and importance of 
            experimental science with its gradual separate identity from pure 
            mathematics. Major early proponents of empiricism were called the 
            British Empiricist School of Philosophy and included Francis Bacon, 
            John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. Later proponents--also 
            usually classified as empiricists--in the nineteenth and early 
            twentieth centuries include John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell 
            (Beck 1966). Russell was the major personality link between the 
            classical British empiricists and the beginnings of logical 
            positivism in the twentieth century. 
            Modern science, as developed by Descartes from his emphasis on 
            doubt, has a number of parallels to empiricism. These parallels are 
            important to the development of logical positivism. According to 
            Descartes, the solutions to the questions posed by epistemology lay 
            in the systematization of knowledge. In the ideal method described 
            by Descartes, man starts with basic axioms whose truth is clear and 
            distinct and he sets aside anything that can be supposed to be false 
            until he arrives at something that cannot be supposed to be false. 
            Critical to this basic analysis is that nothing is accepted as true 
            unless it is clear and distinct. Next, one analyzes the basic axiom, 
            starting with simple thoughts, and only later proceeds to more 
            complex thoughts. Following these steps, one reviews the entire 
            process so that no possible consideration is omitted (Popkin and 
            Stroll 1990). 
            Important similarities between modern science and empiricism include 
            the need to systematize the acquisition of knowledge. This avoids 
            the introduction of extraneous variables that could confuse and 
            cloud the final product. It also promotes the need for careful 
            self-correction and comprehensiveness throughout the process, thus 
            not overlooking or omitting important variables that could affect 
            the final outcome. 
            The most important difference between modern science and empiricism 
            is the issue of the existence of certain innate truths. Modern 
            science and Descartes propose that the universe can be explained in 
            terms of absolute properties or truths. By employing the appropriate 
            procedures described previously, we can discover knowledge that 
            under no circumstances can be false. Empiricists, on the other hand, 
            say even if systematized procedures for the acquisition of knowledge 
            were employed, man cannot discover absolute truths. Man can only 
            develop probable hypotheses about the universe. Within certain 
            confidence intervals and at certain levels of significance, man can 
            work out a theory of knowledge, but only within the bounds of the 
            actual achievements of scientists. Discussion of limits and bounds 
            along with the disputation that certain organizational absolute 
            truths were, in fact, proverbs, would resonate strongly nearly a 
            century later. They were first discussed in public administration 
            when logical positivists like Herbert Simon examined behavior of 
            individuals within organizations using concepts such as bounded 
            rationality and satisficing (Simon 1946 and 1947). 
            With the breakaway of science from classical philosophy in the late 
            nineteenth century, the following questions became significant: 
            What is philosophy apart from science? 
            What kind of knowledge (if any) results from philosophical activity? 
            
            Is philosophy different from science? (Popkin and Stroll 1990) 
            In the twentieth century several influential philosophical movements 
            developed, each with answers to these and other important questions 
            in philosophy and science. Important to the development of logical 
            positivism was the perspective of logical atomism and the works of 
            Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, and eventually, the Vienna Circle. 
            
            From Logical Atomism to the Vienna Circle 
            After more than ten years of work, Alfred North Whitehead and 
            Bertrand Russell, in a series of three volumes entitled Principia 
            Mathematica (1962), described a new type of logic. It was broader in 
            scope than what was then the standard and accepted logic system 
            based on the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. This new 
            system of logic described the relationship of symbols to each other, 
            or symbolic logic. The importance of the work by Whitehead and 
            Russell lay in the fact that it did not reject the centuries of work 
            by philosophers since Aristotle, but refined it through mathematics 
            to a degree of precision never before seen. This symbolic logic 
            could also be used to develop a precise new symbolic language, 
            beyond that of natural languages like French, English, or Spanish, 
            that could clarify the meanings of sentences for further 
            philosophical analysis (Popkin and Stroll 1990). 
            Principia Mathematica and the writings of Whitehead and Russell 
            received further explanation and elaboration with Ludwig 
            Wittgenstein (1899-1951), who many regard as the greatest 
            philosophical genius of the twentieth century. Wittgenstein thought 
            of philosophy as an autonomous discipline (e.g., separate from 
            science) dealing with its own sort of particular problems. He did 
            not believe that science could solve philosophical problems, and in 
            later life he would say that even philosophy could not provide any 
            factual information about the world (Popkin and Stroll 1990). The 
            great body of his work launched the logical positivist movement. 
            Moreover, because of several statements in Wittgenstein's 1922 work 
            Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1961) a small group of students in 
            Austria, led by a University of Vienna professor, Moritz Schilick, 
            began the famous Vienna Circle. 
            The logical atomist perspective of Whitehead and Russell received 
            its most comprehensive explanation in Tractatus 
            Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein's version of logical atomism 
            became known as picture theory. A perfect language, according to 
            Wittgenstein, is like a map, as it pictures or mirrors the structure 
            of reality. As philosophers attempt to utilize the logical atomistic 
            perspective and symbolic logic to develop aspects of the structure 
            of reality, they would be actively engaged in the process and not in 
            a merely passive and reflective stance as in the past (Berg 1967). 
            This single part of Wittgenstein's massive work would become 
            extremely significant for the eventual development of logical 
            positivism. Wittgenstein's contention that philosophy is a genuine 
            activity just as science is would become a major focus for the 
            Vienna Circle. But, unlike science, philosophy does not discover new 
            facts or new knowledge. Philosophy describes the structure of the 
            world and how its basic ingredients are constructed. This is 
            knowledge, but not the same kind of knowledge that science develops 
            (Popkin and Stroll 1990). The philosophical system of logical 
            atomism was a metaphysical system in the traditional sense. As such, 
            it would be rejected by thinkers who would use the same symbolic 
            logic developed by logical atomists to contend that metaphysical 
            knowledge developed by such thinking was itself not sense (Bergmann 
            1967). 
            Logical positivism is often thought to have been initiated by the 
            "philosophy as activity" remarks of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus 
            Logico-Philosophicus. However, the group associated with the 
            beginnings of the logical positivism movement were individuals who 
            met in the early 1920s in seminars in Vienna that were conducted by 
            Moritz Schilick. The original members of the group were committed to 
            science either by scholarship or profession. To them, philosophy was 
            an avocation. Among the group's members were Hans Hahn, Fredrich 
            Waismann, Herbert Feigl, Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Carnap. The 
            original focus of the group was empiricism. However, they were 
            heavily influenced first by Whitehead and Russell and then, more 
            profoundly, by Wittgenstein (Gross 1970). 
            In elaborating upon Wittgenstein's view that philosophy was not a 
            theory but an activity, the Vienna Circle held that philosophy does 
            not produce propositions that are true or false. Instead, philosophy 
            merely clarifies the meaning of statements and in that process it 
            shows some to be scientific, some to be mathematical, and some to be 
            nonsensical (Wedberg 1984). Four principles of logical positivism 
            eventually were developed by the Vienna Circle. The first principle 
            is that of logical atomism. The truth of all complex statements 
            depends on simple statements about what may be sensed. However, none 
            of these simple statements may entail any others.b