The biopolitical state: Public administration and the fabrication of 'the People'

This dissertation proposes a radical reframing of the legitimacy question in public administration by calling into question the status of “the People” as the basis for democratic government. It is grounded in the key texts in the intellectual history of public administration that have concerned themselves with administrative legitimacy, including those of Goodnow, Waldo, Simon, Rohr, Ostrom, Redford, McSwite and Harmon. The work of Deleuze, Foucault, Zizek, Schmitt and Hardt and Negri is also engaged.; The dissertation begins with the observation that in the politics-administration dichotomy there is a silent doubling of the term politics. Politics connotes the intrusion of corrupting elements into the formulation of policy and the formulation of a politics above any particular interest. The politics-administration dichotomy is in actuality a Politics/politics-administration dichotomy, where Politics concerns the articulation of the People. It is demonstrated that in public administration, this originary Politics of the People is always taken for granted and, as such, the legitimacy question is rendered fundamentally irresolvable. This doubling of the political allows for the emergence of representative government. It becomes the task of politics and, secondarily, administration to represent the objectivity of the People. The People serves as a neutral position from which to assess the fidelity of political representations. This conceptualization of the People is used to develop a general theory of representation (a relation of model and copy) that links “post-structuralist” critiques of epistemological representation with a critique of political representation.; It is shown how political technologies are deployed to provide the “empty” universality of the People with specific content. However, given the nature of popular sovereignty, this content asserts itself as the representation of Life, thereby generating a biopolitical state in which life and death are literally at stake in politics at the micro-level. Law and administration are two historical biopolitical technologies deployed to fabricate the People's presupposed unity without exception. It is demonstrated how the contemporary legitimacy crisis of government is a consequence of biopolitical failure to produce the People. The dissertation concludes with an outline of a post-representational democratic governance concerned with the production of singularity.