Public administration, public sociology, and social life: Toward a new intellectuality for public administration

This dissertation is an exploration of a new intellectuality for public administration. I extend Ben Agger's question, "Can intellectuals be reborn as guardians of democracy and community?" to the public administration community, concluding that public administration must re-write its relationship with the reified state and in anticipation of social life. The dissertation is divided into two parts. First, I begin by deconstructing public administration's legitimacy question through varying theories of the state in order to demonstrate that public administration has thus far only defended the state. The point is to shift the ontology of public administration from the state to the social, creating a space for critique as the foundation of a democratic state. I then attempt to recover the excluded public, in contrast to the logic of liberalism, as a "legitimate" source of knowledge. Through a deconstruction of the conflict between intellectuals and the state in late capitalism, in Part Two I open a space for imagining an alternative intellectuality for public administration based in public sociology.