The Humanities and Public Administration: An Introduction

This book makes the case for the significance of bringing back the humanities into the study of public administration, public governance, public management, and public policy. It argues that the humanities and the social sciences complement each other in the study of public administration. Chapters in the book explore the contribution to public administration of such disciplines like historiography, moral philosophy and theology, political philosophy, religious studies, or the fine arts to shed light on under-explored aspects of administrative phenomena. Reason as employed and deployed in the humanities can generate a kind of knowledge and understanding different and complementary to the knowledge generated by the ‘scientific reason’ of the social (and other) sciences. The book provides a much-needed critical, systematic and integrated exploration of the contribution of the humanities to the field of public administration.