Jos C. N. Raadschelders has written a fascinating book with an almost belligerently dull title. In it, he adroitly frames some of the fundamental conceptual divides afflicting the study of public administration. He pays proper respect to the field's big players as well as its giants with a dense skein of references to inspirations, antecedents, and antagonists. (The bibliography alone spans 35 small-print pages.) And he offers his own bold synthesis, one that will not summon full consensus but deserves the respectful consideration of anyone who thinks seriously about what it means to think seriously about government.

Public Administration is not for everyone. The pace is fast and the landscape vast. Before we even reach page 7, Raadschelders invokes not just a score of the usual scholarly suspects but also Einstein, Thomas Kuhn, Lavoisier, Karl Popper, and the seventeenth-century poet John Donne. There are instances of distracting insistence upon conceptual and linguistic precision. For example, (p. 41 and Chapter 2 generally), he warns against the folly of taking Wissenschaft to mean “science,” a misapprehension that I seem to share not only with most other dabblers in German but also with most dictionaries. And while the writing for the most part ranges from workmanlike to deft, it is on occasion self-sabotagingly leaden. (“Attention for methodology in and for the study dominates, but there is very little, if at all, attention for the nature of the study and how knowledge claims are justified in the study” [pp. viii–ix].)

If it is not for everybody, however, it is emphatically just the thing for some of us. Close engagement with this book will pay off richly for those questing after the sweet spot—along the spectrum from practitioners' atheoretical war stories to pristine high-church theorizing—at which to situate intellectual work on government.

Early in the book, and recurrently throughout, Raadschelders takes us back to that pivotal era when public administration sought to break free of its parent disciplines in the traditional social sciences. As it leaves home, which path should it take? This question sparked a famous scholarly slugfest between Herbert Simon and Dwight Waldo that played out in the pages of the American Political Science Review in the early 1950s. For Simon—a pioneer in economics, sociology, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence as well as administration—the proper course was obvious: Public administration should grow up to become its own branch of science. It would be a gross caricature of Waldo to say that he viewed public administration as an art or a craft rather than as a science—he was all for science, properly construed—but he put far more emphasis than Simon on the imperatives of professional practice.

While Raadschelders does not quite endorse Theodore Lowi's indictment of Simon as “diabolical” (from a 1992 article cited on p. 20), it is clear that his sympathies lie more with Waldo. Contingency, eclecticism, and a sense of duty to (but not merger with) the world of practice are his watchwords for scholars of administration: “The challenges confronting government are not served by turf-battles between scientists, craftsmen, and artists. They are served by cooperation and open-mindedness and are facilitated by dropping the shackles of any single approach” (p. 148). He has little sympathy with Simon's vision that public administration can and should mature into its own distinct body of theory—at least a body of theory that “describes, explains, and predicts on the basis of an empirical analysis of objective facts and is universal, causal, and quantified” (p. 129; here Raadschelders is channeling Isaiah Berlin who is in turn channeling John Stuart Mill). Instead, it should embrace the pragmatic use of tools and concepts, as circumstances require, from the whole range of separate social sciences. And it should recognize that this range is continuous, not segmented, with apparent separations reflecting only limits to our comprehension.

Even more than Waldo, Raadschelders' intellectual godfather would appear to be Edward O. Wilson, whose magisterial Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) he cites briefly but tellingly. The two scholars share a strong bent toward the “lumper” (as opposed to “splitter”) persuasion (these terms go back at least to George G. Simpson, “The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 85 [1945]: 23), as well as toward a quiet audacity. Wilson asserts that (while none of us will live to see it) the natural sciences will one day converge and the social sciences will merge with natural science, morph into a branch of philosophy, or go the way of phrenology and other flash-in-the pan “disciplines” (Consilience, esp. Chapters 2 and 9). For Raadschelders, similarly, the blunt fact that government is the intersection of so many disparate forces, factors, arenas and actors “requires the discipline to develop meta-frameworks for public administration as a whole, guiding scholars to relevant bodies of knowledge. It cannot be any other way. Public administration studies government and its interaction with society. Such a complex social phenomenon cannot satisfactorily be captured in one approach, framework, or model, but requires the application of multiple disciplinary and theoretical angles” (p. 72).

There are layers of nuance in this book that defy easy summary, but the thrust is this stubborn insistence that since the real world of government is intricately integrated, honest academics must forswear the crutch of tidily circumscribed disciplines. Raadschelders's stance is the opposite of the flabby anything-goes attitude that interdisciplinarity (at least in purists' caricatures) sometimes entails. He is keenly aware of this hazard (cf. esp. pp. 157–58), and one gets the sense that he is drawn more by logic than by inclination to pluralist and integrative approaches: “[B]eing an inter-discipline … in itself, requires much discipline” (p. 72).

It is the public administration scholars' lot, Raadschelder tells us, to make themselves useful in the messy world of government as it is, rather than to make themselves comfortable in a fantasy of government that defers to academic boundaries and cumulative theoretical progressions. This is by no means to deny that there is a great deal of intellectual work to be done. Insight and analysis and empirical scruples can create plenty of value for vividly real people. What the candid scholars cannot aspire to is the construction of some theoretical edifice in which their successors will reverently dwell and on which they will progressively build. As the tectonic plates shift, they will bring down every crystal palace of the mind, no matter how solidly it might rest in the particulars of some given time and place: “Interdisciplinarity prevents the development of a unifying theory. Historical time and geographical context prohibit the development of timeless usable knowledge” (p. 128). Get over it. And get on with it.