The Ideal of Public Service: Reflections on the Higher Civil Service in Britain by Barry O'Toole

Author:Barry O'Toole [O'Toole, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781135770990
Google: 6UiQAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17523875
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

4 Morals, markets and modernisation

Public administration post-Fulton

The practical application of the ideal of public service in British central administration was at its zenith in the middle of the twentieth century. By 1956, the year in which Sir Edward Bridges retired as Head of the Civil Service, the work of the nineteenth-century reformers and of the great public servants of the twentieth century had come to full fruition. By that time the British civil service was a unified, career bureaucracy. An elite of able, politically impartial and largely anonymous mandarins staffed its centre. Their work was to help ministers, with whom they had their closest working relationships, to make and implement public policies. The leaders of the service professed an ethic of duty to serve the public interest. In some ways, these senior officials resembled Platonic Guardians: many of them had been taken away from their parents at a young age to receive a classical education in the Spartan conditions then offered by the so-called public schools; they had then moved to higher education in the secluded groves of that particular type of academe embodied in the Oxbridge collegiate system; and whilst in these ivory towers their classical education was further strengthened, often in the study of the ancient philosophers. Upon graduation they immediately entered the equally cloistered corridors of power of the Whitehall ‘village’, where they served a sort of apprenticeship in junior positions of authority and in which they were socialised into the traditions and values of those who had already seen the ‘Good’ and taken it ‘as a pattern of the right ordering of the state’ (Plato, 1941 edn, p. 256). These values were most poetically articulated by Plato himself. They have been echoed down the ages by some of the greatest of political philosophers, from Aristotle, through his most illustrious mediaeval interpreter, Aquinas, to Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Green in the nineteenth century and to the communitarians of the late twentieth century. These values are essentially about the setting aside of personal interests and of endeavouring to serve the common good. Thomas Hill Green was the most important British philosopher of the idealist tradition. His view was that the purpose of social organisations, including government, was to create the conditions in which individuals could fully achieve what they were capable of achieving. He inspired a generation who thought public service the best way of ensuring that vision. His ideas went hand in hand with the organisational changes contemporaneously being wrought on the civil service. The two together forged the civil service that was the legacy of Sir Edward Bridges and of the great reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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