The Public Interest and Public Administration

Abstract

Ever since ancient Greece, philosophers have assumed the existence of a public interest that is more than the sum of the interests of the individuals that make up a polity. However, the utilitarians and more recently the theorists of the ‘New Right’ have argued that the public interest consists simply of individual interests summed together, with the result that the related notion that public servants have a special duty to protect and promote the collective public interest has been subjected to sustained attack. However, the collective public interest remains in the form of four values that public servants are required to promote: accountability, legality, integrity and responsiveness. In consequence, public sector management is essentially different from business management and can only be subsumed within the latter to a limited extent when considering the education pf public servants.