Quando Leviatã e Prometeu disputam a cidadania: uma reconstrução epistêmica da Administração Pública Moderna como uma ciência normativa interdisciplinar, premida entre Direito, Economia e Teoria Organizacional

Abstract

The paradigmatic approach, based on Thomas Kuhn’s work, is hegemonic in the study of Public Administration. In its foundation lies an evolutionary perspective that holds a sequence of crisis, revolution and overcoming of three main paradigms, Traditional Public Administration, Public Management and Public Governance. Bresser-Pereira, the author of the most widely disseminated paradigmatic view in Brazil, adapted it according to the paradigms of Patrimonialist, Bureaucratic and Managerial Public Administration. The field of Public Administration, however, is marked by criticisms of its precarious theorizing and conceptual imprecision, aspects that are not exclusive to, but rather derived from, Administration in general. These aspects put a paradigmatic approach under question. Its fragility stems, above all, from the lack of definition of its key concepts of administration, management and governance, which build paradigms as management models, differentiated by organizational techniques and principles. Based on Habermas and Marcuse, it is possible to see that this created what Bachelard calls an epistemological obstacle, generating inconsistencies and erasures, towards a process of theoretical emptiness. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the sustainability of this paradigmatic approach, at the international level and in Brazil. Based on Habermas, an epistemic residence of the field of Public Administration is proposed, which becomes dialectical and not paradigmatic, forming an interdisciplinary normative science. To this end, administration, management and governance are studied from the perspective of Weberian sociology of domination and the ontology of organizing (organizing), which go beyond the War of Senses (logomachy) that the field has become by referencing these concepts. Thus, Public Administration has come to be centered on the modes of social domination aimed at the organization of associated human life that have evolved, historically, in a conflictual and erratic manner, around the definition of the rules of coexistence (rights and duties) expressed, since Modernity, as citizenship. Following Habermas, it is argued that this process started from a moral (ethical-political) reflection on thinking about the organization of life in society and that culminated in the State as its primary organizational figure. Moral reflection on the State, however, was disenchanted by the social sciences of Law and Economics, which established a dispute for its control based on more collectivist logics, in favor of the State (Leviathan), or more privatist, in favor of Markets and Private Companies (Prometheus), since it was understood that, under capitalism, whoever determines citizenship determines the economic order. The result was a long process in which the theoretical domain of Public Administration passed from the influence of Law to Economics, subsidized by Organizational Theory with an emphasis on the private business perspective (managerialist). In view of this, conflicts were established dialectically between administration and management, State and Private Companies, Law and Economics, which turned the paradigms into a scientism in the Habermasian sense, an artifice for legitimizing the discourse to control, in practice, the State, and not to understand it as organizational social things. Theoretical and empirical research in recent years has shown that this dialectic does not result in paradigms, but rather in moments of synthesis, the current one of which could be understood as a Neo-Administrative Synthesis. This path also includes the Brazilian adaptation, which has not been reviewed in light of more contemporary research in sociology and history, which also calls into question the country's paradigmatic approach.