"Killing the King" in Public Administration: From Critical Epistemology to Fractured Ontology and Limited Agency. A Review Essay (To Kill the King: Post-Traditional Governance and Bureaucracy) (Essay‪)‬

INTRODUCTION For Farmer (2005), "imagination", especially in the form of "open engagement", is the fundamental requirement for a critical reflexivity that allows each of us to become an "artist in the conduct of our life" (Farmer, 2005, p. xiv). Farmer illuminates a "moral reflection" by which materialist political economy is conjoined with post-structuralist (even post-modernist) linguistic/symbolic analysis in order to recover the arena of norms/values from the deadening embrace of technocratic praxis. Farmer (2005) presents an imaginative, critical Public Administration indicative of what Dahrendorf (1968, p. vii) refers to as "a social science of values." This involves the type of "big range", "morally-committed" theorizing that "weave[s] historical awareness into sociological [or public administration] generalizations" (Dahrendorf, 1968, p. vii). Farmer beckons academics and practitioners into an imaginative, critical public administration, akin to Habermas's expansive "critical sociology," which "keep[s] us aware of what we are doing [...] irrespective of whether we are doing it consciously or blindly and without reflection. A critical sociology in this sense should view its subject precisely from an imagined [...] a priori perspective, as a generalized subject of social action" (Habermas, 1963, p. 228, cited in Dahrendorf, 1968, p. vii).