Short reading report on Theory-Pluralism in Public Administ

The dispute between classical pragmatism and neopragmatism lies in the whether foundationalism or coherentism, and the link between epistemology and legitimacy. For a new starter of pragmatism, it is hard to imagine the quarrel between classic and neo. However, theory-pluralism is relatively acceptable on behalf of problem-solving.

It enlights me the article wrote, “The domination of positivism in political science was and remains more pervasive than in PA, presumably because PA is more robustly a dual practitioner/academic discipline” (p.9). If we study political science , the beginning of that would be Aristotle . He raised the problem “ what is a good regime?”, which indicated different regimes by categorization and comparison. And that is certainly how he tried to solve the problem, “ how to make a state long-live”. Machiavelli’s “The Prince” was trying to deliberate a king to maintain his power and rule the state, it seems the pragmatism lies within.

However, in recent researches of political science, we could hardly find article like Aristotle or Machiavelli, but mostly positivism researches of causalities verification. Nonetheless, there are diversities in problem-constructing and methodology in PA, at least in the scope I have read. Perhaps, pragmatism could bring different flavor to political science research of current trend.