In Defense of the Science of Administration

Abstract

The author shows the current situation of the science of administration. For this purpose, he presents its fate in post-war Poland. He discusses the initial dusk of the science of administration in the Stalinism period, and then its separation from the science of administrative law. He indicates changes of its material scope under the influence of the Soviet conception and the first Polish school of praxeology that in the ‘60s and ‘70s led to the renaissance of the science of administration, and then in the mid-’80s to its independence as a scientific discipline. For more than thirty years the science of administration was a formally separated branch of knowledge, within the scope of legal science, and its representatives independently or in cooperation with other researchers studied administration as a phenomenon. This situation was changed by the
reform of the higher education system, called the Constitution 2.0, which led to the formal liquidation of the discussed discipline. The effects of this reform can be seen in the field of research and the teaching process. Despite the need for a study of administrative reality and the transmission of knowledge about it to students and listeners, the adopted system of science and higher education results in the extinction of this interest. The present situation of the science of administration is reminiscent of its decline during the Stalinism period. The article is the author’s contribution to the discussion about the fate of the science of administration, that it should still be practiced in an indivisible, not dispersed manner.