“Honour of the politician” and “honour of the civil servant” according to Max Weber: what contemporary follow up for the public service? Reflections of a public manager

Abstract

Society is expressing renewed, and sometimes ambivalent, expectations of public services to provide an efficient and reactive response to the challenges of social and territorial cohesion and environmental responsibility. At the same time, the crisis of political representation calls for a new citizen engagement in which public decision-making is better informed first by the principles of co-construction, evaluation and participation of public policies, and second, by new modes of territorial adaptation/differentiation which are now part of French law. In this context, the public manager is strongly challenged. He or she cannot simply be “the hand of the law”, but must explicitly embody the values that nourish democratic debate and public action. Without renouncing to the founding principles of the civil service in terms of impartiality and neutrality, public managers are called upon to demonstrate a renewed commitment to active and responsible citizenship. They have to “live” their function and to give substance to explicit or implicit functions of mediation and regulation, but also of active involvement in the transmission of the values that underpin the social pact.