Bernardo Zacka: When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency

Published date01 September 2018
AuthorMichael Adler
Date01 September 2018
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12123
Book Reviews
WHEN THE STATE MEETS THE STREET: PUBLIC SERVICE AND
MORAL AGENCY by BERNARDO ZACKA
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2017, 337 pp.,
£21.99)
This book should come with a health warning, not least for readers of this
journal because it is hard going and, for those without a thorough grounding
in philosophy or political theory, it is really quite demanding. It is probably
directed primarily to philosophers and political theorists who are taken to
task for their tendency to adopt a `top-down' approach to policy rather than a
`bottom-up' approach, for focusing too much on policy making rather than
policy implementation, and for failing to appreciate how much their analytic
work can benefit from the contextual understanding that can be provided by
ethnographic research. It is not a particularly `reader-friendly' book and I
was, at the start, rather put off by the density of the author's account and his
repeated use of unnecessarily abstruse terminology but I persisted and I can
say, quite unequivocally, that it was worth the effort.
The book is unashamedly a study of the state from the bottom up that
addresses the question of how the state should interact with its citizens, of
how institutions should be designed, and of what policies they ought to pursue
(p. 254). Zacka points out that most people's interactions with the state are
through public bureaucracies and the front-line (street-level) bureaucrats who
staff them. In the United Kingdom, members of the public interact with
Jobcentre staff, local authority officials, police officers, probation officers,
immigration officers, and so on, and these interactions, rather than more
abstract principles like the meaning of democracy or the rule of law, shape
their views about the state's legitimacy. It follows that how policies are
implemented by these officials is of central importance for political theory.
Nevertheless, as I have already pointed out, political theorists have
devoted surprisingly little attention to how public policy is actually carried
out and have mainly written about principles, laws, and policies, assuming
that once they are decided, how they are implemented is an entirely
straightforward matter and not really worthy of serious study. Zacka
challenges this view by developing a bottom-up, normative theory of the
state and a political theory informed by eight months of ethnographic
fieldwork as a receptionist at an American anti-poverty agency. In doing
so, he convincingly overturns the dominant view of bureaucracy in political
theory: what Evelyn Brodkin has called the `compliance model'of
bureaucratic responsibility, which posits a clear separation between politics
486
ß2018 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2018 Cardiff University Law School

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