Desmond King and Jerry Stoker (eds.), Rethinking Local Democracy
| Date | 01 September 1998 |
| Published date | 01 September 1998 |
| Author | John Stewart |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9299.00121 |
592 REVIEWS
interest might inspire an appropriate understanding of our relation to others, thereby enabling
us to leave behind the legitimacy problem and bring a new dawn to public administration.
The overall impression left by the work is of a challenging critique of mainstream public
administration weakened by conceptual confusions and unresolved issues. There is, for
example, the conflation of various notions of reason, including reason as antipathy to contra-
diction, reason as adherence to some beliefs to the exclusion of others, reason as faith in scien-
tific and/or ethical certainty, and reason as an exercise of judgement based on professional
expertise. There are, moreover, unfortunate appeals to functionalist explanations in a work
committed to a post-modernism that shows such explanations to be in error. There is, finally,
the failure to tell us ‘how to make the process of discussion work’ – to spell out ‘the details
of an effective participatory process’ – a failure made all the more strange by McSwite’s insist-
ence that this failure was the undoing of the participatory administration movement. Perhaps
McSwite’s work is itself a naive version of the good. Or maybe the real lesson of post-modern-
ism is that there is something wrong with the plot – with pure origins, good against bad, and
a final good.
Mark Bevir
University of Newcastle
RETHINKING LOCAL DEMOCRACY
Desmond King and Gerry Stoker (eds.)
Macmillan 1996. 254 pp. Price not known
This book is intended to stimulate and contribute to a debate about the proper role of local
government and the value of local democracy. In other words it explores the issues of why
and how local government could be developed to strengthen local democracy.
Gerry Stoker argues in his introduction that the restructuring of local government has raised
fundamental questions about the value of local government and of local democracy. The most
readily available answers derive from nineteenth century arguments, well represented by John
Stuart Mill. He argues however that there is a need to break out of the mould that casts the
case for local government in terms of pluralism, participation and efficiency.
This book attempts to do this not by starting with local government as he argues, perhaps
unfairly, past approaches have done – for that was certainly not Mill’s approach – but by
taking major currents in social and political theory and asking what place local government
and democracy had in these approaches.
It leads to some fascinating approaches. Particularly important are the contributions by
David Beetham on theorizing democracy, Anne Phillips on Feminism, Elizabeth Frazer on the
Value of Locality and Kieron Walsh on the efficiency of public services. Each of these chapters
explores the relevance of their topics to local government. Interestingly David Beetham’s
analysis of democratic theory leads to statements about the value of local government not too
dissimilar from the mould which the book was intended to break away from, showing the
resilience of those ideas.
Although full of interest the book is finally disappointing. There are important strands of
thinking that are not represented. Thus the contributions of economic theory and legal theory
are never set out, except in so far as the former is subject to a critique. It is remarkable that
the writings of Christopher Foster and Martin Loughlin do not appear in the bibliography.
The thinkers on the right are again represented only by a critique.
Important concepts that are relevant to any reformulation of local government and local
democracy are barely touched on: the learning government, although Walsh’s passages on
dynamic efficiency are relevant; the nature of experienced local knowledge although Philip’s
Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998
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