Method and Sources of the History of Spanish Administration
| DOI | 10.1177/002085238004600116 |
| Date | 01 March 1980 |
| Published date | 01 March 1980 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
vi
are
hardly
any
economic
or
industrial
public
enterprises
in
that
category
since
other
solu-
tions
are
preferred
for
them.
In
such
an
event,
enterprises
in
Spain
come
under
both
the
Ministry
of
Finance
from
the
financial
point
of
view,
and
the
Supervising
Ministry
from
the
technical
or
operational
point
of
view.
Rarely
has
so
much
been
done
for
so
little
as
in
the
field
of
public
enterprises.
There
are,
however,
certain
principles
about
which
agreement
is
almost
unanimous
but
this
does
not
mean
that
they
are
applied.
For
instance,
since
1967
in
Spain
and
elsewhere,
there
seems
to
have
been
a
type
of
agreement
to
re-estab-
lish
the
autonomy
of
public
enterprises,
but
nothing
has
been
done
about
it.
The
situation
is
similar
in
France
and
in
the
United
Kingdom.
In
Spain,
there
have
been
important
short-
comings
shown
up
by
the
Matesa
case
and
it
cannot
be
said
that
the
difficulties
are
being
overcome.
Solutions
that
are
excellent
on
paper
fail
in
practice.
It
appears
extremely
difficult
to
give
the
public
enterprises
a
truly
autonomous
status,
because
they
must
be
obedient
instruments
in
the
hands
of
the
gov-
ernment
which
will
always
be
tempted,
even
with
the
best
intentions,
to
meddle
with
them.
Method
and
Sources
of
the
History
of
Spanish
Administration
J.M.
GARCÍA
MADARIA
The
origins
of
public
administration
and
the
related
branch
of
law go
back
to
the
end
of
the
feudal
period.
A
period
of
consolidation
began
in
the
sixteenth
century
with
the
develop-
ment
of
the
modem
State.
The
history
of
administration
is
little
known
until
the
end
of
the
eighteenth
century.
Our
knowledge
is
fragmentary
and
a
wealth
of
documents
are
unexplored.
There
are,
of
course,
works
about
the
history
of
towns,
central,
legal,
parliament-
ary,
or
administrative
institutions,
the
civil
service,
and
other
subjects,
but
no
general
survey.
The
progress
and
constitutional
devel-
opment
of
the
Executive
and
of
Administration
started
in
the
symbolic
year
1789,
when
the
history
of
administration
and
administrative
law
really
began,
though
previous
times
must,
of
course,
be
taken
into
account.
The
subject-
matter
of
the
history
of
administration
naturally
includes
legislation
and
institutions,
but
also
the
organization
and
style,
practices
and
cus-
toms,
the
political
and
social
roles
of
the
administration,
and
its
relations
with
the others
organizations
and
spheres
of
society,
in
order
approximately
to
reconstruct
administrative
conditions
in
a
given
period.
From
the
point
of
view
of
method,
two
things
should
be
kept
in
mind.
The
first
is
that,
so
far,
no
special
method
has
been
evolved
for
the
history
of
administration.
What
is
written
more
or
less
depends
on
the
purposes
intended.
Administration
is
customarily
look-
ed
upon
as
a
political
organization
and
author-
ity
though
it
is
also
something
else.
The
second
is
that
it
is
difficult
to
agree
that
the
&dquo;
methods &dquo;
of
the
history
of
administration
should
be
a
more
or
less
felicitous
combination
of
the
methods
of
the
history
of
law
or
of
the
history
of
organizations.
Attempts
should
be
made,
in
spite
of
the
difficulties,
to
move
towards
a
history
of
administration
resulting
from
a
multidisciplinary
approach
aiming
at
a
broad
reconstruction.
It
must
be
admitted
that
this
involves
the
dangers
of
breaking
off
from
the
main
trends
of
political
and
social
history
and
of
interpreting
the
facts
subjectively.
In
short,
the
history
of
administration
calls
for
specific
methods
aiming
at
a
better
know-
ledge
of
the
historical
growth
of
administration
and
administrative
processes
with
a
view
to
an
interpretation
that
would
form
part
of
the
knowledge
of
the
State
in
general.
Various
approaches
would
be
involved,
such
as
general
reasoning,
quantitative
appraisal,
a
tendency
to
take
the
machinery
of
the
organization
structure
to
pieces,
and
the
greatest
possible
use
of
the
knowledge
acquired
by
the
other
social
sciences.
As
archives
are
the
principal
source
of
administrative
history, .a
few
details
are
given
of
their
location
and
organization
in
Spain.
Public
records
have
been
plentiful
since
the
thirteenth
century
but
their
systematic
organ-
ization
only
goes
back
to
the
nineteenth.
Ac-
cess
to
them
has
long
been
restricted
or
limited
and
remains
so
in
part,
even
for
very
ancient
documents.
The
first
two
ministries
in
which
measures
concerning
archives
were
taken
are
those
of
Justice
in
1847
and
of
Finance
in
1850,
with
a
view
to
centralization.
Shortly
afterwards,
archives
were
generally
organized
on
the
central,
provincial,
and
municipal
levels,
with
a
central
general
collection
of
records
of
institutions
that
no
longer
exist,
under
the
Public
Education
Act
of
1857,
amended
in
1887
and
on
several
subsequent
occasions.
At
present,
administrative
archives
are
kept,
some
of
them
permanently,
on
the
central,
district,
provincial,
and
municipal
levels.
They
are
managed
by
the
General
Directorate
of
Ar-
chives
and
Libraries
which
is
assisted
by
advi-
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