The Frank Stacey Memorial Lecture
| Author | Michael Moran |
| Date | 01 October 2000 |
| Published date | 01 October 2000 |
| DOI | 10.1177/095207670001500401 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
THE
FRANK
STACEY
MEMORIAL
LECTURE
From
Command
State
to
Regulatory
State?
Michael
Moran
University
of
Manchester
This
is
the
text
of
the
Frank
Stacey
Memorial
Lecture,
given
at
the
PAC
Conference,
University
of
Durham,
4
September
2000.
It's
a
great
honour
to
be
asked
to
deliver
this
year's
Stacey
Lecture,
and
I
want
to
start
with
a
moment
of
reminiscence
about
Frank
Stacey,
but
the
reminis-
cence
is
more
than
a
bit
of
piety.
I
met
Frank
Stacey
only
a
couple
of
times
and
then
briefly
-
he
was
external
examiner
at
Manchester
Polytechnic
where
I
had
my
first
ever
academic
post
in
1970.
As
everyone
testifies,
a
nicer
man,
and
a
more
generous
supporter
of
young
academics
you
could
never
hope
to
meet.
But
if
I
am
honest
I
have
to
admit
that
I
thought
his
work
a
bit
old
fashioned.
I
was
a
freshly
baked
doctoral
student
out
of
the
great
graduate
school
in
political
science
created
in
the
1960s
by
Jean
Blondel
at
Essex,
and
I
had
swallowed
the
Essex
doctrine
wholesale.
In
other
words,
I
more
or
less
thought
that
the
only
serious
way
to
study
politics
was
to
treat
it
as
a
science,
and
I
thought
the
success
of
political
science
would
be
measured
by
the
extent
to
which
it
started
to
look
like
physics.
Stacey's
interests
in
incremental
institu-
tional
reform,
his
moral
commitment
to
the
notion
of
the
scholar
as
a
public
intellectual
advocating
institutional
change
-
all
that
seemed
a
bit
passe.
How
the
wheel
turns!
Who
today
seriously
believes
in
the
vision
of
a
science
of
politics
modelled
on
the
natural
sciences?
By
contrast,
all
Stacey's
old
fashioned
preoccupations
now
look
like
the
stuff
of
policy
innovation
and
cutting
edge
scholarship.
The
concern
with
institutional
reform
that
prompted
his
work
on
the
Ombudsman;
the
concern
with
the
devolution
of
power
in
an
overly
centralised
political
system;
the
concern
with
making
power
more
accountable:
all
these
are
now
central
to
policy
argument
and
to
the
scholarship
of
modern
Britain.
What,
back
in
1973
must
have
seemed
more
utopian
than
the
project
of
writing
a
'A
New
Bill
of
Rights
for
Britain'
-
yet
twenty
seven
years
later
Stacey's
utopian
project
is
the
quintessence
of
New
Labour
(Stacey,
1968,
1973).
Public
Policy
and
Administration
Volume
15
No.
4
Winter
2000
I
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