Public Administration Matters

Professor V.A. Nikonov’s open lecture that he read to students at the Public Administration Faculty, Lomonosov Moscow State University, on September 3, 2012.

The lecture examines the role of public administration in the history of the rise and fall of great states. Numerous examples show the importance of management models, managerial innovations that led one or another nation to the climax of its historical development ensuring unprecedented economic growth, political advantage and the superpower status. A comparative approach to the understanding of history allows us to identify the opportunities and results of using managerial technologies in a sociocultural and historical context, to show that the great states of the past that aspired to be a superpower were created not only by using military force, army, economic influence but also by unifying culturally and ideologically their peoples with the help of common religion, language and value imperatives. For instance, the importance the Arab rulers attached to education, science and its practical application ensured vitality and global influence for their world. However, the closed traditional Arab society lost its historic leadership when it failed to meet the challenge of modernization. This challenge was taken up by Europe that created a new scientistic technogenic civilization, a new global order.

The West posits desacralized ‘Weltanschauung’, market economy and democratic politics as the cornerstone of a unipolar world project and a response to the challenges of globalism. In its struggle for world leadership the West’s opponent and rival is modern China, whose civilizational characteristics and governance models have ensured her a superpower status. The civilizational approach allows us to consider the history of mankind as an integral process of interaction between civilizations and as a struggle for historical leadership. In this philosophical and methodological paradigm, history fully becomes a teacher for professional managers.