Governing the World? Philanthropic Foundations and Public Administration in the United States (1930–1960)

Résumé 0

In the recent hype for transnational subjects, policy transfers have been taken into consideration. This kind of work has not yet met the scholarship by historians who have « made the bet on connections », an angle that consists in studying transnational links, their nature, their shape, their content and their evolution in time. This article takes place in this context, and proposes to put in context some past circulation that dealt with governmental action in its technical dimension, the « administrative machinery ». This ground was materialized and organized by some US philanthropic Foundations through their support to the attempts to define and disseminate scientific and universal principles of organization and operation of the governmental machine, a science of public administration with relevance from local to international administration, and from the USA to India. The article scrutinizes an international system of circulation set up in 1920-1930 by a cluster of organizations based on the University of Chicago campus. This system seems to crumble in the 1960s, but beyond that it did produce an harmonization in cognitive and practical aspects of administration.