Bureaucratic discretion, legitimacy, and substantive justice

Chiara Cordelli’s book The Privatized State makes an important contribution to debates over the morality of public administration and widespread privatization. Cordelli argues that privatization is a problem legitimacy, as private actors impose their will unilaterally on others. Bureaucratic decision-making, by contrast, can be legitimate, within correct institutional context in accordance with bureaucratic ethos. In this review, I argue policymaking faces similar changes from value legitimacy raises against First, for polity subject self-ruling, bureaucracies must incorporate more democracy; but, so doing goes rationale form. Second, bureaucrats acting behalf state do not have starkly different levels free purposiveness, it morally desirable purposiveness than allows, less.