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About Fred Thayer

I once heard Fred Thayer’s former colleague at Syracuse University, Dwight Waldo, quoted as describing him affectionately as the most “constructive crazy” in American public administration. Waldo’s felicitous oxymoron (in the original and, regrettably, now largely forgotten meaning of the word) combines, I believe, two sometimes warring aspects of Thayer’s part in shaping the discourse in our field: first, as a sometimes exasperating and contentious colleague and, second, as an utterly indispensable scholar to anyone seriously concerned about the role of hierarchy in impeding the successful transition to a global age. In his landmark An End to Hierarchy! An End to Competition!, Thayer’s argument was both radical and oddly minimalist: radical in urging the elimination of the three signature institutions of modern industrial democracy, namely, hierarchy, economic competition, and voting; and minimalist for merely formalizing the core messages of two of his heroes, Mary Parker Follett and H. Richard Niebuhr. If Follett was right in believing that sensible action can emerge only from social processes unencumbered by the authoritative commands of leaders, Thayer’s proposed elimination of hierarchy took what he regarded simply as the next logical, and decidedly modest, step of stripping from leaders the power to interfere with those processes. And from Niebuhr’s conviction that no action can properly be regarded as moral if taken alone, Thayer, as a consensus advocate, concluded that ridding the world of hierarchy was the obvious and only reasonable way to insure that people acted with, rather than apart from, one another. Owing to the centrality of hierarchy in virtually all of his writings, Thayer is sometimes misleadingly depicted as a “one-idea” (albeit a decidedly big idea) scholar. Often neglected, unfortunately, is his parallel, and equally important, critique of economic competition, including its vital role in sustaining, and in turn being sustained by, hierarchical organization. By explaining how and why hierarchy and competition reinforce one another, Thayer in effect provided the most succinct explanation to date of why, for example, rational choice theory, the New Public Management, and the Reinventing Government movement can offer no serious alternative to traditional normative conceptions of