Results
Until the Second World War, the study of public administration in France was quasi monopolized by administrative law. In the aftermath of the war, however, many initiatives flourished in order to create an administrative science. The initial sketches of this new academic discipline came mainly from public law professors, and were presented as a necessary complement to administrative law. Administrative science was intended to provide a more flexible theoretical framework than traditional administrative law, which was accused of having become obsolete with regard to the numerous institutional breakthroughs that characterized the postwar period. Administrative science was intended to help resolving the theoretical dilemmas faced by public law theoreticians, which could not be resolved with the merely normative administrative law. The latter emergence of administrative science was marked by differential uses of Public Administration concepts that have to be replaced in a relational analysis of the development of French sociology and political science. Retracing these processes allow us to understand the meaning of the importation of American Public Administration concepts and methods that lie at the heart of the French administrative science.