Weberian reflection of the teacher Darío Mesa Chica on Public Administration

Abstract

The article presents the result of an archival investigation on the reflection advanced by Professor Darío Mesa Chica, during his years as a professor at the National University of Colombia, between 1965 and 1992, on public administration. The inquiry found that in the essay “Political life after Panama”, published in the Colombian History Manual, in 1978, in which it refers to the Colombian public administration, it is a pioneer in the use of Weberian conceptualization, in National historiography, to apprehend the public phenomenon. The professor uses the three types of “administration” offered by M. Weber in his posthumous work “Economy and Society.” The article presents the types of administration: “Entourage”, “Patrimonial bureaucratic administration” and “Rational bureaucratic administration” that Weber builds in his writings and reflections. Weber himself uses his conceptualization in his research on religions and in particular in his writing “Confucianism and Taoism”, which is part of the “Essays on Sociology of Religion”, published in 1920. It was concluded that the Weberian conceptualization possesses the analytical force and relevance to interpret contemporary public and private “administrations”, of different instances or levels, in social and political organization. The interpretation made by Professor D. Mesa is corroborated with three recent investigations on subsequent periods of Colombian history of the twentieth century, on public administration.