Decentering Technocratic Modernity: Levinasian Ethics, Filipino Loob, and Post-Technocratic Public Administration in the Philippines

Florante Delos Santos, University of Makati

Public administration is often presented as a universal model of modern governance grounded in bureaucratic rationalization, expert authority, and technocratic control. This article decenters technocratic modernity by treating technocracy as a historically Western form of governance whose contemporary critiques risk producing post-technocratic arrangements that displace expertise and procedure without securing ethical restraint. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s claim that ethics precedes knowledge and Albert Alejo’s account of loob as relational moral interiority, the article develops a normative framework for ethical post-technocratic public administration that subordinates administrative rationality to responsibility for persons. Rather than rejecting modern governance as such, the argument rethinks administration beyond technocracy without reproducing new modalities of domination. The Philippine experience under Rodrigo Duterte is employed as a theoretically illustrative case of post-technocratic governance emerging through the erosion of expert mediation and procedural constraint. Engaging the Minnowbrook tradition and public value theory, the analysis shows how humanistic approaches to public administration remain vulnerable to instrumental capture unless grounded in a prior ethical responsibility to persons that exceeds and constrains institutional rules, procedural equality, and performance metrics. Situated within histories of colonial administration, neoliberal reform, and populist sovereignty, the case is theorized as a hybrid modernity rather than a deviation from Western modernity. The article connects historical trajectories of state rationalization to contemporary transformations of governance, arguing that a Levinasian–Alejoan ethics offers a non-Westernizing horizon for decentering technocratic modernity in public administration.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 3. Media and Technocracy