For both historians and political scientists concerned with dilemmas of development in Latin America, studying the role of public administration—potential as well as actual—can make important contributions to understanding. As in the colonial past, present-day administrative involvement in political control, cultural diffusion, and economic growth assumes great significance. Unfortunately, this significance stands in inverse ratio to the amount of scholarly attention that has been addressed to contemporary administrative institutions and processes in Latin American countries.

Thus one welcomes books such as this. Half of it consists of an essay by Honey, and the remainder is devoted to commentaries by Peter D. Bell, Richard A. Fehnel, James R. Himes, and George Sutija on Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela. The preposition “toward” in the title is an important qualifier, for Honey calls his proposals “suggestions to be explored rather than . . . formulas to be applied” (p. 2). The result, then, is perhaps more accurately described as a “pre-strategic” survey and analysis coupled with a list of general proposals from which a given country might find various ones appropriate for selection and adaptation.

Nevertheless a basic strategy begins to emerge in the emphasis given to two broad sets of factors. In the first place, the author is clearly aware that problems of administrative development are inextricably embedded in the political systems of the countries concerned—specifically, in processes of political socialization, the nature of civic cultures, and the structure and functioning of governments. One might quarrel with Honey’s wish to define public administration so broadly as to encompass the conduct or operation of the entire political system in order to make this basic point. Nevertheless, the point may be taken as valid. The second set of factors is, broadly speaking, educational and includes research and special training programs as well as national educational systems.

In simplified form, then, Honey’s strategic argument would seem to be that administrative development depends on changes in political systems, and that these changes can be influenced by improving the ways in which future administrative and political leaders absorb the political culture and are prepared for roles in the political structure. More specifically, educational changes increasing empirically grounded training in the social sciences can contribute to the desired changes in processes and structures. Also external (largely North American), as well as internal agencies, both governmental and nongovernmental, can contribute to such educational changes. If this is a proper statement of an argument that is largely implicit, then it is well to point out Honey’s emphasis that the changes referred to can be based only on the determination of Latin American political leaders themselves.

In discussing means, neither the principal author nor his four commentators limit their attention to educational systems and processes. For example, Honey’s first proposal is to establish in each country a “National Council on the Public Service,” which will focus attention on the problems and symbolize top-level support of the need for change. The reader can learn much about Latin American administrative problems, and about measures already taken to cope with some of them. Some of the latter, while promising, are shown to be faulty and inadequate.

The book contains minor flaws. One wonders, for example, why the efforts of the Ford Foundation are discussed in the midst of bilateral and multilateral governmental programs of external aid (pp. 11-12), rather than under the heading of “Private Organizations”— which, curiously, subsumes the scholarship program of the French government and the loan program of the Spanish government (p. 19). And on pp. 28-29 a statement attributed in the text to Frank Brandenberg (sic) is cited in the footnote as that of Frank Tannenbaum— who will no doubt be gratified to learn that he only “edited” Ten Keys to Latin America (p. 29). The four commentaries, while useful and informative, tend to use Honey’s essay more as a springboard than as a guide. This is less true of Bell than of the others. At the conclusion of Fehnel’s otherwise helpful essay on Chile, he gets himself in the awkward position of arguing that the “size of the assistance must not be determined . . . by the capacity of the recipient to absorb the assistance” and then asserting the contrary in the next paragraph (p. 140).

More basically it is regrettable that Honey did not go on to explore the relationships among his proposals and to suggest priorities or the possible “mixes” that might be appropriate to countries with differing profiles of developmental problems. (His four commentators might have been more deliberately systematic here.) But perhaps this is to tax the authors with a shortcoming that is more the responsibility of scholarship on Latin America in general, for we still do not have an adequate theoretical understanding of development there. Since time is central to any concept of development, and since historians have put forth more effort on Latin America than scholars in other social disciplines, it is to be hoped that historians will find further work in this direction as challenging as do some of their colleagues.