In the end, however, Foucault would likely not have specific advice for public administration intellectuals, or at least his advice for administrators would be confounding and unuseful in their own terms. He would teach them to take the practical moves of authority—its syntax, architecture, and implements—more seriously and to take its big modernist themes (rationality, capitalism, rights, and so on) a little less seriously. He would show them that the important work is a signal of the new configurations.
This may or may not lead to the production of better administrators—such was never Foucault's concern. It will surely not lead to great critiques of the high moral dudgeon favored by every modernist intellectual. What the Foucauldian approach can do is accord strategic thought and action the role it deserves in the public world. It could engage our students in what politics and administration actually have done, sending them on a hunt for illustrative cases that might change their lives, and the lives of others.