`BUREAUCRACY`

As is the case with information, bureaucracy as a phenomenon is considerably older than bureaucracy the word. An *Enlightenment physiocrat, decrying excessive regulation of trade, invented it to deride a new form of government. French radicals, struggling to achieve the promise of the revolution, lambasted it as an impediment to social reform. English political theorists, observing complacently the centralization of continental European monarchies, congratulated themselves on avoiding it. Theorists of social organization, seeking the harbingers of modernity, praised and feared it as a technology of machine-like efficiency for controlling the flow of vast quantities of information. Cynics, appalled by its clandestine procedures and extravagant inefficiency in clawing information to the center, satirized it witheringly. Public officials, promoting their administrative efficacy and espousing an ethos of service, deny that they might embody it. Populist leaders, stoking fears that it thwarts the will of the people, threaten emptily to destroy it.

Ever since “it” was first named in the mid-eighteenth century, bureaucracy has carried unambiguously pejorative connotations. So it remains in our collective consciousness, even as the phenomenon of bureaucracy has come to saturate our every action and interaction. As the anthropologist David Graeber notes, in the literary sphere of “sword and sorcery” fantasy fiction, when good and evil are invariably locked in combat, only the evil people are depicted as bolstering their rule with bureaucracies.

What, then, is “it”? We may profitably begin by distinguishing between the word, the wide range of connotations it has provoked, and the phenomena it has been taken to denote. For the sake of clarity, the following characteristics may be offered as a working definition of bureaucracy as a category of analysis: bureaucracy describes a system of administration in which routine administrative activity is delegated to officeholders (who are often, but not always, professional career administrators), conducted on the basis of information (typically in the form of written records), with some differentiation and specialization of offices that are organized hierarchically and are reliant on systems of communications. By this definition, bureaucracy existed as a system of administration long before it entered our vocabulary. Already in the fifteenth century, the sheer drudgery of routine administration was recorded in the verse of the English poet and clerk Thomas Hoccleve (d. 1426), who labored by day in the hierarchy of the Privy Seal Office, where he stared in silence “upon the sheep’s skin” (membranes of *parchment) keeping his songs and words within. A history of bureaucracies will not, then, be commensurate with, nor englobed within, the conceptual history of the word. On the other hand, scholarly efforts to comprehend bureaucracy sociologically or to investigate specific instantiations of bureaucratic administration historically cannot ignore the cultural freighting of the term and the contested nature of the concept.

In 1745, the French economist Jacques-Claude Marie Vincent, Marquis de Gournay, is said to have quipped: “We have an illness in France that appears likely to ravage us; this illness is called bureaumania”—bureaumanie. De Gournay saw this malady as the outcome of a new form of government—rule by officials—which he dubbed, bureaucratie. This conjoining of the French bureau with the Greek kράτος (kratos, “governing power”)—by analogy with the classical Greek forms of government such as aristocracy and democracy—marks the arrival of bureaucracy into our common *lexicon.

From French, bureaucracy passed into German (1799), English (1818), Italian (1828), and Russian (mid-nineteenth century), without shedding its pejorative connotations. Uniformly hostile, the polemicists varied subtly in the targets of their hostility. Some followed de Gournay in using bureaucracy to refer to illegitimate rule by overweening officialdom. It is in this sense that the French term made its debut in English prose when in 1818 Lady Morgan described British rule over Ireland as “the bureaucratie or office tyranny by which Ireland had been so long governed.” For others, it was the officials specifically, not the system at large, who were suspect. To describe this ruling caste, the French Revolution created another neologism—“the bureaucrat” (first documented in 1791). Soon a whole social class—the bureaucrats—found itself satirized in pictorial and literary form. The lithographs of Henri Monnier, published under the title “Scenes from bureaucratic life,” depict low-level functionaries idling the day away in reading daily newspapers and sharpening their quills (figure 1). Honoré de Balzac in Les Employés (1836) refers to the birth of bureaucracy after the French Revolution, describing it as a “gigantic power set in motion by dwarves” (La bureaucratie, pouvoir gigantesque mis en movement par des nains, est née ainsi).

Many authors depicted bureaucracy as a societal malignancy. A Prussian pamphlet published in 1844 describes bureaucracy—in the sense of ranks of salaried officials ever increasing in numbers—as a “powerful cancer [that] feasts voraciously, insatiably, and lives on the marrow and blood of the people.” The paradox of bureaucracy was its indispensability, and ineluctable growth, in the face of this distaste. Friedrich von Schulte (1880) wrote of the “tumor of bureaucracy” but noted the irony that: “Everybody blames the Bureaucracy and asks from it everything he needs.”

It was primarily through the sociology of Max Weber (1864–1920) that bureaucracy was rescued from polemic and redeployed, analytically, as a sociological concept to refer to a particular form of rational administration. The pithiest formulation of Weber’s conception is found in his political writings. “Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order” (1918) was a controversial essay first published in serial form in the Frankfurter Zeitung (1917). Here Weber links the modernization of the state with the rise of “bureaucratic officialdom,” whose characteristics he lists as being “based on recruitment, salary, pension, promotion, professional training, firmly established areas of responsibility, the keeping of files, hierarchical structures of superiority and subordination.” Notably, bureaucracy refers to a system of administration, not the new form of government invented by de Gournay; for the latter, Weber employed the word Beamtenherrschaft—“domination” or rule by officialdom.

Weber’s most elaborate account of bureaucracy was composed earlier, about 1912, and published posthumously in his unfinished opus magnum: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and society). This account is often summarized as a checklist of ten constituent elements. In fact, Weber provides a fully worked out “ideal type” with reflections on historical precursors and preconditions. The opening section describes the features of “bureaucratic authority” and then moves to the role of the official within that structure of rulership. The chief elements of bureaucratic authority are its delimited jurisdictional competence ordered by fixed administrative rules and regulations. This permanent, public “bureaucratic authority” is, in Weber’s view, historically exceptional, typical only of modern officialdom. The second characteristic concerns structure, specifically the hierarchical office with graded levels of authority. Weber sees the development of hierarchy and specialization as typical of all bureaucratic structures, whether public (the state), ecclesiastical, political (the political party), or private (enterprise and industry). The third characteristic concerns control of information. Here “the files” assume a vital role in the management of the modern office: written records are the means by which information is systematized and channeled, and their maintenance requires a vast staff of clerks and scribes.

`Figure 1.` `Dix Heures: Lecture des journaux, Déjeuners, Taille des Plumes` `(Ten o’clock, reading the papers, lunch, sharpening of the quills). Engraving from` `Moeurs administratives` `(1828) by Henry Monnier (1799–1877). Courtesy of Gallica and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.`

From this outline of the structure of bureaucratic authority, Weber advances a description of the ideal-typical official who holds office as a vocation. Office is not a personal or family possession that can be inherited, nor is it a mechanism for personal enrichment; rather, it is a duty. The pure type of bureaucratic official serves not out of personal loyalty to the ruler nor by election from below but rather achieves office through impersonal qualifications, training, and expertise, with office work constituting the primary activity of working life. The bureaucrat enjoys a career within the hierarchical structure of the bureaucracy and is salaried, moving progressively from lower- to higher-paid positions.

Weber’s contribution is widely acknowledged as seminal. It has also been widely misunderstood. Critics object that real historical examples never precisely fit the profile of the ideal type. This is to miss the methodological point. Weber deliberately intensified the elements of the ideal type to throw into relief the salient features of real historical examples, which never occur in a pure form. Actual historical bureaucracies are likely, to lesser or greater extents, to reflect wider societal norms and attitudes concerning such matters as patronage and personal probity. By way of illustration, George Washington famously established a bureaucratic ethos in which the only bars to attaining office were “family relationship, indolence and drink,” whereas in Britain at the same time, as Samuel Finer observed, “the last two criteria were no barrier to office, and the first was a positive recommendation” (Mann, 458).

Where one can quite justifiably query Weber is in his value judgment about the technical superiority of bureaucratic organization. Bureaucracy is a precision instrument for achieving goals, the pinnacle of formal or “means-end” rationality (Zweckrationalität): “The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs—these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.”

Contemporaries disagreed. The Russian Encyclopaedic Dictionary of 1891 includes the comment that “bureaucracy observes form for the sake of itself and sacrifices the essence of the matter to it.” The idea of essence and meaning being sacrificed to serve futile and relentless office formulas suffuses the work of Weber’s contemporary the Czech author Franz Kafka (1883–1924). It is likely that Kafka met Alfred Weber (1868–1958), younger brother of Max Weber, who taught at Charles University Prague during Kafka’s time there as a student, graduating in 1907. Certainly, Kafka encountered an essay by the younger Weber published in 1910 under the title “Der Beamte” (The official), which describes the alienation of administrative life and the dangers of a coming “age of bureaucracy.” The influence is felt directly in Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony,” and the theme of impenetrable bureaucracy is prominent in Kafka’s prose more generally. In his final, and incomplete, dystopian novel, The Castle, Kafka emphasizes the symbolic power of documents and power of (mis)information. The life of the protagonist, K., is thrown into confusion by the misplacement of a file appointing him as surveyor of the local village. Seeking to have the error rectified, K. learns of an official in the Castle named Sordini, whose office is stacked with paperwork. Officials rush to and fro, piling up further bundles and removing others, so that the files are always collapsing, and “the constant sound of one pile after another crashing to the floor has become associated with Sordini’s office.” The crashing files are not, however, taken as a sign of inefficiency; rather, they betoken Sordini’s conscientious effort to control the flow of information and prevent error within a complex administrative organization. As the head of the village explains to K.: “Is there a bureau of control? There are only bureaux of control (Kontrollbehörden). Of course, they are not meant to detect errors in the crude sense of the word, for errors are not made, and even if one is made, as in your case for instance, who can say for certain that it is an error?” Kafka does not use the German word for bureaucracy here, but he creates an indelible image of “it” as a rules-based system of menacing absurdity and farcical bureaucratic infallibility.

Sociologists in the generations after Weber argued that informality was a necessary characteristic of efficient administration, and excessive adherence to formal rules rendered bureaucracy ineffective. But ineffective need not mean powerless. This takes us to the unintended consequences of how bureaucracies think. It is not simply that the effectiveness of bureaucracy falters when it fails to comprehend the real social complexity it was created to administer. It is rather that bureaucracy reshapes society in the effort to render it comprehensible or “legible.” Bureaucratic institutions simplify radically, imposing external categories and insisting on uniformity and standardization in the effort to count populations, control the environment, and extract wealth. As James C. Scott describes: “The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic institutions … can never adequately represent the actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that they employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice to the world that they purport to describe.” The outcome of such abstract and schematized institutional thinking, when imposed on the scale of mass social engineering, has often been tragic in its impact on environments and populations.

One point on which the interpretation advanced by Scott sits in agreement with Weber is in depicting bureaucracy of this kind as a project of high modernism of the twentieth century. For Weber, bureaucracy in its pure ideal-typical form was a “structure of domination” characteristic of legal-rational forms of authority, closely associated with “modernity,” and distinct from patrimonial administration, which Weber depicted as personal, traditional, and normally premodern. This is a view that remains influential, notably in the work of neo-Weberian social theorists such as Michael Mann, who places the most intensive phase of bureaucratization in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (well over a century after the arrival of “it” as a word) and describes bureaucracy as a project encouraged by ideologists pursuing rational administration to augment the power of the nation-state.

A different angle of critique complicates the chronology and the assumed causal connection between bureaucracy, “modernity,” and the state. In long-range historical perspective, the “state” as a territorially bounded and (more or less) uniformly ruled political formation is very much the exception. Much more typical was extensive rule over various peoples or ethnicities—the rule of “empires.” While empires developed formal institutions of administration, few (if any) had the manpower or economic resources to communicate with their subjects directly. Power was necessarily delegated to or mediated through local power brokers, whether natives or settlers or bureaucrats on the ground—the “kings of the bush,” as they were termed in French colonial Africa. For bureaucracy to be operable in situations of this kind, it required flexibility. Efforts to expand imperial bureaucracies, to exercise direct rule, or to override local power structures often proved destabilizing. The *early modern Spanish monarchy provides an example of a colonial bureaucracy that possessed much greater administrative latitude than its formalized hierarchy might at first suggest. This flexibility is summed up by the famous formula “I obey, but do not execute.” The formula provided colonial bureaucrats located thousands of miles away from Spain with a necessary degree of autonomy and discretion in choosing to implement the central directives of the monarchy, without altogether denying the overarching authority of the monarch.

There is, then, a twofold risk: first, of foreshortening the history of bureaucracies as a form of administration by examining their operations solely in the context of the formation of modern states; second, of exaggerating the capacity of bureaucracy to exercise power extensively, especially in imperial contexts. Our empirical evidence for studying historical bureaucracies was, more often than not, produced by the bureaucrats themselves, whether in the form of the “files,” the procedures they prescribed, or the moralizing claims they made for their own legitimacy and indispensability. All this evidence is potentially self-aggrandizing and needs to be unpicked. Tolstoy captures the reality neatly in his parable of the ruler-administrator—the bureaucrat—on the sea of history in War and Peace:

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labour and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boathook to the ship of the people … naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat-hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.

For historians, whose interpretations are shaped by the information that is preserved when bureaucratic files become historical archives, the chief danger lies in writing history from the viewpoint of the bureaucrat adrift in his bark, holding on to a boat-hook.

Peter Crooks

`FURTHER READING`

Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy, 1970; Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons, eds., Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, 2016; H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, new ed., 1991; Eugene Kamenka and Martin Krygier, Bureaucracy: The Career of a Concept, 1979; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, 2012; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.