Bureaucracy: the career of a concept

The word ‘bureaucracy’ has become one of the shibboleths of our time. For many, it signifies a concept that deserves a central place in the theory and especially in the critique of modern society. The word is used to identify an institution or a caste, a mode of operation, an ideology, a way of viewing and organizing society or a way of life. As such, it has engaged some great minds and a host of lesser ones; it has become a social category. We find discussions of it in textbooks of sociology, politics, economics, social psychology and administrative theory; it is ubiquitous in popular journals and current political invective. For some it is an inescapable trend implicit in the logic of a developing capitalism; for others it is of the very essence of socialism. Certainly, a whole new turn in radical socialist thought — the rejection of ‘bureaucratic socialism’ and ‘obsolete communism’ — was dependent on the view that bureaucracy is the new danger, infecting the socialist revolution as much as, if not more than, advanced capitalist society. There are those, indeed, for whom bureaucracy has characterized a new, or not so new but alternative, social formation in which the state is the centre and ultimate controller of all significant activity and in which the classical dichotomies of bourgeois and proletarian, of free enterprise and public ownership, become irrelevant. As a term of abuse, ‘bureaucracy’ has been hurled against the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare or any other social agency the speaker dislikes, against General Motors and the big corporations, against the Soviet Communist Party and the contemporary Chinese opponents of the ‘Gang of Four’. Retrospectively it has been used to characterize the ruling caste of the great ‘oriental despotisms’ of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China and the ruling elites of a host of countries from Thailand to Meso-America. The concept of bureaucracy, in brief, works as a Jack-of-all-trades and today it works overtime. Bureaucracy, then, is a vast subject and this volume cannot and does not pretend to deal with it in all its aspects, comparative, analytical, empirical and theoretical, examining its operation in the political systems of the past and of the present, in chieftain societies, great empires and modern totalitarian or dictatorial complexes. This volume studies in detail neither the contemporary civil service nor the contemporary firm. It is concerned rather with the emergence and development of the concept of bureaucracy as a conceptual tool for large-scale, macro-sociological, discussions of society, as a tool in the armoury of social criticism, as an idea that betrays and carries with it an ideology. It does so in the context of the great social issues and some of the great social thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the context, in short, that has shaped our time. Since concepts do not arise out of a vacuum, the volume begins with a sketch of the growth of powerful, hierarchical and centralized administrative institutions in Europe in connection with state-centred absolutism and the theoretical responses to and ingredients in this growth. It notes that the term bureaucracy began with a strong pejorative overtone and that it took a comparatively long time to develop a proper theoretical appreciation of the administrative imperatives to which it pointed and of the social functions that it performed. At the same time a whole new tradition of social criticism inaugurated by Saint-Simon and carried on, in certain respects, by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky put enormous emphasis on social planning and the rational development of social resources while insisting that the government of men would be replaced by the administration of things. The realities of Soviet socialism created more and more difficulties for this view and even for the Marxism that was supposed to give it a solid theoretical foundation. Much of the volume, therefore, is concerned with the way in which the term bureaucracy functions in and raises difficulties for the Marxist view of the world and of the development of contemporary society — a theoretical drama that has occupied the attention and shaped the thought of thinking radical socialists for some forty years. But that drama, while not without its continuing echoes, is to some extent played out and the volume concludes with an examination of new problems that increasingly engage the attention of the present generation—the relationship between law, freedom and the increasing strength and role of bureaucratic-administrative structures and attitudes in the regulation of society as well as the possible disintegration of the ideal type ‘bureaucracy’, the coming apart of factors that have been lumped together, in the light of new social and technological developments, above all the computer.