BUREAUCRACY AND DEMOCRACY

MORE ON WEBER'S DIALECTIC OF RATIONALITY

I’m wrapping up my dive into the thought of Weber here with a couple shorter pieces that flesh out his thinking, but address topics that I couldn’t fit into the main post on Weber without too much of a digression. I suspect the next post will be the “big announcement.” Actually, it’s not that big. Don’t get built up for a let down; keep expectations low. But, it is kind of big for me. In any event, moving on.

Weber’s fleshing out of the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy is another example of his overall appreciation that rationality has built into its logic a dialectic that ultimately undermines its initial virtues. What he calls the pre-democratic administration of table companions — e.g., the king’s favored at court — entrenched aristocratic privileges in a manner odious to democratic sensibilities. The introduction of bureaucracy, with rationally informed and designated officers, selected on merit and beholden to the mission, gave rise to the new form of bureaucratic administration.

Such a bureaucracy, functioning according to extra-personal standards of rationality, removed the aristocratic ethos, promoting the idea of a popularly controlled and accessed administration. This was why the emphasis upon the bureaucracy being rule based and meritocratic was so important. A rational pursuit of the public good, rather than administration merely in the self-interest of the aristocracy, assured that the public good would be the guiding light of public administration. In this way then the bureaucracy is portrayed as an necessary instrument for the realization of democracy, at least insofar as it transcends administration by aristocracy: i.e., the king’s table companions.

And while Weber grants that this benefit to democracy is a real thing, he of course is not so naïve as to conclude his assessment there. Regular readers to this substack will know that I’d be inclined to ultimately conclude all talk about rational administration in interest of the public good is, in reality, at the end of the day, always only the propaganda and ventriloquism of the managerial class. As Weber himself says:

Of course, attention should be paid since the word “democratization” can be misleading, because the Demos, in the sense of an unstructured mass, never really “administrates” in bigger groups. Rather, the Demos is administered.

And equally as interesting for an Italian realist perspective, Weber adds:

The Demos only changes the way a governing head of an administration is selected and changes the degree of influence that the Demos (or more correctly, other groups of people from its midst) are able to direct administrative activity by using so-called public opinion. “Democratization,” as defined here, does not necessarily mean that the percentage of governed people who participate actively in the governance of a particular social entity increases.

And, in predictably dialectical terms, Weber goes on to acknowledge that at a certain point democracy and bureaucracy come to be at odds. This happens in two dimensions. First, over time the bureaucracy comes to be an exclusive class, and therefore of course eventually comes to rule increasingly in interest of its own class. And secondly, in a dimension that may initially seem synonymous, but really is another angle, Weber argues that the bureaucracy tends to become technocratic in its operation. So, even if it hadn’t developed its own, self-interested, class character, it would tend to undermine the democratic ideal of popular control over the government and public administration. The point of democracy is that people get the government they want, whether it’s “rational” or not. And of course, the very idea of “rational” presumes the prescribed standard by which any policy or practice is to be measured as “rational.” There’s no escaping the naturalistic fallacy.

So this is another way bureaucracy flips into its opposite. And the iron cage of rationality betrays the French Enlightenment’s promise of transcendent and redeeming reason. For readers of this substack, today, perhaps these insights might seem obvious. When Weber was developing them over a hundred years ago, that was hardly the case. Yet, I’d still say that most of our fellow travelers in the Western world remain very far from appreciating the character and implications of Weber’s iron cage of rationality. And my anticipation is that they’re going to learn about it the hard way, before very long.

And I’ll be having so much more to say about both the consequences of and causes driving those big changes that lie ahead for our civilization. So, if you’ve haven’t yet, do…

And, if you know others who might appreciate what we do around this ole substack campfire, please...