THE BUREAUCRATEM AND THE MARKET

ON SPATIALIST SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY

In my last post (in footnote 2), I noted John Milbank’s valuable distinction between the marketplace and the market. The latter captured a vital distinction, emphasized also by Polanyi. Marketplaces are embedded locations, usually within towns: physical spaces where people came to buy and sell commodities. The market is conceived by Milbank as disembodied from any specific physical space: a system in which the laws of supply and demand are abstractly operationalized in pervading the entire social fabric. It is only with this latter innovation that it becomes possible to commodify the very foundations of human life and community: i.e., labor and land. In Polanyi’s terms, this is the Great Transformation: we could say, invoking our Innis-Nisbet framework, a transformation from temporal pluralism to spatial monism.

Spatials – as illustrated by that leftist ratatouille of the French Enlightenment and Revolution – aspire to a homogenization of universalism, progressivism, monadic individualism, and rationalism. These are topics discussed frequently on this substack (e.g., here, here, here, and here). That the market has this effect is something to which so many free marketers remain oddly obtuse. Libertarians, most notably of the Austrian School of economics variety, maintain a strange lacuna on the market, neglecting what they otherwise know from economics: there are no benefits without costs (minimally, missed opportunity costs, but almost always too unintended or unconsidered consequences, and often even perverse outcomes.)

So many will attempt to defend the market as a transcendent good either by appealing to freedom or prosperity. As has been identified elsewhere on this substack, though, “freedom” is not a self-evident good. Freedom from and for what, makes all the difference. As Nisbet demonstrated, freedom of the monadic individual has historically resulted in the liberation of the state, from the inhibitions imposed on its actions by the intermediary associations of a pluralist society, which from a temporal’s perspective provided the essential and vital collective freedom from state control. “Multiply your associations and be free!” (See here.)

Appeals to “prosperity” are no less problematic. Prosperity too has tradeoffs. Whether one prefers the benefits to the costs, or in which proportions, even what one considers to be costs and benefits, is determined by personal values. “Prosperity” is not an intrinsic good: alleviating economic impoverishment may well come at the expense of cultural impoverishment (here). To simply assume prosperity is an intrinsic good is to ignore the problems of the naturalistic fallacy, also familiar as Hume’s is/ought problem. Such thinking is in fact – though all such libertarians would scoff at the suggestion – a form of technocracy. It is the argument that a form of social technology can be so rational as to transcend subjective objections over the nature of the good life.

Yes, I’ve read Human Action. I understand that Mises’ stated premise is that the market as mechanism does not need or presume to explain the preferences of any market actor. That though isn’t the point: once the totality of all such preferences is established, the very logic of the market’s appeal is that – by its decentralized, invisible hand type logic – it spontaneously calculates the most rational allocation of resources to achieve those ends entailed in such a constellation of preferences. Hayek explicitly identified the process as an algebraic algorithm.

The logic of the market system, in however decentralized and spontaneous a manner, assigns to each of us our market-situated role for achieving the rational realization of posited preferences.¹ (In that sense, as we’ll see, it’s not much different than Weberian bureaucracy.) It may be true that the market is the greatest generator of wealth. Even if this is so, it doesn’t follow that its implicit values, or entailed social relations, ought to either exist or be preferred by anyone.

The technocratic attitude of such free marketism, and the market’s situating as a form of social technology, might be better appreciated if we take a moment to reconsider that other quintessential social technology of the spatials: bureaucracy. And here I’m going to offer a little revision to arguments I’ve been making on this substack going back over several months. In speaking of the spatials’ Janus-faced symbionts, I’ve posed the state, alongside the market, as the two prongs of this spatialist assault on the temporalist intermediary associations of a pluralist society. Having dug down deep into the work of Max Weber, I believe this was a misaligned framing.

The framing of course I was taking from the implicit or explicit expression of other thinkers who have been instrumental in providing the insights that underpin that framing: e.g., Polanyi, Michéa, Nisbet. They all emphasized the role of the state. But the definition of the state is a well-disputed one. It’s standardly used to invoke a wide range of historical powers, structures, and legitimacies. And at least in theory, there’s no reason one can’t proffer the minarchist ideal of the night watchman state, which makes no effort to control or regulate anyone’s behavior beyond basic crime control.

If what we’re aiming to identify is the spatials’ social engineering ambitions, the more accurate and precise referent is not the state, but bureaucracy. And, as mentioned in the last post, Weber put a great deal of emphasis upon, and effort into analyzing, the historical role of bureaucracy. And, of course, harkening back to themes explored at more length earlier in this substack, it is through bureaucracy, properly speaking, that the managerial class has instituted its power. Shifting the emphasis from the state to bureaucracy clarifies much and ties together many central themes of the analysis conducted here over recent months.

An additional benefit of emphasizing bureaucracy (in addition to better understanding of the managerial revolution) is that we better capture its nature as a social technology by divorcing it from any intrinsic connection with the state. And indeed, Weber emphasizes in his analysis that so-called public and private bureaucracy operates in the same manner, under the same assumptions, with the same aspirations and outcomes.² In fact, to better illustrate Weber’s insight in this regard, I want to introduce what I believe to be a useful neologism: the bureaucratem. This is a conjoining of bureaucracy with system.

For those who don’t know, the etymology of “system” is a combination of terms for “holding together” and “making firm.” So, this neologism signifies bureaucratic practices and imperatives being bound together across contexts. Bureaucratem is shorthand for a bureaucratic system and ethos which transcends and integrates not merely individual organizations, but ostensible distinctions between state administration, commerce, military, and civil society (NGO, political party, church, etc.).

It is a social technology that pervades the social order, subjecting everything to rational planning of the social engineer. So, while bureaucracy is the analytical equivalent of Milbank’s marketplace, a specific and concrete example of a particular kind of social practice, the bureaucratem is the analytical equivalent of Milbank’s market: the abstraction of the logic and assumptions of the concrete social practice to a form of socially colonizing technology.

Such social technology assumes the subjugation of all social entities to its rational logic. Though, again, as I’ve frequently emphasized, it is an analytical and historical mistake to regard these two forms of social technologies as alternatives. Rather, they are symbionts. As we’ve seen in prior posts, it was the pervasiveness of such bureaucratic rationality and social engineering that enabled the perversion of marketplaces into markets (see here and here). The Janus-faced symbionts still exist, it’s just that one face has been redefined for better analytic accuracy. However, also, it would be a mistake to misconceive such social technology’s insatiable colonizing impulse with existential permanence.

We saw last post Weber’s dissection of how what we called bureaucratic rationality, while starting off with genuine promise of enhancing human freedom and prosperity, winds up in the end inverting its promise and becoming an iron cage which locks all under its influence into dehumanizing functions as cogs within the rationalizing machine.³ If the standard technocratic elision of the naturalistic fallacy is uncritically accepted, and something like “prosperity” is allowed to be installed as the intrinsic good, the market no less than the bureaucratem becomes an iron cage of rationality, in which each person is demanded by the requirements of rational resource allocation to play their role as cog in the machine of prosperity production.

These spatialist social technologies advance the spatials’ agenda of mass, universal rationalism, in the name of a progressive vision of individual freedom and prosperity. Whether this is achieved through the rational social engineering of the bureaucratem or the rational resource allocation mechanism of the market, both are social technologies for achieving the spatialist agenda. Both entail the eradication of society’s intermediary associations and institutions in the name of rationality (see here, here, here, here and here).

Obviously, these social technologies are not identical. One is far more centralist, the other decentralist. And disagreement among spatials about the relative virtues of either form of social technology is no doubt sincere. Such distinction though merely notes divergent paths to a common spatialist terminus. And, as Weber observed, in the end, both have built into them the collapse of their rationalist mission: the terminal diminishing (eventual, inverting) returns from the iron cage of rationality.

Thereby, the vicissitudes of each social technology, eventually, reopen the questions of social organization, and which values are to be instantiated, and how. In the face of the iron cage of rationality, the temporalist option, of organic community and authority, and strong intermediary associations and institutions, finds itself once more on the table, back in play.

1. The fact that this assignment is done through carrot and stick incentives, rather than legal compulsion, may matter for the non-aggression principle, it’s entirely irrelevant though for the iron cage of rationality dialectic.

2. This analysis should not be mistaken as obscuring Weber’s understanding that all historical cases have explanatory details that fall outside the “ideal type.” The purpose of the latter as methodology was not to bulldoze specificity, but to identify the Venn space of trait commonality.

3. Incidentally, though founded on different (non-dialectic) premises, Weber also makes an inversion argument about the relation between democracy and bureaucracy, but I’ll save that discussion for its own post.