Special edition on the Neo-Weberian State

Special edition on the Neo-Weberian State Sam Whimster (bio) Experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization in its precision, stability, stringency of discipline and reliability ... is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. (Economy and Society)1 This passion for bureaucratization, such as we have heard expressed here, is enough to drive one to despair. ... the central question is not how we further and accelerate it but what we have to set against this machinery, in order to preserve a remnant of humanity from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this exclusive rule of bureaucracy over the ideals of life. (Max Weber’s contribution to debate on municipal enterprises in Verein für Sozialpolitik meeting, Vienna 1909)2 On the one hand bureaucracy is inevitable, on the other, for the sake of humanity, it is to be resisted. Bureaucratic ‘red tape’ is everywhere, yet at the same time it should be mocked and derided. At the beginning of the 19th century, William von Humboldt in his Limits of the State attacked the rule of officials, while the cameralist Johann von Justi likened that proper state to a faultlessly running machine whose ruler is its soul. What is universal about bureaucracy is the debate over its necessity and how this must be confounded. We have not just one but two Erkenntnisobjekte, as Husserl might have expressed it. This special edition of Max Weber Studies, edited by Wolfgang Drechsler and myself, carries the debate forwards. Neo-Weberian State (NWS) theory defends a revised and updated version of bureaucracy, and New Public Management (NPM) takes on the part of the perpetual antagonist of bureaucracy. These debates always have a time-and-place political focus. In 1909, Max Weber and his brother Alfred were [End Page 7] vehemently opposing Prussia’s and Austria’s giant bureaucracies that operated outside political and democratic control. They were mammoth constructions of imperial rule, just as the Indian civil service was the instrument of British imperial rule. Democratic liberals have always demanded reform—J. S., Mill in the India Office and William Gladstone driving the reform of the home civil service, which resulted in the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms—in aspiration a close cousin of Weber’s own ideal type. The bureaucratic machine is critiqued from many political standpoints—not just a liberal critique but anarchist, socialist, libertarian, neo-conservative and populist ones. Regimes and their critics come and go, but they are all dependent on officials running a bureaucracy. Hence bureaucracy is always in the front line of attack from whatever is the political philosophy and ideology of its critics—sometimes more deserved, sometimes less. Bureaucracy may be a constant feature of modern societies, but the critiques are diverse. Weber’s ideal type, signalled in the opening quote above (from Economy and Society), holds up remarkably well as a description of bureaucracies in modern society. Weber supplied the explanation for this circumstance. Modern societies are characterised by an expanded state, large armed forces, industrial production, and the provision of the needs of mass populations. Both the organization of the large firm and large voluntary bodies like churches as well as the officialdom of state and local state administration demand rational, functional, and expert bureaucracies which have a chain of command. But because critiques come in many forms, they are less than ideal-typical. Indeed they are specific to the case (der Fall) of the country under study. Camilla Stivers argues that in the American case, the bureaucracy was never considered to be other or alien to the citizen. Instead it was the citizens’ right to be part of a political administration. Tocqueville’s European astonishment that at all levels of government, posts were open to election is one such feature; likewise the spoils system of Andrew Jackson is another. For Stivers and her colleagues administration is not what is done for you—favourable or unfavourable in outcomes, but what the citizen participates in. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal changed the whole regime of government

Bureaucracy · Economics · Epistemology · Humanity · Law and economics · Passion · Political science · Politics · Ruler · Sociology · Soul · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory