Fear of Bureaucracy: A Raging Pandemic

Abstract

Bureaucracy is nothing new. Although the French term for it apparently did not gain currency until the nineteenth century, the phenomenon itself seems to have existed for a long time-in ancient China, in the Roman Empire, in the Church, in the Ottoman Empire, and in the kingdoms of Europe from the time they emerged from the Middle Ages, for example. It has been especially luxuriant, however, in modern industrial states, whatever their political complexions-not only in governments, but in the large-scale organizations of every kind that the industrial system seems to spawn. Although bureaucracy is not a product of industrialism exclusively, industrialism has been particularly hospitable to it. Chances are bureaucracy was never popular, wherever and whenever it occurred. But it seems to me to have come under exceptionally heavy fire recently, particularly in the United States. You find hardly any academic treatments of it in America before 1930, and not many between 1930 and 1940. They became much more common after World War II, however, and now scarcely a year goes by without publication of another treatise on the subject. And in the popular press, of course, reporters, columnists, and editors pour out a steady stream of complaints and exposes. Antibureaucratic sentiment has taken hold like an epidemic. More and more people are apparently convinced that bureaucracy is whirling out of control and are both infuriated and terrified by the prospect. Yet for all the hostility towards it, the character of its threat is hard to pin down.