Introduction: The Iron Law of Liberalism and the Era of Total Bureaucratization
Nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy. But in the middle of the last century, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies, the word was everywhere. There were sociological tomes with grandiose titles like A General Theory of Bureaucracy [1], The Politics of Bureaucracy [2], or even The Bureaucratization of the World [3], and popular paperback screeds with titles like Parkinson’s Law [4], The Peter Principle,[5] or Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them.[6]
There were Kafkaesque novels, and satirical films. Everyone seemed to feel that the foibles and absurdities of bureaucratic life and bureaucratic procedures were one of the defining features... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
1. Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity
Let me begin with a story about bureaucracy.
In 2006, my mother had a series of strokes. It soon became obvious that she would eventually be incapable of living at home without assistance. Since her insurance would not cover home care, a series of social workers advised us to put in for Medicaid. To qualify for Medicaid, however, one’s total worth can only amount to six thousand dollars. We arranged to transfer her savings—this was, I suppose, technically a scam, though it’s a peculiar sort of scam since the government employs thousands of social workers whose main work seems to involve telling citizens exactly how to perpetuate said scam—but shor... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
2. Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
“Contemporary reality is the beta-version of a science fiction dream.”
—Richard Barbrook
There is a secret shame hovering over all us in the twenty-first century. No one seems to want to acknowledge it.
For those in what should be the high point of their lives, in their forties and fifties, it is particularly acute, but in a broader sense it affects everyone. The feeling is rooted in a profound sense of disappointment about the nature of the world we live in, a sense of a broken promise—of a solemn promise we felt we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring here not to the standard false promises that chil... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
3. The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really Love Bureaucracy After All
Everyone complains about bureaucracy. The essays in this book have themselves largely consisted of such complaints. Nobody seems to likes bureaucracy very much—yet somehow, we always seem to end up with more of it.
In this essay I’d like to ask why that is, and particularly, to consider the possibility that many of the blanket condemnations of bureaucracy we hear are in fact somewhat disingenuous. That the experience of operating within a system of formalized rules and regulations, under hierarchies of impersonal officials, actually does hold—for many of us much of the time, for all of us at least some of the time—a kind of covert appeal.
Now, I... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Appendix: On Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power
I am appending this piece, ostensibly about the Christopher Nolan film The Dark Knight Rises— the long version of a piece published under the title “Super Position” in The New Inquiry in 2012 —as it expands on themes of sovereignty and popular culture broached in the third essay in this book. In that essay, I noted that there were three historically independent elements that I believed came together in our notion of “the state,” which I described as sovereignty, bureaucracy, and (heroic) politics. My thoughts on sovereignty, however, were only minimally developed, so I thought it might interest the reader to see some further reflections on the su... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
[1] Elliot Jacques (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976).
[2] Gordon Tullock (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1965).
[3] Henry Jacoby (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
[4] C. Northcote Parkinson (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1957). “Work in an organization expands to fill the time allotted to do it.”
[5] Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hill (London: Souvenir Press, 1969). The famous work on how those operating in an organization “rise to the level of their incompetence” also became a popular British TV show.
[6] R. T. Fishall (London: Arrow Books, 1982). A now-classic text on how to flummox and discomfit bureaucrats, widely rumored to be by British astronomer and BBC host Sir P... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
