The Bureaucratic Vocation: State/Office/Ethics

This paper seeks to indicate how and why public bureaucracy has been and remains a cornerstone of the modern state and of representative democratic governmental regimes. It does so by highlighting both the constitutive role bureaucratic practices and ethics play in securing civil peace and security,...

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Published in:New formations Vol. 100; no. 100; pp. 77 - 96
Main Author: Gay, Paul du
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London Lawrence & Wishart 01.01.2020
Lawrence & Wishart Ltd
Subjects:
Analysis
Anti-Statism
Blair, Tony
Book publishing
Bureaucracy
Bureaucrats
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Democracy
Ethics
Holmes, Stephen
Office
Pandemics
Partisanship
Peace
Political history
Politics
Publishing industry
Quinlan, Michael
Rhetorical figures
Society
Statism
Trump, Donald
Weber
Weber, Max (1864-1920)
England
United Kingdom
United States > US
ISSN:0950-2378, 1741-0789
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper seeks to indicate how and why public bureaucracy has been and remains a cornerstone of the modern state and of representative democratic governmental regimes. It does so by highlighting both the constitutive role bureaucratic practices and ethics play in securing civil peace and security, and individual and collective rights and freedoms, for example, and how attempts to transcend, negate, or otherwise 'disappear' bureaucracy can have profound political consequences. The paper begins with a brief exploration of some of the tropes of 'bureau-critique' and their historical and contemporary association with key elements of anti-statist thought. It then proceeds, in section two, to chart how attempts to detach an understanding of bureaucracy from its imbrication in critical polemic and political partisanship can be best pursued by revisiting the work of Max Weber. Weber's great achievement, it will be argued, was to provide a definitive analysis of both the 'technical' and ethico-cultural attributes of public bureaucracy without falling into pejorative critique. In so doing, Weber's work provides a useful resource for exploring the limits and pitfalls of 'bureau-critique' historically and contemporaneously. The problems identified with politically partisan and critique- oriented understandings of public bureaucracy identified in the first two sections of the paper are then illustrated in section three with direct reference to specific episodes in German, US, and British political history. The paper concludes by re-emphasising the enduring significance and political positivity of the ethos of bureaucratic office-holding, not least in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Bibliography:(J) Political Science - General
0950-2378(20200601)100:100L.77;1-
ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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ISSN:0950-2378
1741-0789
DOI:10.3898/neWF:100-101.06.2020