Having made some progress in my preparations for the second
Marx lecture, and having nothing to say about Trump’s inaugural State of the
Union message to Congress, I thought I would spend a few moments talking about
the concept of a deep state. The term
has been popularized by Steven Bannon but it was introduced into modern sociological
discussions, under a different rubric, by the great German theorist Max Weber.
In his extensive and groundbreaking discussion of
bureaucracy, which takes up a good deal of his posthumous work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft [Economy and
Society], Weber identifies the bureaucratic organization of government, and also
of the economy, the military, the church, and the Academy, as the distinctive
feature of modern capitalist society. A bureaucracy
is a functionally differentiated system of roles defined by written and
unwritten rules that are independent of the persons who occupy the roles. The authority exercised by the role occupants
derives not from their personal characteristics – strength, height, intelligence,
age, individual prowess, charismatic appeal – nor from their race, gender, family connection, ethnicity – but from rules that define the scope,
functions, and authority of the roles they occupy.
It is characteristic of a bureaucracy that most of the roles
are occupied by persons for whom those roles are their profession and source of
income. The persons in the command
positions of a bureaucratically organized operation may come and go, appointed
for relatively brief periods by some superior military, corporate, religious,
academic, or governmental process, but the professional bureaucrats stay on,
continuing to perform their rule-defined functions.
Inevitably, the permanent bureaucrats develop institutional
loyalties and memories and a resistance to interference by those they view as
amateurs or interlopers. They resent
such interference and, having an intimate knowledge of the bureaucracy, are
frequently able to frustrate the policy plans of those who are technically
their superiors. Tenured professors,
middle managers, local archbishops, master sergeants are all examples of career
bureaucrats who function in this manner.
I was constantly amused, during my thirty seven years at the University
of Massachusetts Amherst, by the inability of the Chancellors, each recruited
from the outside and staying no more than five or six years, to make much of a
dent in the ongoing activities of the departments. By the time the Chancellors found their way
to the executive washroom, as it were, and had convened an all campus select
committee to consider dramatic [and mostly unwelcome] changes to the
institution, they were only two or three years from moving on to their next
job. It was child’s play for those of us
who wanted no interference with our activities to slow walk administrative proposals
until the next chancellor arrived on campus with his or her own exciting plans
for reinventing UMass.
The United States Federal Government is an enormous cluster
of bureaucratically organized departments, the regular career participants in
which are protected from higher interference not only by the logic of bureaucracy
but also by laws explicitly blocking the political class from reaching into the
bowels of an office or department and directly removing individuals whom the
powers that be consider inimical to their policies. These career bureaucrats, who number in the
tens or hundreds of thousands, are supporters of both principal political
parties, but they are all partisan defenders of the same post-World War II
policy consensus that has reigned more or less unchallenged for seventy years
and more. How could they not be? They have been the creators and curators of
that consensus!
There is nothing sinister or malevolent in this
situation. It is, as Weber taught us
almost a century ago, an inevitable consequence of the foundational
bureaucratic organization of modern mass capitalist society. Steve Bannon, if we can take him at his word,
seeks to overthrow that consensus, and he quite correctly judges that his
principal enemy is not the political class – the elected representatives and
the president – but the deep state,
the bureaucracy itself. The good news is
that he will fail. The bad news is that
so would we, were we to win control of the Congress and the Presidency.
Would things be dramatically different in the socialism of my
dreams? Of course not. Kibbutzim, communes, and love-ins to the
contrary notwithstanding, a socialist state overseeing a modern post-industrial
economy would necessarily, unavoidably be a bureaucracy. The best we could hope for is a bureaucracy
whose guiding principles were more just, more humane, and less
exploitative. But you may be certain
that after the revolution, as we used to say when I was young, the men and
women leading a socialist America would have to contend with the mort main of bureaucracy.
6 comments:
Tell how advances in technology sway this bureaucratic inertia?
I've just finished reading David Talbott's "The Devil's Chessboard" and "Brothers," both about the Dulles brothers and other security/deep state actors during the Kennedy era and before. I was dumbstruck by the power these bureaucrats exercised in defiance of presidential policy to the point where Arthur Goldberg said that had FDR lived, the Dulles brothers would have been brought up on charges of treason. JFK had to admit to DeGaulle, when a coup (with CIA backing) was being organized against the French leader, that he (JFK) was not in control of the government.
Professor, are you planning any posthumous work yourself? I ask because I have planned a lot of it for myself (it seems to fit my schedule better). Unfortunately, I cant figure the best way to go about it. How did Weber manage it? (Any chance I could get paid upfront on that work?)
Come to think of it, Weber probably had the right idea waiting till he was dead to deal with the bureaucracy. I will relegate that to my posthumous work also.
In my 26 years as a tenured faculty member in one of the largest community college systems in the country, I have to agree with much of this analysis on the power of the bureaucrats (or what I call the worker-bees). At my college, we can be without Presidents, VPs, and Deans for months on end and we go right on without much notice. But if a faculty or staff member doesn't show up for one day, classes aren't taught and office work grinds to a halt. The bureaucrats do keep the lights on, literally. However, I have to add one caveat. When skilled leaders come in with changes and consult with the bureaucrats and enlist the aid of the bureaucrats, change may take place. Hopefully, it's positive, but that can be negative as well. For positive change you need moral leadership as well as principled bureaucrats. :)
In this connection, I thought I should remind the readers here of the hilarious BBC series from thirty years ago Yes Minister, whose plot line was entirely the defeat of the MP's plans by the bureaucracy.
I think this is all going a bit far, y’all. I’m a bureaucrat in a public sector authority in the United Kingdom. The people around me are modern and flexible. We are not rule-bound - we use rules as tools for decision-making, as a judge uses precedent, not as excuses for not doing something or as a way of avoiding responsibility for our actions. And it certainly isn’t the case that bureaucrats I know are independent of the rules: every day, I and people around me make our own rules to suit changing circumstances. When we solve a particular problem, we habitually look to see whether our solution can be generalised or the root cause addressed. We don’t let a problem fall between departments, with each saying it’s the other’s responsibility. Are we perfect? Christ, no, but we do do the best we can to keep a city of around a million souls on the road, with little support from senior managers, councillors, or government, with inadequate renumeration, and with public abuse from right-wing media pushing a small government agenda. The last with which people on this board now agree with, apparently.
“Yes Minister” is very funny, but I doubt the civil service was ever like that - I know Thatcher said it was, but, well, she would, wouldn’t she? As for Weber - I bet bureaucrats were as diligent and innovative in his time as well, in their way, and that he himself was working from stereotypes.
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