Politics and Bureaucracy in the Modern State

Abstract

Government, today, encapsulates both politics and bureaucracy. Yet if politics and bureaucracy are understood within this context it is hard to conceptualize the nature of each or their effect on one another. In this paper I attempt to separate bureaucracy from politics in order to understand each before considering their effect upon one another. I begin by considering bureaucracy according to its most famous commentator, Max Weber. Since bureaucracy must be understood in relation to the modern state, I include a treatment of the modern state that presumes a beneficial civil service, G.F.W. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. If Hegel shows us a politics dependent upon the bureaucracy and seamlessly reflected in that bureaucracy, we must examine politics anew in a context in which it is neither entangled with nor compromised by bureaucracy. Aristotle provides a definition of politics unencumbered with bureaucratic administration: a seeming alternative to the modern state. But is such activity possible today? Or in the American republic? I conclude with a discussion of these questions using the work of Hannah Arendt and James Q. Wilson. Arendt discusses the worst effects of bureaucratic administration while Wilson suggests that the American constitutional order can withstand the addition of bureaucratic administration. The question that remains is whether politics as described by Aristotle—speech about justice and injustice on the public stage—can exist alongside the American bureaucracy. My initial response to this question is yes and no: political speech in America is still possible, but its character has been altered. The productive form of political speech has become complaint—complaint against the actions of the government, complaint that makes its way to the floors of the House and Senate, and complaint that is registered in the voting box or the courthouse. Complaint, however, is not the whole of political speech, and therefore bureaucracy cannot be wholly compatible with political activity.