Bureaucracy and the Theorists of Democracy

The idea of bureaucracy arose out of a concern for the proper place of the official in modern government. We have seen, in particular, how the nineteenth-century writers contrasted bureaucracy with democracy. They discerned numerous ways in which the use and usages of public officials subverted democratic values. In other words, the phenomena which were held to constitute bureaucracy were defined as significant topics for analysis by their relation to the values of democracy, and, because of their conflict with those values, were held to be problems requiring solution. Similarly, the remedies which were suggested for bureaucracy were designed to realize the very values which defined the nature of the disease. It follows that as the values of democracy were reformulated so the concept of bureaucracy was recast.