Strauss Eric. The Ruling Servants: Bureaucracy in Russia, France - and Britain?

New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1961. — 304 p.Every generation embodies its hopes and fears in idols and monsters which assume giant size by projection on the dark screen of the future. Bureaucracy is one of the most prominent monsters of our time. Its shadow hovers over all organized efforts of modern man, but its most frightening impact is due to an intimate alliance with Leviathan itself — the State. Like the spectacle of a Gulliver tied hand and foot by the threads of his Lilliputian captors, modern society enmeshed in the irksome bonds of bureaucratic restrictions provokes scathing taunts as well as denunciation—but all clarion calls to action have remained largely ineffective, and bureaucratic routine has proved immune to the poison of ridicule.The following study tries to tackle its subject from a different angle. Taking for granted that bureaucracy is ridiculous, inefficient (at least in some respects) and dangerous, it looks for its roots in the soil of modern mass society and its characteristic institutions. In recent years a great deal has been done to explore the nature of large-scale organizations and the management problems arising from them, and this knowledge provides a useful starting point for a discussion of the meaning of bureaucracy and the causes of bureaucratic defects. This analysis leads to the threshold of the problem which makes bureaucracy an issue of critical importance for industrial society: the change in the balance of power between social forces and the administrators of the large organizations which these forces have found indispensable for their purposes. In favourable conditions, this change has made enough progress to warrant the question of whether there is a genuine prospect of the bureaucratic rule either at present or in the foreseeable future.The Age of Mass Organization
The Nature of Large-Scale Organization
Bureaucratic Defects
Remedies against Bureaucratic Defects
Bureaucratic Degeneration
Bureaucracy and the State
Bureaucracy and the Party SystemBureaucratic Rule in Russia 139Before the Revolution
The Soviet Party State
The Social Roots of Bureaucratic Rule in RussiaBureaucracy and Democracy in FranceThe Machinery of Government
The Party System and the Social Forces
The Crisis of French Democracy
The Meaning of French PoliticsConditions and Limits of British DemocracyThe Tradition of Oligarchic Self-Government
From Tories and Whigs to Conservatives and Labour
Democracy and the Party System
The Prospects of Bureaucracy in GovernmentBureaucracy: Cause or Symptom?Coming to Terms with Leviathan
Mass Organization and Political Action