The words of Max Weber (1864-1920), the renowned German sociologist, still ring true almost one hundred years after they were written. Although Weber died 86 years ago on June 14, his dark wisdom continues to haunt the highest achievements of modern society.  

Working in the early days of the twentieth century, Weber was very interested in understanding how modern society worked; and he was especially interested in its bureaucratic institutions. Some consider his dark views concerning modern society and its future to be prophetic; perhaps he is today best remembered for his pessimism.  It is this pessimism -- and the reasons for it -- that may help us to illumine some of our most pressing contemporary social and political problems, including education.

There is, for example, the following passage taken from his work that has helped to earn him his reputation as both a pessimist and a modern prophet:

Imagine the consequences of that comprehensive bureaucratization and rationalization which already today we see approaching. ... By it, the performance of each individual worker is mathematically measured, each man becomes a little cog in the machine and, aware of this, his one preoccupation is whether he can become a bigger cog. ... The problem which besets us now is not: how can this evolution be changed? -- for that is impossible, but: what will come of it? We willingly admit that there are honorable and talented men at the top of our administration; that in spite of all the exceptions, they constitute a chance of selection for talent. But horrible as the thought is that the world may one day be peopled with professors (laughter) -- we would retire onto a desert island if such a thing were to happen (laughter) -- it is still more horrible to think that the world could on e day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones -- a state of affairs which is to be seen ... playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system ... This passion for bureaucracy … is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics the specter of timidity -- which has in any case always been rather a good standby for the German -- were to stand alone at the helm; as if we were deliberately to become men who need 'order' and nothing but order, who become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is therefore not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life. The answer to this question today clearly does not lie here.

What has happened in many years since these words were first written, of course, is that the distant threat on the horizon has now become the  bureaucratic reality that envelops our lives. And still, there is no answer to Max Weber's question: "What can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life"?

Robert Michels (1876-1936) was a German/Italian academic who had won the support of Max Weber, but in spite of this was unable to teach in the universities of Germany due to his political involvement with the Social Democrats. Ironically, much of Michels' work with voluntary political associations, such as the Social Democrat party, was extremely critical of its political opportunism and hypocrisy. It is, however, for this work that he is remembered today.  

Michels' political analysis is penetrating, and worth recalling. In the very least, Michels grounds the theoretical pessimism of Weber in the exigencies of political life, adding another dimension of support to the prophet's doomsday soothsaying.

“[T]he bureaucracy continually increases. It comes to assume the form of an endless screw [sic!]. It grows ever less and less compatible with the general welfare. And yet this bureaucratic machinery remains essential. Through it alone can be satisfied the claim of the educated members of the population for secure positions. It is further a means of self-defense for the state. … [but the] mechanism becomes an end in itself.”  

“There are,” according to Michels, “two classes of intellectuals. One consists of those who have succeeded in securing a post at the manger of the state, whilst the other consists of those who … have assaulted the fortress without being able to force their way in. The former may be compared to an army of slaves who are always ready … to undertake the defense of the state which provides them with bread.” Thus, “The state best fulfills the need for securing a large number of defenders by constituting a numerous caste of officials, of persons directly dependent upon the state.”

From this analysis, Michels derived his Iron Law of Oligarchy, which simply states that in large organizations, even those that are run on democratic principles, there will eventually be only a small number that actually make  decisions. Furthermore, those in power tend to retain their power and privileges, and transfer these to those they choose, thus retaining the character of an oligarchy. Lastly, over time, power elites will lose touch with the values and grievances of those that put them in power, and will instead focus on staying in power – something elites are very successful at. (See Note 3.)

This last point foreshadows an important postulate of later sociological thinking, namely the recognition of the extent to which individual outlook is determined by social position, that is, the large degree to which that ones o utlook is largely dependent upon ones social situation.   

Perhaps it is no accident that Herbert Marcuse, the fiery Marxist prophet active during the Free Speech Movement at the University of Berkeley in the 1960s, most clearly and accurately characterized the darkest aspects of Weber’s nightmare for contemporary America. As the heir and recipient of the intellectual assets of the Frankfort School (which attempted to combine Marxist sensibility with Freud’s psychodynamics), Marcuse also received, and then communicated, the Weber-Michels critique of bureaucratic society.

According to Marcuse, in today’s bureaucratic mass society, “… all domination assumes the form of administration. At its peak, the concentration of economic power seems to turn into anonymity: everyone, even at the very top, appears to be powerless before the movements and laws of the apparatus itself. ” [Eros and Civilization, 98] This is Weber and Michels gone completely and absolutely mad. For Marcuse, the process of “subordination appears as implemented through the social division of labor itself (although physical and personal force remains an indispensable instrumentality).” (89) The complexity of modern society can only be managed bureaucratically, that is, subordinated to the ordering imperative of the bureaucratic society itself, the most efficient means of social control over human beings. Yet, this efficient means of ordering society is invisible, undetecta ble, and limitlessly coercive. Thus, “the sadistic principals, the capitalist exploiters, have been transformed into salaried members of a bureaucracy.” (98)

The end result of this is captured in the title of his book, One-Dimensional Man, which describes the bitter fate of a humanity pressed flat beneath the relentless force of a non-human but totally efficient bureaucracy now in complete control of everything. Even here, and revolt against the system is doomed to become a “betrayed revolution,” since even in success the new victors succumb, and adapt themselves to the true master, which is the bureaucratic system of social control, the all encompassing state. (90-91)  

[The worst case scenario for all this, of course, is that democracy itself deconstructs or decouples into pure rhetoric and rhetorical procedures that mask the true concentrations of power and wealth. Perhaps it was never really there to begin with, just the result of special interest groups happily competing against each other behind the scenes, with a few helpful innovations thrown in. But if the intensity of that competition should suddenly grow, and is noticed, and threatens the mutual trust that makes free markets possible, then the system would be pushed aside. This, of course, was the fear of de Tocqueville, the aristocratic French traveler and essayist writing about Jacksonian America. Some contemporary political theorists continue to share his fears (see Beyond Tocqueville). Democracy, then, is the form of capitalism that can only exist on this kind of founda tional trust.]

Along these lines of thought in Marcuse, Paul Ricoeur points to Eichmann’s defense of the killing of Jews, where it was said “that they obeyed orders, that they were good officers.” Ricoeur’s comment here is illuminating: “The administrative system, then, may not only deprive the individual of person responsibility, it may even cover up crimes committed in the name of the administrative good. … the anonymity of organizational relationships … has led to the diffusion of anonymity in society at large. Something  in the human texture is harmed.” (Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 206). 

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Today's News Herald (May 30, 2006) contained an editorial that -- as sometimes happens, but not very often -- spurred me to reflect on the impact that governmental bureaucracies are having on public school education. And it is with this thought that I end this discussion of the dark legacy of Max Weber.

In his perceptive column, "The school daze," Tibor Machan, originally from behind the Iron Curtain, reminds us, among other things,  that: "… the one major institution of Western society that's similar to what it had been under communism is education. Elementary schools, high schools, the majority of junior and community colleges, as well as colleges and universities --- these are all arms of government. They obtain funding by the extortionist means of taxation. The textbooks used are products of the political process, not of independent scholarship.” 

“When I went to college, I had a problem with the discipline of history. It may have started when I was a kid in Hungary and first ran up against official 'scholars' who rewrote Hungary's history' - renamed the streets in Budapest, rewrote all the textbooks, reshuffled the holidays and even completely recast Western intellectual history. Also, under Marxism, there was room for just one account of the development of philosophy, namely what Karl Marx and his epigone wrote.”

“At first I thought that in a relatively free society historians could be trusted a lot more than under Marxism. But I am not so sure about this now. … [There is now] a monopoly of governmental influence in education … This monopoly clearly influences scholarship, including the reporting and study of history. Books selected by scholars and teachers employed by government schools have a tendency to suppress uncomfortable truths, so the major publishers are inclined to interpret the past in favor of the political ideology that dominate[s] in the schools. ... But because most of these folks are protected by government's near complete monopoly of education, the normal forces of competition aren't at work in their area of scholarship. Can we hope to see any improvement? Not really, not as long as the government's monopoly on education remains basically unbroken."  

But Machan misses a key point.

Rather than emphasize governmental “inputs,” as Machan does, we should consider the context in which education operates – and then we can see that government is itself the largest consumer of America’s educational product.

In other words, the governmental influence on (its) education monopoly is not limited to various inputs, but this influence is far surpassed by the kinds of government employment available, whether it is with a municipality, a county, a state or some federal agency, or their subcontractors. These employment opportunities, in fact, encompass the majority of jobs available to graduates today. The reasons for this, of course, have already been described earlier by Michels. 

REFERENCES
Max Weber, "Some Consequences of Bureaucratization," pages 454-455 in Lewis Coser and Bernard Rosenberg, Sociological Theory: A Book of Readings, 3rd edition, 1969.  

Robert Michels, “Bureaucracy and Political Parties,” pages 456-458 in Lewis Coser and Bernard Rosenberg, Sociological Theory: A Book of Readings, 3rd edition, 1969.

Randall Collins and Michael Makowsky, “Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy,” in The Discovery of Society, pages 215-218. 

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If only *Unmasking Administrative Evil* by Guy Adams and Balfour lived up to its ambitious title; sadly, it does not.

As were the authors, I was also shocked by the revelations of Richard L. Rubenstein (1975) that associated modern bureaucracies with the Holocaust. But if you are looking for more than a couple of superficial case studies highlighting von Braun's shadowy Nazi past, and an only somewhat plausible attempt to link the Challenger disaster with his managerial legacy, all sandwiched into a book on public administration, this is not the book for you (Chs 4 & 5).

Nor is this the book to reach conclusions useful for public administrators regarding the equally shocking results of Milgram's social psychology experiments in the 1960s; if this is what you are looking for, *The Lucifer Effect* by Philip Zimbardo is more relevant -- especially when it comes to "unmasking administrative evil" at Abu Ghraib. (But be warned: the descriptions and photos are very unsettling.) 

Although Adams and Balfour frequently cite Zygmunt Bauman's classic, *Modernity and the Holocaust* (1989), it fails to supply them with the missing theoretical ballast which their fluffy book requires (especially in regard to Weber and the division of labor, the social production of moral indiffernece, and moral displacement in bureaucracies). Even Zerubavel's *The Elephant in the Room: Denial and Silence in Everyday Life* is far more insightful when it comes to elaborating the social mechanisms of administrative evil; or even a book on mobbing in the workplace. 

How a book on public service ethics can evade the issues Bauman raises seems itself an ethical lapse of significance.

I guess the problems start in the literature review in Ch 2, which lacks a theoretical center. This leaves the book badly under-theorized, and misses the chance to address the ethical problems posed by administrative bureaucracies of all kinds. For example, the authors never quite grasp the fact that public administration is a type of social institution, and thereby miss out on important contributions of organizational ecology and neo-institutionalism to our understanding of the operation of human organizations. (The book that addresses this head-on is Peter Berger's *The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness,* with Brigette Berger and Hansfried Kellner, 1973. Don't let the title fool you -- this book mines the deep reserves of social constructivism and social cognition by reminding us that the "structure of modern consciousness" is social, and it is also bureaucratic if it is truly modern.) 

In hindsight, Woodrow Wilson's approach to studying administration (1887, p. 70 here) astonishes, and shows us just how big these problems really are.  But without sufficient theoretical depth, the scant conclusions in Ch 7 fail to inspire (p. 174), and only sound like empty pleading. 

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Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (1989).

Some comments on Bauman by "Helen DeWitt" at http://paperpools.blogspot.com/2009/01/bauman.html , to which I have added.

Bauman's most important book, the one that introduced themes he has since explored in many that followed, is Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Bauman argues that the Holocaust was a by-product of certain features of modernity, including: 

-- the extreme specialization, the breaking down of work into small narrowly defined tasks whose relation to the whole is not evident, the incorporation and integration of these tasks into highly hierarchical structures (so that part of doing a good job is not simply performing the task but facilitating the smooth transmission of commands and responses up and down the hierarchy).  But in order to accomplish this, following Max Weber, is the need to "follow orders" regardless of ones own personal feelings or opinions. In fact, as Weber states, the entire pyramid rests on the lack of autonomy of those at the lowest rungs, those explicitly denied the right to make decisions on their own.

The social process required to produce just this necessary absence of morality -- that is, the amorality that is necessary for the smooth operation of the bureaucratic machine -- Bauman refers to as the "social production of moral indifference."  Relying on Elias and others, Bauman moves considerably beyond them in his analysis of amoral bureaucracies.

For Bauman, the disappearance of morality in all but the upper most reaches of a power hierarchy has to do with the segregation of duties that creates moral distance between roles, but which is also the mechanism at work in the displacement of "responsibility" up the chain of command, to the peak of the hierarchy. He calls this process "moral displacement."

The displacement of morality, Bauman argues, is pervasive in modern life simply because bureaucratic culture is. According to Bauman, the Holocaust is the epitome of this kind of dynamic, not its perversion.

Bureaucracies are reliable and efficient because they grease the wheels of progress at the same time that the individual cog is rendered mute and insignificant. This is why the bureaucratic machine can operate so efficiently -- by removing the unpredictability of the individual.

But here is a mystery: Why did Bauman (on page 22) cite Weber (in German text, G/M p. 95), but leave out Weber's 'punch line'?

"To take a stand, to be passionate -- ira et studium -- is the politician's element, and above all the element of the political leader. His conduct is subject to quite a different, indeed, exactly the opposite, principle of responsibility from that of the civil servant. The honor of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities, exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction. This holds even if the order appears wrong to him and if, despite the civil servant's remonstrances, the authority insists on the order. Without this moral discipline and self-denial, in the highest sense, the whole apparatus would fall to pieces."

"Without this moral discipline and self-denial, in the highest sense, the whole apparatus would fall to pieces" (95). Wow! It is true that much of Bauman hinges on this very idea -- that the suppression of the moral dimension is what greases the cogs of the bureaucratic machine, and that this is what makes possible the increased efficiency and productivity of modernity [for ex., "...the organization as a whole is an instrument to obliterate responsibility" (163).]  So I wonder why would he miss a chance to capitalize on this connection with Weber.

These features, however, are precisely those which made possible the abdication of personal responsibility documented in Stanley Milgram's 'Obedience to Authority'. Milgram's series of experiments is probably best known for the brute fact that subjects, told to administer a test and to punish wrong answers with what they were told were electric shocks, in a large number of cases proceeded to administer shocks which would, if genuine, have been fatal; for Bauman's purposes, however, the point of interest is the fact that results varied dramatically depending on the distribution of authority, the visibility of resistance to authority. (If there were two 'scientists' administering the experiment, and they appeared to be in disagreement over whether the shocks could continue, the vast majority of subjects refused to go on; if two subjects were in the same room and one resisted, the second was likelier to do so; and so on.)

Too often, when the we study the Holocaust, no attention is paid to the machinery which makes such an event possible, or how one might put safeguards against abuse into the institutional structures of one's own society. As DeWitt points out, no school or university she ever attended showed any awareness of the moral implications of its bureaucratic structures; and she never dealt with a government agency anywhere that showed any such awareness; never has she dealt with any kind of health facility that showed any such awareness.

Not even, one can add, when these inner failings come to be recognized as "conflicts of interest" or "moral hazard."
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Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (1989)

Chapter Summaries
The introduction (Chap 1) is very strong. Page 6 following begins to show how links between modern factory system, bureaucracies, etc., that characterize the modern state, are also central to the Holocaust. (8, 9, 10).

Refs to Weber start in pages 13-15, where the "ethical blindness" feature of bureauracy first appears, especially in 18-30, in sections on "Social production of moral indifference," etc. with 22-23 very strong, and 24-25ff.

Skip Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, which are very boring, all except the section "Racism as a form of social engineering" 66-72. Much of education can be seen as "social engineering" if viewed in terms of its progressivism, its optimism.

Chapter 4 is very strong, argues that "we can no longer assume that we have a full grasp of the workings of our social institutions, bureatucratic structures, or technology" (83). 86ff picks up and expands the moral crisis of the modern state, eventually bringing in Norbert Elias (96ff), who articulates some themes Michel Foucault made famous (again) without referring to the Holocaust.

My favorite section is "Effects of the hierarchical and functional divisions of labor," 98-102, because it addresses the problem of cognitive stratification of groups and organizations, and especially with institutions.  Here he talks about statistics (graphs), and the role they play in the a-moralization of modern society -- "Dehumanization of bureaucratic objects" follows, 102-104. Then at 107 a new theme, the failure of societal safeguards, is introduced, with a mention of computers at the very end (115-116).

Ch 5, Soliciting the Cooperation of the Victims, describes a whole side of the manipulation of ghetto life by the Nazis I never knew about. It is striking that, just as the Nazis eliminated choice, they also eliminated the possibility of moral action. This point is implicit in the earlier chapters: you can only behave morally when there is choice -- precisely that which bureaucratic life seeks to eliminate when it buffers society against risk and against the individual.

Ch 6 uses the famous Milgram obedience experiments, and the reaction to them, that demonstrated the very processes discussed so far, to showcase Bauman's concerns. Really excellent -- even though I published a tiny bit on Milgram, this brought a whole new way of understanding this to light.

Ch 7, Ch 8 and the Appendix attempt a "sociology of morality," with mixed results. What is valuable is the re-iteration of the themes just discussed. 192-198 discusses the social production of moral distance, and the Appendix deals with the "Social Manipulation of Morality." Bauman only slips when his relentless critique lapses, as he attempts to redeem the "Iron Cage" (Weber) he so masterfully analyzes. The purity -- and the horror -- of his analysis is that no such redemption is possible. But even Bauman cannot face this truth. 
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