The Bureaucratic Mentality in Democratic Theory and Contemporary Democracy

The Bureaucratic Mentality in Democratic Theory and Contemporary Democracy Jennifer M. Hudson Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Jennifer M. Hudson All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Bureaucratic Mentality in Democratic Theory and Contemporary Democracy Jennifer M. Hudson This project draws attention to a contemporary exaltation of competence and swift decision-making that emphasizes the moment of executive power in democratic political practice and within democratic theory. Drawing on Weber’s concept of rationalization and his opposition between the mentalities of the official and the politician, I develop a distinct conception of bureaucracy as a mode of thought. Bureaucratic thinking involves the application of technical knowledge and skills, with a claim to universality and objectivity, in order to produce results and promote consensus and social harmony. I argue that this conception allows us to better recognize the contemporary diffusion of a flexible, decentralized type of bureaucracy and situate it within the history of affinity and tension between bureaucratic and democratic principles. I focus on a tradition within continental democratic theory, which tends to downplay politics by replacing it with administration and regulation. French political theorist and historian Pierre Rosanvallon is its contemporary representative, building on Hegel and Durkheim as well as Saint-Simon and Léon Duguit. Initially, Rosanvallon offered a theory of participation and democratic legitimacy that would work within the administrative state, taking into account his own strong critiques of bureaucracy. I argue that significant shifts evident in his later works, which respond to new realities, explicitly and/or implicitly mobilize bureaucratic thinking and practice to buttress democratic legitimacy within the nation-state and the European Union. I then play Rosanvallon’s earlier anti-bureaucratic arguments against his modified position in order to argue against attempts to reconcile bureaucracy and democracy, understood in its procedural form with equal freedom at its core. My claim is that bureaucratic thinking aims at consensus, encourages passivity, undermines the democratic value of political equality, and obscures values and interests behind policy decisions that are presented as neutral, technical, and fact-based. Methodologically, I use the history of ideas to develop the concept of the bureaucratic mentality, tracing it through the work of exemplary thinkers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Hegel, Durkheim, and Weber. Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 CHAPTER I Corporatism and impartiality in Durkheim, Duguit, and Hegel 22 CHAPTER II Weber’s Bureaucracies 85 CHAPTER III Bureaucratic Democracy: Pierre Rosanvallon’s Managerial Turn 155 Conclusion 206 Bibliography 228 i “I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution to the social formula, there can be no other.” —Dostoevsky, Demons ii Acknowledgements I would like to begin by thanking my advisor, Nadia Urbinati, and my committee members, Jean Cohen, Samuel Moyn, Steven Lukes, and Turkuler Isiksel, for their guidance and encouragement throughout and especially for the crucial push that helped me through my fears and apprehension at the very last stage. I thank Nadia Urbinati for continuously accepting the inchoate jumbles of ideas I presented to her, beautifully repackaging them, and giving them back to me, pretending they were mine all along. I appreciated your advice and support at every turn. I thank Jean Cohen for encouraging me to come to Columbia in the first place and for her incisive critiques that forced me to challenge my thinking. I would like to thank Samuel Moyn for excellent feedback on chapter drafts, for good advice, for understanding what I was trying to do from the beginning, and for then helping me to take the idea where it needed to go. I thank Steven Lukes for sharing his expertise and pointing me in certain key directions. I appreciate the care he took to give substantive, comprehensive, and very helpful comments. I would like to thank Turkuler Isiksel for providing inspiration in addition to excellent intellectual and practical advice. I would not have been able to finish my dissertation had it not been for the unflagging moral and material support of my parents, John and Dana Hudson. I thank them for letting me struggle while keeping me afloat and pushing me forward. I would also like to thank my brother and sister-in-law, Christopher and Michelle Hudson, for bringing the discussion back down to earth when necessary. I am extremely grateful for the extensive amount of free labor in the form of edits, formatting, logistics, and therapy performed by Dana Hudson and Rose Phillips. I would still be typing if it were not for you. iii For my incarcerated students iv Introduction While bureaucracy was a popular topic of study, public discourse, and criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, it fell out of favor in the 1990s despite the fact that our lives and governing structures have arguably become more bureaucratized. In returning to this topic, I aim to draw attention to a contemporary exaltation of competence and swift decision-making that emphasizes the moment of executive power in democratic political practice and within democratic theory. It is worth examining this phenomenon—along with the rise of the regulatory state, the emergence of new forms of public and private partnerships in governance, the discourse of “deregulation,” and the extension and solidification of post-national governing structures like the EU—through the lens of bureaucracy, even though these developments are sometimes presented as alternatives to traditional bureaucratic administration. They can only be presented as anti-bureaucratic remedies insofar as we retain a specific notion of bureaucracy that derives from the 1960s imaginary. This involves ideas about large, centralized, hierarchical, sometimes state-owned firms and perceptions or fears relating to the technocratic welfare state as well as soviet-style central planning. The persistence of this—older, institutional—view has obscured the emergence of new phenomena which indicate that, along with the capitalist firm, specifically, bureaucracy in general has managed to adapt. It has subsumed demands for individuality and participation in order to continue to function as a structure of domination while appearing to do the opposite. Instead, I propose the adoption of a new perspective on bureaucracy, which would emphasize the type of thinking that is involved. Drawing on Weber’s concept of rationalization and his opposition between the mentalities of the official and the politician, I will develop a distinct conception of bureaucracy as a mode of thought. Bureaucratic thinking involves the application of technical knowledge and skills, with a claim to universality and objectivity, in order to produce results and promote consensus and social harmony. I argue that this conception allows us to better recognize the contemporary diffusion of a flexible, decentralized type 1 of bureaucracy and situate it within the history of affinity and tension between bureaucratic and democratic principles. Shifting our understanding of bureaucracy for this purpose entails recognizing an alternative, non-Weberian, tradition of theory about the bureaucratic state. I develop the concept of the bureaucratic mentality by reconstructing a tradition within continental democratic theory, which tends to downplay politics by replacing it with administration and regulation. Pierre Rosanvallon (the focus of Chapter 3) is a contemporary representative, and he builds on the foundation laid by G. W. F. Hegel and Émile Durkheim as well as Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon and Léon Duguit, among others (Chapter 1). Durkheim constructs what I term a theory of “bureaucratic democracy,” the goal of which is to domesticate politics and harmonize social relations at a particularly turbulent time in French history. Indeed the function of bureaucracy in Hegel, Durkheim, and Duguit is to neutralize politics and interest in favor of objective knowledge. It can be understood as democratic in that it is opposed to inherited privilege. Bureaucracy counterbalances particular interests in favor of universal concerns, represented by objectivity and impartiality. In this view, democracy, which Durkheim defines as the degree of closeness that exists between the state and society, should facilitate social peace. This should be achieved by finding the objectively best and thus universally acceptable way of organizing society in order to channel, subdue, or obviate disruptive critique. Emblematic of this type of theory is the system constructed by Saint-Simon, which Durkheim largely seems to endorse. One major aim of the dissertation is to recover this alternative tradition of bureaucratic theory, in which bureaucracy appears as an organizing principle rather than a specific institution, in order to reestablish a line of continuity that has gone ignored between the bureaucracy of the modern liberal state, welfare state technocracy, and the newer ways in which the bureaucratic mentality manifests itself. We will also see, though, that the standard characterization

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