I, too, have spent my entire adult life working in a bureaucratic setting — a good one, as it happens.
The Wikipedia article on bureaucracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy) is informative. It notes the benefits that bureaucracy brings to human affairs, but it also quotes Max Weber (who I imagine is the person you cited as its founder) about its dangers:
While recognizing bureaucracy as the most efficient form of organization, and even indispensable for the modern state, Weber also saw it as a threat to individual freedoms, and the ongoing bureaucratization as leading to a “polar night of icy darkness”, in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in the aforementioned “iron cage” of bureaucratic, rule-based, rational control.
In any case, I was not discussing an idealized version of bureaucracy — anything reduced to its ideals sounds unimpeachable — but rather the deficiencies of human nature that make some form of authoritarian organization necessary, and the real-world (not idealized) implementation of bureaucracy by the same human nature. In that light, I think that nothing that I said was incorrect.
I, too, have spent my entire adult life working in a bureaucratic setting — a good one, as it happens.
The Wikipedia article on bureaucracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy) is informative. It notes the benefits that bureaucracy brings to human affairs, but it also quotes Max Weber (who I imagine is the person you cited as its founder) about its dangers:
While recognizing bureaucracy as the most efficient form of organization, and even indispensable for the modern state, Weber also saw it as a threat to individual freedoms, and the ongoing bureaucratization as leading to a “polar night of icy darkness”, in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in the aforementioned “iron cage” of bureaucratic, rule-based, rational control.
In any case, I was not discussing an idealized version of bureaucracy — anything reduced to its ideals sounds unimpeachable — but rather the deficiencies of human nature that make some form of authoritarian organization necessary, and the real-world (not idealized) implementation of bureaucracy by the same human nature. In that light, I think that nothing that I said was incorrect.