What Is Bureaucracy?

Bureaucracy is the group of professional officers who performs rationalized functions in large scale organizations, especially government ones. Thus and organizations said to be bureaucratized when its procedures for action and decision have become formalized and impersonal through elaborate rules that are "public". The growth of modern government is thus been as intimately tied to the development of bureaucracy, and no modern state could operate without bureaucracy.

The popular antithesis between bureaucracy and democracy is an oratorical slogan that endangers the future of democracy for a constitutional system that cannot function effectively, that cannot act with dispatch and vigor, cannot alive. Fortunately, both the Swiss and the British have shown that an affective, responsible bureaucracy is quite compatible with second constitutionalism. Bureaucracy is not only a privileged oppressive group but a new exploiting class, a class characterized by a new type of oligarchic regime that is neither socialist nor capitalist and that is rapidly spreading both in East and West.
Soviet bureaucracy constituted a new ruling class that exploited the proletariat as much as the capitalists had in the past. It differed from capitalism only in that the new domination was based not an individual but on group ownership of the means of production.