Bureaucrats and Heretics: Gendering Mythology

Ever since Vincent de Gournay (1712–59), the French economist, complained about the spirit of laws in France, ‘an illness … which bids fair to play havoc with us’ and diagnosed this illness as bureau-mania and bureaucracy, the bureaucrat has been a contested character (Albrow, 1970 pp. 17 ff). In the nineteenth century polemicists and novelists such as Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and Karl vom Stein (1757–C1831) produced not only degrading portraits parlés of the bureaucrat but o paved the way for a specific way of thinking about bureaucracy and bureaucrats, as well as a specific attitude towards the phenomenon, which in many regards has come to be part of the Western stock of knowledge. In the words of Balzac, for instance, bureaucracy is to be seen as a ‘giant power wielded by pigmies’ and the bureaucrat as ‘fussy and meddlesome … as a small shopkeeper’s wife’ (cited in Albrow, 1970, p. 18), whereas according to vom Stein the bureaucrats of the state apparatus are to be portrayed as nothing but ‘lifeless machines’; salaried, hence striving to maintain and increase the number of those with salaries; with a knowledge of books, hence not living in the real world, but in one of letters; with no cause to support, for they are allied with none of the classes of citizens that constitute the state, they are a caste in their own right, the caste of clerks, without property, and therefore unaffected by its fluctuations. Come rain or sunshine, whether taxes rise or fall, it makes no difference to them. They draw their salaries from the exchequer and write, write, write, in silence, in offices behind closed doors, unknown, unnoticed, unpraised, and they bring up their children to be equally usable writing machines. (vom Stein, cited in Albrow, 1970, p. 19)