HCJ4: Bureaucracy and the New Industrial State

Weber and Bureaucracy

Max Weber wrote about bureaucracy and the people in charge of bureaucratic organisations become powerful. He said that someone in a traditional role of authority (parents, teachers), people with some sort of higher/legal authority (judges, politicians) or someone with enough charisma for people to follow them and what they say (Stalin, Lenin, Hitler etc).

According to Weber, bureaucracy has led humanity to lose the skills we used to have e.g. architecture and music. People in bureaucratic societies are are just a very small cog inside an extremely large wheel. We can't get away from bureaucracy, we live and die in a bureaucratic world, this includes hospitals and schools.


John Keynes

Keynes' economic model involved printing more money so that the economy would grow. This doesn't work in the long term because if people keep spending money, the producers of the goods keep having to produce in high amounts and sometimes this can lead to them being unable to keep up with demand. This could result in a lack of supply and too much demand.

Capitalism nearly ended during the Great Depression in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but World War 2 made unemployment rates drop as men were employed as soldiers and women were employed to help build weaponry as well as helping out with the general war effort. In 1932 21% of the US population was unemployed and a year after WW2 began, 14% of the population was unemployed and that figure dropped to 4% in 1942.

Keynes was attacked by those on the far-left (Maoists, feminists and the green movement) and far-right, who said that his ideas would lead to racial integration  and a loss of national identity.

Hayek criticised Keynes as well, he said that we should go back to a free market system and have less state control of the economy.


JK Galbraith - New Industrial State

There is a bureaucratic power structure, which is ruled by a technocratic elite (scientists, economic planners and propagandists).

The activity of a few large corporations controls 2/3 of all economic activity, many of the leaders of these corporations have high levels of charisma (Rupert Murdoch). These people are just cogs in a machine. There is no aim to the system, it is nihilistic and can be violent.