The Nature, Conditions, and Development of Bureaucratic Herrschaft

Acceleration

Today, mostly the modern capitalist commerce demands a quicker and more precise administration that manages the administrative tasks clearly, without ambiguity, and consistently. Generally, the largest modern capitalist undertakings are also themselves unrivaled examples of such strict bureaucratic organization. Their business operations rely completely on increasing precision, consistency, and, above all, speed.
Such qualities again are made possible by the peculiar nature of the modern means of communication and transportation, to which the news service of the print media also belong. As such, the exceptional acceleration in the transmission of public announcements, economic news, or just purely political news brings by itself a steady and strong pressure on the administration to accelerate their response to the specific situations that arise. Optimal reaction time to such situations is generally only produced by a bureaucracy organized in a strict fashion. (That a bureaucratic apparatus again can and does actually inhibit the completion of tasks that are tailored to individual cases will not be discussed here.)²⁰

Objectivity/Dispassion

However, first and foremost, bureaucratization provides the optimal venue for establishing the principle of a division of labor in administration, based on objective considerations. Individual tasks are distributed among the Beamte who are specifically trained for the task and who optimize their skill through practice. As a result, they become experienced and well-schooled functionaries. Handling cases objectively means, foremost, that the task is handled according to prescribed rules and “calculable” regulations, and “irrespectively of the person concerned.” Notably though, “irrespectively of the person concerned” is also the slogan of the impersonal “marketplace” [of capitalism] and, more generally, of the pursuit of naked economic interests over all else.
The resulting implementation of bureaucratic dominion [Herrschaft] denotes the leveling of Stand-based “honor.” Thus, the implementation of such bureaucratic dominion leads to the universal domination of social class in the stratification of society [and the decline of Stand],²¹ as long as the principle of the free market is not restricted at the same time. The reason that the resulting bureaucratic domination [Herrschaft] and decline in Stand-based honor do not always occur simultaneously with the increasing bureaucratization is that the political Gemeinschaft also have various possible principles at hand to satisfy economic needs.