The Nature, Conditions, and Development of Bureaucratic Herrschaft

The Concentration of the Means of Administration
The bureaucratic structures coincide with the concentration of the material means of production that are controlled by the Ruler and in the hands of the Ruler. This is a well-known kind of development for private capitalistic large companies for which they are an essential feature. Nevertheless, the same is true for public organizations.
Thus, the bureaucratically managed army of the Pharaohs, of the later Roman Republic, and of the Principate, and especially of the modern military state essentially differs from the militia armies of agrarian tribes, the citizen’s army of the ancient cities, the militia of the early medieval cities, and from all vassal armies. In the latter cases, the armies are characterized by the fact that the soldiers obligated to render military service also provided their own equipment and food. The bureaucratically managed armies are equipped and fed from the Ruler’s depots. The battles of machinery in today’s war [World War I] make the concentration of means indispensable for technical reasons, just like the domination of machines advances the means of production in the industrial sector.
In contrast, bureaucratic armies of the past that were equipped and victualed by a Ruler emerged mostly for another reason. They emerged only when social and economic developments reduced the number of people who were economically able to self-equip themselves to a point that there were too few to form the necessary armies. Of course, this is all relative. The minimum threshold for the number of soldiers needed was in relation to the extent of power claimed by the state.
But only bureaucratically managed armies make it possible to establish professional standing armies. Professional standing armies were necessary for sustaining a lasting peace within large states, as well as for warfare against faraway enemies, especially those overseas. Further, usually only in bureaucratically managed armies is the specifically military discipline and technical drilling developed to the high degree known in modernity.
Historically, the bureaucratization of the army took place everywhere in the context of a shift in military service from the propertied, for whom such service was an honor and a privilege, and foisted it off on the unpropertied. (The “unpropertied” included locals in the armies of the Roman generals during the late Republic and the Empire, or in the modern armies until around the nineteenth century, or foreigners who served in mercenary armies throughout history).
There are two main factors that played a role in this development. First, increasing population density intensified the demand for regular economic activity, which in turn increased the indispensability of the salaried population for purposes of war. Second, typically the shift of military service onto the unpropertied happens at a time of emerging material and intellectual culture. Times of strong ideological surges aside the suitability and the capacity of the propertied with their sophisticated urban culture to do the coarse work of war as a common soldier is typically low. All else being equal, the propertied from the countryside seem to be more suited, better qualified, and have a strong affinity for becoming professional officers. Thus, with the possibility to use machines in war that demand technical skills from their officers does the difference between town people and country people level out.³⁷
As in any other industry, the bureaucratization of warfare can be organized on the basis of private capital. Until the dawn of the nineteenth century, typically the rule for military recruitment and administration of the mercenary armies in the Occident was based on private capital. Thus, during the Thirty Years’ War,³⁸ the soldiers of Brandenburg still were the owners of the material means of war (weapons, horses, clothing), although the state already supplied these, so to say, as an “intermediary.” In the Prussian standing army, the company commander was the owner of the material means of war. Only at the Treaties of Tilsit³⁹ these resources have become state-owned. Also, beginning at that time, the use of uniforms was standardized. Previously, the uniforms were at the discretion of the regiment commander, unless the Prussian King assigned specific uniforms to particular regiments (for the first time in 1620 to the personal guard and later during the reign of Frederick II).⁴⁰
One has to realize that terms like “regiment” on the one hand, and “battalion” on the other, typically meant two different things in the eighteenth century. Only the latter was a tactical unit. Today both are. In contrast, a regiment was an economic unit of the army that was created by “entrepreneurial” position, the “colonel.”
Semiofficial naval warfare enterprises (like the Genoese “Maonae”), and the recruitment of armies, were the first privately owned capitalistic “giant enterprises” with a largely bureaucratic structure. The nationalization of these enterprises had a modern parallel with regard to the railway system, which was, from the beginning, subject to national controls.
Likewise in other spheres, the bureaucratization of administration goes along with the concentration of the means of production. In the older administration systems, the means of production were decentralized (e.g., the administration by satraps and governors, the administration by tenders and buyers of Ämter, and particularly administration by vassals). Such decentralization implied that the local needs of the provinces, including the costs of the army and the costs of the lower-level Beamte, is normally paid from the local income. Only the surplus is paid into the central treasury.
The Beamte in the feudal system completely administered his sphere of influence out of his own pockets. In contrast, the bureaucratic state pays the total costs for national administration from the state budget. In this situation, the state routinely supplies the means of production to the lower levels of administration, thereby controlling and regulating their usage. As a result, the “economic efficiency” of an administration is similar to that of larger centralized capitalistic enterprises.
Today bureaucratization is pervasive in university “departments” in the area of scientific research and teaching (the first one of large scale was Liebig’s⁴¹ laboratory in Gießen). This is the result of the increasing need for material means of production. However, the majority of researchers and lecturers are effectively cut off from their “means of production.” This is because the means are concentrated in the hands of the department’s head who is privileged by the government. This separation is similar to the separation of the “means of production” from the workers that takes place within capitalistic companies.⁴²