The Nature, Conditions, and Development of Bureaucratic Herrschaft

The Quantitative Nature of Administrative Tasks
From the start, the actual foundation for administrative bureaucratization involved the specific development of administrative tasks, particularly their proliferation in quantitative terms. (For instance, in the political domain, the big, territorial states and the mass parties provide the classic ground for bureaucratization.)
Yet it is not the case that every territorial state ever founded necessarily brought forth a bureaucratic administration. Initially, the purely temporal continuity of an existing large state, or the uniformity of a state’s culture, was not always dependent on a bureaucratic structure. Nevertheless, such continuity and uniformity were indeed developed to a high degree, for example, in the Chinese empire. Contrast this with the short duration of the countless African empires, and other similar formations, which declined quickly mainly due to the lack of a Beamte apparatus. Likewise, the national unity of the Carolingian empire crumbled with the decay of their Beamte organization, which however was mostly of a patrimonial character, and not of a bureaucratic character.¹⁷ If one considers only the duration of empires, the Caliphate and their predecessors in Asia, with their mostly patrimonial and prebendal organization of Amt, and also the Holy Roman Empire of Medieval times, have lasted impressively long periods of time despite the almost complete absence of all bureaucracy. Further, they even managed to generate a cultural unity almost as strong as bureaucratic states tend to produce. And the ancient Roman Empire crumbled from within despite the increasing bureaucratization. The collapse of the empire actually happened during the process of bureaucratization. This happened because the nature of the state’s bureaucratic “burden sharing” came to favor the barter economy.
But if one looks at the duration of the Caliphates and their forerunners, as well as the Holy Roman Empire considering only their strength and integrity as a political unit, one discovers that they were unstable and often existed in name only. In reality, they were just conglomerates of various political structures with steadily declining capacities for political action. The relatively strong cultural unity was in part due to the uniformity of their religious organizations, which in the Occident of the Middle Ages were increasingly bureaucratized, and in part due to the large commonalities of the social structures, which in turn was a backwash from the political unity of previous centuries. In effect, both the unified churchly organizations and the common social structures exemplified a strong sense of ingrained cultural affiliation, rooted in traditions, and this favored a labile equilibrium. Both of these factors had such strong capacities, so that even enormous expansions such as the Crusades were undertaken despite a lack of effective political unity. In this context, such enterprises were undertaken, so to speak, as “private enterprises.” However, their failure and their often irrational progression in terms of politics clearly related to the lack of support from a unified strong state authority. Further, it is beyond doubt that during the Middle Ages, the seeds of the modern states were sprouting in those places where bureaucratic structures developed. In the end, it was also the case that the political structures that were bureaucratically the most developed eventually led to the destruction of those “conglomerates” that had mostly relied on the labile equilibrium.
In part, it was also the bureaucratization of the military and Beamte apparatus that induced the decay of the ancient Roman Empire. This bureaucratization in Rome was only made possible by simultaneously implementing a method of public taxation [e.g., a “burden sharing”], which in turn led to the growing importance of the barter economy.
So, as always, individual components played a role.
Further, it does not hold true that the degree of bureaucratization is directly connected to the “intensity” of governmental activities. It is connected neither to outside activities (i.e., the capacity to expand) nor to the inside (i.e., the government’s capacity to influence the state’s culture). Only for the outside activities can it be said that there normally is a connection, but this connection is by no means without exceptions.
For instance, two of the most expansive political entities, the Roman Empire and the English Empire, were based only in small part on bureaucracies, especially in their most expansive period. The Norman state in England had introduced a system that was strictly based on feudal hierarchy. However, the Norman state largely received its homogeneity and expansive power as the result of an exceptionally strong process of bureaucratization of the royal accounting office (e.g., the Exchequer). This was in contrast to the other political structures during the time of feudalism. From then on, the English state was not part of the continental development toward bureaucratization, but stopped at an administration by Honoratioren.¹⁸ Like the case of the administration of the Roman Republic, this had its roots in conditions particular to England, and besides England’s lack of certain continental characteristics. These preconditions are vanishing in England today. One of these peculiar preconditions to bureaucratization is the indispensability of a large standing army, which is needed by a continental state with borders given the tendency to expand.
By the same token, bureaucratization in Rome advanced with the transition from a coastal to a continental empire. Also, within the Roman Herrschaft-structure, the military character of the magistrates’ powers took the place of the technical administration of the bureaucratic apparatus, i.e. its precision and coherence of functioning This applied particularly to administration beyond the city limits. This form of power was not known by any other people. In addition, continuity for this kind of Herrschaft-structure was guaranteed by the unique status of the Roman Senate. It further needs to be pointed out that another precondition for the dispensability of bureaucracy in Rome, and likewise in England, was that the state authority increasingly minimized the scope of its function on the inside. That is, the state confined itself to what the “reason of state” absolutely demanded.
In contrast, all continental state powers fell into the hands of those Rulers who trod the path of bureaucratizing the administration most ruthlessly during the early modern times. It is obvious that in the long run, the older and more technical a large modern state becomes, it will necessarily depend on a bureaucratic base. In fact, the larger the state becomes, and especially the more it becomes a major power, the more the bureaucracy becomes a necessity. Thus, the character of a non-bureaucratic state-system inevitably slowly evolves into a formal bureaucratic structure. The bigger the sources of friction toward the outside become, and the greater the need for unity within the administration is, the more pressing it becomes to put in bureaucratic structures. The United States still displays the characteristics of a non-bureaucratic state.
Moreover, the partly non-bureaucratic structure of the state is, in such cases [e.g., the United States], compensated for by a tighter bureaucratic structure of the de facto ruling political entities: the parties who are led by professionals¹⁹ who specialize in organizational and electoral tactics. In fact, the increasingly bureaucratic organization of all actual mass parties is the most obvious example where a purely quantitative profusion as a lever for bureaucratization of social entities becomes important. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party can be counted among such social entities, and abroad, particularly the two “historical” American parties [e.g., Democratic and Republican].