“Nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy,” writes David Graeber at the outset of his new book, The Utopia of Rules. In the first half of the 20th century, he reminds us, the word was on everyone’s lips. In the wake of the pioneering work of Max Weber, who defined bureaucracy as the consummate form of modern social organization, interest in the phenomenon spiked among sociologists like C. Wright Mills, journalists like William H. Whyte, and novelists like Joseph Heller. Nor has this tradition died out completely: In the last few years, we’ve had books from Ben Kafka on the history of paperwork, Nikil Saval on the office, and David Foster Wallace’s unfinished IRS novel, The Pale King.
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.
By David Graeber (Melville House)
Still, Graeber argues that there have been fundamental changes in the way we talk — or don’t talk — about bureaucracy since the 1960s, when radical social movements encouraged “rebellions against the bureaucratic mind-set.” For the past 40 years or so it has been mainly the libertarian and neoliberal right that have talked about bureaucracy, often as a synonym for “big government.”
The right-wing critique of bureaucracy, grounded in the thinking of neoliberal economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, was based on a sharp distinction between state administration, held to be slow-moving, sclerotic, and potentially tyrannical, and free-market capitalism, viewed as dynamic, efficient, and fundamentally fair.
In practice, Graeber maintains, this distinction doesn’t really hold up; indeed, as he argued in Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011), markets as we know them today are largely the creation of the state, and bureaucracy has been driven by the needs of business just as much as those of government. Nevertheless, “right-wing populists soon realized that, whatever the realities, making a target of bureaucrats was almost always effective,” Graeber writes.
At the same time, the anti-authoritarian-left critique of bureaucracy began to wither away as leftists devoted themselves instead to justifying and reinforcing the institutions of the welfare state. “The Right, at least, has a critique of bureaucracy,” Graeber writes. “It’s not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none.”
The Utopia of Rules is Graeber’s attempt to revive a left critique of bureaucracy in our time — an attempt that he, as an anthropologist, anarchist, and politically engaged public intellectual, is uniquely placed to make. Graeber first came to broad public attention with Debt and his simultaneous involvement with Occupy Wall Street.
The Utopia of Rules is a modest volume only in comparison to Debt and its follow-up, The Democracy Project (which sought to find the roots of Occupy in the American Revolution). It is less a treatise than a collection of essays, one that finds room for excursus on topics as diverse as ATM machines, structuralist theory (by means of which he demonstrates that vampires are the opposite of werewolves, and Sherlock Holmes is the opposite of James Bond), the glories of the German post office, and the finer points of Malagasy grammar. By the time you’ve arrived at the book’s appendix — a meditation on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises entitled “Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power” — you might begin to wonder whether The Utopia of Rules is really a book about bureaucracy at all.
A better unifying term might have been “imagination.” For Graeber, “bureaucracy” essentially means any hierarchical institution governed by fixed rules and regulations. Such arrangements, while useful in certain contexts, are fundamentally hostile to the human values of improvisation, flexibility, and creativity.
The contrast between bureaucracy and imagination is especially stark, Graeber holds, in the case of the modern university. “A timid, bureaucratic spirit has come to suffuse every aspect of intellectual life,” he maintains, and he is particularly dismayed at the amount of time and energy that present-day academics, who should be inventing flying cars and constructing ambitious new social theories, are expected to put into administrative matters like evaluations and grant proposals. “There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical,” he writes. “No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: It would seem society now has no place for them at all.”
Imagination, for Graeber, doesn’t just mean creative productivity or technical innovation; it extends to moral imagination, or what we might call compassion. He observes that the people who wield bureaucratic power are not obliged to notice or understand much about the people over whom their authority is exerted. The authorities have no incentive to be imaginative, whereas the rest of us expend most of our creative energy trying to follow an elaborate set of arbitrary rules, which leaves little time and energy for creative thinking. “Bureaucracies … are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity,” Graeber writes, “of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination.” They are thus “dead zones of the imagination,” from which nothing really new is likely to issue.
Graeber himself has plenty of the former kind of imagination — indeed, his intellectual creativity seems inexhaustible — but is sometimes lacking in the latter, moral variety, often slipping into polemic or caricature where others’ ideas and viewpoints are concerned. As in Debt, he moves quickly over a very large territory, and is prone to dismissing entire academic disciplines and intellectual movements with a wave of his hand. Nor does he engage with the substantive tradition of writing about bureaucracy by post-Weberian sociologists like Robert Merton, Alvin Gouldner, and Michel Crozier.
Still, you’ve got to admire the sheer range and brio of these essays; few public intellectuals seem to be having as much fun constructing their arguments. (Slavoj Zizek, in his more puckish moments, comes close.) Graeber can be very witty, and on occasion he tosses off critical insights (like a dialectical interpretation of Dungeons & Dragons worthy of Adorno) that would keep a cultural-studies seminar occupied for hours.
It’s unlikely that The Utopia of Rules will do for bureaucracy what Graeber’s previous work did for debt. As Graeber notes, a serious public conversation about the costs and benefits of bureaucracy does not yet exist in this country, and no single book, however brilliant, will be able to call it into being. But in its quixotic vitality, The Utopia of Rules makes an implicit claim that feels just as important: that works of social and political theory can be works of the imagination too.
Evan Kindley is a visiting instructor of literature at Claremont McKenna College and an editor at large at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
