by Daniel Bell
was known neither to the handicrafts nor to industry in its infancy. For the master craftsman of old, as the independent proprietor of a manufactory, was totally different from the technical official of today’s mammoth concern. These modern industrial concerns have devised a whole superstructure or mechanism, of which the technical employee must form an integral part. This mechanism removes and draws in all possible brain and routine work from the shops; everything is centered on the planning and laying-out department.43
And in the society, the issues become technical. As Zbigniew Brzez-inski states the case: “. . . social problems are seen less as the consequence of deliberate evil and more as the unintended by-products of both complexity and ignorance; solutions are not sought in emotional simplifications but in the use of man’s accumulated social and scientific knowledge.” 44
With the rise of the technicien has come the belief that advanced industrial society would be ruled by the technocrat. This is a belief held particularly in France where there has been a long tradition of administration from the Center (reinforced, as Tocqueville pointed out, by the French Revolution) and where the elite Corps de l’Etat is drawn from the Grandes Ecoles which were created for that purpose: the Ecole Polytechnique, founded in 1793 by the revolutionary government as a center of higher technical education, and, after the Second World War, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. (August Comte, as Raymond Aron points out, is the “symbolic patron” of the polytechnician manager.) A number of writers, principally Jean Mey-naud, have argued that “real power” has shifted out of the hands of the elected representatives to the technical experts and that there now “begins a new type of government, neither democracy nor bureaucracy but a technocracy.”
The rise of technocracy, Meynaud argues, goes hand in hand with the expansion of the powers of the Executive, and already in France, “three important sectors have been taken over by the technocrats today: economic planning, national defense and the organization of scientific research.” We can “safely postulate,” he writes, “that technocratic power tended to increase under the Third and Fourth Republics, if only because of the extension and systematization of state intervention in social and economic fields.” These powers were enlarged in the creation of the specialized bodies of the European Economic Community, such as the European Coal and Steel Community. The decline of parliamentary influence in the Gaullist Fifth Republic, and the expansion of ministerial power-—with many of the ministers drawn from the civil service—spread the role of technocratic influence in the 1960s. “The technocrat’s predominance in the Fifth Republic,” writes Meynaud, “may be partly attributed to some of the ways in which the regime functions, notably its power to prepare certain decisions or interventions in secret.” 45
Much of the writing on the subject portrays technocracy as in contrast to, or undermining, the normal political framework of democracy; some of it borders on hysteria, vide the late Georges Gurvitch, who defined technocracy as
a formidable social power, absolutist and secretive in character, which threatens to devour the state. Organized, planned capitalism pushes this power in the direction of fascist structures, camouflaged or otherwise, which unite the system of trusts, cartels, the banks, employers, higher administrative personnel and the most senior career soldiers with a totalitarian state at their service.46
Much of the confusion on the problem arises from the failure to distinguish two functions and two kinds of technical intellectuals: the technicien, who corresponds to the application of knowledge; and the technocrat, who is engaged in the exercise of power.47 Technical knowledge—the administration of things—is a necessary and growing component of many kinds of decisions, including political and strategic ones. But power—the relations between men—involves political choices that are a compound of values and interests and cannot always be “ordered” in a technical way. The technocrat in power is simply one kind of politician, not a technicien, no matter how much he employs his technical knowledge.48
It is clear that in the society of the future, however one defines it, the scientist, the professional, the technicien, and the technocrat will play a predominant role in the political life of the society. But if any meaningful generalizations are to emerge about these different roles, a discussion of the power of this stratum or a section of it will have to clarify four questions:
1. The scope and limits of technical expertise in solving problems in society;
2. An assessment of the new kinds of industries which sell “knowledge,” not goods, and the weight of these industries (profit and nonprofit) in the economy of the country;
3. The basis of cohesiveness of any new social class based on skill, not property; and
4. The likelihood of the techniciens and technocrats becoming a new, dominant class 49 (like the bourgeoisie, who preceded the development of large-scale industry), replacing the older capitalist class.
These, then, are the strands of social development as they have arisen in the sociological writings in the West since Marx. As I pointed out, they are, implicitly, an unravelling of Marx’s schema two, but in a direction he did not think it would go. In these conceptions, the forces of production (technology) replace social relations (property) as the major axis of society, and from this arises the concept of industrial society in the work of Raymond Aron and others. Capitalist society is seen as undergoing change, but in the visions of Weber and Schumpeter, not towards socialism but towards some form of statism and bureaucratic society. For the classical Marxian views, and for the societies and social movements which claim to be Marxist, these theories of social development pose a crucial intellectual challenge.
Marxism: The Problem of Bureaucracy
In the post-Marxist sociological writing in the West, then, two themes have emerged as central for the transformation of capitalist or industrial society, one the bureaucratization of the enterprise, if not of the society as a whole, the other the rise of new classes, particularly the technical and white-collar occupations, to predominance in the society, altering thus the sociological character of the stratification system. To put the issues in the Marxian framework, the social forces of production have become industrial, but are common to a wide variety of political systems; the social relations of production have become bureaucratic, in which ownership assumes a diminishing role.
Marx had foreseen many of these changes. The joint-stock company, he wrote, “is the abolition of capital as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production itself” (Capital, vol. III, p. 516). He thought, as I indicated earlier, that the separation of ownership and control, and the transformation of the capitalist into a manager of “other people’s capital,” were a step in the socialization of the enterprise. (For Marx’s discussion, see Capital, vol. III, pp. 454–459, 515–521.) But he did not foresee the issue of the managers (of both capitalist and socialist enterprises) becoming a new class. Nor did he take up much the question of bureaucracy. In the mid-twentieth century, bureaucracy has become the central problem for all societies, socialist as well as capitalist.
Strange to say, in only one essay, in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written in 1843, did Marx squarely confront the subject. Afterwards, other than marginal references, the topic seems to vanish from the center of Marx’s concerns.50 The reason lies, perhaps, in Marx’s fundamental vision of the relation of society to politics in modern times.
In the classical world, as Hegel had pointed out, there is no distinction between the social and the political, between society and the state. As Avineri writes: “When the political state is just a form of socio-economic life, of the material state, res publica means that public life is the real content of individual life. Therefore anyone whose private life lacks political status is a slave: political unfreedom means social servitude.”
The Middle Ages reverses this relationship. Each person is defined by his sociological standing and is a member of a specific estate or Stände which defines his rights a
nd obligations. It is a society which is the foundation of social as well as political status; the term Stände refers both to social stratification and to political organization.
In modern society, there is a fundamental distinction between state and civil society. As Marx writes, in his essays on The Jewish Question: “The political revolution [i.e. the shattering of Estates and guild privileges] abolished the political character of the civic society. ... The political emancipation was at the same time the emancipation of civil society from politics, from even the semblance of a general content.” 51
For Hegel, from whom this basic distinction derived, the civil society was an assemblage of special interests, each pursuing its own individual aims while the state represented the “general interest” ruling for “all.” The responsibility for carrying out the monarch’s decision—the monarch embodying the state—is the civil servant’s; Hegel does not use the word bureaucracy. “The nature of the executive functions,” he writes in The Philosophy of Right, “is that they are objective and that in their substance they have been explicitly fixed by previous decision.” For that purpose a special kind of person is required.
Individuals are not appointed to office on account of their birth or native personal gifts. The objective factor in their appointment is knowledge and proof of ability. Such proof guarantees that the state will get what it requires; and since it is the sole condition of appointment, it also guarantees to every citizen the chance of joining the class of civil servants.
The misuse of power—the guarantee that officials will not overstep the bounds of the general interest—is guarded against by the “hierarchical organizations and answerability of the officials,” and the independence given to corporate bodies, e.g. universities and local communities with their own powers.52
For Marx this is sheer mystification. As he says in the Critique: “What Hegel says ... does not deserve the name of philosophical exposition. Most of the paragraphs could be taken verbatim from the Prussian Civil Code.” The opposition between general interests and special interests is illusory for the state is itself a private purpose simply confronting other private purposes, and the impartiality of the bureaucracy—a word Marx does use, in a pejorative sense—is a mask for its own special interests. It is in this context that Marx develops his views about the nature of bureaucracy.
Hegel proceeds from the separation of the “state” and “civil” society, from “particular interests” and the “completely existent universal.” And bureaucracy is indeed based on this separation. ... Hegel develops no content for bureaucracy, only some general definitions of its “formal” organization. And indeed bureaucracy is only the “formalism” of a content lying outside. ...
“Bureaucracy” is the “state formalism” of civil society. It is the “state’s consciousness,” the “state’s will,” the “state’s power,” as a corporation, hence a particular, closed society in the state. ...
Bureaucracy is a circle no one can leave. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of information. The top entrusts the lower circles with an insight into details, while the lower circles entrust the top with an insight into what is universal, and thus they mutually deceive each other. ...
Bureaucracy possesses the state’s essence, the spiritual essence of society, as its private property. The general spirit of bureaucracy is the official secret, the mystery sustained within bureaucracy itself by hierarchy and maintained on the outside as a closed corporation. Conducting the affairs of the state in public, even political consciousness, thus appears to the bureaucracy as high treason against its mystery. Authority is thus the principle of its knowledge, and the deification of authoritarianism is its credo.
... within bureaucracy spiritualism becomes a crass materialism, the materialism of passive obedience, of faith in authority, of the mechanism of fixedly formal activities, fixed principles, views and traditions. For the individual bureaucrat the state’s purpose becomes his private purpose of hunting for higher positions and making a career for himself. In one respect he views actual life as something material, for the spirit of this life has its separate existence in bureaucracy. ... Bureaucracy has therefore to make life as materialistic as possible. ... Hence the bureaucrat must always behave toward the real state in a Jesuitical fashion, be it consciously or unconsciously. ... The bureaucrat sees the world as a mere object to be managed by him.53
Acute as this is, one has to attribute the subsequent lack of attention to bureaucracy—and the lack of a systematic discussion of the political order—to the evolution of Marx’s thought, from politics to sociology so to speak, an evolution reflected in the subsequent writings in the Economic Manuscripts and The German Ideology. Out of this came Marx’s distinctive conception of sociology: the focus on society, not the state; on the economy, not the polity.
For Marx all basic social relations derive not from politics, but from the mode of production. Class relations are economic relations: there could not be autonomous political classes, or orders, such as bureaucracy and the military. For him, what was distinctive about modern society was not the creation of a national state, or a bureaucracy, but the capitalist mode of production. The crises which would shake modern society were primarily economic, deriving from the “laws of motion” of the capitalist mode of production: the chronic underconsumption, the disproportion between the producers’ goods and consumers’ goods sectors with consequent overproduction, and the falling rate of profit—all derived from the murderous competition between capitalists, and the consequent changing ratios of the organic composition of capital in the society as a whole. What was unique about capitalism was the existence of an autonomous market society which was not dependent on the state.54
For Marx, then, it was not politics but social structure which was decisive. Politics is an arena where the social divisions of a society are fought out. Politics has no autonomy; it is a reflection of societal forces. What is the state? An instrument of force—the army, police, bureaucracy—used by the dominant classes. For Marx, there was no capitalist state, but a state used by capitalists. In fact, there is no theory or history of types of political order in Marx, as in Weber, with his distinctions of patriarchal, patrimonial and legal bureaucratic political orders, or types of political legitimacy. For Marx, the focus is on the underlying social structure whose actual relations are obscured by formal relations (so, in his discussion of the fetishism of commodities in Capital, vol. I, Marx points out that abstract exchange relations between commodities mask concrete social relations between men).
For Marx, the capitalist mode of production was possible in a wide variety of political states, democratic or authoritarian (vide England and Imperial Germany), but, inevitably, since the capitalist was the dominant class in the society, the state would reflect and support capitalist interests.
But not always. The most vivid and striking of all of Marx’s analyses of the ebb and flow of political power is The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Yet The Eighteenth Brumaire is a study of an adventurer who was “above” the classes, and used the state to manipulate one class against another. As Marx writes:
This contradictory task of the man explains the contradictions of his government, the confused groping hither and thither which seeks now to win, now to humiliate first one class and then another and arrays all of them uniformly against him. ...
As the executive authority which has made itself an independent power, Bonaparte feels it to be his mission to safeguard “civil order.” But the strength of this civil order lies in the middle class. He looks on himself, therefore, as the representative of the middle class and issues decrees in this sense. Nevertheless he is somebody solely due to the fact that he has broken the political power of this middle class and daily breaks it anew. Consequently, he looks on himself as the adversary of the political and literary power of the middle class. But by protecting its material power, he generates its political power anew.55
“But above all,” as Marx writes, Bonapart
e, in fact, as the chief of the Society of 10 December, is the “representative of the lumpenpro-letariat to which he himself, his entourage, his government and his army belong,” and their prime purpose is to enrich themselves. And so, the political character of a regime is transitory. And yet, for a short space in history the state can be politically against the “dominant” class and be run by men or groups, demagogues or the military, who stand against the bourgeoisie or the major economic classes; but for Marx, what counts in the end is the underlying economic system on which “material power” rests.
It is this theme, the underlying mode of production and the character of property relations, which is central and decisive for Marx; all the rest is secondary. Marx’s early writings were the criticism of religion and politics. The writing on bureaucracy, written before he turned to economics, came when Marx was still a democrat and not yet a communist.56 In those writings, bureaucracy appears as a quasi-independent force, developing its own mode of existence, ruling the rest of society in its own interests. Yet two years after his essay on bureaucracy, when Marx had completed his Economic Manuscripts, he turned scathingly on a former friend, Karl Heinzen, and comments: “The fatuous Heinzen connects the existence of classes with the existence of political privileges and monopolies.”57 Marx had become a believer in the primacy of economic power.
The idea that the bureaucracy could become an independent force above a society was a theme that was central to all the skeptics of nineteenth-century progress, from anarchists like Bakunin to conservatives like Burckhardt.58 Yet for Marxists, this would only contradict the proposition that class relations were economic relations and economic relations were au fond property relations. It was an insight into history that became an ideological dogma; and like all ideology it served, in turn, to obscure reality. The irony of it was that the place where this paradox worked itself out—where politics replaced economics—was in the first socialist society where power was taken in the name of Marx, in the Soviet Union.