Abstract
Perhaps the most significant feature of the social government systems of the 20th century in North-Western Europe has been the growth of bureaucracy. Focusing on the systems of Britain, France, Germany and Sweden, the author relies on a vast amount of secondary sources to trace development and changes between 1880 and 1985. He establishes the fact that, despite national peculiarities, the main trend in all four centuries has been the same - state bureaucracy has changed in intimate interplay with private sector capitalism, in the conspicuous manifestations such as German Beamtentum and the professional civil servant in France and England. In his study, Torstendahl covers the Weberian question of the role of bureaucracies in the governance of society. He claims that at least two fundamental changes have occurred since the 1920s: the welfare state, developed after World War II, and the dissolution of strong centralism which characterized the post-1970 period.
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