Democracy and Bureaucracy

Abstract

Henry Richardson is mainly concerned in this book with reconciling the ideals of democracy with the needs of the modern state. This is a problem that has dogged political scientists and economists for over a century and philosophers have begun to take up the issue in the last decade. Richardson is one of the thinkers spearheading this new development and his book offers a highly sophisticated and valuable contribution to this discussion. The basic problem is fairly easy to lay out. The underlying rationale for democracy is that it is a way of treating citizens as free and equal under the circumstances of disagreement about substantive policy issues. Citizens disagree on what justice requires, what the common good is, and many other issues including how to balance the weights of the different considerations that ground law and policy. When citizens disagree in these ways it is important to make decisions in ways that treats each citizen with equal respect. This suggests that we ought to make collective decisions in such a way that citizens have an equal say in the decision making. Hence, each person is entitled to a vote, to equal opportunities to participate in discussion, and decisions must be made by some majoritarian process. These forms of democratic equality are necessary to the realization of the freedom and equality of citizens. The trouble is that the modern state requires for its proper functioning that there be a highly specialized division of labor in the process of decision making. The time, information and resources needed to make reasonable decisions about environmental, employment, fiscal and monetary policy (to name just a few) are immense. The need for a division of labor, however, involves the need for specialists making decisions about policy. Those in the bureaucracy will have to make controversial decisions because the legislature can at best make fairly vague and general legislative directives to be carried out by the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy will be left with the task of making these vague directives more specific. This task will inevitably involve the bureaucracy in the job of deciding on some of the ends that are to be achieved by the government. Hence, the system seems to be set up in a way that those in the bureaucracy have more power than other citizens to make decisions on con-