From ‘Judicial Mind’ to ‘Democratic Soul’: Law and Politics on the Bureaucratic Frontline

Abstract

AbstractThis article considers the relationship between law and democratic politics as manifest in the practice of ‘street‐level bureaucracy’. By glancing back to debates about citizenship and public administration between the two world wars, it sets contemporary concerns about the political constitution in broader context. In doing so, it discloses a fundamental division between conceptions of the state derived from Roman jurisprudence on the one hand, and ancient Athenian political practice on the other. It finds in the tragic dilemmas posed for street‐level bureaucrats—by the competing claims on their values—a test of individual moral agency and of democracy as the management of diversity. It concludes that what is at stake in our estimation of street‐level bureaucracy is not so much the purity of the ‘judicial mind’ as the complexity of the ‘democratic soul’ and the ‘connected society’.