Abstract
Bureaucracy, so often demeaned, should be understood as an embodied means for the production and deployment of knowledge. Its reputation as humdrum and rule-bound is not necessarily undeserved, yet it makes possible a variety of activities on a scale that would otherwise be out of reach. Here we survey and ponder some of its diverse forms as they have adapted to diverse aims and circumstances evolved over several centuries. This afterword is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.
Highlights
This afterword is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen
If less elevated than a calling, bureaucracy stands for a basic dimension of modern life, the management of human affairs
Bureaucracy is one of the prototypical forms of social science, and one on which the natural sciences as well as technical enterprises have long depended. We explore it in this collection as an agency of knowledge-making, a worldly social enterprise that natural scientists have often preferred to disdain
Summary
This afterword is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen. Even Max Weber, who took great interest in the historic significance of bureaucratic power, held back from describing bureaucracy as organized wisdom or as a calling, Bureaukratie als Beruf.[1] The relationship of knowledge to bureaucracy is rather like that of craft work or engineering to the experimental sciences, a field of fluid exchanges rather than a settled hierarchy.
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