BUREAUCRACY is usually seen as a profession but, if so, it is a profession ofa peculiar kind. The distinguishing feature of the bureaucrat is his unmediated relationship to state power, ?which is not to say that other professions do not influ? ence government decisions, only that their influence must be exerted indirectly through elected officials. There are a range of problems for analysis.1 There is the extent of bureaucratic power, that is, how far the official's independence of action is limited both by his relationship to other elements in the state, and by his relationship to his own class of origin. Do historical investigations, for example, support Marxist ideas of the class state, one in which the bureaucracy is seen as acting primarily as the executive of a class, either its own class of origin or another class in a position to dominate government decisions? The question of what constitutes the official's sense of professional obligation must be considered. Lastly there are questions about the interac? tion between government, of which bureaucracy is a part, and society: whether one consistently dominates the other, or whether there is a shifting balance of power dependent on the state of economic and social development attained by different societies at different times. This paper examines some relatively recent historical writings on bureaucratic behavior in the nineteenth century to see if any areas of agreement on these matters exist. For purposes of this analysis it does not seem that one must always