Paperwork: The State of the Discipline

"However many people complain about 'red tape,' " Max Weber remarks in Economy and Society, "it would be sheer illusion to think for a moment that continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices. The whole pattern of everyday life is cut to fit this framework."1 Weber's account of the rise of bureaucracy has long served as both a master and a mistress narrative for the humanities and social sciences. A master narrative because it makes sense out of the wildly uneven yet strangely similar processes of state formation that have taken place around the world over the last two or three centuries; a mistress narrative because its existence, while known to all, nevertheless remains a bit scandalous. There seems to be something about the stories we tell each other of our encounters with the bureaucracy those complaints about red tape that are as endless as the red tape itself that make us feel like we've been naughty. Freud calls this "joke-work," and for a long time bureaucracy talk was mainly after laughs. Indeed, the word owes its early success to its origins as a pun, when Vincent de Gournay, a protoliberal political economist in mideighteenth century France, added to democracy, aristocracy, monarchy rule by the many, the few, the one rule by a piece of office furniture.2 In his article on "bureaucracy" for his Tableau de Paris (1788), Louis-Sebastien Mercier explained that "it was a word recently coined to indicate, clearly and concisely, the overgrown power possessed by simple clerks."3 In his early critiques of Hegel, Karl Marx borrowed the French term to mock the philosopher's ambitious claims for the state. In the preparatory materials for The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), Tocqueville jotted down a reminder to himself to resist its semantic temptations. "Bureaucracy" was nothing more than "modern jargon that one should try to avoid." He was