6 ideas
Modern bureaucracy is defined by fixed official jurisdictions set by rules, a graded hierarchy of offices with appeal upward, and administration based on written documents (the files). It also requires expert training, the official's full working capacity, and general rules that can be learned. The ideal type is an analytical yardstick that real administrations approximate to varying degrees, not a description of any single office.
Bureaucracy spreads because it is technically superior to every other form of organization, just as machine production is superior to non-mechanical production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, and reduced friction and costs are raised to an optimum in a strictly bureaucratic administration. Collegial, honorary, and avocational administration cannot compete on these measures.
The modern official holds office as a career and not as a personal possession or source of rents. Office is separated from the official's private household, and the means of administration belong to the organization. The official is appointed rather than elected, receives a fixed salary and a pension, and climbs a career ladder. In exchange, loyalty is owed to an impersonal, functional purpose rather than to a personal lord.
Bureaucratic power rests on specialized expert knowledge combined with knowledge of the files, which accumulates through service. Bureaucracies deliberately increase this advantage through the concept of the 'official secret'. As a result, the nominal political master, whether a monarch, a minister, or parliament, stands before the trained official as a dilettante facing an expert.
A fully developed bureaucracy is among the hardest social structures to destroy. The individual official is a single cog chained to the apparatus and cannot squirm out of it, while the governed cannot do without the apparatus or replace it. Revolution in the old sense therefore gives way to coups that seize control of the machinery rather than abolish it, and the apparatus goes on working for whoever controls it.
Bureaucracy discharges business 'without regard for persons' and 'sine ira ac studio' (without anger or partiality), according to calculable rules. The more completely it eliminates love, hatred, and every irrational, personal, emotional element, the more perfectly it develops. Seen this way, the impersonality people complain about is not a defect but the source of the calculability that capitalism and mass democracy demand, and it goes hand in hand with the leveling of status differences.