Bureaucracy and the Secrets of Hierarchy

"A circle from which no-one can escape"

This is the first of what I intend to be a series of short pieces drawing out some of the themes of my research over this year. Broadly they deal with issues around the purported shift in modern developed societies from politics to economics and from national sovereignty to trans-national "governance". More specifically they approach those issues by way of what has been termed - for better or worse - economic theology; which deals with the legacy of theological thought for modernity's experience of economy and government. This first piece is an opening into work which deals with the genealogy of hierarchy (a theological signature par excellence) and its significance for understanding bureaucracy in the age of globalisation. My intention is to avoid excessive referencing and to make these pieces as "blog like" as possible. However, where the material involves lesser known or esoteric sources some degree of referencing will be unavoidable. These pieces have two aims: to provide to a descriptive account of what I am calling "one-world" governance; and to contribute to the expanding field of political/economic theological research, which first and foremost seeks (in a Kantian sense) to construct a critique of secularisation.

1. Everyone thinks they know what bureaucracy is about; paperwork, pointless rules, red tape, computer says no. Despite this seeming familiarity it nonetheless stubbornly resists conceptualisation.  The critique of bureaucracy - an endeavour once undertaken by all shades of the political spectrum - has fallen by the wayside in recent decades. The reasons for this are multiple. Of special significance however was the framing in the immediate post-war years, of bureaucracy as a phenomenon associated with the state civil service and mass political parties. Indeed this characterisation - which has been tacitly accepted - reached its extreme with Ludwig Von Mises On Bureaucracy (1944) in which this father of neoliberalism blamed government suppression of the profit motive through regulation (and New Deal style welfarism more generally) for the rise of bureaucracy in the US. In an echo of what was to come under Reaganomics and Thatcherism, Von Mises located central government as the seed bed of bureaucratisation, the stifling of free enterprise and even totalitarianism itself.

Ludwig von Mises 1881-1973

Even before Von Mises' polemic the Left had an ambivalent relationship with bureaucratic forms of organisation. On the one hand, Marx in his early writing saw in the state bureaucracy only an imagined universality which in practice was preoccupied with little else than securing and legitimising its own forms of activity and giving rise to a cult of authority. In his writing on the Paris Commune he went further to claim that the suppression of the city bureaucracy by cutting their salaries to the level of an average worker was the Commune's first truly revolutionary measure. Lenin on the other hand viewed the state bureaucracy predominantly as a weapon of the dominant class and thus as potentially appropriable by a revolutionary party as a means to transform society. Lenin's admiration of the 19th century German postal system with its complex but remarkably efficient structures was well known and became the butt of jokes from Von Mises about socialists wanting to turn the whole world into a post office. Lenin's adoption of bureaucracy "for revolutionary means" and the use the Soviet Union made of it significantly hampered any independent Leftist critique. Consequently the pejorative "apparatchik" has become a near synonym for bureaucrat. 

Fast forward to the 1970s and these basic coordinates were the starting point for Claude Lefort's analysis, with the civil service and mass party as his principle object. Interestingly though, Lefort raises the problem of bureaucracy's autonomy with respect to the class struggle and the state. Like Max Weber in the early 20th century he recognised bureaucratisation as a problem with capitalist development generally and not simply as emerging as an instrument of class power. Bureaucracy's rationalism, its reduction of complex tasks to technical, calculable units and its reliance on impersonal, non-clientalistic relations, are all factors drawing on wider developments in society.  By this account bureaucracy as form of social organisation seems to have its own internal dynamic, irreducible to traditional Marxist categories, or for that matter the hyperbolic red scare rhetoric of the neoliberals. It is as the young Marx observed "a circle from which no-one can escape" but its essential character is stratification and ordering. As all the commentators on bureaucracy have noted, its principle tendency is towards self-expansion, thus mirroring capital's ceaseless drive to accumulation. But if it's not merely an instrument of the dominant class or an outgrowth of the state, where then does the power of bureaucracy lie, and where does it ultimately come from?

These questions were never really answered. With the advance of neoliberalism in the West and the collapse of Soviet Communism, social theory moved instead towards the individual subject and that subject's placement within a network of power relations. Grand theory attempting to explain the rapidly emerging age of globalisation took a back seat. The caricature of the state or party bureaucrat proffered by the Right won the day, and as socialism waned and mass parties across the West shrunk, critique of bureaucratic power fell into abeyance.  In Lefort's analysis however there were the beginnings of a theory of social power that would be developed throughout the decade and into the1980s, notably by the likes of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. Little was done however to contest the notion of bureaucracy as exclusively a problem with socialism, the big state and mass political parties. As David Graeber notes in his recent book on the subject, the instances of the word bureaucracy in English language publications have fallen steadily after reaching a peak in the mid 1970s. Intriguingly though he also notes that other terms generally associated with bureaucracy such as paperwork and performance review have risen dramatically over the same period. Could it be that rather than disappearing with the Soviet Union and the mass socialist parties, the problem of bureaucracy has been forgotten? Lost, owing to a theoretical development that has obscured the basic problem, tying its fate to the wrong historical figures and leaving us unable to understand how power and order function in the era of globalisation.

2. An essential point which has often been overlooked is that bureaucracy is both a form of social ordering and an ordering power itself. Its nature is order through and through and one where the edges are difficult to find. Furthermore, it's an ordered/ordering power distinct from the type of rule making authority we associate with sovereign nation states. In other words, bureaucracy does not attempt to ground itself in anything like a popular will or charismatic leader. As Weber noted, charismatic power is antithetical to the impersonal power of the bureaucrat. The cult leader or Medieval King might draw his power directly from his person, but the public official draws theirs from their position within the hierarchy. Rarely do bureaucrats or officials of any kind feel the need to justify themselves in political terms since their sphere of actions is deemed to be purely technical or administrative and relations with others governed by contracts of the business rather than social kind. This does not mean however that the power of the bureaucrat is neutral or benign. Indeed the lack of a traditional centre of authority is one of the more often complained about aspects of bureaucracy. How often do people demand to "speak to someone in charge" when dealing with a big company or state service? What people want is someone with the authority to "cut through the red tape" and just make a decision. Often such a person simply does not exist (charismatic individuals tend to be weeded out by bureaucracies). Authority in a bureaucracy is widely dispersed and jurisdiction heavily prescribed. The lowest call centre workers or even their supervisors simply don't have the power to interpret the rules, whereas senior managers know next to nothing of the details of their businesses and are transfixed by metrics and key performance indicators that tell them nothing of the reality on the floor. A general incompetence prevails, yet the money continues to roll in while lives are daily thrown into turmoil.  

What are the basic characteristics here? Let's think again about the most generic description of bureaucracy; ordering and stratification, nominally independent of sovereign (or if you like political) power. Ordering is perhaps too general a concept to be of much use here. Armies are heavily ordered and have chains of command, but soldiers are not bureaucrats, though the upper echelons of the armed forces are sometimes considered to be. And we can think of endless examples of highly ordered human arrangements that are not stratified; a football team for example or the members of a theatre troop. Workers too might have many different roles but all be on the same grade at a big company, in practice organising the work between themselves. Management on the other hand we always tend to associate with "layers". The relationship between modern managerialism and bureaucracy is an important part of this story which we'll leave for another day. Of our two principle concepts we're thus left with stratification, or to be more precise, hierarchy. No true bureaucracy is without hierarchy and every description of bureaucracy from Marx to Graeber emphasises it as a fundamental trait. Have we not however ended up back where we began with a familiar concept, the very familiarity of which resists precise determination? What then is hierarchy? It's a Greek word, the origin of which is in fact very precisely, though not very widely known. Rather than denoting mere gradation it refers to a totalising form of order and action that operates explicitly within an economic context. Economic, that is, in its broadest sense as the administration of people and things.

There is no unambiguous translation; however, Marx, when he referred to bureaucracy's "cult of authority" and Weber, when he described the "ideological halo of the bureaucrat", may have had some inkling of its etymology. In early Christianity it referred to the office (the ἀρχή, archē) of the bishop in relation to his subordinates, and developed out of the more general hierarchēs meaning the one who carries out a sacred ritual. It is however through the works of an unknown author of the 5th century known to us as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite that the term acquired the lexical weight which it has carried ever since and which St Thomas Aquinas denoted as sacred power (sacer principatus). In two texts - The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, this apocryphal author describes how a transcendent first principle (God, nominally) is able to govern through the use of intermediaries right down to the smallest elements of creation. The intermediaries of this divine government of the world are respectively the order of Angels and the clergy. These works had immense authority during the middle ages owing to their supposed provenance as the writings of a Athenian convert of St Paul. Aquinas in particular drew from the Corpus Areopagitum, citing it in his Summa Theologiæ more frequently than he did Aristotle. The ranks of Angels carrying titles such as thrones, principalities, archangels, and cherubims can still be seen depicted on the ceilings of Medieval buildings throughout Europe and the near-East.

 

Ceiling fresco depicting orders of angels. Baptistery in Florence.

Hierarchy, sacred order, is the name for this metaphysics of government, the original "world order" connecting heaven and earth and the origin of the key concept in bureaucracy. It is also a  commonplace term used to describe all manner of systems of gradation. That this symbolic figure of global technocratic malaise has its locus in theology is one of the great mysteries of power in the West. In my next piece we'll delve deeper into the meaning of this economic-theological concept, drawing out the "metaphysics of hierarchy" and how it depends on an important distinction in the Ancient Greek understanding of Law.

Beautiful, Intelligent, and Utterly Pernicious: A Review of Agora

 I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum although some plot details will be needed for the review to make sense. Also this review is to do with the ideas presented in the film rather than the technical or acting aspects.

Agora is ostensibly a biopic of the Neo-Platonic philosopher Hypatia who lived in Alexandria around the end of the 4^th and beginning of the 5^th century AD. Accounts of her life are sketchy and none of her own works, if indeed she wrote any survived. The fairest and most detailed account of her life and the events in Alexandria come from Socrates of Constantinople, a contemporary writing at the beginning of the 5^th century. He was also a Christian and this is worth bearing in mind.  In cases such as this where primary sources are minimal there is predictably, and perhaps necessarily, considerable scope for poetic licence. Added to that there is the obvious need when staging an expensive historical epic to put on something of a show. All of this should not distract us from taking seriously what this film has to say; or rather what it wants Hypatia to say to us as Westerners in the 21^st century. All evocations of the antique world play on the fantasy and dream like perception we have of those times, steeped as they are in the Western cultural consciousness. But like Freud knew, when dealing with dreams what matters is not so much the dream content as the dream work. How does the dream rearrange familiar objects and characters, and what precisely does this arrangement aim to say about our own time?

The cinematography is outstanding throughout, recreating the life of a turbulent multicultural city in the Eastern Roman Empire. Much credit should go to the set designers and location managers who bring Alexandria to life as a crowded, dirty and often dangerous place to as faithful degree as possible. But behind the visual historical fidelity there are I would argue two ideals at work around which the story rotates; these being the character of Hypatia herself, and the Library of Alexandria. Now, Hypatia was a philosopher in late antiquity, but the character Rachel Weisz personifies is far closer to a modern liberal scientist, an independent and secular woman of reason. The role of science (which in the 4^th century was not distinguished from philosophy) is written large in her character. She is seen grappling with problems of astronomy and mathematics, the director even going so far as to suggest she was on the verge of overturning Ptolemy’s geocentric view of the universe. This is a total fiction but crucially it projects a very modern scientific view onto Hypatia, and it is this distortion that we are invited to identify with. Hypatia is to be seen reaching across the centuries as one of us. Her virtue is also exemplified to a preposterous degree as she is seen working with slaves, even allowing one slave to give a presentation to her class. She expounds a doctrine of liberal tolerance to bickering Christian and Pagan students and shows forgiveness in a way Christians would wish to claim only they can.  All this is one side of the antagonistic opposition that the film depicts. On the other side are the religious believers.

It has been a historical commonplace ever since Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to depict the story of the late Empire as a gradual conversion to Christianity and absolutism, and with it (even perhaps because of it) the disintegration of the classical world and the entry into the Middle Ages. Christians have been the fall guy in this story for a long time but Agora is singularly unique in its portrayal of all religion as intolerant and destructive. We see Pagans attacking Christians, Christians attacking Pagans, Christians attacking Jews and Jews attacking Christians. Alexandria however was known to be an especially volatile city long before Constantine gave the nod to Christ, with riots and violence of all kinds being perpetrated by forces imperial, religious and otherwise. But director Amenabar want us to see this complex period in a very particular light.

The set piece of the first half of the film is the storming of the Serapeum, the temple dedicated to the Pagan god Serapis. Now here is where the other ideal, the library of Alexandria comes in. I won’t deviate with a lengthy excursus on the history of the library but the main point to note is that the fate of the library is unknown. It is known that one part of the Serapeum was used to store books that were recovered when the original Royal Library of Alexandria was destroyed (how this happened is also disputed). There were at least two other occasions prior to 390AD that the library may have been destroyed but even then whether all or even most books were lost is unknown. Second point to note is that there is no evidence that after the Serapeum was closed when Pagan worship was banned under the edict of emperor Theodosius I that any books were burnt, or even that any were still stored in the building. But ideals have a hold on the contemporary mind, and when the modern viewer unsullied by the nuances and incompleteness of historical data witness the spectacle of bearded religious hordes gleefully burning the contents of what we are told is the greatest library on earth, full of the wisdom of humanity, it is not the rational mind that is being called upon to respond. The cinematographer knows your pain and when the mob enter the domed classroom smashing the instruments and tearing up books, the camera rotates 180 degrees; it is the death of the classical city, the world turned upside down.

Another striking image is a high angle (God’s view) shot of the Christians scuttling about like insects burning books in the courtyard. The image of book burning is not the only stock trope of 20^th century ignorance called upon in the film. It should by now be clear how the director has arranged the pieces in his dream, what fundamental antagonism he want you to witness and deplore. No, not Gibbon’s 18^th century thesis of Decline and Fall, but the post 9/11 world of clashing civilizations; the world of secular scientific reason under threat from the intolerant religious barbarians. Despite Agora’s generally intelligent screenplay there are still moments of almost brazen didacticism. How naive to think we had finally changed laments Roman prefect Orestes after one bloody conflict, aping the Oxford view ala Richard Dawkins. Bishop Cyril publicly reads a notoriously misogynistic passage from the bible (1 Timothy 2:8-15 if you want to look it up) and is seen amongst a baying crowd of Christian monks called the Parabalani venerating an executed man as a martyr; a word we now commonly associate with terrorism and fundamentalism. The latter scene is of particular note as it ignores sources that report this was not a popular move; other Christians being uncomfortable with the title martyr as he had been executed for attacking a Roman official not for refusing to deny Christ. 

In the last instance what all of this serves to obscure is the central role of power in the sorts of conflicts we see in Agora. Even Wikipedia, that bastion of detailed analysis has the events in Alexandria into which Hypatia was drawn as to do with Bishop Cyril and prefect Orestes. In a city like Alexandria the prefect could often end up an isolated figure with the army away on the frontier and being faced with a mass of near starving poor on the one hand and tax dodging civic notables on the other. Owing to the institution of Christian charity which the film does depict but without comment, the Bishops of major cities were increasingly important figures, not least in their potential ability to mediate between the imperial administration and the mob. This function of free speaking to power was a role which had often been afforded to philosophers in earlier times. The Christian Socrates of Constantinople reports that Hypatia was “of careful mind in performing the public duties affecting her city, [her] self-possession and freedom of speech derived from her culture”. She could do little however in the Roman administration’s struggle to maintain order between the various sects and groupings in Alexandria despite being the prefect’s preferred council. The Bishop however could speak to the Christian mob and the poor. The role of the philosopher and the ideal of the classical city that she carried with her was slowly displaced. Despite Orestes old world sensibility the tide had turned, he could not afford to ignore Cyril in this new climate. These are the wider events that the story of Hypatia brings to tragic focus, not the very modern ideological perspective that this film wants to present.  For let us not forget that the idea of a clash of civilizations and the unquestionable correctness of western reason has been used and is still being used to justify military intervention in Islamic world. It is after all from recent conflicts that Agora derives many of its images. Be they woman hating fundamentalists, book burning bearded fanatics, or murderous men after martyrdom, this director, like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris before him damns all faith but principally takes aim at Islam.

I would not go so far as to call Agora propaganda for militant atheists, although I’m sure they’ll like it. What stops it being propaganda is the film’s mostly intelligent screenplay, the wonderful attention to visual if not historical detail, and the very fact that this story from a little exposed era of history has even been given such epic cinematic treatment at all. I identify with Hypatia as so many have done down the centuries (even Christians), but I do not identify with the crude and obscurantist perspective that the film makers want to project onto her. If philosophy means anything it is the solemn and necessary duty to subject power to critique. Agora’s perspective is borne of power, the power to bomb civilians with unmanned drones, to manipulate public opinion through mass media, and to stoke up fear and prejudice and call it enlightenment. Power re-writes history in its own image, the duty of critique is to unravel it.