Question to my US Comrades

[RedKobra]

Did the US become more bureaucratized after the cold war and if so did it happen as a response to the cold war?

I ask because I have heard it argued that the Soviet Union went from a leaner form of strictly Bolshevik dictatorship before the cold war to a far more dense and labyrinthine bureaucratic structure afterwards, in a sense to create a buffer of impenetrable middle men between the governing and the governed. I wondered whether the same could have happened to the US.

[Invader Zim]

Did the US become more bureaucratized after the cold war and if so did it happen as a response to the cold war?

I ask because I have heard it argued that the Soviet Union went from a leaner form of strictly Bolshevik dictatorship before the cold war to a far more dense and labyrinthine bureaucratic structure afterwards, in a sense to create a buffer of impenetrable middle men between the governing and the governed. I wondered whether the same could have happened to the US.

All Western societies became increasingly bureaucratized in the 20th century. This can be seen any any number of different respects. This includes the introduction of systematic administration into business and state organisations, resulting in the vast expansion of purely clerical and administrative labour from at least the 1920s onwards. In terms of technology we see a similar phenomenon, with the invention of tabulating / punch card machines by Herman Hollerith in the late 19th Century to collate US Census records. These soon spilled over into business, industry and government. The development of information technology mechanized the production and processing of data. While making data processing much quicker and organisations more versatile, such systems tend to be labour intensive and subject to growth. Increased efficiency results in increased demand and thus administration grows.

Information experts and technocratic mechanisers were also in an unrivaled position to utilize new technology to gather power both in business and government. Technocrats and mechanisers had a distinct advantage during a period when those who rose to the top of society, be it in business or government, tended to be educated in the arts and classics. They occupied a middling tier within both US and British businesses and government departments. They were in the position of being able to suggest to the mandarins (senior civil servants) and executives that administrative technology was the solution to greater output and lower costs - technology that the vast majority of the mandarin class of a civil service or large company had no hope of actually understanding. The mandarins were, of course, happy to go along with this. However, one of the bi-products was that these technologies received ever increasing investment and became inherent in the operation of a business or department. What we see is the mechanisation of systems in both the figurative and literal sense - information processing became information factories complete with mechanized production lines and distribution of labour.

This, in many ways, had been a phenomenon that had been developing for decades if not centuries. The 'calculator' of the 19th century was, in fact, a person. Large teams of people, when producing mathematical information, be it gunnery tables, navigation tables or observatory tables, would use multiplication tables to perform hundreds of sums. These would be passed to another more senior individual who would check the sums and perform more complex calculations on the data before passing it further along (or up) the chain until the master of the establishment gave it his blessing.

The creation of machines to perform these processes allowed those processes to be completed quickly, with greater guarantee of precision, and theoretically with fewer staff members. However, they also allowed the processes being performed to become increasingly complex and make data processing more integral to individual businesses or government departments.

Of course, the two world wars both massively increased the need to efficient yet complex bureaucratic systems capable of hitherto unprecedented data manipulation and production capabilities. We are, after all, talking about wars which saw armies of millions, directed labour, and vast industrial production be it or arms or whatever. This all had huge data requirements, and industry, business and government all had to step up to that challenge or face failure. The result was that if you look at government departments, and businesses carrying out major contracts for the state, all becoming increasingly mechanized in terms of information technology and in turn bureaucratized. It is no coincidence that the development of computer science underwent a stratospheric leap during the Second World War, as both the British and US states in particular pumped huge investment into building information machines and technologies.

So, I don't think that this is because of the Cold War, but because the industrialization of data, and the industrialization of 'organization' all necessarily stem from the wider processes of actual industrialization. Industrialized 'total war' then catalyzes this process further.

It is also worth noting that if you mechanize and bureaucratize a culture (and all businesses and government sections are indeed cultures or rather have cultures), and by changing that culture you create a new institutional memory and change the way which the organisation and its employees actually think about and conceptualize the job.

It's a bit out of date now, but one of my favorite primers on bureaucracy is:

Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy, MacMillan Student Series: Key Concepts in Political Science (MacMillan, 1970).

[RedKobra]

Thanks a lot Zim, thats very interesting. I'll be starting a degree in Politics & Philosophy in October so we may well cover this stuff. I'll check the book out in any case.

[Creative Destruction]

Did the US become more bureaucratized after the cold war and if so did it happen as a response to the cold war?

I ask because I have heard it argued that the Soviet Union went from a leaner form of strictly Bolshevik dictatorship before the cold war to a far more dense and labyrinthine bureaucratic structure afterwards, in a sense to create a buffer of impenetrable middle men between the governing and the governed. I wondered whether the same could have happened to the US.

The bureaucratization of the United States began around the Civil War. Lincoln instituted one of the biggest increases in state control over several parts of the economy, including executive attempts at halting slavery from expanding in the new states, and telling slaves from the south that if they escaped to the north, they would be considered free.

After the civil war, partly because of the size of state machinery and the influx of population into the cities, large-scale patronage started getting a foothold in the government, which is what gave rise to the Party machines in various cities (New York and Chicago had two notorious Democratic machines.) Patronage was still big in the federal government, as well.

President Woodrow Wilson argued for clean political bureaucratization in an 1887 paper he published (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Study_of_Administration). When he became president, he more or less enacted the ideas that he laid out in the essay. From this is really where the modern bureaucracy comes from.

[Blake's Baby]

As some of us call it... 'state capitalism'. You can look at similar processes in Bismarckian Germany in the late 1800s, even the developments of Russian capitalism in the same period, and see similar things happening.