Max Weber's Views on Bureaucracy and Democracy

weber believes that a democracy tends to irrationality at times, and the bureaucracy is meant to correct such tendencies, in economics, politics, and culture. Weber "was especially interested in the impingement on the economy of the political role system of the modern state, and of value-attitudes associated with phantasmal and cultural tradition" (Weber possible action 54). The roles of the bureaucracy, then, in Weber's passel, include the impeding of excess political interference in the economy, and the prevention of the lie of irrational religious and cultural values on the state.

With obeisance to the system of privilege and inherited power which marks non-democratic government, Weber argues that the bureaucracy is an obstacle to such aristocratic tendencies, and is therefore facilitatory to the approachment of democracy:

The development of rational-legal authority, with bureaucratic administration, is both certified on the breakdown of traditionalized particularistic privileged groups and in kink has a levelling influence, in that it treats social class by yield and other privileged statuses as to a large decimal point irrelevant to status in the system of authority (Weber Theory 73).

However, Weber is in no way radical in his support of democracy. As MacRae writes, Weber was "a bourgeois, a humankind of the upper, trading orders of urb

Nixon and his aides act to use the bureaucracy to subvert the constitutional democracy he was elected and sworn to uphold and defend. Had the bureaucracy been one undivided entity whose only purpose was to obey the President, Watergate would have been a off the beaten track(predicate) greater disaster for the country and for democratic principles and practices. In fact, however,

The bureaucracy can serve as an obstacle to undemocratic blackguards of power in a democracy. The Watergate scandal stands as a decently example of this bureaucratic role in blocking the efforts of politicians who view themselves as above the law. Weber delineates three main features of a bureaucracy: an officialdom, governance by rules, and spheres of competence. Officials serve as the spine of the bureaucracy with their "technical expertise, .

. . ; a claim to continuity in office; appointment on the basis of merit; expressed duties and jurisdiction." Rules are what keep the bureaucracy from passion, irrationality and arbitrariness. Both aspects advance the spirit of democracy through their tendency to level nonequivalent socioeconomic distinctions. However, the "spheres of competence" are what especially resisted the efforts of Nixon and his aides to abuse the bureaucracy for their own undemocratic aims. These spheres are carefully designated areas of tariff and integrity which have their own independence. As Broom and Selznick write,

Broom, Leonard, and Philip Selznick. Sociology. brand-new York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Among the lessons of Watergate was a reassessment of the relation between the professorship and the federal bureaucracy. The president's effort to master the federal agencies at first gear seemed . . . a healthy effort to streamline the government. . . . However, it became clear that Weber's flummox of bureaucracy, which includes the idea of "spheres of competence," was still relevant and important (Broom and Selznick 210).

Despite his principle in the bureaucracy's formal rationality as a way of o
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