Weber's Bureaucratic Order and the Supreme Court's New Vision of Charismatic Bureaucracy.
Weber’s Bureaucratic Order and the Supreme Court’s New Vision of Charismatic Bureaucracy.
In previous posts I’ve discussed how several recent Supreme Court decisions have created a radically new legal framework that can be used by whomever becomes the 47th President to create the initial phase of forming a new turbo-charged American presidency that will have the powers to reach into the Federal bureaucracy to impose decisions and set priorities without even the fear of criminal liability.
The exact consequences of this new form of presidency, however, will depend heavily on who gets to use these new powers first. The Supreme Court has somehow discovered that the 1787 text of the U.S. Constitution permits many new Presidential executive powers. It will be up to the 47th President to select which new powers to test, and for what purposes.
I don’t use the term “radical” lightly. Indeed, I believe the potential new powers that the Roberts Court has created for the 47th President open up opportunities to fundamentally recast the core source of social authority on which the U.S. Federal government has evolved, at least since the advent of the Federal civil service in the so-called Pendleton Act of 1883.
To explain the scale of this threat, it helps to provide some background on this concept of social authority. Please bear with me as I jump into some esoteric material about the long history of social authority. I promise it is relevant to today’s challenge.
Bill Bowen and I wrote a book in 2019 that we titled The Evolution of Human Settlements, From Pleistocene Origins to Anthropocene Prospects. One of our core arguments in that book is that a great deal of variation in the evolution of different settled human cultures over the last ten thousand years can be understood best by uncovering the sources of social authority that each culture used to muster the large amount of coordinated human labor, both manual and mental, that was required to build and maintain human settlements that could be inhabited for many generations.
We defined social authority as the ability of one person, or a small group of people, to compel large numbers of other people to behave in desired ways that those people might not otherwise do. All human settlements, from the smallest rural hamlets to the largest modern megacities, are complex enterprises that require enormous amounts of focused labor to build. And each settlement requires a tremendous amount of creative problem-solving labor to maintain and grow.
All this hard work needed to be motivated and directed. Since we use systems theory to conceptualize the complex layers that make up any human settlement, we used systems theory’s core concept of “purpose” to help understand how all that hard work within each layer was prioritized and orchestrated to evolve.
Each settled culture’s sources of social authority, we argued, were combined in a unique way to express that culture’s purpose by setting priorities and orchestrating the work of building permanent settlements. The evolution of that culture’s cities, therefore, reflects its underlying purpose.
By borrowing liberally (and we hope intelligently) from the work of anthropologists, ancient historians, political scientists, and other specialists, we argued that three different traditional sources of social authority have been combined in countless ways by different human cultures to build human settlements for different purposes. (And yes, we admit we are simplifying enormously rich historical contexts and counter-examples in favor of identifying core long-term patterns.)
The first common source of social authority is violence, or at least the threat of violence, to compel the behavior of others. The second is the use of heredity as a source of social authority. There is something in the human mind that affords legitimacy to the idea that patterns of social authority should be maintained from one generation to the next.
The third is the human quest for meaning. Every human culture evolved some group of people who asserted they had deep insights into the meaning of human life. Those insights turned into a wide panoply of philosophies and theologies about which principles, and which gods, create the examples of behaviors that humans should seek to emulate in order to find deep meaning in human life. The human mind seeks meaning in all that we do. Those who offer to fill that quest for meaning exert the most powerful of the three traditional sources of social authority.
Many thousands of combinations of violence, heredity, and “religious” meaning, therefore, created thousands of cultures that built and maintained networks of settlements that we refer to as civilizations since the first permanent settlements emerged less than ten thousand years ago. The vast majority of these civilizations persisted only for short periods of time. The details of most of them are lost forever. A handful grew large enough that we know something about them from their ruins. An even smaller handful invented writing on materials that somehow survived. We know these few examples better.
Bowen and I argued that humanity as a whole evolved through hundreds of settled civilizations without substantially increasing the total number of people who were alive at any one time. From the first permanent settlements ten thousand years ago until the fourteenth century CE (i.e. the 1300’s), the total number of people alive at any time was kept in check by what the British philosopher Malthus later identified, and we now call, the Malthusian Trap.
Whenever a settled culture solved enough problems to allow it to grow, it was never able to increase its production fast enough to keep up with its population growth. Consequently, population growth always led to a decline in per capita production, which then led to some form of social upheaval, famine, unrest, cultural decline, and population collapse. Every settled human culture eventually expanded to the point where it could no longer sustain itself and would thereby come undone.
Bowen and I argue that the Malthusian Trap was kept in place for thousands of years largely by the ever-changing tug-of-war among each culture’s combination of those three traditional sources of social authority. The goal of increasing overall production of food, etc. in order to keep production growth ahead of population growth was never the purpose of traditional elites whose social authority rested on violence, heredity, or concepts of other-worldly purpose.
Every culture had a small number of wealthy elites. But their wealth did not grant them social authority. Their social authority granted them their wealth. Those who found ways to accumulate their own wealth did not thereby obtain social authority. Wealth could easily be stripped away by those who controlled traditional sources of social authority.
This began to change in a sustained, evolutionary way only by historical accident in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Beginning in several places in otherwise backward Europe, a series of prolonged crises, sparked by the Little Ice Age and the spread of plague, created existential threats to all traditional source of social authority in that time and place. Religious authority crumbled in the face of famine and sickness. Hereditary social regimes fell into constant warfare amid the social chaos of the era.
Into this vacuum of social authority, merchants who were able to accumulate money wealth used their money to help selected members of the traditional elites regain control and end the chaos. But in showering money on favored clerics, favored monarchs, and favored generals, merchants created for themselves a new form of social authority that rested independently on their own accumulated capital. Traditional elites came to rely on their help, and therefore did not quash their rise. A new form of independent social authority was born.
This social evolution took several centuries to mature. But when it did, it blew the lid off the Malthusian Trap, first in Europe, and later around the world. A new era, which we labeled “industrial social relations,” altered the trajectory of humanity by giving social authority to those who core social purpose was to create social authority for themselves by maximizing their wealth through rapid growth in production, and the control of global trade.
The juggernaut of European-orchestrated, globalized production systems grew rapidly through the 17th, 18thand 19th centuries into a series of European-orchestrated global systems of trade and military power focused on agricultural commodities, raw materials, finished products, and African slaves. Global population boomed, and per capita production boomed even faster.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the new European social system spawned waves of popular protest, intellectual critique, never-ending internal warfare among rival monarchies, and competing ideologies about how traditional sources of social authority could mitigate the unending consolidation of social authority among the wealthy. (Yes, this is a great simplification, but stay with me a bit longer).
It was the German intellectual Max Weber who characterized one important reform that took hold across all of the various warring European powers in the nineteenth century. He called the reform “bureaucracy.”
Although we use this term with derision today, the rise of European bureaucracies created the modern, “industrial,” nation-state, and largely prevented the collapse of industrial social relations. The bureaucratic nation-state became a new source of social authority that gained enough power to check the unfettered social authority of money. This social innovation is perhaps the single most important factor that prevented the economic, social, and political forecasts of Marx, Engels, and other 19th century intellectual critics from coming true.
By wedding a rules-based, secular, meritocratic, hierarchical, non-aristocratic, bureaucratic government to the coercive power of the military, and associating the combination (at least initially) with the traditional hereditary authority of the national aristocracies and religious institutions, the modern state grew strong enough in the nineteenth century to begin regulating the affairs of private wealth within each of Europe’s major industrial powers.
Yet despite the rapid rise in bureaucratic social authority, that authority remained firmly embedded within, and constrained by, the broader social systems that still included the competing social authorities of heredity, religion, growing expectations of democratic governance, science, class, and other evolving sources of social authority in the complex dynamics of industrial social relations.
These social trends in Europe echoed across the Atlantic in the U.S. Not long after the American Civil War, American industrial growth exploded. The Federal government began expanding its social authority in American society in response. The traditional “spoils system” of political patronage was replaced by a new American civil service, fashioned on the principles that Weber later used to describe bureaucracy.
American bureaucracies were slotted into the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers and democratic accountability by making them part of the Executive Branch, yet dependent on Congressionally-authorized budgets, and liable to oversight by the Federal courts.
Weber’s description of secular, meritocratic, rules-based, hierarchical, and democratically accountable bureaucracies have grown into a major source of legitimate Federal-governmental social authority in American culture. Weber’s classic parameters of organizationally managed reform have served Americans well over decades of profound social change, political upheavals, new technological and ideological threats to national security, and demographic changes.
Yet Weber also envisioned a different kind of bureaucracy. The sociologist Helen Constas argued in the 1950s that a different genre of Weberian bureaucracies had always existed.[i] Her examples were the Catholic Church, Ancient Egypt, and Soviet Russia. These were bureaucracies driven not by rules-based, socially accountable meritocracies. Instead, Weber argued that these alternative bureaucracies could be driven by “charismatic leaders.” These bureaucracies could deliver the same scale of organizational efficiency, but their purposes would be defined by the charismatic leaders who directed their every action. Charismatic bureaucracies were not accountable to other sources of social authority.
In the case of the Catholic Church, Constas argued, its bureaucracy served the dictates of the Pope, whose authority rested on divine inspiration alone. In Ancient Egypt, the extensive bureaucracy of the state was controlled entirely by the divine Pharoh. And in Soviet Russia, the ideology expressed by the top officials of the Community Party was implemented with brutal efficiency by the charismatic bureaucracy of the Soviet state. Any competing source of social authority would be dispatched without pity.
Although Constas recognized that Weber argued that charismatic bureaucracies, when they formed, would be short-term evolutionary steps that would mature into rules-based meritocratic bureaucracies, Constas argued that Weber’s own analysis revealed that charismatic bureaucracies were just as likely to sustain themselves as long as the charisma could be maintained and built into the bureaucracy itself. In her own words,
“The routinization of charisma in a bureaucratic direction [results] in a totalitarian order, and, conversely, a totalitarian order is an example of the routinization of charisma in a bureaucratic direction.
In our view, the prospects for a responsible (i.e., democratically controlled) bureaucracy depend upon the realization that a theoretical distinction must be made between charismatic and legal-rational bureaucracies. The former are basically totalitarian structures, ends unto themselves, and therefore incapable of responsibility to anything outside themselves (except under duress). Only if a bureaucracy is rooted in a legal-rational order can it remain entirely a technical instrument and, hence, a responsible bureaucracy.”
Between passage of the Pendleton Act of 1883 and the consolidation of power by the current majority on the Roberts Supreme Court, the bureaucracy of the U.S. Federal government evolved within the Weberian tradition of rules-based meritocracy with high levels of public accountability within the traditions of the U.S. Constitution.
Recent rulings of the Roberts Court, however, explicitly invite future U.S. Presidents to abandon the rules-based Weberian framework in favor of a form of charismatic bureaucracy. In this new era, each President is invited to commandeer each Federal bureaucracy to implement her/his own vision of how vague Congressional authorizations and funding levels should be deployed. Presidents are explicitly exempted even from criminal liability for their executive actions.
The Roberts Court seems to argue that the traditional Weberian conception of a rules-based, meritocratic, bureaucracy does not fit well into the governance framework described by the text of the U.S. Constitution of 1787. Instead, the Court concludes that some new form of charismatic bureaucracy fits better into its vision of the Constitution’s separation of powers, even if limited in time to each President’s term in office.
This new vision of bureaucratic social authority portends profound disruptions in the evolved balance of power that current Federal bureaucracies have helped create among powerful, competing sources of social authority in contemporary American culture. Indeed, the Roberts Court has opened the door to what may become a new era of Constitutionally-permitted authoritarianism that could be fundamentally incompatible with the orderly evolution of complex industrial social relations in the contemporary world.
Whoever wins the right to exercise the new powers of the turbo-charged American Presidency starting on Monday, January 20, 2025 will inherit unprecedented opportunities to destabilize the evolved balance of power in American culture – and the world – by reforming the structure and dynamics of the U.S. Federal bureaucracy based on their own extended charisma.
Bob Gleeson
[i] See Helen Costas, “Max Weber’s Two Conceptions of Bureaucracy,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol 63(4) January 1958, pp. 400-409.