Abstract
Whilst for Marx the middle-class entrepreneur was the dominant element in the bourgeoisie and the professional a minor subsection, the fastest-growing and most numerous element, the bureaucrat, was quite unnoticed by him; perhaps a not unreasonable attitude in a thinker who confidently expected that the centralised state would wither away! The unprecedented expansion of the role of the state and the consequent employment provided at all levels is the subject of this chapter. The rapid growth of state administration and its transformation into a recognisable modern bureaucracy was closely related to the demographic explosion, subsequent urbanisation, and economic and social development. The rationalising ideas of the eighteenth-century philosophes added respectability to the attempts of ‘reforming’ autocrats to exercise greater control of traditional sources of independent authority within the state, feudal, communal or clerical. In this formative stage in the development of the modern state, bureaucratic structures crystallised. Governments sought to transform their administrators, who might have local loyalties and a degree of autonomous authority, into obedient civil servants committed to furthering the power of the centralised state, in other words bureaucrats.
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© 1990 P. Pilbeam
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Pilbeam, P.M. (1990). The Middle Classes and the Bureaucracy. In: The Middle Classes in Europe, 1789–1914. Themes in Comparative History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20606-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20606-3_5
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