Abstract
German sociologist Max Weber argued that because of their expertise and constant presence, bureaucracies were or could be the chief force in government, a position supported by reformers and progressive politicians who believed that technological advances required more sophisticated government administrations. It was questionable, however, whether expertise and efficiency in government and the political process have been, or could be, improved. The conflict between administrative and traditional judicial processes is still active, along with the political complications of regulation.
In a modern state the actual ruler is necessarily and unavoidably the bureaucracy, since power is exercised neither through parliamentary speeches nor monarchical enunciations but through the routines of administrations.
—Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922, p. 1393).
The widening area of what in effect is law-making authority, exercised by officials whose actions are not subject to ordinary court review, constitutes perhaps the most striking contemporary tendency of the Anglo-American legal order.
—Felix Frankfurter, “The task of administrative law” (1927).
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Notes
- 1.
Remini 1981, pp. ix, 15, 192. “The years 1816–28 are generally known as the Era of Good feelings because … one party ruled the nation…. (Actually there was considerable quarreling and factious bickering within that party.)”
- 2.
For example, Schlesinger (1945, pp. 115, 218), and Richard Hofstadter (1949, p. 63, discussed by Temin, 1969, p. 16). Catterall (1902, p. 476), was representative of historians when he wrote that “Jackson and his supporters committed an offense against the nation when they destroyed the bank. [F]ew greater enormities are chargeable to politicians than the destruction of the Bank of the United States. It was a machine capable of incalculable service to this country – a service which can be rendered by no bank not similarly organized.” Hummel (1978) observed that even some normally inclined to laissez faire criticized Jackson’s war on the bank
- 3.
In 1936, the president established a Committee on Administrative Management (chaired by Louis Brownlow) to make recommendations about how he might manage the independent agencies. The Committee pointed out that they had been created one by one over the past 50 years, and threatened to become a headless fourth branch of the Government, not contemplated by the Constitution, nor responsible administratively to the President, Congress, or the Courts. “The president needs help,” the Committee reported, and its recommendation for a new Executive Office of the President to oversee the agencies was adopted in the Reorganization Act of 1939, along with the assignment of several agencies to existing departments of government. (Fesler 1987)
- 4.
In 1895, the Supreme Court ruled that the American Sugar Refining Company had not violated the law even though the company controlled about 98 percent of all sugar refining in the United States on the ground that the company’s control of manufacture did not constitute a control of trade. Manufacturing was not the commerce specified in the law. On the other hand, the Roosevelt and Taft “trustbusting” administrations used the Act successfully against the Northern Securities Company, Standard Oil, and American Tobacco. The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 was passed to make the Sherman Act’s provisions against anticompetitive practices more precise.
- 5.
John Hampden was a member of Parliament who stood trial in 1637 for his refusal to be taxed for ship money, and was one of the five members (with John Pym) whose attempted unconstitutional arrest by King Charles I in the House of Commons in 1642 sparked the Civil War.
- 6.
- 7.
McGarity (2012) addressed Dodd-Frank’s charge to the Federal Reserve to limit bank charges to retailers for credit- and debit-card transactions (“swipe fees”) to what is “reasonable and proportional” to their costs, and indicated a reduction from 44¢ to 12¢. The Fed’s decision of 21¢ was overruled in July 2013 by a U.S. district court which said Congress had wanted a much lower fee. The U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. overturned the district court in March 2014, saying that Dodd-Frank’s language was sufficiently ambiguous to give regulators leeway to set a higher fee cap. The U.S. Supreme Court declined an appeal. Michigan democratic Senator Richard Durbin announced that efforts to reduce fees would continue (Reuters, January 20, 2015).
- 8.
Failures, according to Bardach, included minority hiring, President Johnson’s plan to build model communities on surplus federal land in cities, a model education program, subsidized integration of southern schools under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and improved community mental health services.
- 9.
Wilson earned a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1886, taught at Cornell, Bryn Mawr, and Wesleyan, moved to Princeton in 1890, where he was president (1902–10) until becoming governor of New Jersey (1911–13) and president of the United States (1913–21).
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Wood, J.H. (2020). Bureaucracies. In: Who Governs?. Palgrave Studies in American Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33083-5_3
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