Introduction: From the Active to the Enabling State

Abstract

Top civil servants in Europe have traditionally been counted among the most powerful of political elites (Armstrong 1973). Whether they served democratically elected politicians, monarchs or unelected military or party regimes, top bureaucrats in most countries either held the levers of power or worked closely with those who held them. In part the powerful position might have resulted from the high social status of senior officials. The upper reaches of the bureaucracy had tended to attract the sons of the petty nobility and higher bourgeoisie since at least the eighteenth century and continued to do so well into the twentieth. In part the power might result from sharing a common outlook on how societies would be governed, thus providing, in elite theory terms, a cohesive governing elite. Moreover, in many cases they shared this outlook with their political masters (Armstrong 1973; Kingsley 1944). Our previous volume in this project (Page and Wright 1999) examined the changing patterns of recruitment and the sociological character of the civil services of western Europe. This book examines changes in a third basis of the political power of bureaucratic elites: their strategic position within the state apparatus.