From Trump to Milei, elected leaders often promise to rein in unelected officials. Max Weber thought this was the cure for rule by bureaucrats: a charismatic leader to set the state's goals and keep its experts in check. But philosopher Sandy Berkovski argues this is a fantasy. A leader only knows what their officials tell them, and their powers of judgment are either weaker than government expertise or a matter of values which can't be right or wrong. Elections can't pick a wise leader, only remove a bad one peacefully. Berkovski concludes that real control has to come from officials checking each other, whilst the electorate can exercise their freedom to choose one bureaucracy over another.

The paradox stated

Every few years, the citizens of a modern democracy do something odd. They live under a state run by tax inspectors, central bankers, judges, prosecutors, police officers. Then, one day, they choose a single person to sit on top of it all. And they make their choice on the strength of debate performances, a mien, a story, a vague feeling of trust. Nobody interviews the candidate. Nobody regards him as an expert in anything in particular. The head of the modern bureaucratic state, the most rational organization in human history, is placed there by an act of faith.

Writing at the end of the First World War, Max Weber welcomed this very arrangement as a remedy for a fundamental political problem. He argued that, once in place, the rational administrative apparatus is practically indestructible.  Unchecked, the indispensable trained officials become the actual rulers. He regarded this condition of bureaucratic rule as a malaise—if not to be cured, then at least kept in check.

Weber’s remedy harbors a paradox: the more rational the administration of the state becomes, the more its direction depends on a legitimacy that isn’t rational at all. Unsurprisingly, the paradoxical remedy doesn’t work, even on Weber’s own terms. Before saying why, let’s see the problems inherent in bureaucratic rule.

The malaise of bureaucratic rule

What do the officials have that the rest of us don’t? First, professional training, whether in law, public finance, or military logistics. Then the service knowledge that settles in the “files” as business gets done. Enveloping both is secrecy, invented and fiercely guarded by bureaucracy.  The result is rule by experts.

The first ill is built into the design. A bureaucracy is equipped to find means. Give it an end, revenue to raise or a war to supply, and its effectiveness is often wondrous. On which ends are worth pursuing, it is silent. Direction has to come from outside: even the purest type of bureaucracy requires at its head an authority selected differently from the officials below it.

Where there is no outsider to control them, the officials govern according to their own, often arbitrary values and preferences. Germany in the First World War shows the effect: a great state governed by its officialdom into catastrophe.

___

When ultimate values clash, each of us must simply “decide which is God for him and which is the devil”.

___

The second ill is the negation of freedom. As Weber narrates it in his work on farm labor in East Prussia, the laborers were abandoning the great estates, despite having the most secure material position in Germany.  They were fleeing the world of masters and servants where their children would forever toil on someone else’s land, subservient to the masters’ will. Anyone who couldn’t appreciate that urge, Weber argued, was oblivious to “the magic of freedom”.