Opportunities for Law’s Intellectual History
Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University of Buffalo
October 10-11, 2014
Bureaucracy as a Subject of Intellectual History
and as a Producer of Intellectual Discourse
by Nicholas R. Parrillo
My charge is to discuss possibilities for using intellectual history to understand
bureaucracy. Though bureaucracy is a phenomenon transcending the public and private sectors,
I shall focus on the public side—government administration—because that is the side I know
better. And I shall focus on the United States, since that is where I specialize.
Public administration in America, as a trans-substantive subject, has been a focus of
professional academic writing for about 130 years, and of lengthy monographs written by
sophisticated non-academics for even longer. Some of the best-known of these thinkers are
Dorman Eaton, Luther Gulick, Herbert Simon, Dwight Waldo, and James Q. Wilson. Works by
these kinds of thinkers can serve as the basis for intellectual history of the traditional kind, that
is, close reading of complex texts by sophisticated writers. Such history can be justified in at
least two ways. First, the very best works on public administration (e.g., those of Simon) are
brilliant meditations on collective human behavior. Such works deserve to be examined from
any and all perspectives (including historical perspectives) because they are intrinsically
important.1 Second, the academic discourse of public administration suffuses the atmosphere in
which officials run agencies and politicians create and oversee them. Though the discourse does
1
For a volume of critical intellectual biographies of leading thinkers on public administration (mostly American),
written mainly for an audience of public administration scholars and students, see Brian R. Fry and Jos C.N.
Raadschelders, Mastering Public Administration: Max Weber to Dwight Waldo, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014).
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not rigidly determine the actions of officials and politicians, it does help determine the menu of
technical tools and legitimating rhetorical moves. Such interaction between ideas and
bureaucratic reality can take many forms. It is most obvious when the authors of sophisticated
works on public administration get personally involved in administrative reform—though, in
those stories, the impact of the authors’ ideas depends much on how wily operators use (and
perhaps twist) them. A classic example is the Brownlow Committee of 1937, consisting of the
public administration professors Louis Brownlow, Charles Merriam, and Luther Gulick, whose
report President Roosevelt used to justify proposals that would expand presidential power,
several of which eventually became law. Drawing upon the committee members’ academic
works, their famous report, and their correspondence with each other and the President, scholars
have argued that Roosevelt exploited the then-dominant intellectual construct of public
administration as a politically neutral, scientific, business-like, and objective enterprise in order
to legitimate his own highly political effort to entrench New Deal welfare programs against
congressional interference.2
It would be a mistake, however, to limit the intellectual history of bureaucracy to the
discourse on public administration and that discourse’s connection to bureaucratic reality. This
is because the discourse of public administration is trans-substantive, and much of the
intellectual discourse that pertains to bureaucratic operations is specific to the substantive area in
which this or that government agency operates. Thus, politicians and officials seeking to impose
a tax must engage with the writings of substantive experts on economics and public finance;
those seeking to regulate drugs must engage with substantive experts on medicine or
2
Barry D. Karl, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal: The Genesis of Administrative
Management, 1900-1939 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), esp. 207; Sidney M. Milkis, The President and
the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1993), 104-22.
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biochemistry; etc. In the most familiar of these stories, experts originate ideas, and
bureaucracies then apply them. Sometimes, the expert originates the idea in the ivory tower and
then personally moves into government. A classic example is Thomas McCraw’s case study, in
Prophets of Regulation, of the economist Alfred Kahn. In McCraw’s telling, Kahn theorized the
use of marginal-cost pricing in utility regulation while teaching at Cornell, and he was able to put
his ideas into action when in 1974 he became chair of the New York state utility commission, at
a time when stagflation, oil shocks, and environmental fears greatly increased the pressure on
utilities to become more efficient. This is a pretty straightforward progression from drawing
board to application, although McCraw’s narrative becomes somewhat less determinate and
messier when he explains that in 1977 Kahn departed the familiar world of electricity, oil, and
gas to begin chairing the federal Civil Aeronautics Board, where he was less expert and had to
adjust his ideas to challenges in more improvisational ways.3 Still, McCraw’s history largely
starts in the intellectual sphere (theory) and ends up in the bureaucracy (application). There are
several excellent histories that have a roughly similar structure.
However, history can also proceed in the reverse direction—from administration to
intellectual discourse. “[B]ureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through
knowledge,”4 and government agencies are perhaps the greatest producers and repositories of
knowledge in the United States. To be sure, much of this knowledge does not take the form of
the sophisticated academic-style texts that are traditionally the focus of intellectual history; for
example, it may take the form of the relatively inarticulate “know-how” necessary to implement
3
Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), 222-99.
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich eds.
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), 225.
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the broader policies chosen by the agency’s high-ranking officials or political overseers,5 or
collections of data that provide the raw material for academic-style arguments by non-agency
actors.6 But even if we reject know-how and data collection as fit subjects for intellectual history
(and it is not clear that we should), bureaucratic agencies also shape intellectual discourse of the
most articulate and academic kind. Daniel Carpenter, in his history of the Food and Drug
Administration, elaborates on this “conceptual power” of an agency:
. . . [T]he basic terms, standards, schedules, and rules of modern drug development have
been fashioned by the [FDA] as much as by any other global entity. When scientists and
physicians test a new drug in clinical studies separated by “Phase 1, “Phase 2,” and
“Phase 3”; when companies submit a study “protocol” to the [FDA] that defines
hypotheses and measures before their assessment and use; when firms and physicians
debate the “efficacy” and “safety” of a drug before its approval or afterward; when
scientists attempt to demonstrate the “bioavailability” of a drug in a given dosage form;
when legislators write laws and insurers write policies governing generic drugs that
depends upon demonstrations of “bioequivalence”—in these cases and many, many
others, human agents are consciously and unconsciously using the terms that have been
deeply and thoroughly shaped by officials of the Food and Drug Administration. . . .
[S]cientific and technical considerations have rarely if ever operated independently of
national regulation in the formation of therapeutic concepts.7
Thus, it would be impossible to write an intellectual history of pharmaceuticals in twentiethcentury America without significant attention to the FDA. Similarly—to draw on another of the
case studies in McCraw’s Prophets of Regulation—it would be impossible to write an
intellectual history of accounting without significant attention to the Securities and Exchange
Commission. According to McCraw, the SEC in the 1930s—in its quest to force companies to
This kind of knowledge is labeled mētis in James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve
the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), 309-41. Many of Scott’s examples of
mētis are of knowledge that exists among a lay population prior to its subjugation by modern bureaucratic actors,
and he notes that such state actors often destroy mētis as part of their effort to control the population. But Scott does
not think mētis is exclusively confined to this context. I think mētis is surely present within many operations of
bureaucrats themselves, especially those nearer to the “street level.”
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To be sure, such data inevitably reflect a variety of moral or technical assumptions in terms of how they are
collected (e.g., the fact that GDP does not include non-market household labor).
7
Daniel Carpenter, Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation and the FDA
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), 17. See also ibid., 62-65.
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disclose financial information that would be meaningful and useful to investors—played a major
role in the creation of accounting as an independent and cohesive profession (complete with
peer-reviewed journals and university departments). The SEC did this by leading the drive for
“more uniform accounting standards—ones that would permit the comparability of companies so
desirable for both investors and regulators.”8 One can multiply examples of government
agencies playing a central role in intellectual discourse: the Federal Reserve’s endless production
of papers on economic policy, or the U.S. Army’s production of academic tomes on strategy,
tactics, logistics, and economic mobilization.9
Thus, it is not merely that bureaucracy can benefit from the lens of intellectual history;
intellectual history can benefit from the lens of bureaucracy. Traditionally, intellectual history
has tended to focus on single-authored texts by extraordinarily smart or creative individuals. But
the production of knowledge (and even of intellectual discourse) has increasingly become an
institutional endeavor. Intellectual history works best when it defines itself in light of that fact.
8
McCraw, Prophets of Regulation, 191.
E.g., the Army’s 750-page official analysis of its own economic mobilization in World War II, R. Elberton Smith,
The Army and Economic Mobilization (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the
Army, 1959), a beautifully-written and critical monograph whose author was a federal government economist.
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