Saturday, August 29, 2020

This passion for bureaucracy is enough to drive one to despair...

"This passion for bureaucracy is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics we were to deliberately to become men who need order and nothing but order, who become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is in such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is therefore not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life."

Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (1864-1920)

As observed in his own country Germany of course, but throughout Europe as well United States, Canada and elsewhere, and as stated in his 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Personal note... When randomly falling upon such beautifully written as well quite observable truisms, often I will seek out a copy of the book. It will be interesting to read and consider Weber's greater context and argument within which this quote resides, a statement well confirming my running thesis regarding Individualism.



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