Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
If only everybody meant the same thing by ‘bureaucracy’—or ‘feudalism’, ‘Old Regime’, ‘capitalism’, and so on, ad nauseam. If we all agreed on what these terms meant a good deal of paper might be saved. Since this is not even remotely the case, I had better begin by saying something about how the term ‘bureaucracy’ is to be used in the pages that follow. A government shall be said to be bureaucratized to the extent that it has come to resemble the organizational portrait drawn by Max Weber in Economy and Society. Weber's so-called definition is a list (or lists) of characteristics whose relative importance and relation to one another have stirred much debate.