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State, Centre and Bureaucracy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Pierre Birnbaum
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THE STATE, IN THE STRONGEST MEANING OF THE WORD, IS NOT indispensable to the functioning of civil society. Indeed society can often so organize itself as to prevent the emergence of a state intent on establishing itself as an absolute power. The very existence of the state itself, the consequence of particular sociohistorical processes, upsets the whole of the social system which is henceforth ordered around it. The relationships between the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the working class or, today, the middle classes, differ profoundly according to whether these groups were confronted by a strongly institutionalized state or a centre which exercised essentially co-ordinating functions. Still today the political systems which have simultaneously a centre and a state (France) can be distinguished from those which have a weak state without a real centre (Italy) or a centre without a genuine state (Great Britain, the United States) or neither centre nor state (Switzerland). In the first two cases, in varying degrees, the state dominates and manages civil society; in the two latter, civil society manages itself. It is therefore possible to distinguish societies in which the state attempts to dominate the social system by endowing itself with a strong bureaucracy (ideal type: France; paralle development: Prussia, Spain, Italy) from those in which the organization of civil society makes it impossible for a powerful state and a powerful dominating bureaucracy to emerge (ideal type: Great Britain; parallel development: the United States and the consociational democracies like Switzerland). Without claiming to retrace methodically the history of each of these states or of their political centres, I should like to sketch a broad outline of their evolution with the object of showing that the different relations by which the many governing groups are linked together within the different social systems depend sometimes on the formation of the state and sometimes on the simple formation of a political centre.

Type
Original Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1981 , pp. 58 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1981

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References

Footnotes

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33 Ibid., p. 180. In a somewhat contradictory way, D. Richet states however that what we call the. ‘public function’ was so identified with its holder that ‘it is impossible to retrace the history of any council or post without writing that of the individual who presided over it or occupied it’ (ibid., p. 79). This is tantamount to denying the specificity of the system of roles.

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36 On the relations between the governing categories at various periods in French society, see P. Birnbaum, Les sommets de L’Etat, op. cit., and P. Birnbaum, ‘The State in contemporary France’ in R. Scase, The State in Western Europe, London, Croom Helm, 1980.

37 The bibilography is very extensive. See Rosenberg, H., Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: the Prussian Experience 1660–1815, Cambridge, 1958;Google Scholar Gillis, J., The Prussian Bureaucracy in Crisis 1840–1860, Stanford, 1961;Google Scholar on the present epoch, see Zapf, W., Beiträge zur Analyse der deutscher Oberschicht, Munich, 1965.Google Scholar

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