Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T03:23:45.052Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Honor in the Bureaucratic Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Lewis C. Mainzer
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

How shall men know honor in the bureaucratic life? If not at all, we may largely lose sight of a virtue respected in the West, though not unquestioned, at least since Homer. A substantial and evidently increasing proportion of the members of a modem society, including many persons not “clerks” or “administrators” by vocation, works within bureaucracy. Though large organizations differ in the degree of their bureaucratization, for example, in the tightness of routine and control, they have common features which influence their members. These are: the anonymity of each participant, the joint nature of every action, the force of precedent and rules, and hierarchy in relations among members. These features work against honor.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , January 1964 , pp. 70 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1964

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. IV, Ch. 3.

2 Carlyle, Thomas, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (Garden City, Dolphin Books, n.d.), pp. 59Google Scholar, 105, respectively. Hegel spoke of the heroes as “thinking men, who had an insight into the requirements of the time — what was ripe for development.” Hook, Sidney, The Hero in History; A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York, 1943), p. 63Google Scholar. On the “heroic vitalists,” cf. Bentley, Eric Russell, A Century of Hero-Worship (Philadelphia, 1944)Google Scholar.

3 “Magnanimity,” Webster's New International Dictionary, 2d ed., unabridged (Springfield, 1936)Google Scholar. Cf. Read, Herbert, The Sense of Glory; Essays in Criticism (New York, 1930)Google Scholar.

4 Op. cit., Bk. I, Ch. 10.

5 On Princely Government, Bk. I, Ch. 7, Aquinas, Selected Political Writings, ed. d'Entrèves, A. P. (Oxford, 1948), pp. 37 ffGoogle Scholar.

6 Op. cit., Bk. V, Ch. 6.

7 Ibid., Bk. I, Ch. 5.

8 McNamee, Maurice B., Honor and the Epic Hero; A Study of the Shifting Concept of Magnanimity in Philosophy and Epic Poetry (New York, 1960)Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., p. 24. A more sympathetic, though not uncritical, view of Greek concern with honor is found in Bowra, C. M., The Greek Experience (New York, Mentor Books, 1959), chap. IIGoogle Scholar, “The Heroic Outlook.” Admirers of the point of honor may be sobered by reading so matter-of-fact an account of the “abominable custom of judiciary combat” as Montesquieu presents in The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. XXVIII.

10 de Gaulle, Charles, War Memoirs: The Call to Honor, 1940–1942 (New York, 1955), p. 46Google Scholar.

11 Hemingway, Ernest, Death in the Afternoon (New York, 1954), p. 232Google Scholar.

12 Barber, G. L., The Idea of Honour in the English Drama, 1591–1700 (Göteborg, 1957), pp. 98–100Google Scholar. Montesquieu, op. cit., Bk. III, identifies honor as the proper principle of (the motive which makes work) a monarchical government — not of a republican or a despotic government.

13 Vagts, Alfred, A History of Militarism; Romance and Realities of a Profession (New York, 1937), pp. 69 fGoogle Scholar.

14 Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society; A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York, 1960), p. 127Google Scholar. Class bias is confirmed by a dictionary's concise analysis: “From the conception of virtue that of honor is chiefly distinguished as connoting the virtues especially associated with rank, station, or profession,” and “the military and chivalric associations have given the word its distinctive reference to public recognition of conformance to the standard of conduct, courage, and good faith appropriate to one's station.”

15 Cf. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Garden City, Anchor Books, 1959), pp. 44 f.Google Scholar, respecting the need of excellence to have a public. Cf. pp. 65 ff., respecting the consequences of making good deeds public. Cf. Terraillon, Eugène, L'honneur; Sentiment et Principe Moral (Paris, 1912)Google Scholar. He argues that honor “gives to the vision of a moral or social ideal the force of a psychological motive” (p. 12, my translation). When honor becomes a passion in us, he says, it permits us to do the most sublime actions or the most monstrous crimes.

16 Op. cit., pp. xi f. Terraillon, , op. cit., pp. 148, 266–280Google Scholar, states as the rule of honor that one should always act so as to be and to seem worthy of the role he fills in a group to which he has consented to belong and with which he feels identified. Honor, then, has a social basis in opinion and varied forms within and among societies. He sees the weakening of narrower forms of honor, and the coming triumph of “human honor,” which is equivalent to moral duty.

17 From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York, 1946), p. 228Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., p. 95.

19 De Gaulle, , op. cit., pp. 51, 133Google Scholar.

20 Janowitz, Morris, The Professional Soldier; A Social and Political Portrait (Glencoe, 1960), p. 21Google Scholar.

21 Cf. Morgenthau, Hans J., “Death in the Nuclear Age,” Commentary, XXXII (09, 1961), 231–34Google Scholar.

22 Schwebel, Stephen M., The Secretary-General of the United Nations; His Political Powers and Practice (Cambridge, 1952), p. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Bettelheim, Bruno, The Informed Heart; Autonomy in a Mass Age (Glencoe, 1960), p. 246Google Scholar.

24 The New York Times, April 22, July 8, July 14, July 8, 1961, respectively.

25 Parliamentary Debates, Commons, Fifth Series, Vol. 530, col. 1190, 07 20, 1954Google Scholar. Cf. Hamson, C. J., “The Real Lesson of Crichel Down,” Public Administration, XXXII (Spring, 1954), 383–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D. N. Chester, “The Crichel Down Case,” ibid., 389–401.

26 Parliamentary Debates, Commons, Fifth Series, Vol. 530, cols. 1261, 1266, 07 20, 1954Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., cols. 1290–91. Cf. Jennings, Ivor, Cabinet Government (Cambridge [England], 1959, 3d ed.), p. 499CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jennings recognized that there must be substantial delegation of power within a department, but that “the most essential characteristic of the civil service is the responsibility of the minister for every act done in his department.”

28 Dale, H. E., The Higher Civil Service of Great Britain (New York, 1941), pp. 153, 152Google Scholar. Politicians, too, may huddle together, seeking the protective warmth of anonymity. For a brilliant statement, cf. Eliot, T. S., The Elder Statesman (New York, 1959), p. 60Google Scholar. The seniority system in the United States Congress serves the obvious function of preventing competition for posts of honor and power.

29 The New York Times, June 19, 1951.

30 Ibid., January 31, 1952.

31 Ibid., September 8, 1961.

32 Cf. the touching editorial by Goudsmit, S. A., Physical Review Letters, VIII (03 15, 1962), 229–30Google Scholar, in which he felt impelled to observe that perhaps physics is changing from “a rather individualistic occupation with, as principal reward, the recognition by one's colleagues,” attracting “those who believed that they could make a personal contribution to its progress. In the future it may require a different type of person, one who gets satisfaction from a cooperative achievement, in which he may eventually rise to a key position.”

33 Op. cit., p. 6.

34 Op. cit., Bk. III, Ch. 5. Martin Buber wrote of the manner in which Hasidism redirected Judaism after the misleading teachings of Sabbatai Zvi: “Sabbatianism had created the illusion that one could redeem evil by doing it without intending it as evil. That is an illusion, for all that man does reacts on his soul, even when he imagines that his soul floats above the deed.” The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, ed. & trans. Friedman, Maurice (New York, 1960), p. 82Google Scholar.

35 Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim (Cambridge, 1958), p. 10Google Scholar.

36 Bettelheim, , op. cit., pp. 16, 18, 70Google Scholar, respectively. Cf. Merton, Robert K., “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Reader in Bureaucracy, ed. Merton, et al. , (Glencoe, 1952), pp. 361–71Google Scholar.

37 Bettelheim, , op. cit., pp. 126, 153, respectivelyGoogle Scholar.

38 Ibid., p. 158. Cf. Riesman, David et al. , The Lonely Crowd; A Study of the Changing American Character (Garden City, Anchor Books, 1955)Google Scholar. Riesman, called “autonomous,” those who “on the whole are capable of conforming to the behavioral norms of their society. … but are free to choose whether to conform or not” (p. 278)Google Scholar. The autonomous person “can cooperate with others in action while maintaining the right of private judgment” (p. 288). One's autonomy depends upon “the success of his effort to recognize and respect his own feelings, his own potentialities, his own limitations” (p. 297).

39 Koestler, Arthur, Darkness at Noon (New York, New American Library, 1948)Google Scholar. Rubashov came finally to ask “the meaning of suffering, or, more exactly, the difference between suffering which made sense and senseless suffering” (p. 181).

40 The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. O'Brien, Justin (New York, 1958), p. 121Google Scholar.

41 Arendt, , op. cit., p. 297Google Scholar, warns that “contrary to what is currently assumed about the proverbial ivory-tower independence of thinkers, no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.” Cf. Mannheim, Karl, Man and Society In an Age of Reconstruction, trans. Shils, Edward (London, 1940), pp. 51 ff.Google Scholar, for a discussion of the growth under industrialism of functional rationality, the calculated organization of acts toward any end, at the cost of substantial rationality, the capacity for individual judgment, intelligent action on the basis of one's own insight.