Bureaucracy and Constitutionalism

In: American political science review, Volume 46, Issue 3, p. 808-818

Abstract

There is an old aphorism that fire is a good servant but a bad master. Something like this aphorism is frequently applied to the appropriate role of the bureaucracy in government. Because bureaucracy is often viewed as tainted with an ineradicable lust for power, it is alleged that, like fire, it needs constant control to prevent its erupting from beneficient servitude into dangerous and tyrannical mastery.The folklore of constitutional theory relegates the bureaucracy to somewhat the same low but necessary estate as Plato does the appetitive element of the soul. In the conventional dichotomy between policy and administration, administration is the Aristotelian slave, properly an instrument of action for the will of another, capable of receiving the commands of reason but incapable of reasoning. The amoral concept of administrative neutrality is the natural complement of the concept of bureaucracy as instrument; for according to this view the seat of reason and conscience resides in the legislature, whatever grudging concession may be made to the claims of the political executive, and a major, if not the major, task of constitutionalism is the maintenance of the supremacy of the legislature over the bureaucracy. The latter's sole constitutional role is one of neutral docility to the wishes of the day's legislative majority.