was Weber wrong about bureaucracy?

With the US civil service under attack, it’s worth revisiting classical ideas about bureaucracy. Max Weber begins his hugely influential discussion (Weber 1922/1968) with this paragraph:

Experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization—that is, the monocratic variety of bureaucracy—is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations, and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks (223).

Weber seems to have a kind of Darwinian model in mind. Given a soup of different kinds of organizational forms, the bureaucratic ones will prevail thanks to their superior efficiency. Socialism requires bureaucracy, and Weber even lists soviets (communist workers’ councils) as one of the bureaucracies of his time. He also interprets modern capitalism not as a system of market exchanges but as a space in which corporate bureaucracies grow. “Capitalism in its modern stages of development requires the bureaucracy” (p. 224). In fact, state agencies and corporations use convergent methods. Today, the same Microsoft Office tools can generate similar-looking Key Performance Indicators or org charts for a company, a nonprofit, or a state agency, because these organizations work very similarly.

If you asked people to associate words with “bureaucracy,” I doubt that many would suggest “efficiency.” Quite the contrary: words like “bloat” and “waste” would come to mind. Few would worry that we are trapped in a world in which bureaucracies metastasize because they are so efficient. Their spread would be treated as a sign of declining efficiency and would be blamed on the self-interest of the bureaucrats.

Was Weber right about the bureaucracy of Wilhelmine Germany but wrong to generalize, because bureaucracies tend to become inefficient? In that case, was he wrong to see their growth as inevitable? Or was he right about bureaucracies, and critics mistake bureaucratic systems as inefficient when they actually maximize outputs? Are many people undervaluing bureaucratic work as a calling, in Weber’s sense? Do people dislike the means that bureaucracies use, or resent their inevitable costs, or disagree about their ends? Are bureaucracies efficient for their own goals but not for the public good?

Source: Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 1922. The translation of this section is by Talcott Parsons (Bedminster Press, 1968). See also in defense of institutions as “garbage cans”; radical change needs institutional innovation; what to do about the guy behind the desk

strategies, policies, and skills

I’m thinking about the differences among strategies, policies, and skills, mainly because the Tufts Civic Studies Major, which I direct, aims to teach all three. I assume that definitions of these concepts have been extensively discussed, but without consulting any literature, I’m inclined to categorize them as follows:

  • Skill: The ability to do something useful. A skill can be quite concrete (e.g., conducting an interview) or more abstract (leading a team). Developing a skill often involves imitation, practice, and perhaps a dose of theory. Typically, we attribute skills to individuals, although I suppose that a group can be skillful.
  • Policy: A choice that an institution makes that affects people and/or nature. Such a choice need not be conscious and deliberate. However, if something happens by necessity, I wouldn’t call it a policy. A policy is something that the institution could change by choosing otherwise. Therefore, policy-analysis is about identifying the choices available to institutions, predicting their consequences, and assessing which one is preferable.
  • Strategy: A planned sequence of actions by an individual or group that aims to accomplish some goal. A strategy that’s worthy of that name considers the opportunities, constraints, risks, and threats, including the possible reactions of other people and groups. A strategy can leave room for revision and improvisation, but it needs enough detail to inform action. Therefore, learning about strategy involves identifying possible courses of action and their likely impact and assessing which course is preferable.

These categories relate and overlap in many ways. Policy analysis and strategic planning are skills. Good strategy involves the application of available skills. (For instance, the first part of a strategy might be to deploy skilled people to recruit members.) A strategy can aim to affect policy. A policy can be part of a larger strategy. Institutions may enact and implement policies to develop skills. And so on.

Nevertheless, these concepts are sufficiently distinct that I hope that we offer each to our students.

I would also note that skills, strategies, and policies can be good or bad. The difference depends on their ethics and their outcomes–both their means and ends. Therefore, normative analysis and argumentation must complement any education about skills, policy, and strategy.

to restore trust in schools and media, engage people in civic life

People are more likely to trust institutions if they are involved in diverse, participatory groups, because such participation gives them a feeling of agency, teaches them that compromise is necessary (it’s not a sign that leaders are corrupt), and encourages them to share and critically assess information.

The 2020 American National Election Study (the most recent available wave) asked several items about civic participation, including this one: “During the past 12 months, have you worked with other people to deal with some issue facing your community?” It also asked several items about confidence in institutions, such as whether respondents agreed that “Much of what people hear in schools and the media are lies designed to keep people from learning the real truth about those in power.”

When controlling for education, gender, race, and self-placement on a liberal-conservative scale, working with others is strongly related to not holding a hostile view of media and schools (see below). Conservatives are more likely to be hostile, but when ideology is included in this model along with civic participation, it is not significant. Apparently, people who work with others to address local issues are more likely to trust schools and media, irrespective of ideology.

If I replace working with others with volunteering, the same pattern is evident: those who volunteer are less hostile. And if I replace hostility to schools and the media with positive impressions of Donald Trump as the dependent variable, the same general pattern recurs, with a fascinating twist. Self-placement on a left-right spectrum is unrelated to liking Donald Trump (standardized Beta = 0), but working with other citizens is related to disliking him (standardized Beta = .292, sig. <001).

These are correlations, not proofs of causality. In truth, the causal arrow may point both ways. Trusting schools and media may encourage civic participation, as well as the reverse. I suppose that disliking Trump could encourage local volunteering. However, I see a strong theoretical basis (dating back to Alexis de Tocqueville) for the thesis that local engagement generates trust in democratic institutions.

The question then becomes: how can we engage more people in local civic work? I address that topic in “What our nation needs is a broad-based, pro-democracy civic movement” (The Fulcrum, Nov. 25). (See also: the tide will turn; time to build; strategizing for civil resistance in defense of democracy etc.)

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complexity and nuance about public opinion

Last Monday, I gave a talk at Colgate University. I claimed that if you read a lot of mainstream survey research, you’re likely to conclude that “people are stupid and they hate each other,” but this negative assessment reflects some bias. A student, Colgate senior Clementina Aboagye, told Maddie Koger of the Colgate Maroon-News:

“I think it was important that we had someone like Peter Levine who comes from an institution like Tufts University to present us [with the idea] that as much as we may disagree with each other, we still have complexities in how we think — that it’s important we search for gray areas because politics isn’t so black and white,” Aboagye said. “Those gray areas are important for us to not only converse about, but also to give each other space to speak — even when we don’t agree, because we can’t always agree — and we live in a world where people’s experiences and access to things determine what kind of ways in which they think — that deserves consideration.”

The very next day, a majority of American voters chose Donald Trump, concluding a campaign marked by polarized media, misinformation, hostility, and attacks (from one side) on basic liberal norms. Yet I still think there’s truth in the argument I offered at Colgate, which you could watch in full here.

The previous week, I had given American University’s annual Lincoln Scholars Lecture on “What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life.” Although my topic was quite different, this talk also offered a more positive view of civic life than one would glean by focusing only on an ugly and dangerous national election. According to Ridha Riyani’s summary in the AU Eagle newspaper, I said,

“We disagree because we care, and we need to do it better. …

[Levine] ended with a call to action, reminding attendees that civic life extends beyond national politics and requires thoughtful collaboration. 

“In conversation, we can move towards greater wisdom,” Levine said. “We communities are capable of changing the rules.”

I would not argue now that all we need is to listen generously across differences and explore the complexity of other people’s views. We must also stand up against injustice. Confrontational nonviolent civil resistance was a major theme in my AU talk, and I have been preparing for a Trump victory for several years. Still, there remains a place for listening, bridge-building, and collaboration, and I strive to offer useful concepts and skills for those purposes.

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explaining a past election versus deciding what to do next

The Internet is saturated with explanations of the 2024 election. Some of these “quick takes” are dispassionate, while others take the form: If only Harris had done what I know is right, she would have won.

The challenge is epistemic: it’s virtually impossible to explain a single past event that involves many decision-makers (in this case, about 150 million of them).

Explaining the decisions of a few powerful people is hard enough, but at least then we can use evidence about their individual values, goals, and personalities. For instance, we can investigate why Napoleon ordered the main assault at the Battle of Borodino in 1812. However, says Tolstoy,

It was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know what was going on before him. So the way in which these people killed one another was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him, in accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will (War and Peace, 10:28)

It’s easier to explain the pattern displayed in a large set of cases (inductive reasoning). John Burn-Murdoch observes that every incumbent government in the world that has faced an election in 2024 has suffered major setbacks. John Sides argues that inflation lowered Biden’s approval rating, and the incumbent’s approval predicts reelection.

But these generalizations cannot explain the single event of the 2024 US presidential election. Generalizations inevitably involve variance, and 2024 is obviously anomalous. Should we even categorize Harris as the incumbent, when she was a vice president stepping in for a president and running against the previous president?

We can also look at patterns within the population to try to explain why individuals voted. For instance, Michael Tesler assembles evidence that few American women vote from gender solidarity and race consistently trumps gender as an explanation of voting.

This is a valid approach that will yield more precise insights once we have voter files and better survey analysis for 2024. But this method also has limitations for the purpose of explanation. As the (true) cliché reminds us, correlation is not causation. Besides, individuals vary in ways that are not captured in generic surveys. And we must distinguish carefully between two tasks: explaining why large numbers of people voted for each candidate, versus explaining the marginal change since 2020. Big blocs of the electorate vote predictably, yet much of the conversation is about changes at the margin. Our whole discussion would be different if Harris had won by 4 points instead of losing by less than one point, but either way, most people would have voted the same.

To emphasize the last point: I strongly suspect that a male Democrat would have fared no better than Kamala Harris, or even possibly worse. One of many pieces of supportive evidence is the fact that people whose survey answers indicated sexism already tended strongly to oppose Joe Biden in 2020 (Spencer 2021). I doubt that sexism explains the marginal change between 2020 and 2024, yet that hardly makes sexism irrelevant, since it helps to explain the 2020 baseline. Whether you feel that sexism is at stake may reasonably reflect your own depth of concern about misogyny in our society; this is not simply a statistical question. Put another way, whether you explain the result in terms of sexism depends on whether you are trying to a) combat misogyny or b) win an election. The explanation is relative to its purpose.

We might conclude that it is fruitless to make a model to explain any particular case. But that is exactly what we must do before we act. Even if there is no way to know now what would have happened had Harris acted differently, Harris and her team had to do something. In September, they needed a prospective model of the single case that confronted them: the election.

In 1903, Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term “abduction” (or “abductive judgment”) for the logic that explains a single case. Abduction is a pragmatic necessity because we always act in specific circumstances. In my view, valid abduction never depends on a single claim. There is no way to test whether one premise caused a given outcome in a given case. Rather, a good abduction consists of many linked components: a whole model. And it is appropriate for the model to contain facts, values, and strategies.

Thus, if you were Kamala Harris in September, you needed a coherent account of the current US electorate (facts), what you sought to achieve as a president (values), and how various messages and methods would affect the outcome (strategy). You had to guard against biases (believing facts because they confirmed your values), but you were entitled to bring your self into the analysis. For one thing, this was a model for how you should act, so it had to motivate you and your team and sound authentic coming from you.

We cannot tell which parts of Harris’ implicit model were right or wrong–and it remains possible that her model was as good as it could have been. But what we need now is a model to guide our own next steps.

Since I am not running for president, my model should not be designed for that purpose–although I might start armchair strategizing in 2026 or so. For now, I need a model that guides my actions as a concerned citizen during the Trump Administration. To a limited extent, my model might be guided by my retrospective assessment of the 2024 presidential campaign–but not by much. The main question, as always, is what should we do?


Sources: Spencer, Bettina. “Impact of racism and sexism in the 2008–2020 US presidential elections.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 21.1 (2021): 175-188; Peirce, C.S. 1903. Lectures on Pragmatism, Lecture 1: Pragmatism: The Normative Sciences. See also: using a model to explain a single case; overestimating the impact of leaders; What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life

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a garbage-can model of political ideologies

Summary: This short essay explores four models for understanding political parties and ideologies:

  1. Each party has an ideology that represents positions that fall somewhere on the left-right spectrum;
  2. Each party represents a temperament or underlying principle, such as traditionalism or progress;
  3. Each party represents an interest-group coalition, such as the workers or business;
  4. Each ideology represents whatever its major associated political party stands for at the moment. In turn, per Cohen, March and Olsen (1972), any political party is a “collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work.”

I argue that the first three models don’t fit US politics by themselves, and the last one (a “garbage-can” model) has some validity.

We are familiar with a model in which each political party promotes an ideology, and we can place the various parties’ ideologies on a spectrum to tell how far apart they are, where the median lies, and whether the right or left is more influential. When this model is applied to US politics empirically, the typical finding is that our parties have moved apart or “polarized.”

Verlan Lewis (2021) has argued that most empirical measures of polarization do not inquire into the content of the left or right positions. They identify statistical clusters that they label as ideologies, but they do not tell us what the ideologies stand for. Closer inspection reveals that the meaning of the ideological labels has changed drastically over time.

As Lewis notes, “in the 1960s, liberal MCs [Members of Congress] tended to vote against tax increases and in favor of tax cuts, while conservative MCs tended to vote just the opposite.” This statistical relationship was very strong. The words “liberal” and “conservative” later changed their meanings so that conservatives are now the tax-cutters.

Lewis also illustrates his critique of the standard “static” model with the examples of three 20th-century senators: “‘Cotton’ Ed Smith (D-SC, 1909–1944), Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson (D-WA, 1953–1983), and Ron Wyden (D-OR, 1996–present).” All three have the same ideological score–left of the median–on the influential DW-NOMINATE scale, yet “Smith was a racist demagogue who opposed the New Deal, Jackson was a ‘neoconservative’ who supported both the Great Society and the Vietnam War, and Wyden is a ‘progressive liberal’ who opposes racism, has sought to reform entitlement spending, and opposes militarism.”

Lewis concludes, “As we can see, what it meant to be a ‘liberal’ MC in the 1930s was very different from what it meant to be a ‘liberal’ MC in the 1970s, and both are very different from what it means to be a ‘liberal’ MC today.” 

We might try to detect some underlying values or dispositions that define ideologies over time. One candidate: conservatives want to preserve something or return to the past, whereas progressives want to move forward.

I think that American progressives from 1932 until 1970 were, indeed, temperamentally oriented to change, while conservatives during that period wanted to hold onto traditions. Since then, however, I observe that progressives often want to preserve and conserve institutions that have become traditional (neighborhood public schools. welfare programs, unions) whereas conservatives from Reagan and Gingrich to G.W. Bush (not to mention Trump) embrace radical change. The temperamental orientation of the ideologies has switched.

A third possible model assumes that parties change their positions–and even their temperaments–but they retain the same core interest groups over time. We might expect a given country to have a party for the workers and one for the bourgeoisie, with potentially a third for the peasants. Perhaps the US has only bourgeois parties, but Republicans rely on business-owners and professionals from suburbs and small towns in the North, while Democrats depend on farmers plus urban industrial workers.

The problem with this third model is that the parties prove surprisingly likely to change their interest groups. Indeed, upscale professionals in northern suburbs are now at the heart of the Democratic coalition, while rural people in the South are core Republicans; and Northern industrial workers tilt to the GOP. Each of these groups has switched sides.

Nor is this pattern unique to the USA. The UK Labour Party, formed to represent industrial workers, drew 38 percent of the most advantaged social stratum in the 2024 General Election, compared to the Tory’s 18 percent. Labour performed a little worse among semi-skilled and skilled laborers than among managerial and professional employees. In France, the supposedly left-wing New Popular Front performed worst among workers (ouvriers), and was the top choice of the managerial class (cadres). The German Social Democratic Party, formed in 1875 to represent workers, now performs better among white-collar workers with high education.

if these models based on issues, temperaments, or interest groups fail, what model could work? I’d turn to Cohen, March and Olsen (1972), who posited that any “organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … To understand processes within organizations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated” (Cohen, March & Olsen 1972).

If this model applies to politics, then a given party is not a manifestation of any specific principles, nor an agent for a given demographic coalition. It is a space within which various actors can participate, yielding various outcomes over time. In turn, an ideology–at least in a regime like the USA–is mainly the name for that set of views that is currently held by one of the parties.

In that case, it is not illogical if the word “liberal” comes to mean entirely different policy positions over time; that is the outcome of people dumping “various kinds of problems and solutions” into the garbage can of the Democratic Party, which then represents “liberalism.” (And the same for the GOP and conservatism.)

In fact, I don’t think the garbage-can model quite works for US parties. They do retain some philosophical premises and portions of their coalitions over substantial periods, and to some extent, their changes in positions reflect changes in the external world. For example, the parties may have switched their positions on isolationism versus interventionism because the main perceived adversary was communism for 45 years–but not before or after that.

Still, the first three models don’t fit by themselves, and the garbage-can model has some validity.


Sources: Lewis, V. (2021). The problem of Donald Trump and the Static Spectrum Fallacy. Party Politics27(4), 605-618; Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative science quarterly, 1-25. See also: Mapping Ideologies as Networks of Ideas; in defense of institutions as “garbage cans”; what if political parties structure our thinking for us?; UK election results by social classsocial class inversion in the 2022 US elections;  class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesisclass inversion in France and what does the European Green surge mean?

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what you need to know for collective action

The graphic with this post shows the outline for “Introduction to Civic Studies,” which I am offering for 50 Tufts undergraduates this spring, and also for my 2022 book What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (with an associated website).

To trace one portion of the argument: There is not much point in asking what’s wrong with the world or how things should be unless you can also address the question: “What should we do?” And there is not much point in asking that question unless you are part of–or can form–a functioning “we” that is able to act collectively, assembling and deploying assets.

Functioning groups require rules (broadly defined) as well as attitudes, such as trust.

In order to create rules and trust, it is helpful to know how to:

  • Develop explicit models (simplified representations) of the social situation that can guide your action and that you can modify in the light of experience
  • Analyze institutions in terms of components, such as their biophysical circumstances, the choices that they create for participants, and their outcomes. You should be able to analyze institutions that you want to launch or sustain, so that these entities can persist and even grow. You may also need to analyze institutions that you oppose, to reveal their vulnerabilities.
  • Treat your own group as a common-pool resource: that is, as a good that benefits everyone involved but that can be used up or degraded. Common-pool resources are difficult to finance and sustain, yet some flourish. The ones that succeed usually employ wise principles. Therefore:
  • Apply design principles that enable successful collective action, such as establishing clear boundaries around the the group and its assets, developing efficient processes for resolving conflicts, and using light but graduated sanctions for members who violate the rules.
  • Preserve and expand social capital (otherwise known as “collective efficacy” or “community cohesion”): the social ties and interpersonal commitments that enable further action.
  • Practice skills that organize people (rather than simply mobilize them to take specific actions), such as one-to-one interviews and decision-making meetings.

The second through fifth points come from the work of Elinor Ostrom, although you may decide to analyze institutions into different components from the ones she identified, or apply different design principles, if your experience yields different lessons.

This is not all you need to know, because additional challenges arise when you face conflicting beliefs about good means and ends or when you encounter oppressive power. We will move onto those topics for the rest of the semester. But the list shown here is necessary.

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Foucault the engaged scholar

I admit that I had long understood Michel Foucault as a “universal intellectual” — a thinker who conveys an original and general stance to the public, the nation, or the masses, serving as their conscience. If this intellectual is radically critical of the status quo, and his audience is the whole public, then the implication is: Revolution! Examples of revolutionary universal intellectuals include Rousseau, Marx, and Sartre.

Placed in that tradition, Foucault can be frustrating. He held a distinctive and original (albeit evolving) stance, he participated in radical politics in Tunisia and France, and he reached a global audience, yet he eschewed recommendations and explicit moral judgments. He seemed to conceal his own views, to the extent that he held them.

My take on Foucault has been changed (and my appraisal has been much improved) by reading three interviews conducted between 1976 and 1981 that are included in Rabinow’s and Rose’s The Essential Foucault anthology. These conversations have also revised my understanding of his major works.

In the 1976 interview, Foucault describes “universal intellectuals” as I did at the start of this post, but he says that “some years have passed since the intellectual has been called upon to play this role” (1976, 312). A universal intellectual works alone and addresses everyone. In contrast, a “specific intellectual”–a type that emerges after World War II (1976, 313)–works within an institution where knowledge and power come together. Examples include nuclear physicists, psychiatrists, social workers, magistrates, administrators, planners, and educators. They possess genuine knowledge that gives them influence. Since the failed revolution of 1968, it has become clear that beneficial social change depends on them, not on revolutionaries who fight the state (1976, 305). Specific intellectuals are becoming politically conscious and connected across disciplines and national borders (1976, 313).

And Foucault works with them. He doesn’t go into much detail about his own activities in these interviews, but we know that psychiatrists have read his works about mental illness and sexuality, prison administrators have read his book on prisons, and people who train professionals have assigned his texts; and he acknowledges their influence on him. Thus his audience is not “the people,” and his contribution is not a philosophy. Instead, he is a professional historian who contributes information and insights to various conversations that are also informed by the behavioral and social sciences and law.

In a 1981 interview, Didier Erihon suggests that “criticism carried about by intellectuals doesn’t lead to anything” (1981, 171). This is meant as a challenge to Foucault, whom Erihon assumes is an intellectual.

Foucault first notes that the previous twenty years have seen substantial changes–beneficial ones, I presume–in views of mental illness, imprisonment, and gender relations, issues on which he had worked intensively.

Next, he observes that progress does not result from political decisions alone; any policy requires implementation, and its impact depends on the people who implement it. At any rate, that is how I would gloss these words:

Furthermore, there are no reforms in themselves. Reforms do not come about in empty space, independently of those who make them. One cannot avoid considering those who will have to administer this transformation (1981, 171).

It follows that to influence the “assumptions” and “familiar notions” of practitioners is “utterly indispensable for any transformation” (172). (Compare my recent post on institutions).

Foucault concludes his response by criticizing the ways that universal intellectuals (whether famous or aspiring to fame) typically criticize society. He says, “A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. …. Criticism consists in uncovering [everyday] thought and trying to change it” (1981, 172).

The key point, for me, is that “trying to change” something requires a strategy, and Foucault wants to abandon the strategy of changing everything all at once by telling The People that society is bad and should be different. His alternative strategy is to engage well-placed practitioners.

In the 1980 interview, Foucault elaborates his doubts about criticism that takes the form of denouncing existing things, ideas, or people:

It’s amazing how people like judging. Judgment is being passed everywhere, all the time. Perhaps its one of the simplest things mankind has been given to do. And you know very well that the last man, when radiation has finally reduced his last enemy to ashes, will sit down behind some rickety table and begin the trial of the individual responsible (1980, 176).

Foucault diagnoses Parisian intellectuals’ love of denouncing each other as a result of their “deep-seated anxiety that one will not be heard or read.” This anxiety motivates the “need to wage an ‘ideological struggle’ or to root out ‘dangerous thoughts'” (1980, 177).

The interviewer counters, “But don’t you think our period is really lacking in great writers and minds capable of dealing with its problems?” (1980, 177). Later, the same interviewer asks, “If everything is going badly, how do we make a start?” (1980, 178).

Foucault resists both pessimistic premises. “But everything isn’t going badly,” he exclaims (1980, 178). He describes a “plethora,” an “overabundance” of interesting ideas and people who have pent-up curiosity. The task, he proposes, is to “multiply the channels, the bridges, the means of information” so that more people with “thirst for knowledge” can learn from more other people (1980, 177).

In a passage that reminds me of Dewey’s The Public and its Problems (1924), Foucault describes his “dream of a new age of curiosity” (1980, 178). He says, “I like the word [curiosity]. It evokes ‘care’; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist.” (1980, 177). In the age of curiosity that he envisions, “people must be constantly able to plug into culture in as many ways as possible” (178-9).

Given Foucault’s understanding of his own role as a “specific intellectual,” he must have been at least somewhat concerned about his reputation. He was not only a historical specialist who helped fellow practitioners to become conscious of shared prejudices and to discover alternatives. He was also (and mainly) a world-famous French philosopher, a purported representative of movements like post-structuralism and postmodernism, whose public lectures on general subjects in venues like the Collège de France and UC-Berkeley were packed with aspiring philosophers, and whose interviews about the condition of the world were published in Le Monde and Libération.

I am not sure how he navigated this tension, not having read the biographies. But it’s clear that it worried him. In the 1980 interview, part of a series on major intellectuals in Le Monde, Foucault asks not to be named. The interview (still archived on Le Monde’s website), is headlined, “The Masked Philosopher.” It begins:

Here is a French writer of some renown. Author of several books whose success has been affirmed well beyond our borders, he is an independent thinker: he is not linked to any fashion, to any party. However, he only agreed to grant us an interview about the status of the intellectual and the place of culture and philosophy in society on one explicit condition: to remain anonymous. Why this discretion? Out of modesty, calculation or fear? The question deserved to be asked–even if, by the end of this conversation, the mystery will undoubtedly have dissipated for the most perceptive of our readers…

Foucault explains that he would like to try being anonymous “out of nostalgia for a time when, since I was quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard” (my translation). In other words, we cannot hear Foucault well unless we shake the model of a famous thinker who offers big ideas. He wants us, instead, to ask whether the claims about specific phenomena that we find in his works ring true or false and whether they are useful or not for our purposes.


Sources: Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” (1976), “The Masked Philosopher” (1980), and “So is it Important to Think?” (1981), all in Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, The Essential Foucault (The New Press, 2003), but I retranslated the 1980 interview myself because of a misplaced modifier in the anthology. See also: Vincent Colapietro, “Foucault’s Pragmatism and Dewey’s Genealogies: Mapping Our Historical Situations and Locating Our Philosophical Maps,” Cognitio, 13/2 (2012), p. 187-218; Foucault’s spiritual exercises; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; and Civically Engaged Research in Political Science

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in defense of institutions as “garbage cans”

In a 1972 article that has been cited nearly 15,000 times, Cohen, March and Olsen wrote that “an organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … To understand processes within organizations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated” (Cohen, March & Olsen 1972).

Cohen and colleagues derived their “garbage-can model” by observing a university. To illustrate it, we might imagine a professor who consistently advocates that a new position be created in a specific field. As time passes, this professor presents her proposal as a solution to many different problems. Sometimes it’s a way of meeting students’ declared needs; other times, a way of preparing them for the job market or challenging their values.

This professor drifts in and out of various conversations, sometimes serving on a key committee, sometimes absent on leave. And she is just one of a few thousand advocates for competing proposals who compose the faculty and the administration. In the institution as a whole, there is no explicit, shared understanding of what problems should be solved. People keep throwing diverse proposals into the bin, with constantly shifting rationales.

This is my hypothetical example, but I think it illustrates the formal model of Cohen et al. (which they represent with a Fortran program). They debunk the assumption that organizations are “vehicles for solving well-defined problems or structures within which conflict is resolved through bargaining.” And they conclude, “It is clear that the garbage can process does not resolve problems well.”

In his classic book from the subsequent decade, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, John W. Kingdon cites the garbage-can model and comments, “On the face of it, this looks a lot like the federal government” (Kingdon 1984, p. 85). Kingdon develops a respected model of “organized anarchy” to describe US policymaking that draws heavily on the article by Cohen et al. However Kingdon is a bit less judgmental. He notes, “messy processes have their virtues” (p. 183). I would like to explore those benefits.

One basic assumption I would offer is that programs never simply work. Schools, doctor’s appointments, rural development projects, therapy sessions–these things are either beneficial, neutral, or harmful depending on how they are implemented. Human capital is always essential–i.e., the preparation, selection, and motivation of the people involved. And these people must always attend to the specific context and the communities they serve. Therefore, we can hardly ever demonstrate in the abstract that a proposal is the solution to a problem. Instead, individuals and groups are entitled to work on making their favored initiatives beneficial. Individuals ought to be loyal to specific ideas and to the other people who support them.

The other assumption is that we often rationalize when we make arguments. When we say why we favor a decision, the reason we give is not actually the explanation of our view. We originally favored a given position for reasons that are often opaque even to ourselves, and these reasons may involve bias and self-interest. We then come up with rationales for public consumption.

However, the psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2017) argue that when we listen to other people rationalize, we are decently good at assessing their arguments and sometimes open to changing our views as a result. Kingdon anticipates their point when he writes about policymaking in Washington, DC:

Even if argumentation is nothing more than rationalization, it is still important. Some events may be governed by lobbying influence or by judgments about clout at the polls, but government officials still try to reason their way through problems.

Kingdon 1984, 126.

Consistent with his account, I would posit that officials mostly “reason” by critically assessing and comparing the rationalizations that are given to them by interested parties.

If these two assumptions are correct, then it may be healthy for an organization to consist of many advocates who are loyal to their own ideas and able to change the rationales for their proposals as their audiences and circumstances shift. Other people should listen to their rationalizations and decide what to do. Those who make proposals should be held accountable for helping to implement them if their ideas are adopted.

To use an example from Kingdon, advocates of federal funds for urban mass transportation first argued that it would cut traffic, then that it would reduce pollution, and then that it would diminish US reliance on foreign oil. A transit advocate told Kingdon, “You want to do something and you ask, ‘What will work this year? What’s hot this year that I can hang this on?” (p. 173).

I know little about mass transit advocates during the period that Kingdon describes (ending in the early ’80s). Some of them may have been self-interested in the narrowest sense, e.g., paid to lobby on behalf of companies that would win contracts to build mass transit. Others may have manifested a higher form of self-interest. For example, if you love New York City, you might have a bias for mass transit, because federal funds for subways would flow to your community. Still others may have favored mass transportation for a mix of reasons, from personal experience to political ideology to loyalty to colleagues.

I don’t think the best question is why people really want what they advocate. The important question is whether the federal government should fund mass transit. Subways and buses are “solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer.” It is good to have such options.

This example comes from federal policy, but similar behavior is familiar in universities and other parts of civil society. As the winds shift, an advocate of community service may switch her rationale from democracy, to job-training, to social-emotional learning. Again, this is not bad if service projects have some merit. It should not surprise us that the same intervention may serve multiple goals. More importantly, it is not really true or false that service projects are good. They will be beneficial or harmful–for various purposes in various contexts–depending on how the people involved use them. (The same is true of mass transit, which has sometimes had catastrophic effects.) What we want are committed advocates for a range of plausible ideas, and it’s much less important what they advocate.

This means that when I look out at my own institution and others, I am reasonably tolerant of the messiness of what Cohen et al. would call the “garbage can.” A large organization should include many people who have partly incompatible underlying values and who want to do different things. There may be some value to discussing shared goals in larger forums, such as faculty meetings, but we shouldn’t hope for consensus about both means and ends. Key questions are often of this type:

  • If we did what Person A advocates, would we be able to count on that person and others to carry it forward? How much should we rely on their dedication, ethics, and skill?
  • If we decided to do what A wants, what are some immediate steps for which we already have the necessary resources, and how far would those steps take us? Do we have a prospect of finding additional support later on?
  • Since Person B is advocating something else, what can we do for B if we say yes to A? Can we simply acknowledge that B has lost out for now and thank them for their forbearance? Or do we risk losing them? Could we satisfy both A and B? (But what about C and D and E?)

In short, I’m pretty comfortable with moving from an organization-centered model, in which the goal is to “solve well-defined problems,” to a people-centered model, in which the goal is to enable individuals to advocate, act, and thereby grow in skill and wisdom.

This is a case for decentralization and against elaborate planning. I admit that I have a hard time taking strategic planning documents seriously and am much more interested in assessing the commitment and resources of various people in my environment. I have less tolerance for arguments of the form “This should be done” than for arguments that begin, “I want to be able to help us do this.”

I also tend to expect the most dynamic ideas to come from people who are directly involved in the organization’s work (e.g., professors who are currently teaching and researching, or civil servants who conduct federal programs, or indeed their students and service-recipients). I view senior leaders as people whose necessary task is to allocate scarce resources among the ideas that come before them. Leaders should consider the strength of arguments, but they should be equally concerned to attract and retain diverse talent. And, of course, leaders need to be accountable–not only for their specific decisions but also for the overall climate of the organization.

Following the line of argument from Cohen et al. to Kingdon, I have combined a university and the federal government into the same discussion. Obviously, they differ. For one thing, there are almost 3 million federal employees, whose salaries are paid by more than 300 million residents, who affect 7 billion human beings. These numbers are orders of magnitude larger than those in any educational institution. As a result, there must be much more distance between the formal decision-makers in the federal government (members of Congress and the cabinet) and frontline workers than should exist in any university. Still, Kingdon saw genuine similarities, and we might adopt similar fundamental values in both cases.

Sources: Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative science quarterly, 1-25; Kingdon, J W. 1984/2011. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, Updated 2nd ed. Longman York, NY: HarperCollins; Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2017. See also: democracy’s sovereignty; loyalty in intellectual work (from 2017); making our models explicit; a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups.

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beyond Chevron

Since my 1999 book, The Future of Democracy, I have been critical of delegation: the practice of passing vague laws and asking regulators to work out the details. This practice has become pervasive, not only in the United States but in all the wealthy societies that I know about.

We are taught that the US federal government has three branches, but it has actually had at least four for the past century. The fourth branch consists of the regulatory agencies, which generate 72 pages of regulations for every single page of law passed by Congress.

Congress often intentionally enacts values that are in tension or impossible to achieve fully, so that regulators have the responsibility to make tradeoffs. For instance, the authorizing legislation for the Environmental Protection Agency requires the “Federal Government to use all practicable means, consistent with other essential considerations of national policy, … to the end that the Nation may … attain the widest range of beneficial uses of the environment without degradation, risk to health or safety, or other undesirable and unintended consequences.”

Of course, the whole Environmental Protection Act is more detailed than this, but it leaves a vast amount for the agency to decide. When an EPA policy does not avoid all undesirable consequences (and how could it?), legislators can complain and thereby act as if they were exercising “oversight” even though they have ceded their power to the agency.

Delegation would be appropriate if good policy could be determined by science, but policy choices always involve values. Delegation would be appropriate if utilitarianism (in the form of cost-benefit analysis) were an adequate theory of value, but it is not. Thus, in practice, Congress gives bureaucracies the discretion to govern. This is undemocratic, whether we think of democracy as majority-rule, public deliberation, or accountability. Delegation is also inconsistent with rule-of-law because it generates mutable and inconsistent rules that are hard to predict and follow.

Therefore, in 1999, I favored something like last week’s Loper decision, which held that “courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”

I favored this kind of ruling because I thought it would force the legislative branch to make important decisions instead of enacting vague statutes that might end up being decided by judges. This is not the Supreme Court’s intention in Loper. The decision anticipates that courts will decide what laws mean, using “the traditional tools of statutory construction” to resolve ambiguities, which is the “special competence” of judges. But no judge can decide what the law really means when Congress has written it vaguely. The court will simply make the law. I thought that Congress would be compelled to avoid this absurd outcome by passing clear statutes, which would return both power and accountability to the elected legislature.

What has changed is my confidence that Congress can actually legislate, in the sense of passing or updating substantive statutes. In 1965 alone, Congress passed at least 10 landmark bills that established agencies or dramatically altered national policies. Congress has passed fewer than 10 such laws in the last half century put together.

As an example, Congress has never passed legislation explicitly about the climate. Federal regulatory agencies are using the 1970s Clean Air Act (written before Congress was really aware of climate change) to try to regulate carbon. Likewise, federal financial laws were passed before cryptocurrency; and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 still governs despite some minor new developments, such as social media and smartphones.

I’ve previously explored several explanations for the decline of lawmaking, including the weakening of parties as actual institutions, the altered media system, a loss of confidence and clarity among both progressives and libertarians, and polarization.

A recent example supports blaming the media. Biden did sign landmark environmental legislation, but it has been almost entirely ignored. Why would a legislature be responsible and effective if it passes several trillion dollars of new spending and no one notices?

Another explanation is weak legislative capacity. I will digress briefly to explain that concept: A legislative body votes on bills. That is a zero-sum process: each “no” vote cancels each “aye” vote. But bills must come from somewhere. Developing legislation requires awareness, research, consultation, design, and persuasion. The number and sophistication of pending bills is not zero-sum; legislatures can have more or less capacity to develop legislation.

Today, only five percent of Hill staffers surveyed by the Congressional Management Foundation and the Partnership for Public Service believe that Congress has adequate capacity, and the other 95 percent are correct. Congress can barely get it together to pass budgets that merely modify current spending. With the exceptions of the environmental bills that Biden signed, Congress has little capacity to develop laws–whether conservative or progressive.

Under these circumstances, the Loper decision will shift power from the regulatory agencies to the courts. Given the composition of the federal judiciary, this shift will make regulations more conservative, regardless of what the public might want. Congress will not easily fix this problem, because Congress cannot write ambitious and extensive laws.

However, the best solution remains the same: responsibility must shift to Congress. Here are four ways to accomplish that:

  • Enhance the capacity of Congress. More people could work for the legislative branch, developing detailed statutes or amendments that determine outcomes without delegating decisions to bureaucracies. There are proposals for enhancing the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, and the Congressional Budget Office–all bureaus of the legislative branch. These agencies are about 20 percent smaller than they were in the later 20th century, and a fourth one, the Office of Technology Assessment, is now defunct (Select Committee, 2022, p. 127). Staff could also be added to congressional offices and committees; and whole new nonpartisan bureaus could be formed. The general strategy is to do the same kind of work now assigned to the executive branch but within Congress.
  • Taxing and spending instead of regulating: I believe that wealthy people and companies should bear most of the burden of addressing social problems. Regulations may shift costs and alter behavior for the better. However, the costs and effects of regulation are difficult to predict and account for. They do not appear on the balance sheets of the government. It is possible for burdens to fall on the wrong people (e.g., consumers instead of investors) or not to be efficient. In general, it is more transparent and democratic to impose burdens in the form of explicit taxes and then to use the revenues to purchase things that voters can assess. Taxing and spending are clearly constitutional; there is little that activist conservative jurists could do to stop it. What it requires is political will.
  • Codification: After a large body of detailed law has emerged over a long period, one option is to codify it: to impanel a committee that analyzes the whole corpus and replaces it with a much more concise and general structure. Justinian did this with Roman law, ca. 534. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 did the same for the many specific laws that the French revolutionary governments had passed since 1790. The Model Penal Code of 1962 was an attempt to codify US state criminal laws. At nearly 200,000 [sic!] printed pages, the Code of Federal Regulation is ripe for codification, either as one whole corpus or in big chunks, such as environment and labor. Today’s Congress certainly cannot codify, but a commission could produce a draft for Congress to approve. Congress could create this commission or, in theory, it could form in civil society and simply ask Congress to consider its recommendations. I am generally skeptical of AI, but codification is a task that computers might assist.
  • Public engagement: A commission would be dominated by experts, but representative people can be selected for juries or other kinds of deliberative panels that consider value-laden questions and make decisions. The US EPA offers a page about Citizen Juries, which is one such model. There is a burgeoning literature on “sortition” (randomly selected decision-makers), in both theory and practice, with many of the ambitious examples coming from overseas. Sortition is also a form of delegation, but random selection and a deliberative format provide a different kind of legitimacy. Congress might have to amend the Administrative Procedures Act to make courts defer to citizen panels, but nothing would prevent such an amendment.

Do I expect any of these solutions? Essentially, I expect very little positive to come from Washington over the next two years or more. Nevertheless, now is an important time to envision a better system. We are likely to experience instability or even chaos, and we should be aiming to come through that to a period of real reform.

Source: Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, Final Report, 2022. See also a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon, you’re talking real money; judicial activism when the legislative branch is broken; legislative capacity is not zero-sum

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