Bureaucracy replaces general law with temporary decrees that keep one man above the law.

Evidence

At the basis of bureaucracy as a form of government, and of its inherent replacement of law with temporary and changing decrees, lies this superstition of a possible and magic identification of man with the forces of history. The ideal of such a political body will always be the man behind the scenes who pulls the strings of history. Cromer finally shunned every “written instrument, or, indeed, anything which is tangible” in his relationships with Egypt—even a proclamation of annexation—in order to be free to obey only the law of expansion, without obligation to a man-made treaty. Thus does the bureaucrat shun every general law, handling each situation separately by decree, because a law’s inherent stability threatens to establish a permanent community in which nobody could possibly be a god because all would have to obey a law. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 556

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines bureaucracy’s defining mechanism: replacing stable law with ad hoc decrees, because law’s stability would create community and equality before it.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that bureaucrats shun general law precisely because a stable law would establish a community in which nobody could be a god is a dense, paradigm-shifting inversion of bureaucracy’s normal association with rigid rule-following.
• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia field’s understanding of colonial administrative rule — how decree-based governance produces exclusion without codified law.