Bureaucratic rule requires immunity from democratic control

Evidence

His pride was indeed to “remain more or less hidden [and] to pull the strings.” In exchange, and in order to make his work possible at all, the bureaucrat has to feel safe from control—the praise as well as the blame, that is—of all public institutions, either Parliament, the “English Departments,” or the press. Every growth of democracy or even the simple functioning of existing democratic institutions can only be a danger, for it is impossible to govern “a people by a people—the people of India by the people of England.” Bureaucracy is always a government of experts, of an “experienced minority” which has to resist as well as it knows how the constant pressure from “the inexperienced majority.” Each people is fundamentally an inexperienced majority and can therefore not be trusted with such a highly specialized matter as politics and public affairs. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 552

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core anti-democratic logic of expert rule that the Islamophobia field later connects to colonial administration’s denial of self-governance. — connects to: Capital controls were assumed necessary for democratic domestic policy — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 419
• DEEPTHINKING: Arendt condenses a full political theory here: bureaucracy structurally requires freedom from public accountability precisely because democracy is the enemy of expert rule.