Colonial bureaucracy defines itself against democratic accountability.

Evidence

Cromer himself possessed all these qualities to a very high degree; his wrath was never more strongly aroused than when he was “brought out of [his] hiding place,” when “the reality which before was only known to a few behind the scenes [became] patent to all the world.” 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

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Frames bureaucracy’s self-justification: rule by the ‘experienced minority’ against the ‘inexperienced majority’ — core definitional content.
• XREF: Connects to the expert-versus-democracy motif the reader’s critical-theory vocabulary depends on.

Related

• Bureaucratic rule requires immunity from democratic control (similarity 0.86)