Unchecked administrative growth and wealth produce bureaucratic iron cages and oligarchy

Evidence

In thinking about these issues, we’ve been led by the recent work of the political philosopher Deva R. Woodly. In her powerful study Reckoning (2021), Woodly offers a theoretical account of what movements are and how they work. Drawing on the German sociologist Max Weber, Woodly identifies a central risk that perpetually haunts modern democracies as they stabilize the basic architecture of administrative governance and gain wealth. For Weber, each aspect of that evolution, permitted to run its natural course, inexorably compromises the core of democratic self-governance: Administrative structures gradually harden into the iron cage of Kafkaesque bureaucracy; and the sweet emoluments of increasing wealth inevitably install, eventually, a more or less depraved oligarchy. The result of letting democracy just rumble on? What you will get, sooner or later, is, as Woodly puts it, “dehumanization, expropriation, and stagnation.” — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 224

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Weber’s iron cage and the diagnosis threads from Frankfurt School readings on bureaucratic administration. — connects to: Blairite pseudo-markets produced sprawling bureaucracy, contradicting accelerationist expectations — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2063; Economic growth does not equalize status, and rising wealth only raises entry bars — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 104