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VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST

10. In the Service of the Greater Self

So long as there is a clear belief in the purpose of an organization, those responsible will find a sensible way to run it. But if the heart of belief is only in structure, then the whole body will gradually lose its sense of direction and then its ability to function. The arms business is a prime example of the loss of direction in Western governments and of their growing inability to do what their societies expect of them. It is as if the confusion among those who govern has become so great that they mistake frenetic activity for the carrying out of their functions.

Any search for the cause of this crisis must focus on our continuing inability to deal with the contradictions between democracy and rational administration -- contradictions which have led to the emasculation of the former, whether it he in elected assemblies or in ministerial offices. But the problem is not so simple as is generally suggested. After all, it was a combination of democratic government and rational administration which radically improved the social balance over a period of some two centuries. In the process, however, this coalition lost any practical sense of why or how it was done. The result has been an inversion of roles. Administration has increasingly become the purpose and democratic leadership has felt obliged to follow. Methodology has replaced direction. Moral value has been attributed to such technical tools as efficiency and speed.

The result has been a decline of the democratic function into one of mere process and a growing frustration, if not anger, among elected representatives and their electors. Increasingly that frustration has been seized upon by organized interests -- what in Mussolini's day would have been called corporate interests. The essence of Corporatism is that each group has its own purpose, organization and financial strength. These group interests negate democracy, which depends on the contribution of individual citizens. It was generally believed that the last world war had defeated Corporatism. But the growing democratic void has enabled organized interests to occupy more and more of the structures of Western political leadership in the name -- astonishingly enough -- of the individual voter, frustrated as he or she is by the rational state. Thus, beneath the guise of populist rhetoric, the democratic system has turned increasingly to the service of specific interests. It is a remarkable confidence trick in which the voters have begun voluntarily handing their gains of the last two centuries back over to the same small groups - or their modern equivalents -- which for so long were the principal beneficiaries of a grossly inequitable civilization.

The difficulty in dealing with this problem in a sensible way stems, as so often in rational society, from the absolutism of the ideologies which have defined the parameters of the debate. Once Max Weber, writing early in this century, had turned bureaucracy into a self- contained value, the way was open for others to focus on the contrary as a justification for their opposition to an equitable society. The resulting  false debate has led to a growing number of destructive aberrations in a civilization which wishes to remain democratic. For example, political leaders have been steadily erecting buffers between themselves and the governmental system.

The most disturbing of these walls is the proliferation of unelected advisers, who are now so numerous and powerful that they virtually constitute praetorian guards. Their job is to bolster the power of those in office by increasing their independence from both the people's elected representatives and the administrative system. But as history has repeatedly demonstrated, public power in the hands of the unregulated personal advisers of the heads of government has always led to abuse. The elimination of this was one of the driving forces in the rise of bureaucracy.

What follows here is an attempt. to isolate some of the contradictions in democratic-rational government as a way of uncovering their cause. Is it, for example, the rise in public services which is responsible, as the contemporary Right argues, for the decline in effective democracy? Have the political and the bureaucratic classes profoundly changed because the alteration in their powers now attracts a different sort of candidate? Is there a natural alliance between the democratic and bureaucratic methods? Or a natural tension which must be consciously and constantly controlled? What is clear when these and other questions are asked is that the great national coalitions beneath the banner of democracy and reason have disintegrated and the only way to make sense of the remains is to ensure a practical divorce between ideas and methods, which in being mixed together have deformed our society.

***

After making enormous progress over the last century towards basic justice in many areas, the Western nations are now accepting a general slippage backwards. The OECD members carry 30 million unemployed almost helplessly, as if it were a characteristic of modern societies. Most of these people are chronically unemployed. What progress there has been in the creation of new employment -- particularly in the United States -- has often depended upon unsecured, poverty-level, part-time employment -- in other words, upon a return to nineteenth-century unreformed capitalism. This situation has been accompanied by rising levels of illiteracy, unseen since before World War I, while state school systems decline.

Having, through enlightened social policies, rendered the European and much of the North American working class virtually obsolete, our societies made a terrible discovery. There is no point in eliminating working-class conditions and absorbing the members of that class unless you eliminate the need for a working class or radically upgrade the  general attitude towards their contribution. Both solutions are dependent upon a reorganization of the economy. Rather than attempt such an integrated policy, we have simply created a whole new working class. In countries such as Germany, Sweden and France, this was done by encouraging massive immigration from Third World countries. The conditions surrounding this immigration ensured that the newcomers would remain working class in the old nineteenth-century sense -- often without a vote, without citizenship, often even without access to ongoing social security or education.

In the United States, despite the disappearance of the worst sorts of public racism and the emergence of a small black middle class, including some highly successful politicians, the blacks have been confirmed in their sub-working-class role. This emerges from all the statistics on unemployment, health care, mortality rates, education, prison occupation and family status. For example, infant mortality among blacks is more than double that of whites and the gap is widening. To this racial problem has been added a second subworking class made up of Hispanics who will be, at thirty million, the largest ethnic group in the United States by the year 2000. A large number of these immigrants fuel a low-cost, low-employment-standards black market economy which escapes all social regulation. This in turn has placed great pressure on the economies of the southern states to remain or return to pre-Roosevelt conditions, which in turn has created an industrial drain from the northern states. As a further pressure on this lowest-common-denominator style of competition, America is gradually integrating its economy with that of Mexico, a country that operates at the cheap and rough levels of the Third World.

In Britain a similar approach has led to the creation of large pockets of new wealth and to equally large pockets of new poverty. This return to the old rich-poor society with a gap in the middle has been encouraged by a decline in universal state services -- whether practical, such as transportation, or social, such as health care.

In other words, there has been a gradual undermining of the idea of a general social consensus. All of this has been. fuelled by a slavish devotion to the rational certitude that there are absolute answers to all questions and problems. These absolute solutions have succeeded each other over the last twenty years in a jarring and disruptive way. At the same time the ability of governments to effect economic development has been severely handicapped by a growing reliance on service industries for growth -- a sector dominated not by sophisticated items such as computer software but by consumer goods and personal consumer services. These sectors, it goes without saying, also flourish on labour which is part-time, low wage and insecure, thus creating a false sense of having solved part of the job-creation problem. This growth in services also leaves the Western economies dependent on the most unstable area of economic activity, which is the first to collapse in an economic crisis. Put another way, service industries are to the economy what the uncontrolled printing of money is to monetary stability. They are both forms of inflation.

These examples of a general decline stand out in contrast. to state mechanisms which have never been so sophisticated. This sophistication has reached a level of complexity so great that the systems are, in truth, incomprehensible not only to the citizen, but to the most part of the political class. The latter, in a slothful loss of intellectual and practical self- iscipline, have simply accepted that this is the way things must be. The resulting void in responsible leadership has allowed an hysterical brand of simplistic politics to rise and take power on the back of truisms, cliches and chauvinism, all of which fall below the intellectual level of Jenkins' Ear jingoism. [1]

When President Bush, in his inaugural address, warmed to the theme of a kinder, gentler America, he said: "We know what works: Freedom works. We know what's right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections." No one laughed at his absurd 9ldering of these three freedoms. The men of reason in the other political party, in his own party, in the media and in the universities found nothing to say.

Every word and concept of the wars of democracy and justice has been appropriated by those who traditionally opposed both and who seek power to undo what has been done. The moral sense of the eighteenth century has not only been turned upside down, this has been done with its own vocabulary. Thus Bush could give primacy to free markets over free men, as if to say that the right to speculate in junk bonds is more important than the removal of slavery. And Jefferson, Reagan could say, was against big government. Therefore, the forty million Americans without health care were not a government concern. But what Jefferson was against was unnecessary government -- organisms which no longer contributed anything. He saw political power as a limited deck of cards. Those who held office were to play their hand carefully and endlessly, picking up old cards and putting down new ones, as old problems were solved and new problems arose. [2] Those who seek and often gain power today use the vocabulary of the eighteenth century the way television evangelists use the Old Testament.

By mistaking method for content and structure for morality, we have created a fatal weapon which can be used against any fair society. No honest man can use a modern system to create and serve as well as a dishonest man can use it to destroy and to fill his pockets. The resulting moral confusion cannot simply be laid at the feet of those guilty of taking advantage of the situation. They and their attitudes are the product of a method of reasoning which is now geriatric. The rational elites, obsessed by structure, have become increasingly authoritarian in a modern, administrative way. The citizens feel insulted and isolated. They look for someone to throw stones on their behalf. Any old stone will do. The cruder the better to crush the self-assurance of the obscure men and their obscure methods. The New Right, with its parody of democratic values, has been a crude but devastating stone with which to punish the modern elites. The New Left, which will eventually succeed it, could easily turn out. to be equally crude.

And yet none of this can be said without considering just how bad things were two centuries ago, even sixty years ago, and how relatively good they are now. We have taken to punishing our elites and condemning the way our society works because of real flaws, but flaws in what context?

Take public health, for example. In the late seventeenth century Paris was without a sanitary system -- its streets were a gigantic latrine for five hundred thousand people. The terraces of the king's palace -- the Tuileries -- smelled so strong that no one dared go onto them except to relieve themselves.

At that point in history, the modern administrative structure was in its infancy, limited to little more than the maitres de requetes. An early form of ombudsmen, they were judges who listened to complaints and requests addressed to the king. Richelieu had not even begun his razing of city walls with the idea of making central administrative control possible.

One hundred and fifty years later, in 1844, very little had changed. Six hundred thousand of the 912,000 residents of Paris lived in slums. [3] At Montfaucon, in the north of the city, transporters of excrement, who had been collecting door-to-door during the night, dumped their loads into great swamps of the same matter. Men spent their lives living on these shores and wading out every day in search of small objects they might sell. At Ulle, in the 1860s, in the working-class district of Saint-Sauveur, 95 percent of the children died before the age of five.

The famed Paris sewer system was created over a long period in the second half of the last century. The long delays were largely due to the virulent opposition of the property owners, who did not want to pay to install sanitary piping in their buildings. These people were the New Right of their day. The Prefect of Paris, Monsieur Poubelle, succeeded in forcing garbage cans on the property owners in 1887 only after a ferocious public battle. This governmental interference in the individual's right to throw his garbage into the street -- which was, in reality, the property owner's right to leave his tenants no other option -- made Poubelle into the "cryptosocialist" of the hour. In 1900 the owners were still fighting against the obligations both to put their buildings on the public sewer system and to cooperate in the collection of garbage. In 1904 in the eleventh arrondissement, a working- lass district, only two thousand out of eleven thousand buildings had been piped into the sewer system. By 1910 a little over half the city's buildings were on the sewers and only half the cities in France had any sewers at all.

Photos of early-twentieth-century Marseilles show great piles of refuse and excrement down the centre of the streets. Cholera outbreaks were common and ravaged the population. In 1954 the last city without, St. Remy de Provence, installed sewers.

It was the gradual creation of an effective bureaucracy which brought an end to all this filth and disease, and the public servants did so against the desires of the mass of the middle and upper classes. The free market opposed sanitation. The rich opposed it. The civilized opposed it. Most of the educated opposed it. That was why it took a century to finish what could have been done in ten years. Put in contemporary terms, the market economy angrily and persistently opposed clean public water, sanitation, garbage collection and improved public health because they appeared to be unprofitable enterprises which, in addition, put limits on the individual's freedoms. These are simple historic truths which have been forgotten today, thus permitting the fashionable belief that even public water services should be privatized in order that they might benefit from the free-market system.

It was the property owners, with their unbelievably narrow self-interest, who made Marx a man to follow. That there was not some sort of abrupt social revolution in Western Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was due almost entirely to the devotion and gradual success of the administrative class. In effect they saved the property, rights and privileges of those who opposed their reforms. And they did so, despite being poorly paid, only half supported by the politicians, and resented -- as they are still today -- by those who had to contribute from their pockets.

How then, if the battle fought and won was both just and popular, have the old elites been able to convince so many citizens that public servants and the services they offer are to be looked upon with contempt? In part the explanation has been a spreading realization among those elites who oppose universal services that reason is just a method. It was therefore only a matter of time before people who opposed such things as public sanitation learned how to use the relevant skills, as one might learn how to use a new weapon. More to the point, the men of reason, like Chinese mandarins, have always been for hire. And pools of large capital lying where they do, the bulk of new rational argument is now provided by corporate-sponsored think tanks and foundations. Two centuries after the Encyclopedistes, their victims are busy paying for their own version of the truth to be written.

***

Citizens are nevertheless surprised by the facility with which the rational mechanism is being used to do exactly the opposite of what the eighteenth-century philosophers. intended. This inversion has been facilitated by a natural division between elected representatives and administrative elites. Their on-again, off-again cooperation lasted through much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the last quarter century, it has been definitively off. At the best of times it was a fragile alliance which involved temporarily putting aside opposing values and different origins.

The main line of reason was always the creation of a new man -- one who would revolutionize the governing of all men, thanks to a new process. The result of this public- private revolution would be a fair. society. Democratic control was not part of the process. And moral belief was there only indirectly, because many eighteenth-century philosophers were convinced their rational structures would finally release the full force of morality into the public place.

"I sincerely believe," Jefferson wrote in 1814, while Napoleon was still raging across Europe and everything seemed to have gone wrong, "in the general existence of a moral instinct. I think it is the brightest gem with which the human character is studded." [4] Almost thirty years before, in 1787, Jefferson had been American ambassador in Paris. In those last moments before the cataclysm, he was the only man of reason on the scene to have applied his ideas to a successful revolution. His house was constantly filled with French thinkers and politicians seeking advice. In that atmosphere, he wrote to a young American:

Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed in this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this.... The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them In a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise. [5]

There is no suggestion here that reason and morality were linked. As for the new systems, both American and French, they were' experiments, but the idea of representative government had been neither assumed nor sought. Reason was to provide a process thanks to which new, properly trained elites would be able to create a better society. The result would be a just form of authoritarian government. Men of power would be expected to exercise self-control. Failing that, the system itself would limit them.

Democracy was an unexpected participant that somehow crashed the events. While the origins of modern reason lay with men principally interested in the uses of power, many of them royal or papal advisers seeking more effective ways to rule, those of democracy stretched back to the freemen of tribal northern Europe living in extended families. Little is known of this period after the decline of Rome. From the beginning, however, the concept of an association among equals runs through the evolution of democracy. The early attempts to reach beyond kinship resulted in gilds in Scandinavia and Germany. These gatherings of freemen began with little more than banquets and the swearing of oaths, but quickly evolved into self-protection, self-help groups. By the eighth century they were widespread in England. The earliest surviving gild statutes date from the first part of the eleventh century. Members swore faithful brotherhood to each other." If one misdo, let all bear it; let all share the same lot," was the way the Cambridge Gild put it.

By the tenth century one could see the next stage -- representative assemblies -- emerging slowly in England with the delegates to the local Courts of Shire and the Hundred. Elsewhere in Europe, somewhat the same process was underway. There was a representative Cortes in Aragon in 1133 and Castile in 1162.

All these free associations predated the emergence of the European kings as an important force. Gradually the rising monarchs set about seizing all power in order to hand bits of it back, as if it were theirs to dispense arbitrarily. In Europe the concept of freemen in free association came under constant attack from these kings. Charlemagne began in earnest the efforts to control the gilds. In England these basic structures were left in place. Magna Carta in 1215 is often thought of as a struggle between king and barons. These were indeed the two groups with military power, but the dispute had to do, as Magna Carta clearly states, with the status of "all free men," The document lays out their rights in great detail.

These conflicts between freemen and kings began well before the gilds evolved into craft gilds tied to specific trades. The professional associations didn't abandon the principles of the old gilds. They carried on the idea of freemen in free association and fleshed out the concept of obligation. From their beginnings in pagan northern Europe, gild associations had been linked to oaths or contracts which turned on the obligations of the individual to the group. As the freeman's rights slowly grew, so did his obligations. Implicit in this was the idea of merit. The freeman had both to maintain and to merit his place in the association. As the circle widened and representative assemblies grew, so did this idea of meritocracy. A man chosen as a delegate to the Court of Shires was theoretically the best available, not simply an elder or a man with high inherited rank. A master craftsman in a craft gild held his position because of his skills.

The conversion of northern Europe to Christianity came well after the gilds were in place, but it gave comfort to the idea of freemen in free associations. After all, the underlying theme which the priests brought was that all men were equal before God. However, the Church went on, like the monarchies, to develop elaborate pyramidal structures designed to control the population. But the basic Christian theme remained and with the Reformation it was rereleased in a strengthened form which harped on the moral and social obligations of men equal before God. This renewed message was to play a major role in the affirmation of democratic rights.

When, in the early eighteenth century, many French philosophers focused on England and discovered a "fair society," they interpreted what they saw. as a victory of ordered statehood. But what they had taken to be ordered statehood in reality had more to do with highly evolved tribalism which, thanks to the isolation of island life, had -not been driven off course by external forces.

Democracy emerged in various parts of the West as a product of common sense, hardly related to intellect at all. It remained and remains an organic product of society, along with man's moral sense, Neither are structural nor analytical. Neither rose out of reason. Nor did reason rise out of them. Only with time could it be seen that an innate moral sense and a practical meritocracy were somehow in profound contradiction with efficient, rational structures. The freeman or gild concept had been a primitive version of participation via citizenship. The rational concept was participation by membership in an elite.

That the idea of government by elected representatives benefited at all from the various revolutions of reason must have been as much a surprise to the revolutionaries as to the kings. In fact, the new elites resisted step by step not simply the widening of the right to vote but the very principle of democratic participation. The new rational elites spoke of justice but defined the right to participate in the process by narrow criteria, such as privileged knowledge or levels of property ownership. The practical effect of this was that the Americans didn't reach universal suffrage, even for white males, until 1860; almost a century after the revolution. The Swiss beat them by twelve years. Denmark came third in 1866; then Norway in 1898. Most of the other modern elites, including the British, succeeded in resisting universal male suffrage until 1918 or 1919 -- that is, until the return of the mistreated and angry armies from the first modern rational war made further resistance impossible.

Contemporary language doesn't equip us to distinguish between meritocracy and expertise. The two ideas have been actively confused, although they are actually in profound opposition. Whatever its flaws, the underlying assumptions of meritocracy are open-ended and embracing. They presume generosity, even if this presumption is often betrayed. The underlying assumptions of expertise and specialized knowledge are, on the other hand, elitist. They presume superiority and the privileged possession of answers. They promote both social barriers and political exclusion. It was the popular belief that a meritocracy could be enlarged through the simple redefinition of citizenship, which created the ongoing pressure for increased democracy. And it was the naturally self-dividing, structuralist and elitist tendencies of the rational elites which resisted this pressure and continues to undermine democracy's accomplishments.

France was the one exception to the rule of a long, slow battle leading eventually to one man, one vote. Almost from the beginning of the republican idea in power (1792), universal male suffrage was one of the qualifying characteristics. As a result, it appeared and disappeared with each succeeding revolution and coup d'etat. The underlying message, which the rational elites were able to reinforce by holding themselves back just enough to suggest disapproval of the democratic process without openly opposing it, was that democracy should be associated with instability and political self-interest. Under the Third and Fourth Republics, this disassociation grew to be the continuous background music of national life. Rational administration, on the other hand -- whether provided by a dictatorship, a liberal authoritarian leadership, or a strong bureaucratic management -- was to be associated with fair, efficient and responsive government. The two Napoleonic experiences and that of Louis Philippe were there as early reminders.

This essential conflict between the new elites and the democratic process has never been publicly clarified in any of the Western nations. From the late eighteenth century on, the elected representative has been the odd man out in a world in which knowledge and expertise were meant to be guarantors of truth. At first glance this does not appear to be the case. Repeated constitutions have declared the rule of the popular will and guaranteed decision-making powers to elected assemblies. In some countries -- those of British origin and Italy and Germany, for example - parliaments have almost absolute legal power. In others -- such as the United States and France -- power is divided among an elected executive, courts and the assemblies. But those assemblies are nevertheless legally decisive in the decision-making process. In other words, the people's representative has been inserted into the middle of the governing process as the supreme arbiter between executive action and expert administration on the one hand and the people on the other.

But it was clear from the beginning that those burdened with, the responsibilities of practical power -- the executive, the administrative elites, the courts -- found the elected representative annoying and gratuitous. Given a chance, they actually rendered him gratuitous. The Napoleonic movement was early proof of that, as the forces of efficient, competent and Heroic power swept away the slowly burgeoning responsibilities of the elected. There was little protest from the legal experts, engineers, scientists, soldiers or public servants as Napoleon removed the democratic powers of the people. Nor did they disassociate themselves from his obsession with educating and organizing new elites, which went hand in hand with his lack of interest in training the general population. An alliance between a populist authoritarian executive and an efficient body of experts eliminated the time wasted with elected bodies. With a few exceptions, such as Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, even the intellectuals remained silent, because they had, after all, formulated the idea of the rational state.

And after each subsequent authoritarian coup d'etat, the rational elites pressed forward again to serve men like Louis Philippe and Napoleon III. These regimes devoted themselves to developing commercial and industrial infrastructures, modernizing city centres and constructing transportation systems. In fairness to Louis Philippe's more middle class regime, education was also reformed to take in a broader sweep of people. The emphasis was nevertheless elsewhere and Napoleon Ill's rebuilding of Paris, under his planner-Prefect, Baron Georges Haussmann, was a prime example of the new, authoritarian elite phenomenon. For seventeen years one hundred thousand workmen tore down the core of medieval Paris and replaced it with an infrastructure of grand, wide and straight avenues. Thousands of architects, engineers, government administrators, corporations, bankers and speculators were employed full-time. Slums were replaced with solid, handsome buildings. The new sewer and clean water systems were part of the improvements, thus bringing cholera epidemics to an end. In the process, 27, 500 houses were destroyed and the evicted families left to fend for themselves. Theirs was a long-term, not a temporary problem, because the Haussmann buildings were designed not for them, but for the new middleclass elites who identified with the regime and profited from it. The poor Bed towards unplanned, uncontrolled slums on the edges of the city. These turned into the red belt around Paris, a Communist stronghold for a century. [6]

It is important to notice that the benefits, powers and relevant state structures gained by the elites were neither removed nor diminished when democracy returned in 1871. That is a general rule which can be observed in action again and again, in country after country, over the last two centuries.

Imperial grandeur and the desire to modernize were behind the unprecedented eviction and rebuilding campaign in Paris. So was crude political power, as the wide boulevards and avenues -- designed for cavalry charges and cannon shots -- cut straight through the rabbit warrens where popular uprisings had been common and difficult to contain. Emile Zola described in his novels the misery of the city under the Second Empire, little more than a century ago. For example from Money, a scene set in 1867 in one of the northern slums crowded with the evicted:

Overcome with fear, Madame Caroline focused on the courtyard, a wasteland broken up with potholes, which the accumulated garbage had turned into one large cesspool. They threw everything there, since there was no pit for the purpose. It was a single great dung heap, growing all the time, poisoning the air.... Unsure of her footing, she tried to avoid the debris of vegetables and bones, while examining the habitations on either side, sort of animal lairs, indescribable, a single story high. half falling down, dilapidated and not propped up with any sort of support. Some had only tar paper for roofs. Many had no door, so she could see the black  hole of a cave within, out of which came a sickening breath of misery. Families of eight, ten people were squeezed into these charnel houses, often without a bed; the men, the women, the children jammed in, causing each other to rot, like soiled fruit, left from childhood to the most monstrous promiscuity. [7]

But the alliance between authoritarian power and rational elites was by no means limited to France. The Napoleonic movement -- that of the first Napoleon -- spread throughout Europe in similar form. Populist aspirations were used everywhere to overthrow tired regimes in Italy, Germany and so on. The new elites of Trieste and Udine welcomed the change as their French equivalents had. When the authoritarian reality became clear, they were not discouraged from collaboration, because the building, organizing and training were already underway. That the vast majority of Napoleon's Grand Army -- the one that died in the snows of Russia -- was not French should be taken as a sign of the quasi- religious status which modern organization had attained.

This governing alliance grew and spread throughout the nineteenth century. Flagrant signs of it were to be seen wherever an authoritarian executive had won out over representative democracy. Ridding himself of Bismarck in 1890, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany had effectively abrogated responsible government by 1897. For two more decades he was able to concentration the construction of an empire, an economy and a military force with the full cooperation of a highly advanced social and administrative structure. Mussolini came to power in 1922 by threatening violence against a weakened democracy. By 1928 he had eliminated Italian political parties. During the more than two decades of his dictatorship, the administrative and economic elites kept the machinery of the state running, pleased -- as the Fascist cliche went -- to be making the trains run on time. The same was true in Nazi Germany, as Albert Speer, Hitler's minister of armaments, so convincingly described in his memoirs. It's interesting to note the lengths to which he went in order to paint himself and therefore all other technocrats as the victims of the system: "Technology is depriving mankind more and more of self-responsibility." [8] In other words he was attempting to remove the element of moral choice from his actions. A great deal has been written about the. collaboration of the French technical and bureaucratic leadership from 1940 to 1944. And, indeed, had Britain been occupied after 1940, there is nothing except local chauvinism to suggest that the reaction would have been different.

But in all these cases the principal motivation was not specific ideological commitment to the authoritarian government in question, nor was it a lack of courage. To belong to a national elite was to serve the state, and the state wraps into its mythology everything from civil servants, scientists and judges to bank presidents and industrialists. Only the oddballs are capable of opposition. Most leaders of the French resistance had shown signs of what a rational man would call "peculiar behaviour" long before 1939.

As for the elected man, in the eyes of the new experts everywhere, he was grasping, self- interested, temperamental and capable of appealing to the worst in the populace in order to prolong his mandate. This attitude was implicit from the beginning of the rational argument. Francis Bacon's reference to "depraved politics" or, a little later, Adam Smith's to "that insidious and crafty animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician" have turned into a truism among administrators and specialists of the twentieth century. And so, each time there has been a renewal of the Napoleonic-Expert alliance -- and there have been many over the last 150 years -- most experts have not seemed particularly upset by the arrangement.

Thanks to these incidents and to the emergency governing powers required in countries threatened by new Napoleonic figures, the administrative religion with its sects of speed and efficiency was given a great boost. It has continued to strengthen and spread so that state structures have gradually reduced the representatives and their parliaments back to what they were before the Age of Reason -- consultative bodies which let off steam, but can't really get in the way on any regular basis. They do meet more regularly than in the seventeenth century and are treated with great formal honour, and in major crises they are sometimes called upon to' play essential roles, But that has always been the case. The modem executive, like the king before him, must turn to parliament when the ship of state is in danger. The American Congress appears, at first glance, to be the exception to this decline, but its powers have always been intentionally more political than policy shaping, immediate than long term, negative than creative.

It isn't surprising in this historical context that rational structures, moral beliefs and representative government have been confused as one in people's minds. Nor that today, while structures reign supreme, man's sense of right and wrong is in frenzied confusion. And that democracy in the West, after a gradual rise over 150 years, is in sharp decline. Not that there are fewer elections or fewer politicians or less talk of politics. There has never been so much voting and campaigning and talking throughout the developed world. But the direct effect of citizen politics upon policy and administration seems extremely tenuous. Parliaments have become colourful circuses and to the extent that they attempt to exercise power, it is increasingly as the public arm of lobby groups.

None of this would have been possible had the people themselves not been seduced by the religion of reason. Once they had accepted that such things as expertise, administration and efficiency were irrefutable values, they couldn't help but look upon their own assemblies -- chosen by their own vote -- as old-fashioned, talkative and inefficient gatherings. These were no longer places where all good citizens would aspire to serve for a time. Instead, the people took to watching their ministers dash schizophrenically about, lost between their attempts to become both administrators and stars. As administrators, they assimilate them- selves with their bureaucrats in order to prove that the result of the democratic process is rational action. From there they somersault over and ever deeper into the light show of personality politics. They learn to project their looks, the whiteness of their teeth, their sporting abilities, their love for their wives and their ability to create fully formed children. Elected to set policy and govern, they flip frenetically from attempts at bureaucratic administration to embarrassing and irrelevant displays of "personality." Whatever policymaking aim they do manage to bring to power seems to wither away with experience.

***

An example as straightforward as sanitation demonstrates that the triangular coalition of moral sense, democracy, and rational structure took a long time to establish itself against the selfish interests of arbitrary power. Decades of revolutions, coups, crippling strikes, civil violence and civil wars testify to the difficulty of this general advance. With each victory, the new structures built up their defences and stocked up their weapons for the next advance. Even so it wasn't until the massacres of 1914-18 had drained away all the self-assurance of the old beliefs and the Russian Revolution had struck fear into even the most retrograde minds that the politicians and civil servants were able to begin seriously putting in place their new utopia. From that point on everything moved very fast. So fast that no one noticed the coming apart of the triangular coalition.

The widespread popular sense that moral standards, democracy and rational action were a holy trinity remained clear so long as the civil servants constituted a different class from the politicians, with each bringing different skills to the process of reform. Men from a greater and greater variety of social origins had been finding their way into the political process on all sides of the spectrum, while bureaucracies throughout the Western world were filled with relatively similar men from the middle and upper-middle classes. This marked the civil service as a quieter, almost altruistic place from which to advance society. The politicians, on the other hand, came together in a wild marketplace of ideological and financial ambitions to hammer out what to do and how to convince the populace to accept it, without giving much thought as to how it would be done.

But these characteristics began to change rapidly. As the bureaucracies consolidated the power which went with responsible government and social initiatives, so they attracted much more ambitious people. And once the rational system was in place, it was bound to attract an increasing number of candidates who were less interested in policy ideas and more interested in structures -- interested, that is, in managing them, controlling them, playing them and acquiring the substantial power which automatically came with them.

These systems had in a flash become as widespread as the church structures during the heyday of European Christianity. They offered a detailed regularity which reached the entire population in a way not seen since the Roman Empire. Children stood up all across certain countries at precisely the same moment to sing their national anthem. In some nations they did the same dictation or precise history lesson on the same day, hour and probably minute in every village, town and city. Taxes were evaluated on standard forms. Animals were slaughtered according to national standards. Provincial barriers were broken down and, with the exception of a few peculiar cases like Canada and Australia, were destroyed absolutely.

Illiteracy was on the retreat, social programs were being financed, and rotten meat was being kept off the market. By fairly objective standards, the Western world was becoming a better place to live. And the programs went on multiplying in the flood of reform, so long frustrated and now released to spill over borders from country to country.

But the very success of reform was gradually favouring bureaucrats with a talent for management and blocking the way for those who offered ideas and commitment. By the early 1960s,the managers were setting the pace. This did not appear to be a betrayal of the idea of rational government. Rather, it was a fulfillment. And the structure now stood on its own, virtually freed from political constraints by its very size, complexity and professionalism. There was no place for a moral sense in such a sophisticated organization. The general assumption -- now two centuries old -- was that to be rational was in itself to be moral. As for the democratic procedure, it seemed increasingly inefficient and unprofessional. To debate policy in a public, populist manner was somehow flashy, embarrassing, pretentious. Policy emerged best and logically from professional analysis. Amateurs invited the release of superficiality, misguided emotions and doubtful ambitions.

The servants of the state -- relatively recent servants -- now faced the same problem that had faced the Jesuits after Ignatius's death. They were sworn to our contemporary equivalents of poverty and humility. Indeed, if you wanted riches and fame, you went into business or politics. But the reality was that they now had power and worked with the powerful. As with the Jesuits, humility was bound to disappear in the flush of success. It wasn't long before senior civil servants were paid more than politicians. And in the case of state corporations, the senior positions had to pay at industry levels in order to get industry "quality." So bureaucrats, who were one step removed from the heart of power, were paid more than bureaucrats at the centre, who, in turn, were paid more than their political masters. As with the Jesuits, the order was rich and its members lived within the order. Not that the bureaucrats profited from the funds of others. But in the process of administering this enormous system the life of a senior bureaucrat could become that of a comfortable and sometimes a rich man. They travelled, ate, met and gave orders as, a few years before, only a rich man could have done.

At the same time a popular belief was growing that government bureaucracies did not deliver. Endless Stories of inefficiency and indolence became part of public debate. There was the banal wrench for which the Pentagon paid thousands. And the English child sent by a state social worker back to parents known to have beaten her. The parents then beat her to death. In the subsequent. inquiry, the social worker was exonerated thanks to the support of her Local Authority. And the five thousand Canadians registered for unemployment payments who, during a mail strike, did not appear in person to collect their cheques, thus revealing that the names were fraudulent. These tales of woe go from the tragic to the grandiose. For example, it was the British Exchequer, not its chancellor, which managed to keep Britain out of the European Monetary Snake when it was first set up.

Of course, the sum total of all the failures is small potatoes when compared to the size of the modern state. But each little snag acts as a red flag, alienating the population from their public servants and driving onward the search for ever more sophisticated structures which, theoretically, will eliminate all risk of failure.

Again and again new cabinet ministers, provoked by these institutional difficulties, throw themselves into the conquest of their departments. They set out to master the machine, to understand it, to make it function better, to make it responsive to the slightest public wish. They pore over organization charts, program commitments, hiring standards, reporting lines. They are determined to master the process by becoming part of it. And by the end of their long working day they are physically and mentally exhausted.

Needless to say the minister in question hasn't had a moment to think about policy and execution. The administrative game, however, is not without its attractions. In the absence of reflection there is an addictive level of excitement which fills the day. The minister comes to feel that he is running an important organization. He begins to identify with his extremely competent employees. He becomes what is known as a good minister -- which now means someone who is good with his department. What he has actually become is an honorary deputy minister. A superfluous undersecretary.

This bureaucratization of ministers has become so prevalent that in France the bureaucrats have become the ministers, thus completing the unity of structure inherent in the rational approach. There is only one real government class, political and bureaucratic, and that is usually entered through the Ecole Nationale d'Administration.

The public everywhere, along with most of the politicians, have accepted the "administrative" criterion as the right one for judging their ministers. However, an hour spent with any contemporary officeholder will illustrate the effect that this system has on his ability to think. His desk is littered with the endless detail of briefing material. When he has read that, more will take its place. His signature is awaited on endless memos and letters. In each of these he takes personal responsibility for every gas pump in the country or whatever the subject may happen to be. Deputies, undersecretaries, assistant deputies, advisers, assistants run in constantly to seek his advice on ·an oil leak off the West Coast, or on a request for funds from the East Side Modern Dance Troupe, or how to cover up the escape from the country of a paroled criminal. Not only does a "good" minister have no mental or physical time for policy, he also becomes an apologist for his departmental employees.

Perhaps a minister should not attempt to know or to understand every detail of his employees' activities. Perhaps he should not administer his department. Perhaps he should not work long hours. Perhaps he should keep his distance from the work of his department and thus allow his employees to be judged upon their results. This would be hard on some civil servants, but it would also benefit the most capable. The minister might not have on the tip of his tongue the answer to every question. Would the world suffer for that? He might also have the time and be more often in the frame of mind, necessary to consider policy and to reflect upon its execution. In other words, it might be worth asking whether, since the politician and the bureaucrat have different responsibilities, they would not each do better if they did their own job and kept a certain distance from one another.

Instead, the co-opting of ministers by their departments has become standard procedure -- so standard that the ministerial function has lost much of its power. With that power has gone the essential role of cabinet discussion and therefore, in both parliamentary and executive democracies, of cabinet power. And all of this has happened without the political class admitting publicly that there has been any change.

***

In response to this ministerial crippling, the politicians have developed two tools of government. The first is a web of ministerial-level interdepartmental committees. These are meant to increase information flow, discussion and efficiency. This is supposed to help policy debates break through the barriers of departmental bureaucracy. The second is the explosion in the number of direct advisers to the head of government. These advisers, usually brought in from outside, take on the policy responsibilities which are properly those of cabinet ministers. They have no line function. No legal responsibilities. They are simply the president or the prime minister's adviser on, say, foreign policy. Everyone knows that the adviser alone has constant access to the president on that subject. Everyone understands that ideas can be put forward and problems solved by dealing directly with the adviser and avoiding the relevant minister and his department.

Both the committees and the advisers have altered profoundly the nature of representative government. And yet they have come about without any public debate and, of course, without any constitutional change. We are now pretending to be legally governed one way, when we are in fact governed another.

The interdepartmental committees attempt to treat structural problems with yet more structure. There are cabinet committee systems, for example, which group ministers by subject into smaller sections. The idea is to bring together in a single room every aspect of an important policy development area. Intelligent and complete discussions should then be possible without the overbearing inflexibility of full cabinet meetings. And departmental rivalries should be eliminated. In most countries there are a good dozen of these committees focused on such sectors as economic development or security or social policy. There will also be a theoretically all-powerful inner committee called something like Priorities and Planning or the National Security Council. Many have their own permanent secretariats. This gives them the consistency necessary to duplicate the cabinet itself by simply cutting up the pie of government responsibility in a different way.

These committees were supposed to free ministers from their departmental bureaucratic restraints, thus enabling them to think and act. Instead, by moving policy from the general interests of the cabinet to the specialized interests of the committee, they have shifted debate from political, social and moral priorities to that of concentrated expertise. And expertise is the area in which deputy ministers always outshine ministers.

In Britain the minister arrives in. the committee primed by his own civil servants, carrying under his arm his thick, departmental briefing books and accompanied by at least one of his own bureaucrats -- the one most expert in the subject of the day. The expert is there to whisper in his ear. The results of this situation are so blatantly obvious that a highly popular comic television series, "Yes, Minister," has been built around the minister-civil servant relationship. In Canada the expert is actually permitted to join in the ministerial debate. The civil servants, in any case, have already had lower-level meetings with civil servants from the other participating departments to work out the matter at hand before the ministers even enter the committee room.

In this context of ministerial debate structured to focus primarily on expertise, the ministers are thus at a severe disadvantage. Policy has, in effect, been made to conform to administrative priorities. The decisions of these committees are then presented to full cabinet with a recommendation. There the concerned and, compared to their colleagues, more or less expert ministers will speak as a single voice to the unconcerned. Only a nonexpert minister prone to suicide would speak up in opposition to the committee's recommendation. All the facts will be marshaled on the other side. A nonexpert minister could invoke principle, moral instinct, or common sense, but all these are suspect when faced by rational truth. He would also be inviting massed opposition to his own policies in the future. Thus cabinet committee decisions, which are fundamentally bureaucratic, are preemptive strikes on the real decision-making powers of the. full cabinet. They weaken still further ministerial government. The extent to which the various ministerial committee decisions are themselves determined by preemptive strikes from the civil service is illustrated. by the fact that there are dozens and dozens of nonministerial interdepartmental committees preparing the decisions to be "taken" at the interministerial committees. The direction in which this restructuring leads can be seen in Britain, where the very existence of the committees is secret, as is membership on any or all of them. Thus the primary and essential level of governmental decision making has been totally removed from visibility.

The United States differs only in that the cabinet is not responsible to the electors. The inner cabinet role was taken by the National Security Council for the first time under President Kennedy and was first perverted by its servants when Henry Kissinger was the adviser or chief servant. The subcommittees of the council function much the way cabinet committees do. Again, if the adviser is strong, then the unofficial nature of this structure, like the British version, gives it even more of an administrative stranglehold on a theoretically political process.

Beyond these parallel structures, there have been endless cure-all committees guaranteed to bring unresponsive bureaucracies into line with political objectives. Planning, programming and budgeting systems have been succeeded by public expenditure surveys, to say nothing of policy analysis and review or management by objectives or zero-based budgeting or cash limits and expenditure envelopes. [9]

None of these committees, cabinet or otherwise, has succeeded in doing what it was set up to do. That is, none of them has given fresh impetus to government. They have simply weighted it down further. As Beaverbrook complained during World War. II: "Committees are the enemy of production."

***

The other tool used by political leaders to motivate their stalled government structures is the personal adviser. These individuals occupy the space between the leader and the structure. Advisers are unelected and nonresponsible. They are neither the people's representatives nor the people's servants. They are a republican version of the king's men -- a civilian version of the praetorian guard. They represent an attempt by the head of government to get around government structures.

The Western praetorian guard is most visible -- which does not necessarily mean most powerful -- in the United States, where, under president, after president the controversy surrounding their advisers has grown. Sometimes these disputes and scandals have had to do with initiatives taken or orders given without proper authority. Often they have to do with corruption. Or with adventures into the worlds of security and defence. When the President's chief of staff is incompetent -- as Hamilton Jordan was under President Carter and Donald Regan under President Reagan -- or touched by scandal -- as H. R. Haldeman was under President Nixon or John Sununu under President Bush -- their power does not necessarily immediately shrink away. They exist only through the president's image and so they must first be perceived by the president as a political liability. When that happens the entire entourage will turn on them in a self-protective reflex.

People now assume that one of the central focuses of our attention on the American republic has always been the president's staff. But this is incorrect. Cabinet members were still carrying out their full functions in the 1960s. The loss of power to the White House staff began in earnest under President Kennedy. He was obsessed by what he was convinced were the obstructionist powers of the civil service establishment and the stultifying effects of all formal meetings, particularly committee meetings. He therefore called the cabinet together as little as possible because he thought this "to be unnecessary and involve a waste of time ... All these problems Cabinet Ministers deal with are very specialized." [10] The cabinet never met to discuss policy. Policy was dealt with in small gatherings at which he and his advisers dominated. Apart from a few cabinet secretaries like Robert McNamara, who was prized by the White House and in any case could hold his own with anyone, this meetingless system of government meant that all power lay with the President and his advisers. Put another way, denied any regular relationship with the President, the secretaries and their departments were powerless. Foreign policy was made by Kennedy with his National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, a professor from Harvard. In effect, they prepared the way for Henry Kissinger's usurpation of constitutional power from the same position of National Security Adviser eight years later. Bundy and the White House staff undermined Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, by making fun of him behind the scenes, particularly because he liked meetings. [11] This parallels exactly Kissinger's more vicious undermining of then Secretary of State William Rogers.

The Kennedy method succeeded in that it gave him the personal power he wanted. However it seems to have permanently damaged the power of the cabinet and under successive presidents less dominant than himself, it has given uncontrolled power to the presidential advisers. This imbalance went to an all-time extreme under President Nixon, when the combination of White House power and isolation turned government towards conspiratorial and criminal acts.

Jimmy Carter, during his run for the White House, wrote that he would reinstitute "Cabinet government to prevent the excesses of the past."  Never would "members of the White House staff dominate or act in a superior position to the members of our cabinet." [12] But in the middle of his term he spent forty-eight hours firing or forcing the retirement of five out of twelve members of his cabinet. His principal reason was their inability to get along with his own personal advisers. The victims, including Michael Blumenthal at Treasury, Joseph Califano at Health, Education and Welfare, Brock Adams at Transportation and James Schlesinger at Energy, were among the most successful and most aggressive members of the cabinet. As presidential chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan immediately went on television to deny publicly that these changes were made to give greater power to the White House. "It is a question of competence," he explained. At the same time, Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was widely admired for his successful battle to become the nation's chief foreign policy architect. [13] As for the presidency of Ronald Reagan, it took the praetorian guard phenomenon to its logical conclusion. An aging head of state endowed with a limited IQ and a short attention span inevitably allowed many of the powers of a monarchical position to slip into the hands of his staff and, in this case, of his wife.

While it is true that cabinet secretaries are the unelected nominees of the president, they are nevertheless publicly appointed, after congressional hearings, to oversee an area of public responsibility. They are thus charged and vetted by the people's representatives to ensure that the nation's interests are served. The president's personal advisers, even the national security adviser, do not have to pass through congressional hearings. They have no public responsibilities. They are not accountable to the state. In general they are merely the president's sycophants.

Of course, American presidents have always had personal advisers, hangers-on and courtesans. The constitutional role of a republican monarch with limited powers made this inevitable. However, it is the continuing difficulty successive presidents have faced in making modern government work which has turned the members of their court into a virtual praetorian guard. To suggest that this was a conscious choice on someone's part would be to simplify falsely where the realities of power, personality and governing ensure complication. The reality is that over the thirty-year period since Kennedy, presidents -- who were equipped with very different levels and types of intelligence, political skill, self- confidence and political beliefs -- have all been rapidly closed in behind a wall of personal servants.

Praetorian guards have always had one characteristic in common. Because they are themselves beyond the constitutional and political laws, they have no effective rules to regulate their behaviour towards each other, their leader or the outside world. In the place of rules there is the privilege of sweet-scented anarchy. The battle for survival inside any palace -- in this case, the White House -- therefore, dictates that each adviser constantly struggle for more personal power or be eliminated. The difficulties between Nancy Reagan and her husband's Chief of Staff, Donald Regan, may have had a certain gossipy drama about them, but they were little different from those waged by Hamilton Jordan under President Carter or Henry Kissinger and H. R. Haldeman under President Nixon. One of the truisms proper to the growing power of presidential advisers is that although brought in to help stimulate a frustrating government system, they invariably end up undermining it.

The tendency throughout the West is the same. Mrs. Thatcher's personal economic adviser, Professor Alan Walters, forcing the resignation of Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, in 1989, for example. Or there was her use of a civil servant, Bernard Ingham, as both head of government information services -- an administrative position -- and as her personal political spokesman. In 1990 she sent her foreign policy adviser, Charles Powell, a civil servant, to a small private lunch organized to persuade the owner of a sympathetic newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, that it ought to give the government greater support. [14]

Brian Mulroney has managed to confuse the political with the administrative in an indiscriminate manner. He puts political friends into the civil service policy bureau -- the Privy Council Office -- and public servants into his personal political office. This culminated with a senior civil servant, Derek Burney, becoming his private secretary - that is, his political chief of staff. President Mitterrand's bevy of advisers for a long time were a reserve pen for the new elites. They moved directly from the Elysee to senior bureaucratic and political jobs, as if they were above and 'beyond the constituted powers of the cabinet. Increasingly the American president uses his advisers in the same way. When he wants to strengthen his control over a cabinet department, he moves someone out of his praetorian guard into the ministerial position. President Nixon catapulted Henry Kissinger from National Security Adviser to Secretary of State. President Reagan converted his personal Chief of Staff, James Baker, into Secretary of the Treasury.

This appearance of praetorian guards around elected presidents and prime ministers tells us two things. First, these leaders do not believe they will get what they need from the state structures unless they have what amounts to personal strongmen to ensure it. Second, heads of government no longer believe it necessary to treat representative assemblies as their primary interlocutor or as the source of political legitimacy. In other words, our leaders are returning to a guarded version of the original Napoleonic-rational elites alliance.

***

The rational elites have pushed the cause of modernization and efficiency with such assurance and persistence that any failure must be blamed on having gone neither far nor fast enough. Their definition of governance has become the norm. In response the people's representatives have been trying desperately to recapture their place at the heart .of public power by modernizing themselves. But how can a populist assembly render itself efficient?

The great difficulty for elected representatives is that their chief tool is the word. They need it to argue ideas and to decide on action. But in a rational system of government, the unstructured word is a waste of time. What counts are executive action and effective administration. Even the concept of leadership now turns on those same skills. As for the role of the assemblies. it is increasingly believed by the citizenry that "Talk is air. Debate accomplishes nothing. All they do is sit around and talk."

Much of the responsibility for the decline of the word, as Marshal McLuhan pointed out, can be laid at the feet of electronic technology. While in our real lives we are unable to escape the cage of systems, our senses have been freed to embrace nonlinear imagination in new ways. Seeing and hearing so much more now, we have less reason to talk. We may even find it increasingly difficult to give an order to our words, because the images we watch and the sounds we hear are more often integral than sequential.

For example, those who have grown up since the arrival of television tend to watch five or more programs at once, holding a remote-control device and flipping channels every few seconds. The viewers know the ritual of these programs and so have no need to watch the step-by-step unfolding of events. Instead, they switch from program to program, spreading themselves throughout the whole.

Television is only one of the means of immediate communication which surround us. Sounds and images are everywhere. In elevators, bus terminals, cinemas, airplanes. There is scarcely a moment of electronic silence in the day. What meaning can organized debate have in a civilization which is able to transmit images to receptors implanted on an individual's retina? Is it surprising, then, that senators, deputies, members and representatives feel trapped by the weight of classical debate -- a means of group reflection whose parameters were more or less set in the city-state of Athens?

And yet they and we are wrong to assimilate the intellectual revolution, which electronics may be bringing, with the doctrine of the rational elites. The former is new and, like the brain or indeed like classical debate, easily escapes the chains of structure. The rational approach, on the other hand, is now severely dated by its dependence on complex structures to hold and direct the minds and emotions of the citizen.

Nevertheless technology and reason have somehow been thrown together in both modern philosophy and popular mythology as if they were children of the same family. And this has increased our pessimism about the democratic process.

Citizens once gave their elected members great support against the nonelected, or executive, authorities. Now the member stands in isolation between the public and those who govern. The technocrats have already converted their ministers to the essential nature of efficiency in government. The ministers arrive in Parliament, or before congressional committees, dressed up in their efficient clothes. The elected representatives have great difficulty resisting the assumption that ministers should be judged on their effectiveness rather than on their policies. The forces of expertise and power insist that running things properly is the essence of modernity.

Uninformed policy discussions are amateurish and a waste of time, and so such debates are now among the least important functions of an assembly. For some time ordinary members have been rising to speak to virtually empty Houses. However, until recently, the minister whose bill was under debate stayed in his place to hear what was said and to be ready to reply to pertinent attacks. In most assemblies the minister now usually stays away. Until recently when the leader of a party rose to speak, members of other parties came to listen, partially out of respect, partially out of interest. Now the other parties purposely empty the House, as if to deny the opposing leader any credibility.

In place of the debating of policy, some sort of Question Period has become the most important moment of the day. It is used mainly to ask ministers questions about specific administrative failures. This falls in with the now-received wisdom that a modern elected representative will give great importance to judging a minister on his efficiency. The resulting test of wills is potentially also the minister's moment of public glory. To perform well he must know about every bridge and way station. He must have a ready answer to explain why any incident mentioned is not the fault of his department -- that is to say, of his bureaucrats.

The pressure to conform to this doctrine of structure and method being what it is, these assemblies have applied to themselves the same standards they apply to ministers. And so a gaze back over the last half century of parliamentary reform shows that, in every country, almost every reform was aimed at greater speed to ensure faster passage of more laws and smoother handling of government business.

But is the nature of civilization "speed"? Or is it "consideration"? Any animal can rush around a corral four times a day. Only a human being can consciously oblige himself to go slowly in order to consider whether he is doing the right thing, doing it the right way, or ought in fact to be doing something else. The conscious decision to move slowly is not in contradiction to speed. A human can also decide to stop for a time, or to go very fast for a specific reason, for a specific period of time. Speed and efficiency are not in themselves signs of intelligence or capability or correctness. They do not carry with them any moral value. They don't necessarily make any social contribution. The most horrifying, violent. moments of the twentieth century have centred around regimes wedded to efficiency and to speed. On the limited administrative level of the delivery of services, these two characteristics can, of course, be useful, but they are not in themselves manifestations of civilization.

The principal effect of constant efficiency assaults on Western assemblies has been to discourage reflection, if not to make it actually impossible. These places have become little more than shunting yards for legislation on its way through. Such a change had to have an impact on how the public would see its elected representatives. Suddenly they appeared to play no visibly useful role.

It follows that the assemblies have gradually altered what they require of their members. Tradition had it that elected representatives arrived with interests -- defence of local concerns, consideration of national policy, support of friends or party and personal ambition. The reality was that an average member might have one or two of these, while other members would have others. Even the most local of politicians was at least an imperfect representative of real people. And all together they would constitute the assembly's mind, which was a reflection of the people's. In that sense the public assembly was electronic from the beginning. It was nonlinear and irrational because, at a single seating, it represented the whole. And that dense mass of national representation was the only thing that could force the racing structures of government to stop or at least to slow up in order to consider the public interest with greater care.

Now that assemblies are no longer places to think or from which to rise to great heights, most members fall into one of two groups -- the devotees of local politics on the one hand, and those who arrive, ready for power, on the other. As for seeking to serve in an elected opposition, the contemporary elites see little point in this. A man on the rise is almost embarrassed to find himself formally and publicly against the constituted authorities. In the rational state, power is everything. Only losers oppose. Only marginal outsiders are proud to be on the outside.

The arrival in force of a breed of politicians who respond to the narrow focus on power should not be taken as proof that politics are dominated by egotism or venality. Rather, it confirms that, in the minds of both the citizenry and the expert elites, the administrative process has melded into one with the decision-making process. As early as the 1950s, Francois Mitterrand set out his central rule for contemporary public life: "As for the politician, there is only one possible ambition: to govern." [15] He entered his first ministry in 1944 and was still in place nearly half a century later.

Curiously enough, the primary purpose of the democratic process was never intended to be the election of a government, although one way and another governments did come to reflect the makeup of the assembly. The essential element was the proper constituting of a chamber of public reflection -- a sort of national club -- which would produce decisions in the public interest and control the government. Now, in most countries, the constituting of an assembly is little more than a mathematical process which leads to the immediate conferral of absolute power on a government. The same mathematical process is repeated once every four or five or seven years. This is in effect an elective monarchy.

Most Westerners quite happily embrace the American mythology, according to which the United States is the country and system of the future. But the United States has been the future for more than two centuries. The first of the revolutionary democracies, like the first television or the first mass-produced car, is now the most old-fashioned. It isn't surprising, that to protect themselves against the abuses of an eighteenth-century monarchy, elective or otherwise, they had from the beginning created their system of checks and balances. These included two assemblies, a strong court and the electoral college, which still technically chooses the president.

The American presidency, at its best, could have been an element in the evolution towards a healthy democratic process. At its worst it was an elective monarchy, only marginally different from the kings it sought to replace; absolute monarchs, who were constantly being nipped at the heels by a sophisticated mob of special interests -- some legally constituted but most from a great and varied pack of courtesans. The presidency has moved toward this worst-case scenario. And all the other democracies, caught in the logic of rational government, have slipped in the same direction. Just as the end of cycles somehow come to resemble their beginnings, so we now find ourselves faced by the problems of the mid-eighteenth century. The more evolved and careful forms of democracy seem out of place. The American model, on the other hand, seems perfectly adapted to this civilization of power worshiping, decision by courtesanage, limited public participation and high levels of personal corruption.

The amputation of the real power of representative assemblies amounts to a major change in our civilization's view of itself. Curiously enough for a people who have devoted so much of the last century to exploring the individual's inner self, we have been overtaken by this change in a largely unconscious manner. It is as if a central nerve or muscle had been surgically removed from the body of the civilization, resulting in something like a lobotomy.

The emasculation of the Roman Senate under Augustus inaugurated the disintegration of Roman society. Ahead lay prosperity and glory greater than the strict, simple, tough Romans had ever known or imagined. But all that glory was built on a declining civil body. The "bread and circuses" of the later empire are generally equated with imperial degeneracy and a drift by the rural population to the city, following the imperial decision to import rather than to bother growing wheat. This is true in the same way that the British Parliament's repeal of the Corn Laws combined with the importing of cheap Indian cotton brought on a short imperial flurry followed by collapse. Or that the contemporary American decision to manufacture as much as possible abroad with cheap labour, while concentrating on services at home, is undermining their own civilization. But the point is that, with the decline of Roman society's internal mechanisms, the emperors were obliged to distract their citizens from the fact that they had become irrelevant to their own civilization.

This is a very simple conundrum. Societies grow into systems. The systems require management and are therefore increasingly wielded, like a tool or a weapon, by those who have power. The rest of the population is still needed to do specific things. But the citizens are not needed to contribute to the form or direction of the society. The more "advanced" the civilization, the more irrelevant the citizen becomes.

We are not quite so advanced as that, but neither are we so far off. Our professional elites have spent the last half century arguing over management methods, as if these were the only proper areas of political interest. If we could bring ourselves to think of reason as merely one of several management techniques and as something separate from the democratic process, our understanding of the situation would be quite different. In truth, if there are solutions to our confusion over government, they lie in the democratic, not the management, process. And essential to this is the reactivation or destreamlining of the assemblies. The reestablishment of true popular gatherings is one of the few easy actions available to the citizen. All it would require is a realization in the public mind that the decision-making process -- that is, the process of creating national policy -- is profoundly different from the administrative process. The two have no characteristics in common. One is organic and reflective. The other is linear and structured. One attempts to waste time usefully in order to understand and to build consensus. The other aims at speed and delivery. One is done of the people. The other is done for the people.

A great deal would follow naturally from the reestablishment of this distinction. Citizens would take a greater interest in their assembly and this would give courage to the representatives. They, in turn, would feel strong enough to establish ,a more independent relationship with the government, even in the parliamentary context. This would remind the ministers that they themselves have been victimized and made to feel permanently inadequate by the imposed religion of administrative competence. Only the most insecure of public men could believe that there is real value in mastering briefing books, covering for administrative error and living in a world of banal secrets which any child could see aren't worth keeping. Instead, they could be delegating to their employees and concentrating on the development of real policies.

The most difficult part of the adjustment would be getting rid of that sense, intrinsic to rational systems, that everything public must run smoothly. For example, that nuclear accidents can only be incidents. Or that artificial public calm will prevent public panic, and that calming lies are therefore necessary. Or that policy must emerge mysteriously and fully formed from committees of ministers, whose very existence is often secret. Why should policy appear like a phoenix from the fire, as if it were the natural and inevitable product of a rational process? This phoenix is now so much a part of our lives that it has become as dull and as tasteless as a battery hen.

The proper debating of policy is not smooth. Words are not air. Talk is not a waste of time. Arguing is useful. And speed is irrelevant unless there is a war on. The political class would have to get rid of the fear of verbal disorder which the technocratic classes have instilled in them. In all probability a different sort of individual would then rise to public office.

***

This, however, is not the direction in which we are headed. Instead, the assemblies are becoming· the boutiques of special-interest groups. Nine thousand lobbyists are now registered in Washington. Their job is not to sell the representative on their client's goods. It is to buy the representative's vote in return for local jobs, campaign contributions, promises of income on retirement, and, in the worst of cases, payments here and now. Had John Tower become the American secretary of defense in 1989, his confirmation would have been an accurate reflection of reality. The former Senator from Texas, a major armaments manufacturing state, was a former Chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, an ex-Senate lobbyist who earned $750,000 in a single year on commissions from arms manufacturers, and a close supporter of George Bush. [16] Had his nomination been confirmed, his title could quite properly have been changed from Secretary of Defense to Secretary of Procurement.

There is, as Jefferson said, nothing "so afflicting and fatal to every honest hope as the corruption of the legislature." [17] And, indeed, the world of experts -- whether they are public servants, businessmen or professors -- has used this visible corruption as evidence of how out of date democracy is.

The American Congress is so profoundly a part of the lobby system that, while persistent bad publicity meant the senators couldn't avoid voting against the confirmation of John Tower, neither could they attribute their vote to the real reason -- his corruption. The debate began on a high note. Both senators and the press questioned whether a lobbyist for arms manufacturers ought to be the secretary of defense. The senators then shied away from the essential issue and instead focused in on whether Tower drank and fornicated too much to hold the job. The ex-senators relationship with the corporations was not profoundly different from that of other senators. It was just that he had gone a little too far. He had drawn attention to himself and therefore to the general situation. He was sacrificed so that the others could continue. And yet there is little secret about what they do. The statistics are declared and published. Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen, for example, the former vice presidential candidate, got $8.3 million for the 1988 campaign from political action committees. [18] PACs are organized lobby groups. In 1993 President Clinton named him Secretary of the Treasury.

It was only around the turn of the century that the rise of professionalism and a growing belief in the extended rule of law identified public corruption as a specific evil to be eliminated. And most of it was rapidly eliminated. However, almost as fast, the structures and assumptions of the modern, rational state simply amended themselves in order to legalize, formalize and indeed structure all the old forms of public corruption right into their normal procedures.

There has always been corruption in public affairs. But never -- not even in the worst decades of the eighteenth century -- was it legalized in such logical detail that corruption could spread quite openly throughout the entire system. In all probability one of the principal reasons for this new development has been the gradual loss of the elected assemblies' real power to the executive, the bureaucracy and the judiciary. With the assemblies denied the ability to serve the public interest properly, it was only a matter of time before they would find other interests to serve. For that matter, it was only a question of time before the great organized interests outside the democratic process noticed that the parliaments were profoundly idle, humiliated and discontent. Their meeting could not have been more natural.

The conversion or return of parliaments to lobbying centres has more to do with an elaborate void seeking a new role than with the venality of individual men. Now they have that new role and, with it, a new importance. At the same time they have abandoned all pretension of practical democratic leadership and left government in the hands of rational structure and of the executive branch.

In fairness, the requirement that lobbyists register in Washington may have seemed at first to be a way of limiting the influence of organized financial interests over the people's representatives. In reality it formalized the role of business inside the democratic process. And since there is always a temptation to make more money than legally permitted, this massive regularization of criminality has simply pushed the illegal activities closer to the heart of government structures. The savings and loan scandal is a prime example of this.

Of course, popular mythology has it that influence peddling is at its worst in the United States. But then nations have always comforted themselves by giving foreign origins to venereal diseases. The same is true for political corruption. The Canadian government, in its rush to become a mirror image of its southern neighbour, has now followed the disastrous American path of formalizing the lobbyist's role. The British, thanks to their abhorrence of formal structures, have been able to do the same thing without any question of principle being asked. Year by year the number of company directorships and consultancy contracts picked up by sitting British MPs, including ex-cabinet ministers, continues to grow. Only the most stringent adherence to hypocrisy allows people to avoid pointing out the obvious -- that putting an MP on your board or giving him a contract is buying yourself a lobbyist in Westminster. [19] The difference between this and the old British "rotten borough" system is that MPs used to be bought before their election. Now they are usually not purchased until their market value can be established. In France the single administrative elite has occupied the three seats of power -- bureaucratic, political and business. There is therefore no need for one elite to lobby the other. They are, like the Holy Trinity, alternately, and at their own bidding, three separate bodies or three in one, indivisible.

Indeed, civil servants throughout the West have now caught on to the financial possibilities inherent in their public role. As with the politicians, this often begins with small kindnesses from lobbyists -- lunches, dinners, a case of wine at Christmas, invitations to the country on week- ends or to shoot game in season. But in general the real plum comes with retirement, which is increasingly taken early so that the newly private citizen can lobby. The senior British civil servant, for example, now counts on gelling directorships and even a chairmanship of a private corporation when he retires. As Anthony Sampson has put it, by his "mid-fifties he will be searching anxiously for directorships with which to round off -- or to crown -- his career." [20] How can this not be having an effect on his commitment to the public good during precisely those final years when he is in senior-enough positions to have an effect on policy? Can the secretary of cabinet or the permanent secretary at the treasury be consciously or unconsciously thinking only of the public's interests when he is already surreptitiously job hunting in private industry?

In short, public servants are cashing in on their years of employment by the state. It would seem, in fact, that their obsessions With modernization and efficiency have brought them voluntarily to the same view of public service to which many elected representatives have been indirectly driven by the emasculation of the assemblies.

But these are merely signs of the confusion within the system. Corruption of the public system follows quite naturally from the maze of private-industry fads which have been sweeping Western governments for the last three decades. Privatization, no-hiring, efficiency devices. In themselves these and others have been sometimes marginally helpful, sometimes marginally harmful. But the general introduction of industry standards into the public domain has had a disastrous effect on an already confused situation.

The imposition of short-term profit methods in an area which is only indirectly and in the long run profit-oriented could not possibly have worked. Expecting business methods and market forces to do the job of government, when business and the market fought desperately against every humane and social accomplishment of government over the last two centuries, makes no sense at all. The public interest and the profit motive may be made to cooperate through wise political leadership, but they are not interchangeable. They are nevertheless being treated as if they were. What this implies is that the public does not believe that the governmental structures work. But then the politicians and the public servants don't believe it either.

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