American Senator Eugene McCarthy was quoted as saying, “The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.” While feelings about this statement, and indeed the bureaucracy, may be closely tied with an individual’s view of the role government should play, there’s no doubting that the bureaucracy is often a favourite target when complaining about government. Regardless of the actual reason, many times, when a program runs over budget or either doesn’t meet or exceeds the need for which it was created, bureaucracy often receives the lion’s share of the blame. In order to best understand why this term can have such a negative connotation, it’s important to have a look at the word itself and the underlying problem it can cause.
The word bureaucracy comes from the middle 18th century French term bureaucratie and was first used by the economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay. Styled after already existing Greek words, such as democracy and aristocracy, the word literally translated as “power of the desk or office.”
In an applicable sense though, a bureaucracy takes the rulings of a government and attempts to properly apply and administer them to the public. Unfortunately for us, as the workings and involvement of government have become increasingly complex, the bureaucracy has become exponentially larger to meet this need.
Behind this rather innocuous meaning given by de Gournay is what the term has come to mean to many: a seemingly endless array of confusing regulations, administrative procedures, filling out forms, and waiting. Representing this understanding is a recent audit of the NHS by The Health and Social Care Information Centre which found that junior doctors were being forced to use two thirds of their time accessing or updating patient notes, instead of actually practising medicine. Additionally, in order to meet bureaucratic requirements, more than two thirds of all surveyed medical trusts are required to take paper notes and then manually type them into an electronic system, thus creating a bottleneck wasting time and resources.
The first known use of our word of the day comes from a November 11th issue of The Times, which, displaying the sceptical nature of the general public towards this mystical phenomenon, states, “From that multiplicity of employments..has sprung that complication of intrigues of wheels within wheels, which is called bureaucracy.” By 1861, as the understanding of the word was taking hold, the Hampshire Advertiser lamenting the increasing complexity of the system writes, “All this bureaucracy has to be set in motion for the mere purpose of deciding if two poor people shall be allowed to marry.” Well into the 20th century, the term began to be applied more broadly, as can be seen in G.M. Trevelyan’s somewhat biased English Social History (1942), where he reminisces, “Many an old family firm was replaced by a Limited Liability Company with a bureaucracy of salaried managers.”
While it’s understood that laws don’t just write and administer themselves and we do need some level of bureaucracy to function, but it is the profound question of “how much?” that always seems to complicate things.
