Max Weber's Vision for Bureaucracy by Glynn Cochrane

Author:Glynn Cochrane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

To apply countervailing force Weber borrowed the British idea of the Parliamentary Committee as a device for holding the executive to account. Oversight functions of parliament include subjecting executive plans, policies, and actions to public debate, and posing questions to members of the executive. Parliaments are also tasked with vetting and approving key government ministers and other key national appointees. Therefore, Parliament’s oversight of the executive becomes one of its most important functions. Parliamentary committees enable legislatures to monitor the activities of the government, and check the quality of governance. The role of the executive and the legislature is therefore to complement each other: the executive must govern, while the legislature asserts its key role as representative of the people by acting as an overseer of the executive. Thus, the use of the committee system to scrutinize and investigate whether or not the executive or its authorized agencies have acted properly in the implementation of public policies and programs is crucial.

In Weber’s view, what he called ‘parliamentarization’ was necessary for better foreign policy and what he referred to as ‘democratization’ was necessary for domestic peace and the inevitable consequences of war. Indeed, the proper selection of political leaders was to Weber the most important problem of parliamentarianism and democratization. Neither of these means the rule of the masses; political action is always controlled by the maneuverability of small groups or by an individual acting ‘Caesar-like’ (casaristisch) as someone who has the confidence of the people.31

Bismarck, the master of foreign policy, left, as his domestic legacy, a nation without any political understanding of its politics and that meant a lingering weakness with respect to the pursuit of military objectives (Appendix B). He smashed strong parties, and the consequence of this was the exclusive rule of the officialdom. ‘Only the Parliamentary system, according to which the administrative heads either are drawn from popularly elected deputies or require the confidence of the majority, will educate the nation to think politically.’ The proper election of the political leader was to Weber the most important problem of parliamentarianism or democratization. He said, ‘leadership must no longer be condemned to dilettante stupidity; only experience with the realities will produce a powerful parliament.’ Weber did not base his proposals on ideological political theories but presented them, explicitly and intentionally, as something practical and utilitarian, ‘if the modern state offered every citizen a certain equality of fate and in particular death on the battlefield, it also owed him that minimum of political influence through universal suffrage.’32 Weber’s view was not novel, it echoed the position forcefully made by a generation of Prussian political reformers. Peter Paret had said that if citizens were to die on the battlefield then the state had to do more to grant the individual a more active role in public affairs.33

A conversation with Ludendorff shows how far Weber was prepared to go to get effective leadership for Germany. ‘In a democracy, the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, “Now you shut your mouths and obey me.

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