INTRODUCTION:WE’RE BUREAUCRATS ALL
To catch hold of fleeting appearance he must shackle it with rules, tear into its fair body with concepts, and preserve its living spirit in a meagre frame of words.
—Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man
He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Bureaucracy Is Us
Homo bureaucraticus: humankind is truly the bureaucratic animal. Psychologists have watched children spend more time arguing over the rules of a game than actually playing it.1 Children learn rule-making, of ...
Get The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
