Out here in Jutland, the mainland peninsula of the Kingdom of Denmark, I live in something approaching a perfectly bureaucratic state. The people of my region, the Jutes, were once known for their non-conformity. Denmark’s national epic, Saxo’s Gesta Danorum from the early 1200s, calls the Jutes gens insolens “an uppity people”.[1] Another medieval chronicle of the late 1300s speaks of the antiquam Iutorum pertinaciam “the ancient obstinacy of the Jutes”.[2] Today, Jutes sometimes revel in their vestigial reputation for slyness and rule-bending. A popular euphemism for “cash-in-hand” in Danish literally means “Jutish dollars”. But for the most part this is an affectation. We are good subjects of the modern Danish welfare state. Like anywhere else in the country, we have a rule and a correct process for nearly every occasion. Francis Fukuyama has made a career out of being awe-inspiringly mistaken about the arc of history, but he was not totally wrong to make “Denmark” a euphemism for a well-ordered society.[3] At the university where I work a sacred (and to me, I admit, impenetrable) website called the studieordning regulates all aspects of assessment, curriculum and examination in minute detail. A two-step authentication app on my smartphone, called MitID, is required for everything from booking dentists’ appointments to paying my credit card bill. Woe betide any member of my local sauna and wild swimming club who has not kept themselves appraised of the thirty-odd vedtægter (rules). You can be naked, but you can never strip off the law. Some of my research into the history of bureaucracy in Denmark has recently been published in Social History – namely, an article on those who lived out my own fantasy of burning piles of paperwork during the Danish Peasants’ Revolt of 1438-1441.
Artist’s reconstruction of The Battle of Skt Jørgensbjerg, 1441 (by Svanike Chr. Nielsen, 1991, public domain)
Recently I haven’t been doing so much steamy, self-congratulatory bobbing around in the Baltic because I have been unwell. And of course, there is a document – well, a series of hyperlinked webpages and pdfs – which governs diagnosis and treatment, the lægehåndbog. Here the arduous art of medicine is broken down into processes which could be represented by flow charts. If the patient displays X symptom, refer to Y test. Wait two weeks before referring to scan Z. If the outcome is A, wait another two weeks and refer to procedure B, examination C, biopsy D, etc. Under such circumstances, one becomes acutely aware of the nature of bureaucracy. In libertarian fantasies, bureaucracy is either a byword for stupidity or, more often, a sinister attempt to monitor and dominate the population.[4] Doubtless, totalitarian regimes have used bureaucracy in such dastardly ways. But actually, bureaucracy isn’t interested in control or surveillance for their own sake. Bureaucracy, as the sociologist Max Weber pointed out a century ago, seeks to create rationalisation:
A fully developed bureaucracy embodies very specifically the principle of sine ira ac studio (i.e., without anger or frustration). This specific character of bureaucracy means the complete eradication of love, hate, and all purely personal sentiments from administrative tasks. Put bluntly, this means the eradication of all sentiments that are irrational and incalculable.[5]
This rationalisation is part of an accelerating orderliness in modern society, where individuals follow rules dictated by profit-seeking, or simply doing what they are told in the workplace by their bosses without further reflection on why, instead of working because of a personal or divine calling. Weber called this broader orderliness “a shell as hard as steel” (stahlhartes Gehäuse), popularly translated as an “Iron Cage”.[6]
Bureaucracy, and other Bars You Wouldn’t Want to Walk Into
But let us leave the cage aside for now and stay focussed on one of its bars: bureaucracy. The rationalising tendency advocates that processes which once were unpredictable should be made predictable. In a less-bureaucratised medical situation, the care you receive can be affected by wildcards. Some might be negative, e.g the doctor has an irrational dislike of you and so doesn’t pay you the attention you need, or maybe their goldfish died last night and they’re having an off-day. Others might be positive, e.g. you have a suspected kidney-complaint and the doctor happens to have a private passion for that type of medicine, or the doctor can see you are in considerable discomfort so is extra attentive to your plight. In a more bureaucratised medical situation, rules are introduced which remove these wildcards. If X, then Y. Dead goldfish be damned.
This generates advantages. A properly bureaucratised system, whether in medicine, welfare, education or a sauna-club, should automatically provide the same outcomes for everyone, regardless of their background. As David Graeber pointed out, this also potentially frees us from a great deal of emotional labour.[7] At the university, if the studieordning says we have to award a grade which will cause problems for an exchange student when they return to their home university, so be it. We follow the rules. In a medical context, doctors do not need to lie awake at night worrying about what might be wrong with their patient – they may well do so, of course, because most medics are deeply compassionate people – but their job is not to do that. Their job is to follow the steps in the lægehåndbog, or any other proximal website or pdf.
Weberian predictability also generates disadvantages. In my case, as weeks began to turn to months with no diagnosis or treatment in sight, it was impossible to suppress the realisation that here in Denmark we have become so good at bureaucracy that it was nobody’s job to find out what was wrong with me and see if it could be fixed. Yet I was not a victim of medical neglect. Rather, I was a victim of bureaucratic excellence. Every doctor with whom I spoke was doing a brilliant job clicking through the lægehåndbog. For a historian, this insight produced conflicting feelings. Was it not terribly entitled of me to wish that someone from the state would have a responsibility to diagnose my illness? For the overwhelming majority of human history, such a desire would seem impossibly grandiose. It was not so long ago that only monarchs could expect such favours from a physician paid by the public purse.
Remedy for Leprosy (AM 187 8vo, 34v-35r, Denmark, 1400s, courtesy of The Arnamagnæan Institute)
On the other hand, in pre-modern, not-so-rationalised European societies perhaps there was much less of the sort of impersonality of which the lægehåndbog and studieordning are symptomatic. I wonder whether a medieval timetraveller, while marvelling at our medical technology, would be baffled by the bureaucratic systems which deliver it. One Danish leechbook from the 1400s prescribes the following treatment for leprosy: “If you have leprosy, take living ants and the ant hill, the soil and everything, and put it in warm water, and the leper should strain it in a sauna, and that works” (Om thu hauer spitæls sot, tac lifændæ myrær oc myræ høghæn, muld oc alt samen, oc lat thæt i warmt watn, oc i bastouæ writh leprosum thær mæth, oc thæt dughær).[8] This, presumably, did absolutely nothing except ruin the day of a few ants – and I’m pretty certain it would be against the rules at my local sauna club. But a leechbook, unlike the lægehåndbog, at least always has an answer. It does not aim to provide rationalisation à la Weber (although it does have a rudimentary “if sickness X then treatment Y” grammar). It aims to provide authoritative knowledge as part of the relationship between carer and cared-for. A peasant in medieval Denmark probably didn’t have much chance of getting effective medical care, but they would presumably never have encountered a healer who shrugged that they didn’t know, it wasn’t their job to know, and could you please come back in two weeks?
No Way Out?
Most criticisms of bureaucracy stumble at this point, where both the bad and the good have been acknowledged. The situation might be summarised with “ok, bureaucracy sucks. You got a better idea?”. Graeber coughs up a vague suggestion that we need greater acceptance of play, that is to say, enjoyment without aims or rules, perhaps based on the organisational structures of the Occupy Wall Street camps, but his solution is watery compared to the nearly two-hundred pages of analysis which precede it.[9] The Trotskyite economist Ernst Mandel calculated that with the implementation of a Universal Basic Income, the working day could be reduced to four hours of actual labour and four hours of administration, most of which would be done in workers’ councils (the attraction of Trotskyites to workers’ councils apparently being a physical law as reliable as gravity).[10] Whether this is true, and whether it would free us from the studieordning and the lægehåndbog, I am not convinced.
Alternatively, we could go the way of the libertarians, especially the Austrian economists, and surmise that bureaucracy basically comes from the state. Cut back government, deregulate capitalists, and we’ll all be free of bureaucracy, right? Before we bound too eagerly down that path, we should remember the sentence which comes immediately after the quote from Weber about predictability above: “Capitalism welcomes this specific character and it is praised as bureaucracy’s virtue”.[11] The coterie of entrepreneurs whom we recently saw standing by the American president at his inauguration might rub their hands at the prospect of the Departmental of Governmental Efficiency, imagining themselves as dashing masters of their own destiny. But making money also requires vendors and customers acting in predictable ways. Bureaucracy is a remarkable tool for achieving that. How many grey hairs have you sprouted trying to arrange collection of a package from a privatised delivery company? Or changing your address with your bank? Or finding your payment being rejected because a company’s website cannot recognise your postcode? Or locating the right department to pay your invoice at a major company? To my mind, no evidence suggests that Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos seriously want you to spend less time looking at fiddly websites on your phone.
Me and Dr. Jonok
Perhaps the answer is to be found by addressing the “Iron Cage” of which bureaucracy is a part. A few weeks ago, I reached that page in the lægehåndbog where the patient must have cameras inserted into orifices no right-thinking member of society would wish. The normal state facilities were overloaded, and so I was delegated to an independent contractor, whom I shall call Dr. Jonok.[12] His clinic is at an address shared with a white goods dealership, on an anonymous road in a provincial Jutish town. I am not convinced his premises would ever pass a health inspection. Medical equipment which I can regrettably confirm to you is very much still in use rests in dusty boxes full of old invoices. More or less every fifth word Dr. Jonok utters is in his native language, which I do not speak, but with good will and gesticulation we are able to communicate. Dr. Jonok earns his crust by picking up the slack when the state cannot meet its targets for taking unusually intimate photographs of its citizens – and perhaps occasionally by importing agitator belts for washing machines.
In Dr. Jonok’s hands, the iron cage begins to buckle. He is certainly not predictable. Appointments happen at odd hours of the day and are liable to be re-arranged with less than an hour’s notice. To jump ahead in the flow-chart, he influenced the result of a test whose outcome was a foregone conclusion because I had already previously tested negative. To get me a scan, he rang a hospital in another municipality, and strongly-implied-without-technically-lying-at-any-point that he was a hospital employee calling from inside the building. Neither can it be said that Dr. Jonok practices a Weberian “eradication of all purely personal sentiments”. At the end of our first appointment, he gave me a hug. At the second, he took my hands in his and attempted something not unlike a baisemain. I can only speculate what gesture might accompany the third. In the phone calls which he regularly makes to his patients, he addresses them as “my dear friends”, which sounds even more peculiar in the usually icy language of Danish than it does in English. In other contexts, such behaviours would probably precipitate lawsuits.
In the desert of human connection which arises from a near-perfect bureaucracy, they have made him a hero. Certainly in my eyes, at any rate. After weeks of meeting well-meaning medical professionals who could do no more than give a sympathetic frown as they delicately shuffled through protocols (and certainly not offer any diagnosis or treatment), someone who was willing to dissimulate and evade and possibly slightly invade my personal space was a Godsend.
A Plea for a Wooden Cage
A bureaucracy – medical or otherwise – where everybody acted like Dr. Jonok is probably not desirable. At the same time, I can’t help but feel that no-one would be served if rationalisation were permitted to crowd him out. In Denmark’s present, he is an eccentric figure. I wonder if in Denmark’s past he would have been more intelligible. Late Medieval Danes were less “rational” in Weber’s sense than us, but they did not live in a pre-bureaucratic Eden. There were highly formalised, even ritualised, regional assemblies which acted as courts. It was important that the right oral formulae were used, and participants could also issue paperwork.[13] At the same time, local village-level assemblies existed which presumably were more like talking shops: Places where people who knew each other intimately could meet and discuss their problems with that sense of personal investment which bureaucracy finds so inimical – spaces where people might well have addressed each other as “my dear friend” while executing an official role.[14] They were not locked in a fight between Weberian rationalisation and cosy, small-scale communal life (which, of course, in real terms was less idyllic and more concerned with arguments about inheritance and field boundaries). They experienced both.
Reconstructed thing site from Schleswig-Holstein (photo by Matthias Süßen, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)
The promise held out by Dr. Jonok and by my interpretation of the Middle Ages is that we should not do away with the iron cage, as the DOGErs of the world might promise somewhat disingenuously to do. Rather, we should be prepared to rebuild the cage in wood. A wooden cage can warp, bleach, bend back into shape, last long enough for a lifetime but eventually crumble, to be replaced by something else. It will keep in many beasts, but a number will escape. In other words, yes, we must have “if X then Y” regulations. But we must also be prepared to violate them, or to know when to turn a blind eye when they fail to achieve the goals for which they are intended. To misquote St. Paul, we need to recognise what is “not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life”. As bureaucracies are formed, they make a virtue of how dispassionately we can enforce the rules. When bureaucracies reach maturity, a new virtue emerges: how often we put the person before protocol.
Richard Cole is an Associate Professor of Medieval History at Aarhus Universitet, and director of the Centre for Viking and Medieval Studies. His article in Social History was part of his AUFF-funded project, “Bureaucracy in Medieval Scandinavia”. He is currently working on a book about people’s ability to imagine alternative modes of production in the Middle Ages, titled Feudal Realism. He was eventually diagnosed with a minor gallbladder ailment and, God-willing, is expected to make a full recovery.
References
[1] Saxo Grammaticus. Gesta Danorum. The History of the Danes. Vol. 1. Ed. Karsten Friis-Jensen & Peter Fisher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015), 634 [bk. 9, ch. 4. 4]
[2] Danmarks middelalderlige annaler. Ed. Erik Kroman (Copenhagen: Selskabet for Udgivelse af Kilder til Dansk Historie, 1980), 117.
[3] Francis Fukuyama. The Origins of Political Order. (London: Profile Books, 2011), 431-433.
[4] Ludwig von Mises. Bureaucracy. (New Haven: Yale University Press), passim.
[5] Max Weber. Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society. New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification. Trans. Tony Waters & Dagmar Waters (London: Palgrave, 2015), 98.
[6] Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings. Trans. Peter Baehr & Gordon C. Wells (London: Penguin, 2002), 121.
[7] David Graeber. The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. (London: Melville House, 2015), 151-153.
[8] Det arnamagnæanske håndskrift nr. 187 i oktav, indeholdende en dansk lægebog. Ed. Viggo Såby (Copenhagen: Thieles Bogtrykkeri, 1886), 59.
[9] Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 190-205.
[10] Ernst Mandel. Power and Money. A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy. (London: Verso, 1992), 202-210.
[11] Weber, Rationalism, 98.
[12] Names and details have been altered.
[13] Allan Karker, “Tingsvidne” in Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder. Vol. 18. (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1982), cols. 387-388.
[14] Per Andersen. Legal Procedure and Practice in Medieval Denmark. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 32-34.