Paperwork: The State of the Discipline

“However many people complain about ‘red tape,’ ” Max Weber remarks in Economy and Society, “it would be sheer illusion to think for a moment that continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices. The whole pattern of everyday life is cut to fit this framework.”¹ Weber’s account of the rise of bureaucracy has long served as both a master and a mistress narrative for the humanities and social sciences. A master narrative because it makes sense out of the wildly uneven yet strangely similar processes of state formation that have taken place around the world over the last two or three centuries; a mistress narrative because its existence, while known to all, nevertheless remains a bit scandalous. There seems to be something about the stories we tell each other of our encounters with the bureaucracy—those complaints about red tape that are as endless as the red tape itself—that make us feel like we’ve been naughty.

Freud calls this “joke-work,” and for a long time bureaucracy talk was mainly after laughs. Indeed, the word owes its early success to its origins as a pun, when Vincent de Gournay, a protoliberal political economist in mid-eighteenth century France, added to democracy, aristocracy, monarchy—rule by the many, the few, the one—rule by a piece of office furniture.² In his article on “bureaucracy” for his Tableau de Paris (1788), Louis-Sebastien Mercier explained that “it was a word recently coined to indicate, clearly and concisely, the overgrown power possessed by simple clerks.”³ In his early critiques of Hegel, Karl Marx borrowed the French term to mock the philosopher’s ambitious claims for the state. In the preparatory materials for The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), Tocqueville jotted down a reminder to himself to resist its semantic temptations. “Bureaucracy” was nothing more than “modern jargon that one should try to avoid.” He was unable to keep his promise.⁴ Weber’s subsequent efforts to give the word a more value-neutral meaning were only partially successful. One can still open the New York Times on any given morning and find a headline like “A Bumper Crop of Bureaucracy, ” a lighthearted title for a heavyhearted article about the failure of an upstate New York farmer to obtain the permits necessary to construct decent housing for seasonal workers.⁵

Over the last decade or so, historians, anthropologists, legal scholars, and others have collaborated to put the bureau back in bureaucracy. That is, rather than treating bureaucracy as an ideal type or stereotype, they have set out to investigate the pens, papers, and other raw materials of power. In their focus on technologies of writing and the materiality of communication, many of these studies show a strong affinity for book history, despite our field’s tendency to privilege texts that have been printed and bound. The purpose of this essay is to consider some of these recent efforts. Reflecting my own expertise—or rather lack of it—the pages that follow are concerned mainly with the paperwork that poured forth in Europe, with only very brief forays into other regions in the world, and even then only to those places where Europeans themselves ventured, sheaves of documents in hand. But even from within these artificially narrow confines, I am pleased to report that the state of the discipline is strong.

Weary Fingers, Ragged Pens

The new social history that dominated Anglo-American historical studies in the 1960s and 1970s discovered all sorts of interesting and important things by looking through paperwork, but seldom paused to look at it. That it to say, it put paperwork to use in reconstructing the lives of ordinary men and women, but largely neglected the lives of the equally ordinary scribes, copyists, and clerks who produced and reproduced these sources. This neglect may have reflected a certain ambivalence toward the state among the radical academics who pioneered the field. E. P. Thompson’s poor stockingers or Joan Wallach Scott’s militant glassmakers were members of the working class in a...