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The Utopia of Rules: Technology, Stupidity and Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015)
Life without bureaucracy sounds wonderful. But are states always and only repressive?
An American anthropologist who is currently professor of anthropology at LSE, Graeber begins his inquiry with an angry and moving account of the horrendous form-filling he endured when he had to place his aged mother in a nursing home after she had a stroke. With this diagnosis in mind, it is surprising that Graeber doesn’t explore recent British experience, which has seen successive Conservative and Labour governments attempting to import an American model of market-driven competition into public services. Modern bureaucracy embodies a view of the world as being essentially rational, but the roots of this vision, Graeber astutely observes, go all the way back to the ancient Pythagoreans, who believed that mathematics, music and the motions of the planets all obeyed the same principles.
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