Abstract

The intellectual parents of our current democracies – among others, the likes of Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, Burke, Tocqueville, and the founding fathers—devoted very little attention to the bureaucracy in their cornerstone discussions on how political power should be allocated in a society. They had a relatively well-grounded justification: the bureaucracies of their time were objectively small. For instance, the overall U.S. federal bureaucracy contained less than eight hundred people in the 1790s, and the currently all-mighty Department of State, fit into two rooms, where a doorkeeper, a messenger, and four officials assisted the secretary (Grindle 2012: 61).