Bureaucracy and Violence
Rush Limbaugh went on a rant the other day in which he argued that Hannah Arendt predicted the kind of violence like the mass shooting in Las Vegas; what caught Limbaugh’s attention was the possibility that Arendt attributed the rise in violence to the rise of bureaucracy. (h/t Bonnie Honig) Limbaugh writes,
“I am quoting Hannah Arendt:
“The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”
Let me explain this. As a democracy bureaucratizes, which we have. Another name for bureaucracy would be called the deep state. The bureaucracy is cabinet level administration, every government agency you can think of. And believe me, there are more government agencies than any single one person could name from memory. They are many, and they are redundant. And what do bureaucracies do? They’re like plugging the drain on a bathtub.
When you have to deal with a bureaucracy, if you have a grievance, you’re not gonna get a solution because you get passed up to the next department, to the next supervisor. You never get an answer, you never get a solution, because nobody is empowered to make one. A fully fleshed out bureaucracy, the total bureaucratization of a democracy, of a country, leads to average, ordinary Americans having no power whatsoever to address grievance, particularly grievance that have its origins within the state….
If Health and Human Services has some stupid rule that penalizes you or your business, there’s nowhere you can go to fix it. You can’t even go to Health and Human Services. You try it, and it is like everything is the DMV where you never get your license updated. And she theorizes this is gonna lead to mounting frustration with unstable people being unable to deal with the lack of action, the lack of solution, the lack of movement, and they’re gonna go nuts. And she theorized the attraction to violence from frustration will increase because there is nobody in a fully developed bureaucracy, there is nobody with whom you can argue. There’s plenty of people to argue with.”
Limbaugh’s focus on the bureaucracy of the Health and Human Services Administration is not exactly what Arendt has in mind. Arendt distinguishes different types of bureaucracy. Her original critique of bureaucracy does not target the civil service but administrators who rule without oversight. In a chapter of Origins of Totalitarianism called “Racism and Bureaucracy,” Arendt argues that bureaucracy is what allows racist administrators to rule over colonies without responsibility or limit. There is a difference between bureaucratic rule that empowers bureaucratic Viceroys to rule with absolute power and a civil service that employs bureaucrats in an effort to administer the law and practice good government.
And yet, Limbaugh’s worry about the bureaucratic roots of the deep state does have resonances in Arendt’s work. Yes, Arendt would be repulsed at Limbaugh’s partisanship and defactualization. His use of Arendt to attack the civil service is wrong and makes Arendt useful to his own highly partisan purposes. But that does not mean that he is wrong in this instance when he turns to Arendt to argue that bureaucracy disempowers individuals and can lead to resentment and then violence.
In On Violence, Arendt argues that rule by bureaucracy needs to be seen as “the latest and perhaps most formidable form of [political] domination,” of the absolute rule by sovereign states over individuals.
“Today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such domination: bureaucracy or the rule of an intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. (If, in accord with traditional political thought, we identify tyranny as government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done.”
The problem, as she sees, is when the civil service becomes so large and powerful — an intricate system of bureaus — that it is uncontrollable and unresponsive to democratic control. Such bigness is inseparable from centralization of power that can only disempower individuals and groups who seek to engage in political action. When government becomes large and centralized, the civil service can transform into the terrifying “rule by nobody.”
In analyzing the rebelliousness of the 1960s and the student protests against the Vietnam War, Arendt argues that the “crucial feature in the student rebellions around the world is that they are directed everywhere against the ruling bureaucracy.” Arendt is concerned with the advent of what she calls “the Establishment and what earlier was called the System.” The establishment can become so entrenched that those like the economist Vilfredo Pareto who would contest it “turn to the praise of violent action.”
Arendt’s main target is not the bureaucratic civil service, at least not explicitly. It is the bureaucracies controlling the Democratic and Republican Parties that insulate the parties from popular control. In the late 1960s, Arendt saw the establishment embodied in “the obvious fact that huge party machines have succeeded everywhere in overruling the voice of citizens.” What she sees is that there is a confluence between the rise of bureaucratic government and the bureaucracies of the party machines.
“The transformation of government into administration, or of republics into bureaucracies, and the disastrous shrinkage of the public realm that went with it have a long and complicated history throughout the modern age; and this process has been considerably accelerated during the last hundred years through the rise of party bureaucracies.”
Behind Arendt’s criticism was the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where Hubert Humphrey was nominated over Eugene McCarthy, even though the anti-war campaign that McCarthy represented was supported by nearly 80% of Democrat primary voters. For Arendt, the party bureaucracy’s rejection of the will of the people exemplified “‘Praxisentzug,’ the suspension of action”; it taught voters that their collective action and democratic participation were powerless in the face of a huge and unanswerable bureaucracies. And there is no doubt that many Bernie Sanders supporters and also those voters attracted by Steven Bannon and Donald Trump today feel that both the Democratic and Republican parties are run by bureaucratic establishments that simply won’t listen to the people. What these bureaucracies teach, Arendt writes, is the impotence of citizens.
“To speak of the impotence of power is no longer a witty paradox. Senator Eugene McCarthy’s crusade in 1968 ‘to test the system’ brought popular resentment against imperialist adventures into the open, provided the link between the opposition in the Senate and that in the streets, enforced an at least temporary spectacular change in policy, and demonstrated how quickly the majority of young rebels could become dealienated, jumping at this first opportunity not to abolish the system but to make it work again. And still, all this power could be crushed by the party bureaucracy, which, contrary to all traditions, preferred to lose the presidential election with an unpopular candidate who happened to be an apparatchik. (Something similar happened when Rockefeller lost the nomination to Nixon during the Republican convention.)”
The danger party bureaucracies pose is that they disempower the people and breed the experience of impotence that can lead to violence.
Another and more important element of Arendt’s argument is surprisingly left unremarked by Limbaugh. Even more dangerous than the bourgeois establishment, for Arendt, is the rise of the new elite establishment in modern society that she finds in the elevation of “intellectuals.” The intellectuals, she writes, “suddenly ceased to be a marginal social group and emerged as a new elite, whose work, having changed the conditions of human life almost beyond recognition in a few decades, has remained essential for the functioning of society.”
Arendt elsewhere calls the intellectuals “problem solvers.” It is these problem solvers who, trusting in the “calculating powers of their brains at the expense of the mind’s capacity for experience and its ability to learn from it” carry with their ascent to power the danger that “theory” will replace reality as the foundation of government policy. As the intellectual begin to assume power they will seek to mobilize social science for the common good. Once theories are accepted, facts become irrelevant. Writing of those “intellectuals” who justified the war in Vietnam, Arendt concludes: “They needed no facts, no information; they had a ‘theory,’ and all data that did not fit were denied or ignored…. Defactualization and problem-solving were welcomed because disregard of reality was inherent in the policies and goals themselves.”
The great danger of the rise of intellectuals to positions of power in government, Arendt argues, is that they have an uncanny ability to ignore the reality of suffering that their ‘theories’ carry with them. Intellectuals can become “fascinated by the sheer size of the mental exercises” their calculations demand. Trained, as they are, in “translating all factual contents into the language of numbers and percentages, where they can be calculated,” it is all-too-likely that intellectuals will “remain unaware of the untold misery that their ‘solutions’ — pacification and relocation programs, defoliation, napalm, and antipersonnel bullets — held in store for a ‘friend’ who needed to be ‘saved’ and for an ‘enemy’ who had neither the will nor the power to be one before we attacked him.” Arendt is here talking about the problem-solvers who justified the war in Vietnam, but there are obvious resonances with many populist rejections of the social-science-inspired social programs advocated by governmental agencies today.
In a surprising turn, Arendt cites Noam Chomsky for evidence of the danger that intellectuals pose to democratic government. Chomsky writes, “Quite generally, what grounds are there for supposing that those whose claim to power is based on knowledge and technique will be more benign in their exercise of power than those whose claim is based on wealth or aristocratic origin?” Taking Chomsky seriously, Arendt worries that the new powerful class of intellectuals will employ their power in the name of defactualized social theories and not for the good of mankind.
The coming rule by intellectuals that Arendt fears can, she writes, lead to violence. It is likely lead to “the resentment against a meritocracy” and that this resentment may be as violent as any prior resentment by earlier oppressed groups such as the poor or racial minorities. Indeed, for Arendt, repressed animosity and resentment against intellectuals may well “harbor all the murderous traits of a racial antagonism, as distinguished from mere class conflicts, inasmuch as it too will concern natural data which cannot be changed, hence a condition from which one could liberate oneself only by extermination of those who happen to have a higher I.Q.” Faced with such a danger from a numerically superior class of non-intellectuals, Arendt imagines that “danger of demagogues, of popular leaders, will be so great that the meritocracy will be forced into tyrannies and despotism.” There is no partisanship in Arendt’s analysis, and her fear of the intellectual ascent to power concerns intellectuals in both parties. Her worry is not about specific policies but the likelihood that intellectual problem-solvers will ignore reality in pursuit of their utopian visions.
It is the combined de-politicizing forces of bureaucratic rule by intellectual problem-solvers that, in Arendt’s writing, suggests the possibility that increases in societal violence may emerge. Violence, as Arendt understands it, is the weapon of the weak. It is precisely those people who lack the power to act and achieve their will through persuasion who will turn to violence to get what they want by any means necessary. As an instrument, violence can be justified when it is used by powerless persons or groups to make visible otherwise invisible claims of justice. More likely, however, acts of violence appear as unjust and simply beget more violence. “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”
Limbaugh is certainly right that Arendt argues that “The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence.” It is also true that much of the embrace of guns today by those parts of society who feel powerless in the face of bureaucracies and party machines may be attributable to a profound sense of disempowerment. None of this leads to the conclusion that Stephen Paddock was a politically disenfranchised man who turned to violence out of resentment at party and governmental elites. Nor should we think Arendt would turn her ire on what Limbaugh calls “liberal elites.” But it is true that the destruction of our public sphere and the real feelings of disempowerment across our society are, as Arendt suggests, experiences that can help justify the turn to violence.
Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College
