Review: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Joys of Bureaucracy, by David Graeber

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a densely written, densely documented, conspicuously scholarly (if also highly readable and colorfully written) study, with four hundred pages of densely packed main text followed by sixty, twin-columned pages of even more densely packed footnotes and another forty pages of bibliographical entries after that, befitting its ambitious object--a thorough revision of a very large part of our understanding of the history of human civilization. By contrast, his book The Utopia of Rules, weighing in at less than half the earlier book's length, more sprightly in tone and "think piece" in feel, brings together three previously published essays with new material in what is not a scholarly reconstruction of a big chunk of human economic history and history more generally, but rather a series of meditations tending toward the ideal, the symbolic, the abstract, which merely share certain themes--bureaucracy, and its relations with violence (especially "structural" violence), imagination and rationality.

The introductory piece, "The Iron Law of Liberalism and the Era of Total Bureaucratization," points to the oft-overlooked contribution of the private sector to bureaucratization (it was the U.S. Federal government which was shaped by the corporations, not the other way around); the limitations of the left's critique of bureaucracy (alas, leaving this ground to the growling right-wing populist); and the tendency to underestimate the role of violence, overestimate the role of technology and misrepresent rationality as an end rather than a means in considering the issue of bureaucracy.1 "Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity" considers the bureaucracy-violence-"stupidity" nexus, and what he regards as the curious aversion of contemporary social science to the study of bureaucracy; "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit," the failure of "tomorrowland" to arrive as expected, the overhyping of information technology, and the connections of these with the neoliberal project he argues was about preserving the status quo through quashing alternatives, rather than efficiency, technological innovation or growth; and "The Utopia of Rules; or Why We Love Bureaucracy After All," which stresses the human need for regularity and transparency, which bureaucracy promises (even if it rarely delivers them in ideal fashion). Finally the book includes in an appendix "On Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power" which is, actually, about comic book superheroics (particularly Christopher Nolan's 2012 The Dark Knight Returns, which he watched in the wake of the "Occupy" movement with which he had been involved), and their connections with the preceding themes.

By and large, the themes struck me as well worth exploring, and the case he made for his principal ideas for the most part persuasive, and in cases even necessary. (Too often the complex relationship of private to public is simplified into the tidy opposition existing only in libertarian fantasy. Too often the degree of coercion involved in the minutiae of daily life is overlooked. Too many commentators are intimidated by the ridicule that cheerleaders-for-things-as-they-are heap on those who ask why we aren't living more like the Jetsons, and exalt their cell phone as the telos of the universe from the Big Bang forward.) They were also enriched by numerous smaller observations, sufficiently so that the supporting arguments, the offhand observations, the anecdotes (recollections of his field work in Madagascar, for example), provided much of the book's interest--enough so as to make forgivable his tendency to go off on tangents, and his misses as well as hits. (In his frequent resorts to pop culture for explanations, I found him more convincing when writing about Batman than Star Trek, for instance.) That said, much of what he had to say here (regarding the corporatization of finance and financialization of the corporate, the fusion of public and private, the thrust of information technology, etc.) has been further developed in Bullshit Jobs, so that a reader interested in a fuller exposition of his analysis of bureaucracy and its implications would do well to look to that book, but the wealth of material here is more than ample to justify a look from those already familiar with his other works.

1. As Graeber already noted in Debt, just as states called markets into being, they must also sustain them in being, "an army of administrators" required "to keep them going"--and cites Von Mises on this. Where the case of the U.S. specifically is concerned the bureaucratized corporation preceded the expansion of the Federal government, and corporate functionaries played a significant role in building up the New Deal bureaucracy; while the masses of regulation imposed by government are, after all, largely designed by and lobbied for by business.

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