Bureaucratic Passions

In: Law, culture & the humanities, Band 15, Heft 1, S. 14-29

Abstract

In order to have a more nuanced conversation about the role and size of government, we should attend to our diverse passional experiences of bureaucracy. We overlook our affective experience of bureaucracy in our usual focus on bureaucracy's impersonality and passionless rule and on cost-benefit analyses of individual regulations. To the extent that we consider bureaucracy's passional effects, bureaucracy is cast as something that saps passion – understood as energy and vigor – from our lives. Attention to the variety of passional experiences of bureaucracy reveals neglected and salutary aspects of life within and under the shadow of bureaucracy. For example, particular bureaucratic affects are arguably a pedagogy in the realities, compromises and burdens of politics, and may enhance – in desirable ways – our solidarity with those who share our polity.