FULL CONTENTS IN PDF

Mises's 1944 book applies his insight concerning economic calculation to delineate the difference between bureaucratic management and profit-and-loss management in the free market. The implications of his argument are far reaching, for it shows that all types of public administration lack the ability to conduct their affairs in an economic rational manner.

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REVIEWS

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE 1944 EDITION

PREFACE TO THE 1962 EDITION

INTRODUCTION 

1. The opprobrious connotation of the term bureaucracy.
2. The American citizen’s indictment of bureaucratism.
3. The "Progressives" view of bureaucratism.
4. Bureaucratism and totalitarianism.
5. The alternative: profit management or bureaucratic management.

I. PROFIT MANAGEMENT

1. The operation of the market mechanism.
2. Economic calculation.
3. Management under the profit system.
4. Personnel management under an unhampered labor market.

II. BUREAUCRATIC MANAGEMENT

1. Bureaucracy under despotic government.
2. Bureaucracy within a democracy.
3. The essential features of bureaucratic management.
4. The crux of bureaucratic management.
5. Bureaucratic personnel management.

III. BUREAUCRATIC MANAGEMENT OF PUBLICLY OWNED ENTERPRISES

1. The impracticability of government all-round control.
2. Public enterprise within a market economy.

IV. BUREAUCRATIC MANAGEMENT OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISES

1. How government interference and the impairment of the profit motive drive business toward bureaucratization.
2. Interference with the height of profit.
3. Interference with the choice of personnel.
4. Unlimited dependence on the discretion of government bureaus.

V. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF BUREAUCRATIZATION

1. The philosophy of bureaucratism. 
2. Bureaucratic complacency 
3. The bureaucrat as a voter. 
4. The bureaucratization of the mind. 
5. Who should be the master?

VI. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF BUREAUCRATIZATION

1. The German youth movement. 
2. The fate of the rising generation within a bureaucratic environment.
3. Authoritarian guardianship and progress.
4. The selection of the dictator.
5. The vanishing of the critical sense.

VII. IS THERE ANY REMEDY AVAILABLE?

1. Past failures. 
2. Economics versus planning and totalitarianism.
3. The plain citizen versus the professional propagandist of bureaucratization.

CONCLUSION

INDEX

[Copyright © 1983 by Margit von Mises, New York, New York. Printed with permission of Margit von Mises by Center for Futures Education, Cedar Falls, Iowa. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the Center, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Copyright © 1969 by Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in connection with a review. Copyright © 1944 by Yale University Press. Reprinted 1969 with permission of Yale University Press in an unaltered and unabridged edition.]

REVIEWS OF BUREAUCRACY

• Arnold, Frazer. American Bar Association Journal. 49:3 (March 1963) 276. "Judged by any standard of excellence, this is a terrific little book. So brilliantly written and close-knit is the development of the thesis that a reviewer finds himself marking nearly every paragraph for possible quotation, while hoping at the same time to achieve the impossible feat of condensing the whole into a column or two of summary .... [Mjay conceivably be an epoch-making piece of work."
• Fetter, Frank Albert. American Economic Review. 35:3 (June 1945) 445-446. "AT times even a reader in sympathy with the author's main thesis may question whether capitalism is not exalted too much by crediting it so fully with all the fruits of science, invention, and cultural progress. Yet the case for free enterprise versus socialism has nowhere been more ably and readably stated in brief compass .... Professor von Mises is a consummate general theorist in this day of specialization, and he views the problem broadly and speaks with deep conviction."
• Hazlitt, Henry. "Bureaucracy Defined." New York Times Book Review. (October 1, 1944) 5. "[T]he main thesis of Professor von Mises is that bureaucracy is merely a symptom of the real disease with which we have to deal. That disease is excessive State domination and control .... Published on the day after F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Professor von Mises' Bureaucracy once more calls attention to the ironic fact that the most eminent and uncompromising of defenders of English liberty, and the system of free enterprise, which reached its highest development in America, should now be two Austrian exiles."
• Herring, Pendleton. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 238 (March 1945) 213. "If this volume were written as a campaign document, it would merit attention at the technical level as a contrivance for obfuscating debate in accordance with the adage: 'If you can't convince them, confuse them' .... According to the author, the 'economists' are pitted against the 'progressives.' The latter believe in socialism, the former in a free market. Thus the author reduces the complexities of our age to a bald ideological impasse."
• Shenfield, A. A. Economica. New Series, 12:47 (August 1945). "His case is not new, but his arguments are fresh, his language succinct, and his mode of presentation sometimes brilliant .... the book has two serious weaknesses. First, Mises dismisses the socialist 'solutions' of the problem of calculation without analysis .... The second weakness is the worse. He dismisses Keynes with the totalitarians. Now it may be just to write off the Keynesians this way, for even the most sophisticated of them . . . are capable of totalitarian excesses .... Yet there remains Keynes the master economist. It will not do for Mises to declare tout court that in a free market there is only frictional unemployment. The greatest need of modern popular liberalism is to restate itself in a form which makes room for the Keynes approach."
• The Commonweal. 41:78 (November 3, 1944). "Bureaucracy is, in fact, one of the most amazing exhibitions seen in these parts in many years. The Professor is no dunce. He delivers a critique of socialism that is clever, penetrating, and often damaging. He is a welt-read, cultivated man who knows his Plato and can quote Goethe's tribute to double-entry bookkeeping without even stopping for breath. But then the Professor turns to his eulogy of pure, unregulated capitalism, and suddenly, right there before your eyes. he disintegrates completely and begins babbling the most absurd and vicious nonsense .... One minute you see before you the sound, cultivated scholar; the next minute a dangerous character frothing at the mouth .... To be very calm and objective about it, the Professor's mistake is not that he thinks that [a] world of completely free, unregulated competition is the test of all possible worlds. That is a legitimate subject for day dreaming. What is inexcusable is that an intelligent man should believe, or pretend, that such a world is possible here and now."