Written long before Public Choice economists began to take up the subject, Mises describes bureaucracies as both self-interested and economically irrational (thereby improving on the modern Public Choice critique). There is no reinventing government: if we are to have government do things for us, bureaucracies, which cannot behave efficiently, will have to do the work. This small book has grown in stature as Western economies have become more and more bureaucratized.
This volume's contents include:
- Preface to the 1962 Edition
- 1. The opprobrious connotation of the term bureaucracy
- 2. The American citizen's indictment of bureaucratism
- 3. The "Progressive" view of bureaucratism
- 4. Bureaucratism and totalitarianism
- 5. The alternative: profit management or bureaucratic management
- Preface to the 1944 Edition
- Introduction
- 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 a 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 the 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 a rising generation within a bureaucratic environment
- 3. Authoritarian guardianship and progress
- 4. The selection of the dictator
- 5. The vanishing of the critical sense
- Is There Any Remedy Available?
- 1. Past failures
- 2. Economics versus planning and totalitarianism
- 3. The plain citizen versus the professional propagandist of bureaucratization
Hardcover 978-0-86597-663-4