David Graeber

Presents a tour through ancient and modern history to trace the evolution of bureaucracy while assessing the efficiencies and casualties of its practices in the modern world.

On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

The Utopia of Rules

From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber--one of our most important and provocative thinkers--traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice...though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing--even romantic--about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us--and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.

David Gwiasda

The Iron Law of Liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regu- lations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.

Sebastian Stockmarr

Nick Truden

Needed a better editor. Was also hoping for a more rigorous research into the roots, causes, and answers to bureaucracy.

Gavin

Bureaucracy is the dominant structure in adult life throughout the world. And everybody hates it, including the people nominally in power. How does that work? This book is his answer and is full of his usual sparkling sentences and big dubious historical claims:

  The organization of the Soviet Union was directly modeled on that of the German postal service.


He is sadly not to be trusted on technical matters or in fact anything really contentious. But he's good on some other things.

He notes that corporate life is just as bureaucratic as the public sector, but that corporations are rarely called bureaucracies. This is important! He further notes that left-wing utopias tend to envision vastly stifling regulation and committees as their only lever against unfairness and abuse. 

The book is slightly overegged - but compared to most anarchist social theory he is a model of rigour, epistemic care and systematic focus. In fact he is critical of his people's theorists and practitioners:

  Foucault’s ascendancy in turn was precisely within those fields of academic endeavor that both became the haven for former radicals, but that were themselves most completely divorced from any access to political power, or increasingly, even to real social movements—which gave Foucault’s emphasis on the “power/knowledge” nexus, the assertion that forms of knowledge are always also forms of social power, indeed, the most important forms of social power, a particular appeal. 

No doubt any such historical argument is a bit caricaturish and unfair; but I think there is a profound truth here. It is not just that we are drawn to areas of density, where our skills at interpretation are best deployed. We also have an increasing tendency to identify what’s interesting and what’s important, to assume places of density are also places of power. The power of bureaucracy shows just how much this is often not the case. 

He yields too much to standpoint theory when he is told that they had similar ideas earlier (which he hadn't read and which they didn't put so clearly). But he's fun and witty, heretical to his tribe, original as always. 


  ...if we’re going to actually come up with robots that will do our laundry or tidy up the kitchen, we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power — one that no longer contains either the super-rich or desperately poor people willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs—to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history.

Andrew Louis

The thread of this book often gets lost in tangents and rants but Graeber is such a sharp writer.

Ron Bronson

I didn't realize how much of this book would be a love letter to sci-fi in a weird way and yet, Graeber uses Star Trek as a metaphor in parts discussing how we never think about the bureaucracy of Starfleet. I have actually thought about this before, how Star Trek is surely depicting some kind of non-democracy society, but...anyway, this isn't as good as "Debt" but it's a worthy follow up in its own right.

Ri Liu

I got this book hoping it would validate all my miseries about bureaucracy and its alienating effects. It provided some of that (more in the Utopia of Rules essay than the one that the book leads with), while sneaking in an intro course to anarchism among other things. Some may be frustrated by this misdirection, but I was along for the meandering path that the book took. It revealed some novel insights into our society, backed in no small part by Graeber's anthropological background with references to pop culture and historical context.

Ferran

Raquel 🧚🏼‍♀️ 

Will Araujo

0xADADA

Lizelle G

Jamie McHale

Henning

Boothby

Ivan Shiel

Neta Steingart

Julius Gehrig

Gustav Vallin

Angelo Zinna

From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.

The Utopia of Rules On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

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