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Subject Area: Political Theory

Bureaucracy and the New Equality - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, January/March 1979, vol. 2, No. 1 [1979]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Bureaucracy and the New Equality

Robert A. Nisbet

  • Emeritus, Columbia University and American Enterprise Institute

The New Despotism. Menlo Park, California: Institute for Humane Studies (1976) 34 pp.

The founders of the modern political community believed that republican or representative government tended to diminish the degree of political power intruding into individual lives. Yet, paradoxically, the power of governments over the lives of individuals has increasingly expanded in every Western country, particularly since the end of World War I. Twin forces, an institution and an idea, have accelerated the growth of governmental power in recent years.

The institution is the politically “invisible” infragovernment comprised by bureaucracy's commissions, agencies, and departments that have grown up in the last 50 to 100 years. During this period the bulk of governmental power, as it affects our intellectual, economic, social, and cultural lives, has passed from politically accountable executives and legislative bodies to a vast, anonymous, and politically insulated bureaucratic infragovernment. By pursuing power in the name of health, safety, welfare, environmental protection, and other laudable ends, the reach of the infragovernment has extended into innumerable, formerly private, recesses of the lives of citizens of the modern Western nation-state.

But most important among the ideas that have given birth to the centralized bureaucratic power is “equality.” Nisbet surveys the ways in which various conceptions of equality have influenced Western forms of social organization beginning with the ancient Greek reforms of Cleisthenes at the end of the sixth century B.C. In modern times the infragovernment's crusading promulgation of the “New Equality” as a social objective has posed a serious threat to liberty and social initiative. Unlike other conceptions of equality which have promoted equality before the law or equality of opportunity, the “New Equality” aims at equality of condition or of result. The disturbing menace of the “New Equality” is its enormous increase and centralization of the power of government.

The recent lessening of restrictions on the press, theater, and television does not prove that freedom can flourish despite growing bureaucracy. While freedom of expression has been liberalized somewhat in this century, much more basic economic, local, and associative liberties have suffered massive erosion by the spread of military, police, and bureaucratic power.