In chapter 6, I highlighted the gradual transition to “modernity” by noting that:
“The diffusion of modern technologies can be tracked by the initial dates in the dictionary for the published use of such neologisms as newspaper (1667), bureaucracy (1759), telegraph (1793), steamship (1819), railroad (1822), analytical engine (1843), telephone (1864), and typewriter (1868), all of which helped to accelerate the global growth of communication.”
All these words have extensive histories of their own chronicled by various writers, but few of them have undergone such close scrutiny as the word “bureaucracy” as examined by Anna Joukovskaia in “Bureaucracy: The Making of a Buzzword.” I wasn’t aware of her piece when I was compiling my list above, since it wasn’t published in the Journal of Intellectual History until October 2023, and frankly I wasn’t aware of how “loaded” this particular term has always been, even in France nearly 400 years ago.
She writes:
“Bureaucracy is surely one of the most spectacular linguistic-conceptual
success stories of the modern era, and it is curious that historians of political thought most attentive to language, members of the Cambridge and Begriffsgeschichte schools, have largely overlooked its early history. It has been shown that the origin of the word bureaucratie goes back to the 1750s, to an invention of the French merchant, liberal economic thinker, and high-level royal administrator Jacques Claude Marie Vincent, marquis de Gournay (1712–59). . . Through the following decades, the idea that Gournay “invented a type of government” spread widely and was reified in textbooks and dictionaries of concepts—one of which, for example, stated without nuance that bureaucracy “took its place alongside monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.” More recent scholarly literature questions whether this interpretation of the neologism’s original meaning is correct” (pp. 685-686).
She then delves (and I am using this ChatGPT-favored word advisedly, though as I wrote in a previous post, it’s not a favorite of mine) because she really does go into extensive detail into the origins of the word.
“So, what did Gournay intend when he invented the word bureaucracy?
In Gournay’s rhetorical strategy of legitimizing the merchant state, the neologism bureaucracy, which he used orally when speaking to insiders, functioned as . . . a buzzword in our current jargon. The image of small “clerks and employees” performing narrow and repetitive functions, languishing all their lives in “some bureau,” holding back industry and commerce both by their restrictive and punitive functions and by their demographic and financial weight, highlighted, by way of contrast, the virtuous merchant profession, which lacked consideration in French society. The invention of bureaucracy by a French merchant-economist
in the 1750s was anything but accidental, and the origin of the word should be seen as an integral part of the early history of liberal economic doctrine” (Joukovskaia, 2023, p. 709).
Bureaucracy now, like it or not, remains an essential part of modern life (and our vocabulary) even while some of the technologically-oriented words on my list have been replaced by more up-to-date neologisms. And I see that French president Emmanuel Macron is still trying to reduce the bureaucratic burden on businesses in France!
Keywords In and Out of Context 