Bureaucracy and its Liberal Imaginings: Victorian Aesthetics of the State

Bureaucracy and its Liberal Imaginings: Victorian Aesthetics of the State endeavors, much like Thomas Carlyle, to understand the crisis of the present through an analysis of the past, but more specifically through fictions of the Victorian past. For it is only there, in the amalgam of stories fixated on the issue of reform and empire as found in the works of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, that we can find any insight into our own perceptions, perplexities, perturbations about the underlying tensions that organize (or disorganize) liberal society as a whole. Which is to say, bureaucracy, while on the one hand an integral apparatus underpinning the burgeoning modern state, is, on the other, an emotion, an experience, a sensation of anxiety and trepidation that evokes a certain way of thinking about the world. What I argue below is that this unique mode of contemplation, while typically perceived by contemporaries as “paranoid,” is in fact a reasonable albeit complicated struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible, to make the intangible tangible, to represent what is typically beyond representation. And in making such an argument, I am also suggesting that the idea of bureaucracy is at once inflected by the contradictions inherent to liberalism (a simultaneous demand for more and less State), and that such an inflection produces within the Victorian frame of mind—and arguably our own—a crisis of uncertainty which demands explanation and rectification, one that is ultimately formalized in the works of the above mentioned Victorians as a critical yet sympathetic plea for the expansion and solidification of democracy or a call for its destruction by way of charismatic, revolutionary heroes. And lastly, a claim such as mine seeks to complicate traditional theories and notions of bureaucracy found in John Stuart Mill and Max Weber in an effort to demonstrate the seriousness of such imaginings and why they should not be discounted on the face of their sometimes preposterous nature—a lesson all too prescient now.