Journal of HistoricalSociology Vol. 7 No.

3 September 1994
ISSN 0952-1909

Bureaucracy as a Vocation:
Governmentality and administration in
nineteenth-century Britain

THOMAS OSBORNE

AbstractThispaper focusesupon ethicalconductand liberalmentalltiesofgovernment

in the context of the historical sociology of administrative expertise in nineteenth
century Britain. After a brief consideration of theories of moral regulation, the paper
pursues, by way of a discussion of the government of India and of the famous
Northcote-Trevelyan Report on the Civil Service, the issue of the establishment of an
appropriate bureaucratic persona in the nineteenth century.

Morals and Ethics of Rule

This article takes as its empirical focus the culture of nineteenth
century governmental administration; its subject-matter, partly by
way of a discussion of the government of India, is the well-trodden
field of the formation of the British civil service. It is a consideration
of the relation between ethics and bureaucracy; but it is not an
exercise in history or historiography. Its purpose is rather to raise
again, if only to displace towards its own objectives, the sociological
question of the relation of morality, ideology and, above all, ethics to
the establishment of ruling authority.
Let us begin with the question of moral regulation. Various
historical and sociologicalanalyses have centred around key agencies
of moral transmission, be they the classroom, social class, or the
state. Here interest has tended to centre on institutions rather than
practices, the focus being upon the varied means by which members
of a given population are made the objects or subjects of moral
regulation. The work of Philip Comgan and his colleagues represents
a justly celebrated example of this tradition, which is basically an
extension and refinement of the problem of legitimation. Corrigan, for
example, treats the state as a ‘theatreof educative tendencies’acting
to encourage certain moral forms to the detriment of others: What the
state regulates are thus moral features of the social environment,
above allthe encouraged/discouraged forms of expression, depressing,
repressing and suppressing alternative forms which display
contrasting moralities’ (Corrigan 1981:327;cf. Comgan 1990:264).
But there is also a parallel - perhaps more Weberian - concern to
this question of moral regulation, and this relates to the question of
the self-legitimation of rule, that is, with the ways in which rulers
justifytheir own rule for themselves. This concern actually has two

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Published by Blackwell Publishers. 108 Cowley Road. Oxford OX4 lJF, UK and 238 Maln Street. Cambridge. MA 02142, USA.
290 Thomas osbome

sides to it. When this question is raised it has most often been in the
context of analyses of the moral justification or legitimation of
authority. Again, the work of Corrigan and his colleagues can be
instanced as confronting this question in an exemplary way. Indeed,
for Comgan and Sayer, the ‘machineryof government‘in nineteenth-
century Britain itselfcameto functionasa kind of concrete embodiment
of moral forms for those who ruled as much as for those who were
subject to rule (Comgan and Sayer 1985: 10: cf. Corrigan 1990).One
might also instance in this context the work of Michael Mann,and
those broadly associated with his approach (Mann 1986: cf.
Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 1980; also Mann 1973).According to
this emphasis, one of the main functions of ideology is not so much
to subdue the masses as to boost the confidence - the ‘internal
morale’, as M a n n puts it - of elites themselves (Mann1986:24). Here
indeed those who rule are themselves subject to a moral force:
ideology as a condition of rule, a cohesive force tying together an
otherwise culturally disparate group.
However, the second side to this question of the self-legitimationof
rule is less often considered. This is the question, not so much of the
moral justification of rule or of its legitimation through ideology, but
of the establishment - through a variety of practices - of the ethical
competence to rule. It is not just that those who rule need moral
justification for rule, but that in order to secure rule there has to be
some codification of the ethical type that bears particular competence
to rule. Let us refer to this as the ethical - as opposed to the moral -
constitution of authority (cf. Foucault, in Rabinow 1984: 352). This
approach will concern itself with the diverse means and mentalities
by which sources of authority construct themselves as, so to speak,
authoritative subjects with the authorization to subject others to
authority. To address this field is not to ask the question ’what does
the ruling class do when it rules’?’, nor ’who rules?’, nor even ‘how is
rule accomplished’?’but. rather, ’what do those who rule have to do
to themselves in order to be able to rule’?’
This question of practices of rule, then, is not just a matter of moral
legitimation or ideological justification; rather it concerns the ways in
which moral - or better, ethical - techniques and practices are actually
mobilized to fashion forms of ruling subjectivity. SpeciAc practices
function as aids to the constitution of authority in that they guarantee
the ethical competence of the ruling persona and seek to fabricate a
ruling habitus. so to speak,on the part of those who rule. Nor is this
question of ethical competence reducible to an analytic of class or
gender, that is. one which derives ethical values from a source in the
pre-given‘interests’ of those who rule. Not, of course, that these issues
are unimportant in themselves. But if much historical sociology tends
to be concerned -quite justifiably -with those forms of moral regulation
 Bureaucracy as a Vocation 291

that can be shown to serve particular pre-constituted ‘interests’. the

analysis of the problematisation of ethical competencies of rule might
do better to concentrate upon the links between such ethical
competencies and broader mentalities of government. This will entail
following a ldnd of ‘principle of charity’ with regard to systems and
practices of rule. Here, ethical practices will not be secondary to
interests but will be perhaps analagous to what Austin called
‘performativeutterances’, that is, utterances that achieve their effects,
given the appropriate institutional conditions, as a result of their very
enunciation (Rose and Miller 1992: 177;cf. Bourdieu 1991).Such
ethical practices do not merely serve interests by way of legitimation or
justification; they are in part productive of interests. Hence, moral
forms will not be ‘transparent‘ entities, but will partly constitute or
shape both the reality they confront and the moral identity of those who
are subject to them. This ‘performative’aspect of practices of rule will
tend to be missed by a realist sociology that sets out in advance a
repertoire of social interests for subjects to follow (cf. Hindess 1986).

Government, Administration, Liberalism

Let us, then, pay attention to the ways in which the Aeld of
government constructs authorities as particular ethical types (cf.
Gordon 1991: 12).What do we mean by government here? By
rationalities or mentalities of government we mean those broad
networks or systems of thought and technique which seek to
structure the Aeld of action or others; both so as to preserve and
utilize the ‘freedom’of agents, whilst also seeking to cultivate those
agents in some or other way (Foucault 1982;cf. Foucault 1979;Rose
and Miller 1992;Donald 1988:12-16).The Aeld of government always
presupposes a certain reciprocity between the problematization of a
domain to be governed and the ethical characteristics of those who
are to be subjected to government (cf. Pasquino 1986: 104).This
‘ethical‘component of government also embraces a certain attention
to the ethical characteristics of those who govern, those who are
constructed as the subjects of government; government is not just a
question of shapingthe conduct of others, but, also - as regards those
who are the agents of rule - of bringing about an ethical stylization
of one’s own conduct. To rule, to govern in a particular way,
presupposes a certain ethos of government, what might be called the
ethical subjectivity of power (Rajchman 1991: 116);an ethos that
functions not so much as an exterior agency of moral transmission
but which grasps subjects, so to speak, ‘fromwithin’,as subjectswith
the moral ‘authority’ to rule (cf. Burchell 1991 : 1 19-120).
To take administrativerule as our focus might seem perverse in this
context. For is not administrative rule, with all its negative connotations
292 Thomas osbome

of ‘bureaucracy’,the archetype of a non-ethical form of power? Does

not the very invocation of administrative or bureaucratic rule
automatically imply a version of authority that is, by definition,
devoid of an ethical language of persons? In fact, is not bureaucracy
that form of rule which is exercised precisely without ‘regard for
persons’? Yet, in fact, as I a n Hunter has argued, it is to Max Weber
himself that we might draw inspiration for an insistence precisely on
the ethical character of bureaucracy. Weber treated the bureau as a
distinctive ethical Lebensordnung;a sphere characterized -whatever
its corrosive consequences for the ethics embodied in the field of
politics - by a specific ethical life-orientation that was itself an
historical achievement - the ‘ethos of office’ (Weber 1978: 1404;
Hunter 1993: 11; cf. Gordon 1987: 294).
This historical achievement - if we can call it that - has, no doubt,
many possible genealogies. Weber’s own account of ascetic
Protestantism could, of course, be a key component in any of these.
But one might also narrow the canvas, and look at the fabrication of
the ethos of administration in relation to particular mutations in
governmental reason. This emphasis would consist in showing how
particular rationalities of government sought to call upon, enroll or
mobilize particular ethical stylizations on the part of administrative
authorities. I t would not be a study of ‘techniques of the self in
Foucault‘s sense. I t would not entail, for example, a study of how
particular administrators or bureaucrats actually embodied or
cultivated particular ethical forms. but would focus on how mentalities
and techniques of government have sought to structure the possible
action of others, and to programme particular ethical types into the
field of power. However, we can draw from Foucault some insights
into the linkages between ethics and the ‘political game’, as well as
a certain perspective on what constitutes a liberal problematic of
government.
Foucault takes up the theme - albeit not in itself a novel one for
politicalphilosophy-thattheremay typicallybean interconnectedness
between practices of the government of others and ethical practices
of the self (cf. Bruchell 1993). For example, in his discussion of the
‘politicalgame’ in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, he writes of an
historical situation in which the structures of authority had become
distanced and diffuse, resulting in an emphasis upon the cultivation
of self as a component in the art of governing (Foucault 1990: 89).
Such an ethical codification within the arts of government may be
expected to form a key component within arts of government that
deem themselves to be of a ‘liberal‘nature (Foucault 1989: 109-120).
In Foucault%account, the liberal domain is not that of liberalpolitical
philosophy as such. Liberalism entails neither a substantive social
form nor even a coherent political ideology (for example, a n ideology
 Bureaucracy as a Vocation 293

stressing the autonomy of principles derived from the market).

Rather, liberalism entails generically a kind of permanent critique of
governmental reason itself; it is, as Foucault argues, less a political
ideology than a form of ‘critical reflection on government’ (Foucault
1990: 1 16).Liberal mentalities of government in Foucault’s account
are characterized, above all,by the suspicion that in the very act of
governing one runs the risk of governing overmuch: that is, that the
very act of government can interfere with the felicitous execution of
government itself. Of some special import here is the identiflcation of
a realm of freedom that is in fact impervious to government (civil
society, the market and so forth); this entailing the injunction that
those who govern must take care that acts of government preserve the
autonomy of such realms. A further aspect of Foucault‘s account of
the specifcity of liberal mentalities is the heuristic contrast he
invokes with earlier techniques of ‘police’: although it is not a
question of the historical supercession of one ‘mode of government’
by another. Whereas police emphasized sovereignty over a territory.
liberalism emphasized the regulation of a population: whereas police
emphasized an authority that could be arbitrary over a totality of
subjects, liberalism emphasized the substitution of continuous
apparatuses of security over coups d’mtbrit&(Gordon 1991 : 19-21).

Administrative Ethics: the Indian Laboratory

No doubt the establishment in the nineteenth century of public
administrative service as a particular ‘vocation’- the fabrication of
the civil servant as a permanent administrative official, separated
from the vagaries of politics (Parris 1969: 39) - could be said to have
owed something to this liberal problematic of security. To fidfll such
a role, the administrator had to be constructed on a particular model.
Colin Gordon, emphasizing the disciplinary element of this process,
comments that:

if liberalism halts the cameralfst tendency towards the etatlzat[on of discipline, liberal
government also pursues...a policywhichFoucaultmlls the ‘disdpllnarizatlonofthe state’,
that is to say,a focussing of the state‘s immediate interest In disdpllnary technique largely
on the organization of its own statfs and apparatuses (Gordon 1991: 27).

The key monument to this question of the identity of the bureaucrat

in Britain in the nineteenth century was the Northcote-Trevelyan
Report (Parliamentary Papers [P.P.] 1854). Although the detailed
recommendations of the report - the abolition of patronage and the
establishment of open, competitiveexamination for civil service entry
-were not properly addressed until Gladstone’s reforms of the 1870s
(and even then not properly realized), historians have been justified
in seeing Northcote-Trevelyan as a key point in the establishment of
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modem mentalities of administrative rule (Hart1972;Kitson Clark

1959: 20-3;Gowan 1987, 5-6;MacDonagh 1958: 64-5).What is
signitlcant about the report in these terms is the fact that it sought to
fabricate administration asan autonomousethos or art,separatedboth
from the pull of political patronage and from narrow, specialized
expertise. Moreover, the administrator was not simply to be a faceless
offlcial- the ‘bureaucrat’of modem parlance -but was to enjoy a certain
discretionaryautonomy (Kitson-Clark 1959:22-3). Northcote-Trevelyan
stressed that permanent ofRcials needed to possess the ethical
characteristics required in those who were to be relatively autonomous:
possessing sufadent independence, character and ability to be able to advise,assist and to
some actem. influence, t h e who are from time to time set over them (P.P. 1854: 3).

The key to this was an emphasis on general rather than functional or

specialized management. The civil service examination would not be
restricted to particular types of candidate, nor would it relate to any
particular position or department, but would be a general qualification
for entry into the service; once one had passed the exam one was
qualitled to become a public servant.
Historians have argued over the motives behind the report. One
clear precursor, however, was the reform of the Indian civil servicejust
before Northcote-Trevelyan itself. Indeed, we can conduct a kind of
‘micro-archaeology’ of some of the principles behind the nineteenth
century administrativereforms - and throw some light upon the ethical
assumptions behind the latter - with reference to the government of
India in the Arst half of the nineteenth century. It is not novel to claim
that India represented a kind of laboratory of liberal (and other)
aspirations (Ryan 1972:39 Stokes 1959).If the question of India was
to take on such an importance for the more general question of styles
of administrativerule in the Nineteenth Century (indeed,the term ‘civil
servant‘ originated in the context of Indian government),the reason for
this lies in the fact that that country posed for its British rulers, in an
exemplary way, what might be described as the central problem of
liberal government; that is, putting matters starkly - the question of
how one is to govern at a distance (Rose and Miller 1992: 180).
Goveming India inevitably entailed a certain handling of the cultural
distance between those who governed and those who were governed: ‘a
Government of foreigners over people most difficult to be understood,
and still more d.if3cult to be improved (P.P. 1857-8: 35).Indiathrewinto
relief the question of government as the government of others;here the
relation between rulers and ruled was posed precisely in so far as - at
least prior to the interventions of the Utilitarians, notably James Mill -
India was held not to be totally ‘other’,a blank space reduced to passive
non-agency, but the remnants of a past civilization that had to be
nurtured back to maturity. If India attained the status of a surface of
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emergence for later civil-service reform in Britain, it was because it

became a kind of experimental domain for practical innovations in
styles of government; as Roach argues, India was throughout the
century, ‘alaboratorywhere the English tried out ideas which were too
revolutionary to be initiated at home’ Roach 1971: 23).India also
raised,clearly enough, the question of geographical distance within the
class of those who govern. The whole question of India inherently
pinpointed the fact that to governwas necessarily also to delegate (Cohn
1987:512);a most important consideration, again, especially for liberal
forms of government. India raised the question of the scope for
autonomy that one is to give to those who govern. How is one to govern
those who are distant? How much should the centre delegate to those
who govern some distance away, and how to monitor that delegation?
These questions of government were highlighted, of course, when
at the end of the Eighteenth Century it was widely agreed by those
that took the trouble to consider the question, that India was
governed, in so far as it was governed at all, with a particular degree
of incompetence (cf. Bearce 1961: 40; for a very different, if naturally
biased, view of Company rule halfa century later; P.P. 1852-3). India
was a byword for corruption and the abuse of privilege through
patronage. HoraceWalpole, commenthg on the proflt-makingactivities
of East India Company servants from rice speculations during the
1769-70 famine, provides a vivid instance of prevalent attitudes:

We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru. They were at least butchers on a religious
principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered,
usurped- nay what thinkyou of the famine in Bengal in which three millions perished
being caused by a monopoly of the servantsof the East India Company? (quotedin Kopf
1969: 13-14; Cf. Cohn 1987 506).

An analysis by way of the ‘interests’ of those who governed would

certainly not be out of place here. Marx, for example, spoke of a
‘double government‘ during the Nineteenth Century in India; the
Board of Control and the East India Company, although the secret
mover of India &airs was a third party, the shareholders - ‘elderly
ladies and valetudinarian gentlemen’ - possessing Indian stock
(Marx 1853b).This kind of analysis appeals to the motivated interests
of those concerned. The establishment of the Board of Control in
1784 to oversee, moderate and regulate the activities of the East India
Company was viewed by Marx in terms - hardly to be superceded
today - not of an attempt by the British authorities to regulate the
coups d’authorite of company rule, but as a bid for a stake in the
economic rape of India. This entailed a policy of hiding behind this
smokescreen of the East India Company’s commercial control. Marx
quotes Mill: ‘it was necessary that the principal part of the power
should appear to remain in the hand of the Directors. For Ministerial
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296 Thomas osbome

advantage, it was necessary that it should in reality be taken away'

(Marx 1853a: 150).The real interest in the government of India lay in
terms of those concerned with lining the pockets of the British
government. Marx concluded in 1853 that 'the British government
has been fighting under the Company's name for two centuries, until
at last the natural limits of India were reached (ibid: 152).
Yet, if the analytic cynicism of a sociology of interests has an
explanatory place here, this should not be allowed to obscure the
status of the Indian question as a laboratory for thinking through
questions of government. From this perspective, which necessarily
entails a certain break from the paradigm of viewing ruling ideologies
as merely obfuscatoryof interests, the rule of the East India company
posed the problem of the proper limits of government. This problem
became particularly pertinent in relation to the role of the Company
itself and the scope of its proper activities in India. For what precisely
was the scope of the Company's rule to be? Its primary remit was in
theory that of commerce, and yet it found itself after the Seven Years
War turned effectively into a military and temtorial power (Coen
1971:9).What, therefore, were to be the nature,the proper styhation
and the extent of its rule? Authorities on these matters (and others)
in the Arst half of the nineteenth century answered this question in
various ways. Let us briefly. then, consider three predominant ways
of considering this question of how to go about the government of
India, comparing them as systems of moral authority: Orientalism,
Anglicisation, and Utilitarianism (cf. Cohn 1987: 521-46).
At the turn of the Eighteenth Century there seems to have been a
resistance to the idea of an overt moral transformation of the Indian
populace. The Company was not to be a force of cultural change in
India. That is to say, regulation was not to take the form of a moral
proselytization of the general populace in India: whether secular or
religious - indeed missionary activities were not permitted during
thisperiod. Rather. it was those who governed that were, so to speak,
themselves to be morally regulated so as to attain the requisite social
pacification of India on the basis of a kind of cultural hegemony. A key
Ague here was the reforming Governor-general Richard Wellesley
(Embree, 1962: 187-95). Anxious about the possibility of French
incursion into India, Wellesley argued that the role of officialswould
have to relate to more than just the management of commerce, but
should entail a form of 'statesmanship'. Wellesley argued that:

To dispensejustice to millions of people of various languages, manners, usages and

religions: to administeravast and complicated system of revenue throughoutdistricts
equal in extent to some of the most considerablekingdoms in Europe: to maintaincivil
order in one of the most populous and litigious regions of the world: these are now the
duties of the larger proportion of the civil servants of the company (quoted in Embree,
1967 187: and Cohn 1987: 521).

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 Bureaucracy as a Vacation 297

His plan for a training college for Company officials, an ‘Oxford of the
East’, at Fort William, reflected the aspiration to found a cultural
hegemony in India, a morally sound ruling order, based on the
principles of Orientalism.
Much has been written about this phenomenon, in particular its
racist implications (Bernal 1987: chapter 5; cf. the more subtle
analyses in Said 1985:Inden 1990).More rarely have the implications
of Orientalism as a mentality of government been spelled out. This
matter might fruitfully be approached through the question of
language, a factor central to the Orientalist ideal - the great symbol
of the moment of Orientalism being the work of William Jones in the
‘discovery’of a common Indo-European linguistic heritage (Schwab
1984:35-6;Kopf 1969:31-42:Said 1985:77-9).Hence, at the heart
of Orientalism was the positing of a kind of archaic yet fundamental
link between Hindu civilization and that of Europe (Kopf 1969:38).
Here, one might say, we have an implicit ‘fantasy’ of government
combined with a speciflc ethic of rule. A fantasy of government; given
thiscommon Indo-European heritage, government can not simply be
a question of proselytization - a question of transforming that which
is straightforwardly ‘other’. Matters are more complicated precisely
because the agencies of rule are not dealfng straightforwardly with
‘bfeiiors’or ‘barbarians’but with the heirs to a great civilization that
is both heterogeneous yet phylogenetically continuous with the
culture of the ruling powers.
In so far as the ‘intellectualist‘ideal of Orientalism impacted upon
the ends of government this lay in the aspiration to bring to the
attention of the Indians their previous, now disintegrated, maturity;
amounting, in effect, to a system of moral regulation that could seek
specifically to involve Hindu principles rather than resort to crude
measures of Anglicization (Kopf 1969:97-9).As an ethic of rule,
Orientalism dictated, above all, that officials should cultivate a
formidable linguistic proficiency, especially in the languages of India.
The course at Fort William emphasized the ‘Oriental‘ corpus as a
priority (Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and six Indian vernaculars being
on the curriculum), plus modem European languages, and Greek
and Latin. But the import of languages here was not just a question
of enabling communication between rulers and ruled: languages
were not viewed as being merely facilitative of the instrumental ends
of government. Rather, for Orientalism languages are an ethical- or
more specifically, one might say, a ‘characterological‘- affair. For the
Orientalists,languageswere the concrete embodiments of character-
traits; to work upon language was to shape oneself ethically in terms
of those traits embodied in the language. At Fort William, linguistic
research was viewed as the optimum means for investigating those
speciflc characteristics that functioned as the inherent character
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traits of cultures and people. Kopf writes of Charles T. Metcalfe, for

example (a future Governor-general of India) that:

He believed that the language of the British people was marked by its ‘openness and
boldness ofexpression’.To him the French language was filled with terms of‘politeness
and suavity...[that]bespeak ofdisposition and eloquence of manners’.India, Metcalfe
thought, contained karious races and faiths’and ’we have made only a beginning In
understanding their languages’ (ibid: 101).

Hence, good government would require a certain emphatic

understanding on the part of those who governed in relation to those
who were governed: the very possibility of which would be guided by
language-acquisition,Behind the ideal of Orientalism as an ethic of
administrative government is the behalf that one can only govern on
the basis of an almost intuitive linguistic sympathy with those who
are the objects of government.
Here, one might say, it is the rulerswho are to be morally cultivated.
Orientalism entails a particular stylization of rule - related, above all,
to language leaming - that makes the practice of rule possible. If
there is to be moral hadcatbrz, thiswould pertain to a kind of “trickle-
down’effectwhereby the disseminationof good practices of government
leads to a raising of the moral level of the inhabitants. As an ideal of
government. then, Orientalism could perhaps be described in terms
of its potential alignment with a Zibed form of moral regulation in so
far as its logic resists any impulse to inculcate moral forms in a direct
manner: the ideal of government here is in principle a minimal one
whereby the autonomy of the realm to be governed is preserved on the
basis of the reflexive vigilance of those who govern.
In fact, this lack of a directly proselytizing moral impulse was
precisely what worried those who governed from Britain. ultimately
forming the context of what became known as the Orientalist-
Anglican controversy. Fearing that the Orientalist ethic of
administration could lead to an over-accommodation on the part of
Company ofRcials to Hindu culture, the Court of Directors sought to
reverse Wellesley’s foundation of the college at Fort William. The
problem here was precisely that of the distance between those who
govern: the fear that the agents of the ruling powers might come to
detach themselves from their alignment with those who governed -
in short that the Company’s government at a distance could be
replaced by outright colonization (Embree 1962: 190).To combat the
danger of British administrators becoming agents in the ‘perpetuation
of Hinduism’ (Kopf 1969: 134: cf. 129). Charles Grant advocated, on
the one hand, educating officials outside India itself, and. on the
other, a more direct form of moral intervention on the part of the
governing powers in India. There was to be a division of labour
between pacification and administration: India would be pacified
 Bureaucracy as a Vocation 299

through CMstian values: hence a key aspect of Grant’s opposition

to Wellesley’s policies was an alternative emphasis on freedom of
entry and movement for missionaries in India. But India would be
governed, not through the lights of patronage, but by technical
expertise. Government, in effect, was to be split - between religious
proselytization and the technocracy of administration. The training
of the latter was to be far from the corrupting site of administration
itself but at Grant‘s own foundation, Haileybury College in Britain,
where future officials were to receive their training prior to their
immersion in Indian culture (Cohn 1987: 526-46;Woodruff 1953:
279-286;Monier Williams 1894: 1-25;Stokes 1959:31).
The emphasis at Haileybury was to be upon the means of
strengthening the reasoning faculties of officials to fit them for the
technical tasks of government (the reality, as usual, was somewhat
different; Monier-Williams 1894).To be sure, a condition of such
expertise was the sure foundation of religion; ‘Overarchingthe whole
curriculum ... was to be a concern for religion and morality, for
without a fullattachment to the principles and tenets of the Christian
faith ...the young civil servants would not be able to fuW their trust
either to Great Britain or to the people of India’ (Embree 1962: 135-
6).And this religious dimension had an importance in terms of the
moral governance of the inhabitants. Monier-Williams reports a
Haileybuly professor telling his students:
Remember ... that when you reach India you will probably be sent to some remote
province where you will be like a light set on a hill. Millions will watch your conduct
and take their ideas of Christianity from your actions and words (Monier-Willlams
1894: 38).

Such devotion to a higher moral substance was to be only the

complement, however, of a more ‘technical‘ form of administrative
expertise, founded on the virtues of reason. All training was to be
directed towards this end. Alongside the emphasis upon Oriental
languages that had characaterized the college at Fort William,
attention was paid to command of the classics, as the necessary basis
for ‘a superstructure of that liberal knowledge which is required of
men invested with public trust‘(Embree 1962:196);also to English
literature and composition as aids to the clear and forcible expression
of ideas; to mathematics for its power of ‘strengtheningand improving
the reasoning faculty’ (Report of Committee of Haileybuly College:
quoted in Embree 1962:197);and to natural and experimental
philosophy. Oriental languages were also prominent - only by now a
far more instrumental motivation seems to have been behind this
than had been the case within Orientalism per se, namely the
practical need to carry on diplomacy in native courts without reliance
upon interpreters (Embree 1962:197).In short, as an ideal of rule, the
300 Thomas osbome

purpose was to establish a common culture of officialdom, separated

from those who were governed, a homogeneous class of experts with
a common ruling identity.
The neutral-administrative - as opposed to the moral-religious -
side of this educational confection was pushed to its extreme over
India by the Utilitarian tendency. It is striking that the most literally
'liberal' incursion into this area should represent a combination of
secular proselytization, and ruthless dismissal of any merits for
Indian civilization. However, there was a certain continuity between
the Anglicist and the Utilitarian stances on India. These were partly
related to the individualsConcerned (Malthushad taught at Haileybury,
as had James Mill whilst J.S. Mill was, like his father, to be admitted
to the executive government of the East India Company) but also in
that both were ultimately concerned with founding a system of
regulation in India that would lead eventually to the assimilation of
Hindu culture intohglicized forms of life (Stokes 1959:47-80), esp.
54;cf. Cohn 1987:539).
One can date the onset of the Utilitarian approach to administrative
rule h m James Mill'sH istory ofBritishlndia(1817). a landmarkin that
it was the most monumental work in a trend that was to make India a
key target for elaborations of the ideal 'science of the legislator'. Mill's
history was concerned to place India on a scale of peoples in order to
deduce - on the basis of strict principles of utility -the appropriate form
ofgovemment for the territory. He concluded that the artsof government
in India should have to take note of the fact that India, being at a low
stage of civilization (idealizations of a Hindu 'golden age' being now
forgotten),could not be suitedto the normsof representative government
enjoyed in the Mother country. What was required therefore was an
appropxiate framework of govemment to senre until such a time as
Indian civil society might be brought to a state of maMty. Judicious
- Ricardian - forms of taxation and an appropriate system of
administration would be sufilcient to provide such a fkamework what
was imperative was that the ruling powers should not be constructed
so as to come into contradiction with this autonomous passage to
maturity on the part of civil society. The very existence of the East India
Company, as a kind of indirect institution of rule, would be of some
h c t i o n a l s.lgniticance here. Mill argued that 'the interests of the
dependent or subject people might clash with, and hence be made
subservient to, the interests of the more advanced or ruling nation.
Fortunately India was not ruled directly. The East India Company
provided the perfect instrument whereby impartial, far-sighted experts
with no vested interest in misrule could apply their knowledge to
human affairs' ( C O Wand others 1983: 117).
Administrative expertise according to this view, was to be strictly
objectivizing in so far as government here requires the application of
 Bureaucracy as a Vocation 301

neutral technical principles. Mill’s antagonism towards William Jones

and hiswork is sigruficantin this context. Language attainmentwas not
to be a prominent part of the self-formation of expertise;witness Mill‘s
mistrust of mere ‘eloquence’on the part of thosewho govern (Colliniand
others 1983: 124). The Utilitarians felt that they had found a more
precise, objective, emotionless terminology for politics that would
replace the emotive vagaries of political language: ‘: the dismissal of
eloquence was part of the self-conscious distancing process whereby
the Utilitariansinvented anew terminology to discuss politics -one that
they claimed was more precise and less likely to contain vague
sentimentsandmnancesofmerefeeling‘(Colliniandothem1983:124).
Bentham also expressed this Utilitarian hostility to the effervescence of
language with his advocacy of the use of ‘political arithmetic’ as an
objectivist technical instrument for combatting social pathologies. As
he famously expressed the matter in the Journal of the Statistical
Society; The spirit of the present age has an evident tendency to
confront the flgures of speech with the figures of arithmetic’ (quoted in
McGregor 1951: 155).At this point, political language is purged of its
moral force, and the moral vocation of government is replaced by a
technocratic one: in a sense, then, Benthamism embodied the least
‘liberal‘consideration of the government of India.

The Making ofHome Administration- the technology ofpublicity

In spite of the starkness of the utilitarian position, the question of
India remains interesting from the perspective of the government of
administration in that it fed into conceptions of what a liberal
problematic should be at home: and no doubt because there was
something of an alignment between the question of how to govern an
indigenous people, and how to govern (andenroll)the home population.
The example of India represented a situation where administrative
government was necessarily posed in terms of an ethic, a way of Me.
To be sent to India was necessarily of vocational consequence: a
composite - ‘expatriate’- conduct of living was at stake. At one level,
this ethic may indeed have been tied to a seemingly mundane life;
that of the writer or clerk whose written depositions, however, as J.S.
Mill argued, constituted the essence of security:

All the orders given, and all of the acts of the executiveofficers, are reported in writing
...so that there is no single act done in India, the whole of the reasons for which are
not placed on record. This appears to me a greater secmity for good government than
exists in almost any other government in the world, because no other probably has a
system of recommendations so complete (P.P. 1852-3:314;Ryan 1972:40).

But the ethical side of Indian administration was also ultimately to

reach into a romance of Indian administration. The high Indian
302 Thomas osbome

official came by mid-century to embody, at least for some and

irrespective of the reality of the situation, the epitome of the public-
minded, self-disciplined public servant. George Trevelyan, in the
1860s,provides us with a kind of apotheosis of the romance of Indian
bureaucracy, the administrator governed by a calling, advanced on
the basis of merit, and owing nothing to the false vagaries of
patronage. Here, the Indian life is ethical in a deeper sense, in so far
as it seems to express the essence of Enghsh 'character':

An Englishman cannot be comfortable if he is in a false position; and he never allows

himself to be in a true position unless he is proud of his occupation, and convinced
that success will depend upon his own effort ... He is the member of an official
..
aristocracy, owning no social superior; bound to no man: fearing no man . he is well
aware that his advancement does not hang upon the will and pleasure of this or the
other great man, but isregulatedby the opinion entertained of his ability and character
by the service in general (Trevelyan 1864: 143-4;cf. Escott 1879: xxi).

This sentimental view of the official's calling - even though in the

exceptional context of Indian administration with all its vast
opportunities (Escott 1879:148)-has to be seen, not just as the self-
evident consequence of the hubris engendered by imperialist rule,
but also as something of an 'achievement', the result of an historical
negotiation between the mundanity of the administrativelife and its
ethical romanticization: and indeed, as a condition of possibility for
the transformation of officialdom into a composite ethical calling.
On the other hand, the example of India is of import in more
concrete terms in that it represented the immediate prototype of an
administrative system based on the principle of open, competitive
examination. In November 1854,Macaulay. Jowett and others had
reported to Gladstone at theTreasury on possibilitiesfor reform of the
Indian civil service (P.P. 1854-5b: 8-14). The centrepiece of their
recommendations had been the opening up of the service to open
competition: and, with the examination to be tied more or less to the
final examinations at Oxbridge, effectively disqualifying Haileybury
College from any role in civil service training. India ceased at this
point to be a mere laboratory of liberalism as the destiny of the two
services began to coincide; the Northcote-Trevelyan Report was set
up by Gladstone as a follow-on to the reforms in the Indian service
P.P. 1853-4: Shannon 1982: 279-285; and esp. Conacher 1968:
312-332: on the closure of Haileybuxy, Moore 1964: cf. Hart 1960;
Hughes 1949).The respective reports posited similar solutions to the
question of how to govern; in each case what was at stake was to be
neither a direct form of social control through a moral-religious form
of proselytization nor a neutral-technical edifice of administration,
but rather the installation of an administrative class that was to be
also an ethical class: one that embodied and exemplifled a model of
 Bureaucracy as a Vocation 303

ethical conduct based on the spirit of public service.

Peter Gowan would seek to locate the basis of this public ethic in
the context of a particular brand of Coleridgean conservativisrn
(Gowan 1987; cf. Matthew 1988: 63-5 and Knights 1987: 67).
According to Gowan, what was at issue in Northcote- Trevelyan was
the construction of a new ‘clerisy’- a cultural and administrative
intelligentsia - entrusted with a particular vocation in terms of moral
regulation. Gladstone, for example, saw the establishment of a higher
grade administrative class in the service as being the basis of a new
secular clerisywhich would ‘strengthenand multiply the ties between
the higher classes and the possession of administrative power’
(Matthew 1988:85; Shannon 1982:283; Gowan 1987:25-6). Quite
rightlyeschewingthe explanation of nineteenthcentury administrative
reform that resorts to the interests of a rationallzing and reforming
middle-class who wishes the administrative system to be open to
merit, Gowan contends that what was at stake here was a certain
Coleridgean antipathy to the ‘spirit‘- though not, to be sure, the
substance - of capitalism. For Coleridge and his disciples - from
Thomas Arnold to Benjamin Jowett, and even Gladstone himself-
capitalism must not be permitted to become the ethical basis of the
social order that it had engendered. Capitalism was dynamic, but it
did not breed consent within the national community. In Coleridge’s
view the aristocracy did not live up to their ruling duties in this
respect. But nor were religious ideals Qntheir own enough to supply
the level of consent envisaged by Coleridge; rather a secular form of
moral regulation - a kind of cultural revolution of the middle-class
intelligentsia -would have to be implemented. As Gowan glosses the
matter, according to the Coleridgean view:

...t h e p m ~ c k s s e s m u s t d e v o t e a p a r t d t h e i r
and fmpxuvement of the people, tasks to be undertaken by forming a cadre of dedicated,
culturedintell- imbued with a pmfound sense of duty who would go forth into every
comer of the nation to cement the classesinto a genuine nationalcommunity.. .this clerisy
could be constructed through the reformed universities, a new breed of cM1 servantsand
f@ms like himselfin public life (Gowan 198725-6and 29).

Yet Gowan. in seeking to derive practices of government from a

particularideology.probably over-interprets the Coleridgean influence.
There is no imperative that mentalities of government in any particular
age should be ultimatelyattributableto thisor that politicalphilosophy;
and nor was capitalism the key variable that Gowan’s Marxist
analysis automatically assumes. In any case, it was a common view
- spreading well beyond the intellectual influence of Coleridge - that
there should be moral functions tied to a vocational civil service; that
the service should be more than just the establishment of a neutral-
technical administrative stratum but should embody a particular
0 BasU Blackatell Ltd 1994.
304 mms osbonze
a

ethic of public responsibility. Edwin Chadwick, for example, not

known for his Coleridgean sympathies, laid particular emphasis
upon the moral role of the lower class of civil employee: the great mass
of those who worked for the Post Omce, customs and excise officials
and so on who exerted a moral innuence more mundane than that of
the more exalted Oxbridge Coleridgean clerisy:

The social influence of more than 5O.OOO ofllcers, i.e. of a body of men twice as
numerousas the clergy is.in itself,deserving of seriousconsideration...the lower class
of officers are spread over the country and by their intelligence and respectability
would exerciseabeneflcialinfluenceon the lower ranks of societyin remote places (P.P.
1854-5:155).

Yet what is at stake is not just the intended influence of moral

proselytization wherein the populace is exposed to the cultural power
of certain exemplary personae. but rather what we might want to term
a ‘technology of publicity‘. This is not simply a question of the famous
theme of the evolution of a ‘public sphere’ that is regarded as having
reached culmination by this period (Habermas 1989:67);for there is a
more ‘technical‘aspect to publicity than tends to be suggested by such
evolutionary accounts. The reform of the administration in the 1850s
was an attempt to inscribe the domain of the public into the acts of
government in a particular way, and as such it was simultaneously an
attempt to cortsti-t.tct,and guarantee the allegiance of, a particular kind
of public. To be sure, the social profile of this public was in effect a
limited one. To begin with, it is well known that one of the aims of the
reforms was to tie the civil service more closely to the universities. Thus
the civil service exam was effectively a re-run of the Oxbridge final year
examinations; the liberal education of Oxbridge was tied to the vocation
of civil service-just ashad been decided in the caseof the Indianservice
inthewakeofthe 1853IndiaBill.Therationalebehindthisdevelopment
was that of finding a new vocation for the universities. On the simplest
level this was a matter of finding alternative vocations for Oxbridge
students unwillingto enter either the Church or the bar. Jowett, who,
as G o m demonstrates,was one of the major influences on Northcote-
b e l y a n . observed: ‘I cannot conceive a greater boon which can be
conferred upon the University than a share in the Indian appointments.
The inducement thus offered would open to us a new field of knowledge:
it would give us another root striking into a new soil ov society; it would
provide what we have always wanted, a stimulusreaching beyond the
Fellowships, for those not intending to take orders’ (quoted in Moore
1964:253; cf. Roach 1971:28; P.P. 1854:24-31).
Public Examination
Yet what was at stake was also more than this; more than just a
cynical job-hunt for those who traditionally inherited the
 Bureaucracy as a Vocation 305

responsibilities of rule. Publicity guaranteed an ethical concern on

the part of the administrator. The technology of publicity represented,
on the one hand, an attempt at fabricating an ethical persona for the
administrator (onedifferent from that demanded by either patronage
or ‘bureaucracy’)and, on the other, at fabricating a public that were
to be the subjects of this particular kind of administrative rule. The
key to both sides of this equation - the relay that linked them -was
to be the examination.
The liberal values of an Oxbridge education actually had a kind of
technological import in so far as they fed into the aspiration to create
a civil service ’vocation’.The key to the system was its very generality.
As Northcote-Trevelyan argued, by gearing the civil service to the
young (one effect of the examination system) ‘regular habits may be
enforced (P.P.d 1855%). Moreover exams were not to be held for
speciAc posts but at regular periods: the exams were not to be for
particular positions but to test the general vocation of the potential
civil servant. The installation of a general hierarchy of merit and
promotion would work against the departmental fragmentation of the
service,that is. again,to introduce a sense of unity into administration
asavocation (P.P.d 1855:22-3). ButtheOxbridgeethicalsocontributed
to this generality. This relates to the content of the exam. Once again,
the issue of language was to be importantin the context of government.
For one of the mainstays of liberal education at these universities
was. of course, the acquisition of classical languages, especially
Greek. The reasons for this will be familiar: Greek was the language
of Reason, of ‘civilization’. But in a sense this was not simply a
‘linguistic’ matter; for the consolidation of the Classics as the
mainstay of Oxbridge education in the 1830sand 1840s (1822is the
date of the Arst Cambridge Classics Tripos) was not just tied to a
valorization of linguistic learningbut immersion in the entire cultural
and institutional contexts of the classical world. The views promoted
by the liberal educators - from Thomas Arnold to Connop Thirlwall
and William Whewell- combined in what Bernal has described as an
ethos of Romantic-scepticism,an ethos embraced by the entire mid-
Victorian “new intelligentsia’ (Bernal 1987:322: Jenkyns 1980).
Above all,Greek imbued the scholar with what might be described as
an ethic of distance, or of liberal toleration, combined with a concern
for the practicalities of facts over speculation; in Mathew Arnold’s
words, those subjected to the Greek world were ‘more truly than
others under the empire of facts, and more independent of the
language current among those with whom they live’ (quoted in
J e w s 1980:65-6:cf. Rothblatt 1976:147).
To what or whom was the administrator to be responsible? It is easy
to dismiss the patronage system as a necessarily corrupt bypassing
of any concept of public responsibility. Yet, one might say that a s a
306 Thomas Osbome

principle of government patronage merely represented an alternative

conceptualization of responsibility itself. Those benefitting from
patronage would be responsible to their patron, hence it would be in
the utmost interests of the patron to be assured of the good character
of the appointed official. In a sense the opposition to the system of
patronage was conceived by way of an alternative patronage system;
as an attempt to substitute the patronage of the many (public
opinion) for that of the few. Again,it is Chadwick who provides, albeit
from an extreme position, perhaps the clearest avowal of the rationale
at stake. For Chadwick, it was precisely patronage that lead to
bureaucracy in the derogatory sense; an administrative apparatus
that merely served the interests of its incumbents, that proliferated
according to its own logic, and which impelled in the official no
responsibility towards the public that it served. The aim was not, in
the negative sense, to create a bureaucracy, but to motivate officials
for public service,to make them vocationally responsible to the public
(P.P. 1854-5:187-8;cf. Finer 1952:477-83).
The key to this principle of publicity, its technological aspect, so to
speak, was to be the public examination itself (MacLeod 1982;Roach
1971:22-34). In the 1850s when the general vogue for examination
first took off, it was conceived by its advocates - although hardly,
needless to say, by its opponents (Shannon 1982:283-5)- precisely
as a means for the generation of ‘character’. Lord Ashley had written
of the coming generation in 1844 that:
we must have nobler,deeper, sterner stuff;less of refinement and more of truth:more
of the inward and less of the outward gentleman:a rigid sense of duty and not a delicate
sense of honour (quoted in Thane 1990: 28).

In his account of this kind of demand in its relation to Victorian

governing values, Stefan Collini has recently written of the political
aesthetic of ‘muscular liberalism’: a body of thought that sought to
invoke specific moral qualities of character, duty etc as a condition of
moral authority (Collini 1991: 1 13). Perhaps, stretching matters
somewhat, the examination can be conceived as a technology of
muscular liberalism (cf. P.P. 1854:3). In any case, the exam was not to
be some kind of neutral, transparent technique for testing the presence
of such virtues in the candidate. Rather. there was to be a direct tie
between the examm * ation and the cultivation of virtue. The broad base

of the proposed civil service examinations,prototyped in the Indian civil

service, was notjust a ‘technical‘matter; rather, there was a momlbasis
to the competitive principle of examination. Roach observes:
For the individual,examinations are a test of common-senseand of character as well
as of book-keeping.To do well in them demands perseverance and self-denialwhich
strengthenthe character.For the nation, acompetittvesystemwould be based on high
moral principle and would reduce corruption and place-seeking (Roach 1971:30).
0 Basil Blackwell Lid 1994.
 Bureaucracy as a Vocation 307

Jowett claimed that the exam measures character in so f a r as ‘the

perseverance and self-discipline necessary for the acquirement of
any considerable amount of knowledge are a great security that a
young man has not led a dissolutelife’(P.P. 1854:24).One respondent
to the Civil Service Commission commented approvingly that exams
were anti-democratic (in the sense of democratic as the exercise of
‘mere numbers over virtue, intelligence, property’) because their
existence encouraged the inculcation of good habits (‘steadinessof
conduct’, ‘self-denyingdiligence’);

without steady application a long course of study cannot be mastered: and nothing is
more certain than that habitual diligence brings other virtues in its train; for instance
temperance and self-control, to say nothing of punctuality and accuracy: yet even
these latter have a real connection with truth and honesty [Charles Graves, in P.P.
1844-5:28;cf. the comments of J.S. Mill, 95).

In addition to acting to discipline the virtues, the exam system

represents an apparatus for the formation of public allegiance. It is
less that the official will be accountable to the public, than that the
public will And itself allied in its aspirations to the ideal of officialdom;
indeed, that officialdomwill be an expressionofpublic allegiance. For
above all the existence of open competition will spur on the middle
and lower middle classes to better themselves (Jowett in P.P. 1854:
30);the examination system is notjust a passive legitimation device,
rather it gives something for the lower orders to grasp as an
aspiration, hence it ties them to the system. Even those who fail will
have had the benefit of the character-building aspects of the exam
system as a whole (P.P. 1854-5:25).Roach quotes a pamphlet on
public examination by Richard Dawes-Remarks on theReorgcuzization
of the Civil Service and its Bearing on EducationalProgress ( 1854)- to
the effect that the existence of public examination would act as an
incentive for people to educate their children better: that no reform
’would do more to attach the lower and middle classes of society to
theinstitutionsoftheircountry‘(Roach1971:29).Not directrule, not
moral regulation: but the indirect mobilization of allegiance; and the
creation of a public sphere oriented in aspiration to state service.
But the exam is also a liberal technique in that in so f a r as it acts,
by promoting merit, as a brake upon the arbitrary excesses of
government. it also checks the tendency of government to proliferate
by introducing greater accountability. For Chadwick, the increased
accountability of the administration would mean an economizing of
administrative tasks (P.P. 1854-5:208).But also, in a wider sense,
the very existence of a reformed civil service would be a brake upon,
and a principle of limitation of, the excessive proliferation of
government. The existence of the civil service creates a neutral space
of government, one subject to public control yet outside the coups
0 Basil Blackwell U d 1994.
308 Thomas osborne

d’authorite characteristic of politics (‘government does everything

badly’).The function of the Treasury was to be central here: so much
was evident from Gladstone’s Minute of 1853 (Wright 1969:xiii). For
Gladstone, one of the lynchpins of the reform proposals was that they
should result in overall Treasury control of the home service. The
principle of publicity should itselfensure this: for the system of public
examination should produce, above all. an imperative of efficiency in
the service: ‘the object is, that the business of the public should be
done in the best and most economical manner’ (P.P. 1853-4b: 373).
Hence the fabrication of the civil service was precisely directed at a
de-politicization of state tasks: an attempt, one might almost say. at
the de-politicization of government.

Concluding Remarks
Northcote-Trevelyan has long been a magnet to historians of
administration: much of our discussion has merely followed some
already well-trodden pathways. Why again have we resurrected for
discussion this monument to a reform programme that was, after all,
a failure in immediate terms? Restricting ourselves to the
establishment of the home administration, several conclusions can
be drawn.
On the subject of failure itself, if one’s criterion is that of the
realization of thought, then Northcote-Trevelyanwas indeed a failure.
But if one’s interest is in the history of thought itself then a reform
project like that of the 1850s takes on a kind of density of its own.
Northcote-Trevelyan is, in crystallized form, a kind of diagram that
outlines a rationale for acting upon others in a particular, liberalway.
For thought is itself an agent in the history of arts and practices of
government: it is a point of reference, a relay for a diverse assemblage
of schemes, aspirations and techniques. Northcote-Trevelyan has
justifiably been of interest to historians precisely because it is itself
part of the historicity of the Nineteenth Century.
Northcote-Trevelyan also, of course, partakes of the historicity of
bureaucracy and of the modem state. The constitution of a permanent
home service clearly represents an attempt at the establishment of a
civil, bureaucratic arm as an adjunct to the political and military
functions of the state. But as an historical example, our consideration
of Northcote-Trevelyanalso servesusefully to displace these seemingly
fast sociological categories. This disturbance comes by way of the
question of ethics. There is a theoretical point to be made here that
relates in general to the question of rule. We have sought to contend
that rule is not simply a question of the realization of the interests of
those who happen to rule: that one must pay attention to the relations
that those who rule bring about with regard to themselves, that is, not
 Bureaucracy as a Vocation 309

just the ideologies or moraljustifications of rule, but the ethics of rule.

This attention to the question of ethics does not signify a concern with
the internally generated ‘conscience’of those entrusted with rule:
rather ethics are themselvesprogrammed ‘fromwithout‘via mentalities
of government. Nor does this relate just to how those who rule justify
and seek to legitimate, or delegate, rule. Rather, the point about this
concern with ethics is to highlight the ways in which those who rule
or govern seek to constitute themselves in a space where rule is
rational, reasonable, predictable and justifiable: and the means by
which the requisite capacities for rule are to be installed, maintained
and regulated. What lay behind Northcote-Trevelyan was not a
disciplinary impulse, nor even merely an educational one, but an
attempt to inscribe into government a particular ethics of rule that
would be appropriate to a discretionary - as opposed to a neutral-
technical - bureaucracy. One might conclude that it is not the
neutrality of bureaucrats that makes them ethical: it is their ethical
fomation that allows for a particular conception of what it is to be
“neutral”.If what was at stake was, as Gladstone put it, a bid for ‘a
more strenuous ethic in public life’, then, as such, it was also a bid
to construct an ethic ofpublic life, one that would be dependent for
its functioning upon the moral effects of the ‘public’ (‘Publicity is a
check, said James Graham, in so far as ‘public character is so
valuable to a public man’: Parris 1969:78).And if an apparantlynon-
bourgeois, or even aristocratic, ethic (or Coleridgean or whatever)
seems to have been involved in this construction, this should not lead
us automatically to conclude that such an ethical concern formed
part of a British ‘exceptionalism’;rather, one deploys the ethical tools
that are to hand. In any case, the machinery of rule cannot be
conceived simply as a pure instrument of class or state. Rule, even
bureaucratic rule, is partly a matter of the ethical preconditions of
rule: and power, even state power, has to pass by way of ethics (cf.
Marsh 1979).
Perhaps, then, an historical turn can serve to show that conceptions
of the radically non-ethicalcharacter of bureaucracy, so often derived
from Max Weber, are surelymisleading (bothwith regard to bureacracy
and with regard to Weber). For Weber, the bureaucratic principle
famously leads to the rule of ‘formalisticpersonality’, rule conducted
sine ira et studio (cf. Hennis 1988: 101). But to use Weber to argue
that bureaucracy brings about an eclipse of ethics is to run together
his thinking on discipline with his thinking on bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy could be said to differ from discipline in so far as it
presupposes an ethical formation on the part of the bureaucrat, a
bureaucratic vocation, as opposed to a more or less blind obedience
to rules and orders: the very rationalization of tasks, the very
condition of experiencing authority as deriving from abstract rules,
0 BasU BhckweU Lid 1994.
310 Thomas osbome

roles, not persons - this presupposes an ethical formation on the part

of the bureaucrat (cf. Strong 1992: 15).So what is interesting about
Northcote-Trevelyan, perhaps what has drawn the historians to this
moment, is that, here at the apparent dawn of the modem bureaucratic
spirit, was a realization that bureaucracy cannot be considered as
other than ethical by government.
And this is where bureaucracy is, as Weber insisted, separated
from - and possibly corrosive upon - politics. What is ‘liberal‘ about
Northcote-Trevelyan is precisely this ethical consideration - that the
bureaucrat has to be a certain vocational ‘type’; a liberal ethical
consideration on the part of government that - in its implicit
codification of elements of rational discretion - was not previously
accorded, for example, the administrative agent of ‘police’ or the
recipient of patronage. As has been argued, part of this liberal
concern related precisely to a ‘de-governmentalization’.a subtraction
of administration from the complexities of patronage and politics.
Hence, Northcote-Trevelyan programmed the ethical side of its
concerns in a certain alignment with those that related to efficiency
and economy, that side of its concerns that implied, in fact, the very
least of any ‘regard for persons’. The condition of possibility for this
was an understanding of the character of the administrator - one
based, indeed, upon a typically ‘liberal‘view of education - as being
guided ethically by a sense of responsibility to a wider public: hence
the very ethical formation of the administrator would lead to the
delimitation of wasteful. ‘bureaucratic’, tendencies. Perhaps the
moment for such a n alignment of governmental and ethical concerns
wasvery soon passed: and, no doubt, other mentalities of government.
other ruling authorities, would seek to codify the bureaucrat in
different ways. But, then, there is no reason why bureaucracy should
follow some hard and fast, trans-historical model: the bureaucratic
impulse should invoke in the minds of its analysts the form of a
plurality rather than the inevitability of a monolith.

Note
Many thanksto Ian Hunterand two anonymousrefereesfor their invaluable
comments on an earlier drafi.

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