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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.
- Sales Rank: #51168 in Books
- Published on: 2016-02-23
- Released on: 2016-02-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.19" h x .73" w x 5.53" l, .81 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Review
“A slim, sprightly, acerbic attack on capitalism's love affair with bureaucracy."
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing
“[The Utopia of Rules] should offer a challenge to us all. Should we just accept this bureaucracy as inevitable? Or is there a way to get rid of all those hours spent listening to bad call-centre music? Do policemen, academics, teachers and doctors really need to spend half their time filling in forms? Or can we imagine another world?"
—Gillian Tett, Financial Times
“Graeber wants us to unshackle ourselves from the limits imposed by bureaucracy, precisely so we can actually get down to openly and creatively arguing about our collective future. In other words, yelling at the book is not just part of the pleasure of reading it. It's part of the point."
—NPR
“Graeber’s most interesting claim...is that our expressed hostility toward bureaucracy is at least partly disingenuous: that these thickets of rules and regulations are a source, to quote from his subtitle, of 'secret joys' for most of us."
—Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian (UK)
“Something like an intellectual hike led by an eccentric guide: a winding set of anecdotes, schematics, juxtapositions, and assertions... He is a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate."
—Slate
“Thought-provoking."
—Boston Globe
“What intense pleasure this book gave me, despite the dull topic: bureaucracy.”
—Peter Richardson, The National Memo
“[A] fizzing, fabulous firecracker of a book… Our contemporary bureaucrats are revealed, in fact, as none other than you and me, forever administering and marketing ourselves."
—The Literary Review
“Anthropologist Graeber is one of our wildest thinkers (see Debt: The First 5,000 Years), and in this book, he takes on the topic of bureaucracy, arguing that what we think of as the root of our civilization — capitalism, technology, rules and regulations — may just be what’s keeping us in chains."
—Flavorwire, 10 Must Read Books for February
“Inspiring and full of surprising facts… This is ultimately a book about how the systems we invent come to appear natural. We treat our world as though it is a fact, but actually, we produce it. This is not a new idea, but it’s one of the most hopeful we’ve got. It opens the door to change.”
—Maclean's (Canada)
“A throughly argued, funny, and surprising new book."
—Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire
“Persuasive... Graeber’s aim was to start a conversation on the boondoggles and benefits of bureaucracy. In that regard, he has ticked all the right boxes."
—The Observer (UK)
“Packed with provocative observations and left-field scholarship. Ranging from witty analysis of comic-book narratives to penetrating discussion of world-changing technologies that haven’t actually appeared, it demystifies some of the ruling shibboleths of our time. Modern bureaucracy embodies a view of the world as being essentially rational, but the roots of this vision, Graeber astutely observes, go all the way back to the ancient Pythagoreans."
—John Gray, The Guardian (UK)
“Admirable and convincing...In his irrepressible, ruminative way, Graeber stands in the comic tradition of Walt Whitman, archy and mehitabel and James Thurber. This is the chorus with which to laugh the trousers off corporate management."
—Times Higher Education (UK)
“Interrogates aspects of bureaucratic modernity that are normally unexamined causes of annoyance… Stylish and witty."
—Steven Poole, New Statesman (UK)
“Graeber is an American anthropologist with a winning combination of talents: he’s a startlingly original thinker...able to convey complicated ideas with wit and clarity."
—The Telegraph (UK)
“A sharp, oddly sympathetic and highly readable account of how big government works—or doesn’t work, depending on your point of view."
—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Debt: The First 5,000 Years:
“Written in a brash, engaging style, the book is also a philosophical inquiry into
the nature of debt—where it came from and how it evolved.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“An absolutely indispensable—and enormous—treatise on the history of money and its relationship to inequality in society.”
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing
“[A]n engaging book. Part anthropological history and part provocative political argument, it’s a useful corrective to what passes for contemporary conversation about debt and the economy.”
—Jesse Singal, Boston Globe
“This timely and accessible book would appeal to any reader interested in the past and present culture surrounding debt, as well as broad-minded economists.”
—Library Journal
About the Author
DAVID GRAEBER teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, and Direct Action: An Ethnography. He has written for Harper’s, The Nation, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New Left Review.
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Graeber returns with another lively investigation of injustice
By John L Murphy
How has bureaucracy combined "financialization, violence, technology, the fusion of public and private" as all "knit together into a single self-sustaining web"? In these three essays, two already published but reworked somewhat, David Graeber turns to this question. In his "Debt: The First 5000 Years" (reviewed by me May Day 2014) he looked at how this single web expanded to tangle all of us, long ago. In "The Democracy Project" (reviewed by me June 2014), he extrapolated from his participation in Occupy Wall Street to examine how direct rather than representational democracy can work. An anarchist anthropologist, he writes in a lively style, even if his books can sprawl and scatter his ideas, for he keeps shifting his scrutiny, it seems on paper, as fast as another realm of investigation or application enters his perceptions.
This quality, therefore, may dissuade readers demanding a more academically focused, and perhaps less personally engaged, study. But if you can handle the looser approach, Graeber again delivers a readable, if impatient at times, look at how an all-encompassing top-down structure bears down on everyday folks, and why you and I may oddly find "secret joys" in the predicaments we face when dealing with paperwork and red tape.
In essay 1, the left, Graeber finds, tends to favor the conformity in the guise of equal access and lack of favoritism that bureaucracies were invented to carry out, in lieu of nepotism, bribes, or cronyism.
Graeber peers into this and uncovers the threat of violence, however muffled or cloaked, for those who do not go along. The police, he alleges, are merely "bureaucrats with weapons," after all. He cites Giorgio Agamben that from the perspective of those in charge, "something is alive because you can kill it; so property is 'real' because the state can seize or destroy it." Consider "real estate" too: Graeber traces its etymology back to the "royal" power from which land and property have evolved.
Why don't we rebel? The anarchist question returns. "If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn't have capitalism any more. This is the ultimate revolutionary question. What are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this, to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?" Essay 2 considers this, and alternatives, if in brief, as to why we have not leapt forward politically as well as economically, considering the hi-tech wonders those of us in middle-age now were promised as occurring by the millennium. The shift, rather, to cheap labor overseas rather than robotics causes us guilt, as the Third World's exertions fund the First World's fun. Instead of more leisure for all, those working in the advanced nations find fewer secure jobs, more hours expected as work-leisure boundaries blur, and managers squeeze ever more profit out of workers fearing an insecure future, where tech has not brought us more happiness.
Around us, Graeber finds "voting booths, television screens, office cubicles, hospitals, the ritual that surrounds them--one might say these are the very machinery of alienation. They are the instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered." Rhetoric worthy of the Manifesto.
Instead of liberating us with progressive machines and work-saving strategies, "the technologies that actually emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control." While the security state looms, the insecurity of ordinary folks increases, and this, Graeber insists, "led to a massive increase in overall working hours for almost all segments of the population" as we also must take on more paperwork, more forms, more fine print.
Even professors such as himself suffer. "There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical." Well, maybe at Yale, where he taught before his position now at the more pragmatic London School of Economics? "No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers." Essay 3, on rationality and value, was not made available in the e-galley provided me for review, but I anticipate from the first two downloaded that this book will please Graeber's audience, and that its tone, spirited, exasperated, and inquiring, will reward thoughtful inquirers.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Maybe not what you think...
By RedsFan
Despite its intriguing and compelling title, this book is not a diatribe against bureaucracy (although plenty of phrases therein are delightful for their insightful exposes of bureaucracy). It's really an essay on the tension between creative and conservative forces. As such, it's difficult to put one's finger on its main thesis other than to say that it is an exploratory endeavor--which isn't a "thesis" at all. It is an important book because it makes you think about work and politics and power and myth (and a number of other of seemingly unrelated topics) under one umbrella idea. In other words, it helps you think about why patterns of bureaucracy appear in different places, why creative forces oppose them, and why those creative forces always fail (in the sense that they are destined to display the bureaucratic tendencies of the institutions they sought to revamp or destroy). [My prediction is that not many people will like this book because they will buy it thinking that it is something other than what it is: a book about bureaucracy. And people will probably buy it to confirm that the bureaucracies in which their lives are embedded are frustrating things that someone should do something about.] But if you can get past that expectation and accept the book for what it is, it is really, truly thought-provoking.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
A Fresh Take on Bureaucracy
By Peter Richardson
What intense pleasure this book gave me, despite the dull topic: bureaucracy. Anthropologist David Graeber is perhaps best known for "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" (2011), which became required reading for the Occupy Wall Street movement. In that book, Graeber showed that the standard explanation for the origins of money, rehearsed in dozens of economics textbooks, was a fairy tale. In "The Utopia of Rules," Graeber similarly claims that the conventional wisdom about bureaucracy is misleading; although strongly associated with the public sector, today’s bureaucracies can’t be understood apart from the rise of the modern corporation. Noting that the right’s critique of bureaucracy has been extraordinarily successful, Graeber maintains that the left needs to develop a new way of talking about it. This set of loosely connected essays is an attempt to begin that conversation.
Graeber argues that we have entered the era of total (or predatory) bureaucratization. Characterized by advanced technology, a fusion of public and private power, and the state violence to maintain it, this new system is exceedingly wasteful, at least for the ordinary citizen. If you’ve ever retyped your entire resume into a potential employer’s database, you have some inkling of its extravagance. But total bureaucratization, Graeber argues, is remarkably efficient at one thing—extracting profit. Based on the notion that paperwork creates value, it begins with “the irritating case-worker determining whether you are really poor enough to merit a fee waiver for your children’s medicine,” and it ends with “men in suits engaged in high-speed trading of bets over how long it will take you to default on your mortgage.”
To support his analysis, Graeber returns to familiar turf: banking. Banks have always been regulated heavily, and they naturally try to shape those regulations. Sometimes they even capture the regulatory institutions themselves. But total bureaucratization goes beyond regulatory capture. Now when the government catches banks defrauding customers, it issues fines that represent only a fraction of the swag. No one goes to prison, even when the fraud is massive. Other authors have documented this point and its obvious injustice. But Graeber argues that what appears to be a bug in the justice system is actually a feature. Noting that the government is essentially accepting a percentage of the corporation’s haul, he concludes that the relationship between the two organizations is symbiotic.
Graeber's discussion floats freely between social theory and science fiction, state formation and superheroes, modern anthropology and blockbuster films. Some readers will find the discussion too abstract, while others (fellow academics, for example) will no doubt object that the analysis is too sweeping. But there’s nothing quite like a fresh vista, and "The Utopia of Rules" is brimming with those.
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