Niall Ferguson: belief

Transcript context

…Persuasive to you. I half expected you would say John le Carré — the notion that this deadeningly dull bureaucracy is our sad future. Yeah, I think that’s probably closer to my reads, although I don’t associate the problems of bureaucracy with England particularly. It seems to me that the modern bureaucratic state is really a German idea. The Germans idealized it. Maybe I should say the Prussians, although by the time Max Weber was writing about bureaucracy, it was really German. I think we, in the English-speaking world, imported an idea of bureaucracy from the Germans in the same way that we imported the PhD and all the bad things about academic life from the Germans. When bureaucracy came to Britain — which it did, I think, rather later than it came to Germany — it almost immediately became an object of mockery. The funniest thing ever written about bureaucracy is the sitcom Yes, Minister. I don’t see that as the distinctively English or British pathology, though it’s become a general pathology of the Western democratic world, certainly in the last 50 years. Is James Bond a Scottish prophet of doom?…

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