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XIV. Bureaucracy, Technocracy, and the Stalemate Society

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CHAPTER XIV Bureaucracy, Technocracy, and the Stalemate Society I emphasized at the outset that this would be neither a clinical nor a monographic study of the French bureaucracy. The wide-ranging approach I have adopted has particular advantages, espe­cially when it deals with a subject that has scarcely been studied. But it also has an obvious disadvantage: the more it includes, the more it should include, and the less reason there is for leaving this or that out. Basically, I have dealt with four related themes: the recruit­ment of higher civil servants, their role perceptions, their relation­ship to the political sphere and, finally, their relationship to the society. A number of conclusions have emerged from this analysis. First, the French higher civil service is unrepresentative of the society. Its social basis is extremely narrow and remains so be­cause of the educational system. Knowing the social basis of the administrative elite, however, tells us little about the behavior and attitudes of this elite. Above all, an unrepresentative recruit­ment need not mean that the elite is unresponsive to the society. This is a crucial point and I shall return to it presently. Second, one of the most enduring themes of French political analysis has been to place politicians and civil servants in opposi­tion to one another. Our analysis has shown that civil servants have changing perceptions of their role and that, depending on the positions they occupy in the politico-administrative hier­archy, their role perception may sometimes be closer to that of their political chiefs than to that of their colleagues. Third, this means that they may cooperate with ministers against other higher civil servants, and they do this regardless of the type of regime in existence—regardless of whether there is ministerial stability or instability. In fact, we have shown the de­gree of ministerial stability to be a relatively unimportant factor. It makes little sense, and serves to distort reality considerably, to

CHAPTER XIV Bureaucracy, Technocracy, and the Stalemate Society I emphasized at the outset that this would be neither a clinical nor a monographic study of the French bureaucracy. The wide-ranging approach I have adopted has particular advantages, espe­cially when it deals with a subject that has scarcely been studied. But it also has an obvious disadvantage: the more it includes, the more it should include, and the less reason there is for leaving this or that out. Basically, I have dealt with four related themes: the recruit­ment of higher civil servants, their role perceptions, their relation­ship to the political sphere and, finally, their relationship to the society. A number of conclusions have emerged from this analysis. First, the French higher civil service is unrepresentative of the society. Its social basis is extremely narrow and remains so be­cause of the educational system. Knowing the social basis of the administrative elite, however, tells us little about the behavior and attitudes of this elite. Above all, an unrepresentative recruit­ment need not mean that the elite is unresponsive to the society. This is a crucial point and I shall return to it presently. Second, one of the most enduring themes of French political analysis has been to place politicians and civil servants in opposi­tion to one another. Our analysis has shown that civil servants have changing perceptions of their role and that, depending on the positions they occupy in the politico-administrative hier­archy, their role perception may sometimes be closer to that of their political chiefs than to that of their colleagues. Third, this means that they may cooperate with ministers against other higher civil servants, and they do this regardless of the type of regime in existence—regardless of whether there is ministerial stability or instability. In fact, we have shown the de­gree of ministerial stability to be a relatively unimportant factor. It makes little sense, and serves to distort reality considerably, to
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