The Double State

§01 The forgotten line

[1] In municipalities of any size you encounter them: people with thirty years of service in public administration who know all the movements, all the files, all the political rhythms, and who have never read a line of Weber. They know exactly how a centre-municipality construction works, can recite by heart what a ravine year is, have survived three reorganisations, and when you ask them about the intellectual history of their own profession a courteous emptiness opens up. That is not their fault. Dutch administrative-science education has shifted systematically over the past three decades from a historical and philosophical training to a management-instrumental one. What remained in the curriculum is practical, manageable and ahistorical.

[2] This Compass seeks to restore a line that was cut somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. The pattern that Statecraft has described in publications such as Dissociated Organisations¹ and The Hague Pattern, the persistent separation between the state as it presents itself and the state as it works, is no recent discovery and no Dutch peculiarity either. Ever since there has been thinking about governing, there has been thinking about that separation. Augustine, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Weber, Crozier, Lipsky and Moore have caught it in successive different formulations. The names change, the structure does not.

[3] Marx wrote in 1843, twenty-five years old, on the run from the Prussian censor:

Bureaucracy is the imaginary state alongside the real state. It is the spiritualism of the state. Through it everything acquires a double meaning, a real meaning and a bureaucratic one, and so there exists real knowledge and bureaucratic knowledge.²

[4] Whoever reads these three sentences with the childcare-benefits scandal in mind sees what is going on. The real meaning: these are parents applying for childcare allowance. The bureaucratic meaning: these are risk codes, signal patterns, fraud profiles. The real knowledge: these families have submitted their applications correctly. The bureaucratic knowledge: the system reports them as suspect. When the two diverge, the bureaucratic as a rule wins, because it is the medium in which the system addresses itself. Marx called that in 1843 the spiritualism of the state. A hundred and eighty years before the childcare-allowance scandal the structure had already been described.

[5] The aim of this Compass is modest and concrete. It offers no complete history of administrative science. It draws a line of thinkers each of whom added a key insight to the understanding of what governing is and how it goes wrong. It does so in the conviction that a profession that has lost its own intellectual history can hardly correct itself. Whoever does not know that the same patterns have been observed for twenty centuries quickly thinks his present struggle is unique, or that the solution lies in the next reorganisation. That thinking is itself a symptom.

§02 Augustine and the primal structure of the two cities

[6] The first systematic formulation of the thought that there are always two states, an ideal and a real one, and that they do not coincide, we find in Augustine of Hippo. He wrote De civitate Dei between 413 and 426 AD, in the years after the sack of Rome by Alaric’s Visigoths. The pagans reproached the Christians that Rome’s fall was the consequence of the empire’s conversion. Augustine’s answer was at once theological and political: there are always two communities that overlap and cut across each other, the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena. The one has the common good as its love, the other self-love. Neither is ever fully visible in an earthly political order. Neither can be confused with the other.³

[7] Here lies an unexpectedly productive thought for administrative science. Augustine does not say that the real state is unreal and the ideal state real. He says that they both exist, that they run through the same people and the same institutions, and that the relation between them is the real political question. A state that takes itself for the civitas Dei is dangerous, a state that is only civitas terrena is cruel. The art of governing lies in standing between the two.

[8] The relevance to Statecraft is direct. The diagnosis of dissociated organisations does not claim that the formal state is an invention. It claims that there are always two, a formalised representation and an operational reality, and that administrative quality depends on the capacity to keep those two in continuous conversation. When that conversation falls silent, dissociation sets in. The programme contains the problem within itself without solving it. The report reports on a reality it no longer touches. Augustine had no technical term for that phenomenon, but the structural logic he had already caught in 426. Whoever does not know this discovers it anew with every fresh scandal.

§03 Governing becomes science: cameralism and Hegel

[9] Between Augustine and Marx lies a gap of almost fourteen centuries in which thinking about governing was mainly juridical and theological. The turn to governing as an autonomous scientific discipline comes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the German-speaking lands, under the name cameralism or Polizeiwissenschaft.⁴ Authors such as Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi and Joseph von Sonnenfels wrote voluminous handbooks on the management of the princely territory. It was about taxation, mining, agricultural production, public order, healthcare and poor relief, all at once and in coherence. The concept of Polizei of the time is broader than our present-day concept of police. It encompassed everything that promoted the general welfare of the inhabitants, seen from the perspective of an enlightened despot who wished to govern his country effectively.

[10] Cameralism delivered for the first time a body of doctrine supporting the thought that governing is a craft, with principles, with a schooled profession, with transmissible knowledge. Universities in Halle, Frankfurt-on-the-Oder and Vienna established chairs. Whoever wished to serve at a German court was expected to master this material. The implicit anthropology was that of the schooled servant: a man, at that time exclusively a man, who through training and oath represented the common good against the particular interests of nobility, town and estate.

[11] This anthropology received its philosophical crown in the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, published in 1820.⁵ In his treatment of the executive power (paragraphs 287 through 297) Hegel describes the bureaucracy as the universal estate, the only estate that has the common good of society as its work. The agricultural estate is bound to nature and family life, the industrious estate to self-interest and market relations, but the official estate stands above both. Through his education, his salary (no profit, no rent, but a fixed payment that makes him independent of particular interests) and his oath, the official embodies the universal.

[12] This is a fine and a dangerous thought at once. Fine, because it raises the meaning of the office above the mechanics of rule-following execution. The Dutch senior policy adviser who says he serves not the cabinet but the rule of law stands in this Hegelian tradition without knowing it. Dangerous, because the claim that a particular estate represents the common good is as a rule indefensible and in practice ends in self-satisfaction. Whoever identifies himself with the common good no longer has to listen to those who see that good differently.

[13] For present-day Dutch administration, Hegelian anthropology is still the implicit self-conception of the senior civil service (Algemene Bestuursdienst). The ABD is conceived as a community of senior civil servants who, through rotation between departments, through professional training and through a shared ethos, set the universal above the particular. It is a Hegelian thought that has never been uttered as such, because the people who embody it no longer read Hegel.

§04 Marx 1843: the imaginary state

[14] In the summer of 1843, twenty-three years after the publication of Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie, Marx wrote in Bad Kreuznach a commentary on paragraphs 261 through 313, the piece we now know as Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie.⁶ The manuscript remained unfinished, was first published only in 1927, and is no revolutionary pamphlet. It is a meticulous philological unmasking of Hegelian state theory, line by line.

[15] The occasion matters. In the preceding months Marx had, as a young journalist, written articles about the poverty of the Moselle vine-growers, a series of which one instalment bore the title ‘The Vampires of the Moselle Region’. That poverty was sustained by a combination of tax burden and a Prussian forest law that made the gathering of firewood a punishable offence, a law that the bureaucracy executed as if it were natural and just. When Marx wished to show that it was not, the paper was closed. After that he went to philosophy. Whoever can no longer freely describe empirical reality goes on to analyse structure.

[16] What he found in Hegel was the following. The claim that the bureaucracy represents the common interest is no real representation but an incantation. The official estate makes itself universal by declaring its own activity universal. In reality the bureaucracy pursues its own interests, because that is the only thing a group of people ever does. The universality is a spiritualism, a spiritual fiction kept up by the procedures, registers and titles of the organisation itself.

[17] From here come the well-known formulations. Bureaucracy is the imaginary state alongside the real one. It is the spiritualism of the state. Everything acquires a double meaning, a real one and a bureaucratic one. There is real knowledge and there is bureaucratic knowledge. And, in a passage that bites sharper still: for the individual bureaucrat the aim of the state becomes his private aim, a hunt for promotion, careerism.⁷

[18] This is the diagnostic apparatus that Statecraft most economically employs. The ABD rotation system is precisely the structural realisation of Marx’s observation. Not because the individual senior civil servants would be bad or calculating, but because the arrangement of the apparatus produces careerism as rationality. Whoever does not rotate falls outside the circle in which promotion takes place. The institution turns to its own reproduction, and substantive continuity on the file becomes secondary. The childcare-benefits scandal is no incident in a well-functioning system; it is the visible expression of a system in which bureaucratic knowledge (risk profiles) has systematically come to dominate real knowledge (concrete families).

[19] Two warnings are in place here. The first: the Marx of 1843 is not yet the Marx of Das Kapital and certainly not the Marx of the Communist Manifesto. The manuscript is post-Hegelian state criticism, not revolutionary doctrine. Whoever reads him in this capacity reads an administrative-science author, not a political programme. The second: the sharpness of the diagnosis is no incitement to cynicism. Marx himself ends the manuscript not with a call to abolish the bureaucracy, but with the question of how the real and the imaginary state can be brought back into contact. That is exactly the Statecraft question.

§05 Tocqueville: administrative centralisation as historical effect

[20] Almost contemporaneously with Marx, but from a radically different temperament and a different political register, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his two great works: De la démocratie en Amérique (1835 and 1840) and L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856). Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who saw democracy as both a historical inevitability and a political challenge. His observations on the administrative question are, for Dutch public administration, of lasting value on two points.⁸

[21] The first is his analysis of administrative centralisation as a historical phenomenon. In L’Ancien Régime Tocqueville shows that the French Revolution did not invent the centralisation of French public administration but accelerated it. The Bourbon monarchy was already weakening the provincial estates, strengthening the intendants, extending fiscal control from Paris. The Revolution took over that movement and gave it a republican justification. Whoever thought a new political regime would mean an administrative break was disabused. The apparatus survived, and moreover strengthened itself with every political change.

[22] For whoever studies the The Hague pattern, this is an uncomfortable but indispensable thought. Since the 1980s the Dutch central government has gone through six political shades of colour, four sweeping austerity operations and three major decentralisations. Whoever compares today’s institutions with those of 1985 sees one constant amid all the changes: administrative centralisation disguising itself as decentralisation. The decentralisations of 2015 did bring tasks to the municipalities, but the financial frameworks, the information flows, the inspection frameworks and the ultimate political responsibility remained with the central state. The form moved along, the structure remained. Tocqueville would not have hesitated a moment over the diagnosis.

[23] The second insight lies in his analysis of the psychological consequences of centralisation. Tocqueville observed in America how a decentralised political system breeds self-organisation and civic virtue, because people are used to addressing their own problems at the local level. French centralism, by contrast, he wrote, produces a population that looked to the prefecture for every difficulty. Not out of laziness, but because the apparatus had taught them that this was the place where problems were solved. Whoever thinks about today’s Dutch discussion of self-reliance and own strength without weighing in that Tocquevillian paradox misses half of what is going on.

§06 Weber: the ideal type and the iron cage

[24] The canonical synthesis of bureaucratic thinking is by Max Weber, in his posthumously published Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922).⁹ No serious training in administrative science or the sociology of organisations can avoid Weber, and the way Dutch public administration has routinely passed Weber by is in itself a remarkable fact.

[25] Weber’s contribution consists of three coherent steps. The first is his typology of legitimate authority. People obey for three types of reason: because it has always been so (traditional authority), because a leader is extraordinarily compelling (charismatic authority), or because rules have been established in rational coherence by competent bodies (rational-legal authority). None of these types occurs in pure form, but the modern state rests predominantly on the third.

[26] The second step is the identification of the bureaucracy as the institutional form in which rational-legal authority manifests itself. A Weberian ideal type of the bureaucracy has hierarchical ordering, separation of office and person, written record, expertise on the basis of training and examination, fixed remuneration, career on the basis of qualified performance, and binding to abstract rules. This is no empirical description of an existing organisation. It is a theoretically pure model that reality approximates to a greater or lesser degree.

[27] The third step, and that is what makes Weber more than a classifier, is his diagnosis of what he called the stählernes Gehäuse, the steel housing or, in Talcott Parsons’s notorious English rendering, the iron cage. The rational order that has liberated modern man from arbitrariness, traditional compulsion and charismatic power simultaneously encloses him. The efficiency the bureaucracy delivers becomes itself an end, the procedure crowds out the judgement, the registration crowds out the experience. Weber saw this not as a degeneration but as a structural consequence. The rationality that makes the bureaucracy also makes its limits.

[28] It is important to understand that Weber, unlike Marx, is no polemicist. He describes the bureaucracy with great precision and unmistakable respect for what it can achieve. A Weberian bureaucracy is technically superior to every other form of administration. Files are found, decisions are traceable, officials are replaceable, arbitrariness is reduced. At the same time: precisely this efficiency produces the cage effect. The question is not whether we can abolish the bureaucracy, we cannot, but how we learn to live with an instrument that turns against us when we do not continuously meet it critically.

[29] In the Statecraft corpus this Weberian double image is the analytical starting point. Whoever practises system criticism without weighing in Weber’s first two steps falls into romantic anti-bureaucratism. Whoever takes only the first two steps and ignores the third falls into technocratic self-affirmation. The right position is precisely between the two: recognising that the rational-legal apparatus is indispensable, and at the same time knowing that it produces structural effects that require continuous correction. Embedding is not the closing of an intervention but the durability of the correcting capacity.

§07 Crozier and Lipsky: how practice strikes back

[30] Between Weber and present-day Dutch administrative practice stands a rich empirical tradition that has tested the Weberian ideal types against reality. Two authors deserve particular attention here because both have named a turning at which Dutch administration now stands.

[31] Michel Crozier published in 1963 Le phénomène bureaucratique, based on extensive field research in two French central agencies.¹⁰ What he found was a paradox that hooks directly onto Weber. The rationality of rule-bound execution, conceived as protection against arbitrariness, produces in the French civil service a self-sustaining inertia. Every executor invokes the rule to evade responsibility, every department protects its territory against adaptation, every informal relation is formalised to evade power. The result is an organisation that does not learn in dynamic environments but settles into stable patterns of dysfunction and experiences them as safety. Crozier called this the cercle vicieux bureaucratique, the bureaucratic circle. Whoever wishes to change something cannot do so by moving within the rules, because the rules are precisely the instrument of the inertia. Change comes only through external shocks that force the system into a new pseudo-stability.

[32] For anyone who has worked on transformation programmes in Dutch municipalities, this is painfully recognisable. The attempts at integrated working in the social domain, the dynamic around regional executive agencies, the persistent difficulty of crossing departmental boundaries, are all variants of Crozier’s vicious circle. The problem is not that individuals do not wish to cooperate. The problem is that the system teaches them that their safety lies in the departmental boundary, and that breaching that boundary makes them vulnerable. Whoever does not know this keeps addressing people on behaviour that is structurally produced, and never wins.

[33] The counterpart to Crozier is supplied by Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy, published in 1980.¹¹ Lipsky shifted the perspective from the top of the bureaucracy to the execution. What does the youth-care worker, the welfare counsellor, the teacher, the community police officer do when faced with more applications than capacity, with contradictory instructions, with clients who do not fit the categories? The answer is that they develop heuristics, priority rules, their own indications of whom they do and do not help. Policy on paper is not policy in practice. Policy on paper says that everyone has a right to an appropriate provision; policy in practice is what the counsellor decides after a twenty-minute file.

[34] Lipsky’s point is that this is no failure of the executor but a structural property of execution under scarcity and contradiction. When policy from the legislator conflicts with capacity, a policy of its own arises at the counter. Whoever wishes to restore the official rules must either raise capacity or remove the contradictions in the rules, or both. Raising supervision without doing either makes the problem worse, because it makes the executor vulnerable to sanctions that he or she cannot avoid through the structure.

[35] The combination Crozier-and-Lipsky is the empirical key to the Dutch execution question. At the top of the apparatus the bureaucratic circle that Crozier described prevails: rule production that does not touch practice. At the base the street-level bureaucracy that Lipsky described prevails: a practice of its own that has detached itself from official policy. Between them lies an empty space. The reports from the apparatus to the minister describe a reality that does not exist, because they report on what the rule says and not on what the executor does. The childcare-benefits scandal became visible when the difference between the two, after years of build-up, grew untenably large. The arrangements in youth care, debt assistance and the Wmo sit at different places on that curve.

§08 Moore: the return of public value

[36] In the 1980s and 1990s a new doctrine, the so-called New Public Management, conquered the administrative-science discussion. Under the influence of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their administrative-science advisers, government was conceived as a set of services that could be arranged on market principles. Citizens became customers, ministers became CEOs, civil servants became executors of performance contracts. The Dutch translation of this doctrine brought us the independent administrative bodies, performance-based funding in healthcare, the coalition agreement as output contract, and the growing role of consultancy firms in policy formation.

[37] In 1995 Mark H. Moore published Creating Public Value, an attempt to give the NPM doctrine a fundamental counter-voice without falling back on a romantic conception of the state.¹² Moore’s central concept is public value. Not what the minister wants, not what is efficient, not what satisfies the customer, but what produces a collective value that would not otherwise come about. The question is not whether government performs, but whether the performance is valuable.

[38] To make that question operational, Moore introduced the strategic triangle: public value at the top, operational capacity at one base and political legitimacy at the other. An intervention is sound only when all three corners work. An operationally strong programme without political backing falls over at the first counter-wind. A politically supported programme without operational capacity produces disappointment. An operationally and politically working programme that delivers no real public value is successful theatre politics. The triangle compels the simultaneous thinking of three dimensions that are often, in practice, treated separately.

[39] In De Richting van de Beweging I work out the strategic triangle further as a touchstone for interim assignments and large transformations.¹³ What Moore means for Statecraft is this: he has brought the question back, within Anglo-Saxon administrative science, to where it belongs, namely what the work actually serves. Not the client, not the department, not the official’s career, but the value that would not otherwise exist. There begins every serious administrative effort.

§09 The Dutch line

[40] The Dutch administrative-science tradition is strong in the constitutional and the juridical, and weaker in sociological theory-formation on bureaucracy. That is no coincidence. The Thorbeckean state order, which has determined the structural arrangement of the Kingdom since 1848, called for a legal dogmatics for the relation between central state, province and municipality, and that dogmatics has occupied generations of legal scholars. The General Administrative Law Act, the Municipalities Act, the Joint Arrangements Act, the whole edifice stands in a tradition going back to Thorbecke and his own German and French examples.¹⁴

[41] What is less developed in this legal tradition is the theory of bureaucracy as social phenomenon. The Netherlands has no Weber of its own, no Crozier, no Lipsky. What we do have is a rich tradition of reports and committees that observe and comment on the bureaucratic phenomenon. The Scientific Council for Government Policy has, since 1972, produced a continuous corpus of advice that, read as a whole, forms a Dutch administrative sociology of its own. Reports such as The future of the national rule of law (2002), Learning Government (2006) and Trust in the school (2009) offer, for whoever reads them, a Dutch version of the international line.

[42] Over the past three decades several Dutch authors have presented themselves as practising theorists of Dutch administration. Herman Tjeenk Willink has, in publications such as Think bigger, do smaller (2018) and Can government handle crises? (2021), formulated a diagnosis that, without citing Marx or Weber explicitly, brings the same patterns into view: the erosion of the rule of law under the weight of management doctrines, the autonomisation of government from its own function, the disappearance of the awareness that government is something other than a service provider.¹⁵

[43] Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille have shown, with Diploma Democracy, originally published in 2011 and in 2025 in a thoroughly revised edition, how Dutch public administration has become a closed system in which the highly educated decide among themselves on questions whose outcomes mainly affect the less highly educated.¹⁶ This is an administrative-science observation that translates effortlessly into Marxian terms, but it is delivered in a moderate-empirical tone, and through its empirical solidity it can hardly be contested.

[44] Paul Frissen has, in a long series of publications, from The state of difference to The fatal state and his work on the executing state, described the Dutch situation in a language of his own that does not gloss over paradoxes and discomforts.¹⁷ Frissen belongs to the few Dutch authors who take the philosophical side of administrative science seriously and who compels the reader to handle concepts such as power, form and the tragic without approaching them as jargon.

[45] What is striking about the present-day Dutch line is that it converges on observations that go back almost word for word to Marx 1843, Weber 1922, Crozier 1963 and Lipsky 1980. The Dutch descriptions are empirically rooted, legally underpinned, cautious in tone, and encompass almost everything the international line already knew. What is striking is therefore not what they add, but the degree to which the structural observations stay stable across the centuries. That should be a confirmation that the patterns are real, not a sign that the authors are merely repeating one another.

§10 Closing: the dissociation of a profession from its own intellectual history

[46] This intellectual history ends where Statecraft begins. The patterns we observe in Dutch public administration are not recent, not unique, and certainly not unknown. Whoever is prepared to spend a few weeks on Augustine, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Crozier, Lipsky and Moore discovers that the structural observations have already been made and the conceptual frameworks are already available. The work that remains is to apply them to the Netherlands of today, with the empirical care that one’s own time requires.

[47] But precisely this work is not being done, or hardly. Administrative-science programmes have over the past decades reoriented their curricula on skills, instruments and project-based learning tracks. The great sociological texts have been pushed to the margin or have disappeared entirely. The student who completes an academic administrative-science programme and then enters the central state or a municipality has an above-average chance of not having read Weber. Crozier he does not know. Lipsky perhaps as a name. Marx absolutely not. What he does master is stakeholder analysis, the project plan, the PRI test, the logframe.

[48] This is not only an educational deficit. It is, in the terms of the Statecraft corpus, a dissociation. The profession has detached itself from its own intellectual history. Practice is daily confronted with patterns that the line from Augustine to Bovens has described for centuries, but without knowing that line it cannot recognise those patterns as such. Every generation experiences it as if it were its own discovery that the organisation produces its own reality. Every generation tries to solve it with the instruments of its own fashion. Every generation discovers after some years that the pattern has formed itself again. Whoever has lost his own intellectual history repeats it without knowing.

[49] The ambition of Statecraft, on this point and in the broader series of which this Compass is part, is modest and concrete. Not to reform the curriculum, that is a fight for others. Not to retrain all senior policymakers, that is unattainable. But: to make the line available for whoever wishes to come to know it. To gain a set of readers who no longer need these concepts explained. To build a corpus in which the reference to Marx 1843 or Weber’s stählernes Gehäuse functions as shared knowledge, as the Joint Arrangements Act and a land development account already do.

[50] The question is not whether we have the imaginary state alongside the real one. We do, and we always have. The question is whether we can still see it.

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Notes

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Colophon

The Double State: a brief intellectual history of governing is a publication in the Statecraft Compasses series. Version 1.0, May 2026. Author: Jacob Huibers. The Compass is intended as an intellectual foundation under the other Statecraft publications and as hospitality for readers who work in administrative practice without having had the chance to come formally to know the European intellectual history of governing.

Statecraft is the analytical publishing platform of House of Viridian OÜ. It addresses senior professionals in Dutch public administration. Earlier publications in this Compass domain are the series Dissociated Organisations, the paper The Hague Pattern, and the essays Restoration State Netherlands and Navigating versus Planning.

Contact and subscription via statecraft.nl.

© 2026 House of Viridian OÜ.

Footnotes

1. Statecraft, Dissociated Organisations: six diagnostic papers with synthesis, 2026. ↩

2. Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, written Bad Kreuznach 1843. The manuscript remained unfinished and was first published in 1927. Cited from Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), volume 1, Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Author’s own translation. ↩

3. Augustine, De civitate Dei contra paganos, written between 413 and 426. For a contemporary Dutch edition and commentary see the translation by Gerard Wijdeveld, De stad van God, Ambo, Amsterdam, originally 1983. ↩

4. For an overview of cameralism and Polizeiwissenschaft as the root of modern administrative science see David F. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1997. ↩

5. G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, originally Berlin 1820. The passages on the executive power and the universal estate are in paragraphs 287 through 297. ↩

6. Marx’s commentary on Hegel, see note 2. For the genesis and context see David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, Macmillan, London 1973, chapter 3. ↩

7. Marx, Kritik, passage at Hegel §297, MEW volume 1. Author’s own translation. ↩

8. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, 1835 and 1840, and L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 1856. Dutch translation of the latter work: Het Ancien Régime en de revolutie, Klement, Kampen 2009. ↩

9. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, posthumous 1922, J.C.B. Mohr, Tübingen. The passages on the bureaucracy are mainly in volume III, chapter VI. A Dutch selection appeared under the title Gezag en bureaucratie, Universitaire Pers, Rotterdam 1972. ↩

10. Michel Crozier, Le phénomène bureaucratique, Seuil, Paris 1963. English translation University of Chicago Press 1964. ↩

11. Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, Russell Sage Foundation, New York 1980. Expanded edition 2010. ↩

12. Mark H. Moore, Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1995. ↩

13. Jacob Huibers, De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector, manuscript in preparation, chapter on the analytical apparatus. ↩

14. For an overview of the Thorbeckean tradition and its inheritance see J.Th.J. van den Berg and J. Vis, The first one hundred and fifty years: Parliamentary history of the Netherlands 1796-1946, Bert Bakker, Amsterdam 2013. ↩

15. Herman Tjeenk Willink, Think bigger, do smaller: A call, Prometheus, Amsterdam 2018, and Can government handle crises? Here and Now, Prometheus, Amsterdam 2021. ↩

16. Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille, Diploma Democracy: On the tension between meritocracy and democracy, originally Bert Bakker, Amsterdam 2011. Completely revised edition Prometheus, Amsterdam 2025. ↩

17. Paul Frissen, The state of difference: A critique of equality, Van Gennep, Amsterdam 2007, and The fatal state: On the politically necessary reconciliation with the tragic, Van Gennep, Amsterdam 2013. ↩