Bureaucracy as Knowledge

Author(s)
Sebastian Felten, Christine von Oertzen
Abstract

In this introduction we explain the overall approach taken in this special issue. It is the collective result of a working group of historians who focus on very different periods and regions, such as the medieval Latin West, Spanish America, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire. We show, firstly, how bureaucracy has worked as a term of critique and how, in fin-de-siècle Europe, it became an analytical concept used for world-historical comparison with a strong Western bias. Against this background, we then develop our group’s new approach to analyzing bureaucratic procedures as knowledge processes, a method we term “bureaucracy as knowledge.” This approach builds on the history of science and technology and aims to recover actors’ ways of organizing social and material worlds rather than judge them by modernist, Western standards. Third, we discuss if there is such a thing as “bureaucratic knowledge” sui generis and, based on the experience of our authors, suggest ways of studying plural knowledges that cut across different domains. Finally, we argue that historical bureaucracies merit close investigation because they have demonstrated the power to both make and break social and material worlds. The approach proposed in this issue can therefore help make better sense of the dynamics by which bureaucracies exert such power in situations otherwise studied by political, cultural, and social historians. This introduction is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.

Organisation(s)
Department of History
External organisation(s)
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Journal
Journal for the History of Knowledge (JHoK)
Volume
1
Pages
1-16
No. of pages
16
ISSN
2632-282X
Publication date
12-2020
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
601023 Global history
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/8f8cde4e-4a29-4879-830a-46ea4a6d7433