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David Graeber

David Graeber Quotes

Anthropologist

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Famous David Graeber Quotes

“The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense.”

Common SenseBureaucracy
Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
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“Marx and Engels, in their giddy enthusiasm for the industrial revolutions of their day, [...] were wrong to predict that market competition would compel factory owners to-go on with mechanization anyway. If it didn't happen, it can only be because market competition is not, in fact, as essential to the nature of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else, the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large semi-monopolistic enterprises, would presumably have come as a complete surprise to them.”

CapitalismBureaucracyMarketMarxEngelsBureaucratic SocietyManagerialismMarket Competition
Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
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“It is one of the defining features of any bureaucracy that those who staff it are selected by formal, impersonal criteria. Most often, some kind of test. That is, bureaucrats are not, say, elected like politicians. But neither should they get the job just because they are someone's cousin. In theory, they are meritocracies. In fact, everyone knows that the system is compromised in a thousand different ways. Many of the staff are, in fact, there just because they are someone's cousin. And everybody knows it.”

PoliticsHypocrisyBureaucracyComplicityMeritocracyFormalityNepotismStaffing
Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
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“Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.”

StupidityBureaucracyStructural Violence
Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
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“One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable – in a nutshell, bureaucratized.”

SlaveryBureaucracySocial RelationsFreedomsImpersonal Markets
Book:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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“There is a whole school of thought that holds bureaucracy tends to expand according to a kind of perverse but inescapable inner logic. The argument runs as follows: if you create a bureaucratic structure to deal with some problem, that structure will invariably end up creating other problems that seem as if they, too, can only be solved by bureaucratic means. In universities, this is sometimes informally referred to as the "creating committees to deal with the problem of too many committees" problem.”

UniversityCommitteesBureaucracy
Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
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