Obeying Nobody: Public Service and the Ordinary Evil of Administration
Abstract
This essay explores administrative evil by reconsidering it through Weber’s ideal-type of bureaucracy and Arendt’s concerns over the bureaucratization of social life. It considers how modern bureaucracy is the structural condition Arendt identified as the banality of evil : systematic displacement of judgment by procedural rationality. Through Weber’s account of bureaucracy’s “special virtue” of impersonality, the paper traces how dehumanization becomes superhumanization —a technical transcendence of human thought now realized in algorithmic governance and artificial intelligence. Administrative evil, then, is not an anomaly but the ordinary moral condition of modern administrative life where thoughtlessness is the design.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy
Political Theology and Sovereignty
Critical Theory and Philosophy
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Administration & Society
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Volume
- 58
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 436–457
- Publication date
- 24 February 2026
- Language
- EN