By the time Max Weber set out to construct his Ideal Types, the world was
thoroughly bureaucratized. The process began with the rise of the absolute monarchs
in Western Europe; and, although primitive in terms of rationalization, it was enough
to upset the feudal order and more than a few former nobles. Exported to the new
continent, it soon became a thorn in the sides of liberal capitalists who emerged in the
American economic and political system. It became a target for democratic
revolutions in the 18*'^ eentury and the Jacksonians in the nineteenth. And, yet by the
early 1900s- Weber’s time - it had become an undeniable and seemingly unalterable
fact of industrial political, economic and social life. Bureaucracy had become the
organizational form of choice.'^
Struek by the rise of bureaucracy in the western world, soeial seientists began
to consider the phenomenon as one of great socio-political interest. However,
according to Henry Jacoby, “Max Weber was the first to consider bureaucracy as the
problem of industrial society”, and the first to make it a distinct subject of