When one lifts the mantle of protection from the unstated presupposition surrounding the terms of Weber’s theory of bureaucracy one is confronted with facts of a particular sort. These facts are not sociological data, or even theoretically defensible hypotheses. Instead, one is confronted with a rich and ambiguous body of background information that normally competent members of society take for granted as commonly known. In its normal functioning this information furnishes the tacit foundation for all that is explicitly known, and provides the matrix for all deliberate considerations without being itself deliberately considered. While its content can be raised to the level of analysis, this typically does not occur.