01-20-2017, 02:37 PM
(01-20-2017, 02:02 PM)David Horn Wrote:(01-20-2017, 10:48 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:(01-20-2017, 10:02 AM)Odin Wrote:(01-20-2017, 09:44 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-20-2017, 09:00 AM)Odin Wrote: Bureaucracy is a necessary evil of civilization, you can't have one without the other. Anyone with any historical knowledge knows that the first bureaucracies emerged with the first civilizations. The oldest bits of writing we have from Sumeria are bureaucratic documents.
There were civilizations before Sumeria. They just didn't write things down. Possibly they weren't bureaucratic and didn't need to write things down.
Bronze age civilizations like Sumeria were particularly bureaucratic, because bronze technology promoted bureaucratic empires. The level of bureaucracy actually fell during the iron age.
Huh? Sumeria WAS the first civilization.
I suppose it depends on what your definition of "civilization" is. There is plenty of evidence of permanent settlements, stone buildings, and agriculture that predate Sumer by an extended period of time: Jericho, Tel Qaramel, Chengtoushan, etc. If you are looking for something more substantial the growth of Mesopotamia as a network of cities is largely contemporaneous with similar development in Egypt, Elam, the Indus River Valley, etc.
It's also not outside the realm of possibility that something older will eventually emerge.
This is all true, but it avoids the question: can larger, a more complex human society exist without a bureaucracy to organize and manage it? If yes, can it manage that over an extended period of time? A 'no' to either question answers the mail.
It doesn't avoid the question, I was simply not addressing it. I was responding to Odin's post specifically, as was indicated by the quotation.
As to "the question", *shrug*. Victorian Britain and the pre-1930s US had comparatively minimal bureaucracies. The Soviet one was quite extensive. Somalia doesn't have one to speak of. It is presently fashionable for big tech companies to have relatively flat hierarchies. Mid-20th century industrial companies had much more structured ones. I don't think the evidence bears out a claim of "bureacracies good, no bureaucracies bad" or vice versa. The technological substrate, the presence or not of unifying norms mores and values, the security environment, etc. influence the extent of formal organization required.
The rest of this thread just seems like the typical sort of contentless social posturing I expect from most of you people. "RED! NO, BLUE! WARM & FUZZY! COLD & PRICKLY!"
