ABSTRACT
The intellectual parents of our current democracies – among others, the likes of Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, Burke, Tocqueville, and the founding fathers-devoted very little attention to the bureaucracy in their cornerstone discussions on how political power should be allocated in a society. They had a relatively well-grounded justification: the bureaucracies of their time were objectively small. For instance, the overall U.S. federal bureaucracy contained less than eight hundred people in the 1790s, and the currently all-mighty Department of State, fit into two rooms, where a doorkeeper, a messenger, and four officials assisted the secretary (Grindle 2012: 61).
