ABSTRACT
A society can attempt to put knowledge and values into collective action in three fundamental ways. First, it can arrange itself for collective action by creating organizations that muster and coordinate individual efforts in such a way that the works of the individual members might be orchestrated into a single piece. Only within some such collective structure do the collective expressions of knowledge and values, and indeed society itself, become possible. As we saw in Chapter 2, where bureaucracy provides that collective structure, a Platonic conception of knowledge and set of political values shape the efforts of individuals. Thus, bureaucracy "Platonizes" actions regardless of professed individual and community values. Bureaucracy gives a Platonic shape to societies that purportedly are en route to fulfilling a communist dream via Dialectical Materialism, as well as to those societies that espouse liberal Enlightenment values and a belief in the correctness of open inquiry. Unavoidably, this dissonance between the particular organizational forces that shape actions and the ideological desires of which societal dreams are made forms the basis for frustration and disillusionment. Heroic efforts seem to change little, and ideological commitments fail to make of the world what it was supposed to become.
