Exhibit 1217 · Book chapter (primary theory text)
Legal authority with a bureaucratic administrative staff (the monocratic type of bureaucratic administration), in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization
While not peculiar to bureaucratic organizations, the concept of ‘official secrets’ is certainly typical of them. It stands in relation to technical knowledge in somewhat the same position as commercial secrets do to technological training. It is a product of the striving for power.
Weber treats bureaucratic administration as control by knowledge. He says the concept of official secrets is typical of bureaucracy and a product of the striving for power.
- Source
- Max Weber (trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, 1947)
- Date
- 1922 (English 1947)
- Quoted from
- Paragraph beginning "Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally the exercise of control on the basis of knowledge"
- Grade
- Primary record
- Document
- https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/read/751b5aa0-9356-4241-9534-1325ac62d427/section/84482b92-0d5b-401f-b1dd-de1d85b65a00
- Accessed
- 2026-11-10
- Cited by
- Findings citing this exhibit
- Note
- Henderson-Parsons translation. The sentence in Roth and Wittich's Economy and Society (1968) that a bureaucracy "seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret" was not found in any text read and is not quoted.