London, England. September 30, 2009.

These extensions of the activities of the state involved a parallel organisational development. The other side to the social citizenship that Marshall advocated was the rise of bureaucratic organisation in both the corporation and the state. It was the massive scale of the new national projects, bringing the same organisational principles into play in business and government, that obscured Smith’s public-private divide. The collective organisation of society appeared increasingly to fulfil Max Weber’s dire predictions of a comprehensive bureaucratic cage encasing human experience.

The increased scale of organisation accompanying the extension of the activities of the state raised issues of control that challenged representative democracy. The paradox of modern development was that the public sphere was now the area out of control. The incongruity was even greater because the operations of the business corporations were increasingly subject to public scrutiny. It was a matter of public concern that their collective organisation should be transparent. What was now public was the whole area of collective organisation, however owned, and the private reverted to the individual and the personal. The fall of public man (Sennett, 1977) thus coincided with the rise of the corporate state.

Excerpted from Governance in the 21st Century, chapter 6, ‘Society as Social Diversity: The Challenge for Governance in the Global Age,’ by Martin Albrow. Published by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2001, Paris.