Bureaucracy & Sovereignty

The substance of this webpage was first presented by Victor John Yannacone, jr., at a number of College campuses on Earth Day 1970.

The sovereign Agency State

Sovereignty is a curious example of one of those concepts that are right in one order of things and wrong in another. Ascribing to the nation state, or the transnational or multinational corporations which have usurped the place of national states in many of the functional areas of society, the sovereignty of the people as an independent power, separate and transcendently supreme, which may be exercised upon the body politic from above, inevitably leads to a totalitarian political system.

Totalitarian States

Cosmetically, the image of the absolute or totalitarian state is often improved by personifying the state as the body politic or the people themselves and implying that obedience to the state is merely obedience to themselves. However, under such a concept of state sovereignty, pluralism cannot be tolerated, and centralism is required.

Sovereignty & Morality

After Bodin (1530‒1596), sovereignty eventually rose above moral law. The philosophical trail proceeds by simple substitution of a single word from the principle that an act or institution is just which serves the interests of the sovereign (Bodin); of the People (Rousseau); of the state (Hegel); of the Party (Lenin).

Absolute power

Perhaps the most regrettable effect of the misapprehension of the true nature of sovereignty is that the entity which claims sovereignty, be it state, individual ruler, or corporation, exercises power without accountability. The fact that an absolute sovereign must be separately and transcendently supreme means that the sovereign is not accountable to its subjects other than as a result of revolution. It has been observed that, “the power to do all things without accountability is coincident with the sovereignty of God.” This is the concept of sovereignty that represents all that could be wished for by any of the deified potentates, despots, and emperors of ancient times in their most celestial ambitions.

In modem times, sovereignty has been ascribed to the state on the fictitious ground that the state is the people personified, and the people need not account to anyone for what they do. Most recently, it has been arrogantly assumed by the bureaucracies of industrialized society.

The “Administrative” Agency

Congress and many State legislatures, recognizing the delay inherent in the legislative and judicial processes, attempted to meet the needs of modern technological society by creating administrative agencies, to which they ceded some of the powers of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government which had been reserved to them under the Constitution in order to give speedy effect to the will of the people as manifest by some act of Congress.

Unfortunately, the administrative approach carried within itself the seeds of its own abuse. Any administrative agency, no matter how well intentioned, is not a court, it is a star chamber—judge, jury, and executioner — all in the public interest, of course.

The narrow jurisdiction and mission-oriented viewpoint of administrative agencies, particularly those charged with industry regulation, make them inherently incapable of considering environmental matters with the requisite degree of ecological sophistication. The Scenic Hudson Preservation case [354 F.2d 608 (2nd Cir., 1965)] marked the fork in the road for those concerned with the protection of our environment and the legal defense of the biosphere. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Federal Power Commission should hear evidence on natural values in addition to the economics of electric power generation and distribution before issuing a permit.

The tragedy of the Scenic Hudson Preservation case occurred when the Scenic Hudson Preservation Committee yielded to the Federal Power Commission jurisdiction over the natural resource aspects of the Consolidated Edison application, cloaking the FPC with a mantle of ecological competence it does not possess and cannot attain within the limits of its statutory mission.

The old-guard, reactionary, established preservationist-conservationists, in their all-consuming desire to avoid challenging established bureaucracy, yielded to the Federal Power Commission the ultimate power to make ecological judgments binding on generations yet unborn…

Causes of the crises

If we have to find a common denominator for the serious environmental, social, economic, and political crises facing all technologically developed 204 countries regardless of their nominal form of government, it will have to be entrenched bureaucracies which are essentially immune from criticism or public action. These self-perpetuating, self-sufficient, self-serving bureaus are power sources unto themselves, effectively insulated from the people and responsible to no one but themselves.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy has been defined as organization incapable of correcting its own course of conduct, and it is now clear that the worst offenders in the process of environmental degradation are not ruthless entrepreneurs dedicated to wanton exploitation of our natural resources—the profiteers and abusers of the public interest in the air, water, land and landscape but rather shortsighted, mission-oriented, allegedly public interest agencies.

Accountability

The state as a juristic entity, no less than its agencies and officials, must remain accountable to the people. It is only the inherent right of human beings to self-government and spiritual autonomy that need not be accounted for to any tribunal or agency of the body politic. The people, as individuals, always account for their own decisions by their own sweat and blood.

Attributing sovereignty in the absolute sense to the state inevitably leads those individuals who wield the power of the state as sovereign to endeavor perseveringly, in accordance with the principle of non-accountability, to escape the supervision and control of the people. This has been particularly true among the administrative agencies of the “developed” countries.

One of the strange inconsistencies of bureaucracy is the reluctance of administrative agencies to expose themselves to public scrutiny. A review of the published reports of citizen investigative groups chronicle tales of evasion, suppression of information and a general policy of restricting public information. Assuming the best of motives on the part of bureaucrats and politicians, this course of conduct can only be explained by a kind of totalitarian paternalism inconsistent with American constitutional concepts.

The Administrative State

Lack of accountability by Administrative Agencies and their bureaucrats has created an “Administrative State” in America and throughout the industrialized world. To the extent that those claiming absolute sovereignty as or through the state succeed in avoiding accountability for their decisions which commit the body politic and all the individual people of the nation, the people will bear the cost of the decisions made made in their name. The French have put it well, “Ce sont toujours les memes qui se font tuer”: It is always the same people who are getting killed!

Shortly after the close of World War II, Jacques Maritan wrote “The woes of the people settle the accounts of the non-accountable supreme persons: State, agencies, ministries, committees, boards, staffs, rulers, law givers, experts, advisors—not to speak of the intelligentsia, writers, theorists, scientific utopians, connoisseurs, professors, and newspapermen.”

Fortunately, the end of the omnipotent Administrative State may soon be upon us.