Volume 22, Number 8 · May 15, 1975
The French Disease
By Steven Englund
Politics, Power, and Bureaucracy in France: The Administrative Elite
by Ezra N. Suleiman
Princeton, 440 pp., $9.75 (paper)
Lenin used to say that there were four major bulwarks against revolutionary change in Europe: the English House of Lords, the Prussian General Staff, the Roman Catholic Church, and the French Academy. But at the time of his death in 1924, Lenin had already glimpsed under his nose what proved to be the most obdurate and elusive counterrevolutionary bastion of them all: bureaucracy,[*] in particular the monolithic bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. No other institution of the twentieth-century state, capitalist or socialist, has displayed such capacities for blocking change, adapting to all circumstances, and absorbing, disguising, and wielding political power.
Review, 4634 words
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