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Loved it! Now, where exactly ARE:🎲 my flying cars &🎲 clones & androids & their electric sheep & 🎲 teleportation & 🎲 the (anti)gravity fields & 🎲 the era of time & space travel & 🎲 the era of space-travelling societies &🎲 all the visits to other galaxies &🎲 all the other miracles things I was promised in all the sci-fi (including the Star Track!)? I'm not too sure I really want clones and the idea of time travel gives me migraines but the rest, I want it. Who stole it, now, raise my hand! All the...
I thought this would be a soggy cornflakes sort of book: comforting, full of history and anecdote, and a bit of superficial social theory thrown in to demonstrate the author's intellectual credentials.It was a full English breakfast - with the black pudding! This is a densely packed series of essays that explores the theoretical underpinnings of bureaucracy; our hate-love affair with it; its role in society and history; and even its meanings as understood, symbolized, and depicted in popular cul...
I feel disappointed, and a little betrayed. Debt was my most important book of the decade; A sequel on bureaucracy could be an equally ground breaking contribution. Unfortunately, this is a wandering and disconnected series of weakly researched essays that, while making a few interesting points, buries them under digressions and inaccuracies. Graeber start with the experience of having his stroke-ridden mother declared legally incompetent, disabled, and then dead, and the kafka-esque absurdity o...
Fantastic, as always. No one managed to convert and communicate such seemingly mundane topics as bureaucracy and debt to engaging writing. Part of what makes Graeber’s work so engaging, I think, is his capacity to explore inherent contradictions within taken-for-granted systems and structures. For example, “the iron law of liberalism”, as he terms it, states that the freer a market seeks to become, the more paperwork is required to uphold its conditions. Efficiency, the ideology masking and main...
As usual, Graeber is on the dime. Someone might have noticed from my previous reviews that I became obsessed with bureaucracy lately. It started to ruin my, otherwise, well-organized life. I noticed that when I was working in USA, but, since these were short visits (2 months the most), I didn't pay too much attention to it. However, the trend with stupid bureaucratic rules arrived to Serbia a couple years ago and, each year, things are getting worse. Graeber explains well the origin of these tre...
I love practically everything Graeber writes. This one made me see the world differently. I wish I had read this one before a few of his other ones (like the Democracy Project and Bullshit Jobs) because this one holds the theoretical foundations under the other two. I have to think more about the theories in here and I'll probably come back to a few of these essays again, but it was such an enlightening read. He's just so lucid and radical that it's really refreshing.
Graeber's topic in this book is, more or less, an attempt work through some answers to the question: why are we so in love with rules? And why is it that even when we try to get rid of rules, paperwork, "red tape," and bureaucracy, we always seem to get more?I'm going to sum this book up with a summary of a section towards the end: pp. 190-200 or so.Graeber notes that for a long time academic departments ran themselves based on custom. I can tell you that this is true as well for a lot of small
The only problem with “The Utopia of Rules” is that you end up wishing you were reading “Bureaucracy: The First 5000 Years” (to coin a title) instead. Well, it probably wouldn’t be called that, since Graeber is more concerned with bureaucracy in the modern world, and in particular the way that our society is the most bureaucratized in history, but it would still be an overview of the subject that would fully flesh out the arguments and tie all the pieces together in a way that “The Utopia of Rul...
Have you ever had a friend leave too soon? Well, that can feel like the case when an author departs the scene. Graeber may be the latest but certainly not the last free-thinking author to leave the party too soon, following Benjamin, Camus, Mills, Adorno, Foucault, and others. Despite the feeling of intimacy some may create in the literary space, they are not our friends in real life and some may be using the intimacy as a persuasive device. In any case, when walking into the social theory party...
An exceptional book. Elegantly argued, clear, and insightful. I really cannot recommend this enough.
An interesting book, perhaps a bit above my level. It did impart some key concepts well enough, like how bureaucracy is one of the enablers of structural violence* (i.e. someone without proper papers trying to enter a country, being imprisoned or removed by force); or how bureaucracy has stifled scientific progress; or how it appeals to us by offering the promise of non-discriminatory efficiency but rarely actually lives up to that promise.* in my 101 level conversations with people in real life...
I found the ideas in this book and Graeber's writing style oddly calming. Reflecting on the absurdity that modern power structures are based on (essentially, we all do as we're told because the state has a monopoly on the power to hit people over the head with a stick) and the bureaucratic pretence that informs much of our lives is freeing and will resolve anxiety more than any self help book.
