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Elected democratic leaders have the tendency to face the challenges posed by dispersed leadership throughout society as entailed by democracy. The natural pluralism of a democratic society is reflected in the dispersal of leadership among business groups, labour organizations, social movements, intellectual institutions, opposition parties, and other involved sectors. This chapter discusses how democratic leaders seek to develop further active public sectors by enhancing the value of services offered while avoiding external challenges set from a new leadership form. Leaders in a democratic state wish to combine administrative freedom with political control and this chapter examines whether they are successful with such endevour. It also explores the fundamental nature of the bureaucratic leadership challenge and its implications for the specific forms of leadership appropriate to the modern civil service.

This chapter discusses the historical transformation of the modern regulatory state and suggests that the expansion of bureaucratic authority is an institutional innovation rather than a result of changes in the American economy. It examines three novel characteristics that distinguish the postbellum state from prior forms of American government. First, the level of government was altered, and new forms of authority were placed in the hands of federal officials. Second, there was a shift in power from legislatures and courts to executive bureaucrats and independent commissions. Third, the federal state pursued regulatory objectives that increasingly focused on the market price system. The chapter considers this institutional shift within the context of party ideologies before the Civil War, with particular emphasis on the political parties' positions on issues ranging from federal power to the role of respective branches of government, along with the types of government action they endorsed.

This chapter examines how voter ignorance influenced elections and monetary policy in the immediate postbellum period by focusing on Democrat George Pendleton's use of greenback inflation as a campaign issue in the Ohio gubernatorial election of 1867. Pendleton and fellow Democrat Clement Vallandigham, who opposed the greenbacks when they were initially introduced, took a leading role in demanding currency inflation. The Democratic Party's adoption of inflationary monetary policy forced the Republican Party to defend deflationary monetary policies and the gold standard. This chapter first considers Treasury Department Secretary Hugh McCulloch's decision to withdraw greenbacks from circulation following the end of the Civil War before discussing greenback inflation as a campaign strategy employed by Pendleton in his attempt to become the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1868. It also explores the ramifications of the Democrats' adoption of currency inflation for the development of bureaucratic authority in the Treasury Department.

This chapter introduces two long speeches to the dead, performed at two funeral ceremonies abandoned in the early socialist era. These speeches were said to contain 72 “songs” and to take eight hours to perform. They were said to explain the origins of the world, of all the beasts, birds and insects, and of every kind of invisible beings, and to contain all the secrets of life and death. The speeches were suppressed after 1958, and the ritualists who performed them severely persecuted for the next two decades. This chapter sketches the late twentieth-century history of this verbal art and outlines a method for approaching it. These “songs for dead parents” work to construct a world for dead others and install dead bodies in that world. While the songs subject the dead to bureaucratic authority in the interests of the living, they also give the dead potential routes of escape, possibilities for evading an endless round of life and life and dissolving into something else. The songs were an attempt to investigate, with a degree of empathy, the lives and worlds of that most intimate of “minorities,” whose political subjugation was necessary for the living.