A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Max WeberRead
Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of efficiency and clarity in bureaucratic systems.
Max Weber highlights the essential attributes of an effective bureaucratic administration, where precision, speed, and clarity combine to reduce costs and improve functionality. He argues that an optimal bureaucracy is characterized by tight organization, clear hierarchies, and the ability to execute tasks without unnecessary friction, ultimately leading to more effective governance and administrative practices.
Themes
BureaucracyEfficiencyAdministrationClarityManagement
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a business seminar discussing best practices in management.
More from Max Weber
All quotes →'Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.
Max WeberRead
The modern view of criminal justice, broadly, is that public concern with morality or expediency decrees expiation for the violation of a norm; this concern finds expression in the infliction of punishment on the evil doer by agents of the state, the evil doer, however, enjoying the protection of a regular procedure.
Max WeberRead
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.
Max WeberRead
The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.
Max WeberRead
Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.
Max WeberRead
Similar quotes
Therefore another prologue must tell he is not a lion
William ShakespeareRead
The New Testament is of full authority and open to the understanding of simple men as to the points most needful to salvation.
John WycliffeRead
One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.
J. M. CoetzeeRead
Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all your money), and no right to compensation for the property that's been taken.
Harry BrowneRead
Nobody at any time is cut off from God.
Meister EckhartRead
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests.
Albert CamusRead