arbiter
JournalsAccount

Obeying Nobody: Public Service and the Ordinary Evil of Administration

Roy L. Heidelberg

Administration and Society2026https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997261421492article
AJG 2ABDC B
Weight
0.50

Abstract

This essay explores administrative evil by reconsidering it through Weber’s ideal-type of bureaucracy and Arendt’s concerns over the bureaucratization of social life. It considers how modern bureaucracy is the structural condition Arendt identified as the banality of evil : systematic displacement of judgment by procedural rationality. Through Weber’s account of bureaucracy’s “special virtue” of impersonality, the paper traces how dehumanization becomes superhumanization —a technical transcendence of human thought now realized in algorithmic governance and artificial intelligence. Administrative evil, then, is not an anomaly but the ordinary moral condition of modern administrative life where thoughtlessness is the design.

Open via your library →

Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997261421492

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{roy2026,
  title        = {{Obeying Nobody: Public Service and the Ordinary Evil of Administration}},
  author       = {Roy L. Heidelberg},
  journal      = {Administration and Society},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997261421492},
}

Paste directly into BibTeX, Zotero, or your reference manager.

Flag this paper

Obeying Nobody: Public Service and the Ordinary Evil of Administration

Flags are reviewed by the Arbiter methodology team within 5 business days.

Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.