Bureaucracy: An American History

Title: Bureaucracy: An American History

By Casey Eilbert (Johns Hopkins University, Center for Economy and Society)

Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2026

Time: 1630-1800

Room: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)

Abstract: This talk offers a history of a subject Americans love to hate, tracing how the concept of bureaucracy developed in the modern United States. Looking to discourses in social theory, politics, business, and popular culture, it shows how Americans’ ideas about bureaucracy changed over time and influenced the major political economic developments of the twentieth century. More than merely an organizational form, bureaucracy—a symbol of the instrumentality, impersonality, and rationality of the modern world—was a concept at the heart of Americans’ efforts to navigate tensions between self and society, organize and govern themselves democratically, and build fair and effective organizations in the public and private sectors. By tracing rhetoric about bureaucracy and its influence on business, labor, and government, the talk reveals how a famously boring subject determined Americans’ horizons of political possibility and the trajectory of the modern United States.

About the speaker: Casey Eilbert is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Economy and Society at Johns Hopkins University, where she is writing an intellectual history of bureaucracy in the modern United States, under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. She received her PhD from the History Department at Princeton University in 2024. Her writing has appeared in Time, The Hill, and The Washington Post, and is forthcoming in Modern American History.

Organized by the Department of American Culture and Literature