Administrative Evil Review of Unmasking Administrative Evil Book Report

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Administrative Evil

Review of Unmasking Administrative Evil

In Understanding Administrative Evil, authors Guy B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour explore the idea and evolution of the concept of evil. Adams and Balfour begin by defining historical evil as "knowingly and deliberately inflicting pain and suffering on other human being" (xix).

However, in modern times, this idea has undergone a critical change. Historical evil has evolved into administrative evil, a form of evil that is unique to modernity. Administrative evil is made possible by the rise of technical rationality, a culture that "emphasizes the scientific-analytic mind-set and the belief in technological progress." As a result, administrative evil "wears many masks" (xxi) keeping its nature hidden from the people who unintentionally carry out its plans.

This process of "moral inversion" can thus make public officers the unknowing vehicles of administrative evil.

Thus, the main difference between historical and administrative evil lie in the perpetrator's motivation. In administrative evil, actors are often unaware that they are engaging in evil behavior.

To illustrate their arguments, Adams and Balfour cite numerous and varied cases of administrative evil, including the Jewish Holocaust, welfare reform, immigration and the destructive organizational culture at NASA that spawned the Challenger tragedy. The variety of examples illustrates the power and pervasiveness of administrative evil, and how this new evil could overcome even the most stringent external and professional control mechanisms.

Thus, for Adams and Balfour, the only way to combat administrative evil was through a radical reconstruction of technical rationality. As a society, we should discard procedural and individualistic values in favor of those that are based on substantive and communitarian values.

Methods

To support their argument, Adams and Balfour apply their theory to a number of modern historical events. In their first study, the authors analyze the Holocaust, first by summarizing the debate between intentionalist and functionalist scholars.

However, to fully understand the German society's complicity in the Holocaust, Adams and Balfour argue for a synthesis - that the Holocaust grew out of a "confluence of historical and political forces, racist ideology and anti-Semitism, organizational competition and the bureaucratic processes of a highly developed modern society" (59).

Thus, while much has been documented regarding the cruelty of guards, SS soldiers and Nazi doctors in the concentration camps, relatively little emphasis is placed on the role of the thousands of public administrators who were also essential parts of the Nazi machinery.

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This includes the workers in the Finance Ministry who confiscated the property of Jewish families, the municipal authorities who oversaw the ghettoes and armament officials who organized the forced labor (66).

The participation of these non-military people, assert Adams and Balfour, shows the hidden and complex workings of administrative evil. Most ordinary Germans thus felt divorced from the horrors of the Holocaust. "The destruction of the Jews," the authors stated, "was procedurally indistinguishable from any other modern organizational process" (66).

Adams and Balfour then link the Holocaust to the United States, through the country's association with Werner von Braun's team of rocket scientists, who acted in ways "for which others in postwar Germany were convicted of war crimes" (74). Von Braun's V-2 program was directly linked to Jewish slave labor and weapons production efforts at the Mittelbrau-Dora concentration camp. The authors point to evidence showing von Braun's involvement in Mittelbrau-Dora and the Peenamunde site of V-2 operations.

The authors contend that in its intense pursuit of technical rational goals, the United States military ignored von Braun's involvement and instead, brought the entire team to the United States. This made the United States government complicit with the military in transferring administrative evil into the country's borders and later, the space program.

Once in the country, the von Braun team then laid the seeds for the "destructive organizational culture" that eventually took route at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and later, NASA in general. During this time, NASA developed a culture that "put lives at an unnecessary risk." Eventually, this unsafe culture was manifested in the Challenger tragedy (133).….....

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