Criticizing theories of socialism that misapply Max Weber to conclude that socialism was bureaucratic, Eddy U offers a reconsideration of the nature of socialism based on a rereading of Weber and a study of schools in Shanghai. U argues that socialist organization was actually the opposite of bureaucracy, which he calls “counter-bureaucracy.” This yields insights into the Cultural Revolution and the demise of socialism.
U's reading of Weber surely is more careful than that found in Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968), or convergence theory. Each of these saw varying degrees of bureaucracy as a strength of socialism. U maintains that while Weber did argue that socialism would be bureaucratic, this socialism was to have been delivered by social democratic parties in parliamentary systems. Conversely, he thought...
