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Parrillo, Nicholas --- "Testing Weber: Compensation for Public Services, Bureaucratization, and the Development of Positive Law in the United States" [2010] ELECD 805; in Rose-Ackerman, Susan; Lindseth, L. Peter (eds), "Comparative Administrative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Comparative Administrative Law

Editor(s): Rose-Ackerman, Susan; Lindseth, L. Peter

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848446359

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Testing Weber: Compensation for Public Services, Bureaucratization, and the Development of Positive Law in the United States

Author(s): Parrillo, Nicholas

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

3 Testing Weber: compensation for public services,
bureaucratization, and the development of positive
law in the United States
Nicholas Parrillo


From the colonial period through much of the nineteenth century and sometimes into the
twentieth, public officers in the United States frequently received their pay in the forms
of fees-for-service, commissions, rewards, and other types of compensation that varied,
in a direct and objective way, with the business of their offices and the way in which they
exercised their powers. My larger research project aims to document and explain this
lost system of compensation, as well as its gradual replacement ­ in different offices and
jurisdictions at different times over more than a century ­ by the fixed salaries that have
since come to be taken for granted in the public service. Essentially, I am tracing the way
in which legislators, by reforming the way officers were paid, made the absence of the
profit motive a defining feature of `government' in the United States.
This kind of transition took place in many countries. There are major historical analy-
ses of profit-seeking government in England, though far less attention has been paid to
its demise.1 And there is no modern scholarly attempt to analyze profit-seeking, or its
decline, across American government. Histories of compensation in American govern-
ment are widely scattered, appearing in monographs focused on a single public function
(or occasionally a few related ones), with compensation often treated as an incidental
matter.2
In the absence ...