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Lane Scheppele, Kim --- "Administrative State Socialism and its Constitutional Aftermath" [2010] ELECD 808; 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 6

Section Title: Administrative State Socialism and its Constitutional Aftermath

Author(s): Lane Scheppele, Kim

Number of pages: 23

Extract:

6 Administrative state socialism and its
constitutional aftermath
Kim Lane Scheppele


The temple of bourgeois authority is legislation and its fetish is the law; the temple of the
socialist world system is administration and its divine service is work. It is by no accident that
the political ideals of the bourgeoisie are embodied in parliamentarism and the Rechtsstaat,
whereas, the socialist community is, in its very nature, primarily a community of administra-
tion. (A.G. Goikhbarg, quoted in Quigley 2007: 55)1

The usual narrative about the rise of the administrative state seems universal ­ and runs
as follows. Modern states do a great deal more than did pre-modern states. A great many
of these new functions are highly technical in nature. They are so technical, in fact, that
generalist parliaments cannot possibly write statutes detailed enough to provide precise
and responsive guidance in all of the areas where states now act. To do all of the things
that modern states do, therefore, there must be a division of labor among constitutional
norms of the most general sort that provide the horizons of principle and procedure,
legislative norms of intermediate generality that set general policy in specific fields and
regulatory norms that provide the detail necessary for actual day-to-day governance.
The administrative state is the result of the growth of norms in this last category. Over
time, regulation has increased in scope and complexity, so that the historical sweep of
administrative change always moves toward an ever-increasing ...