By David Graeber, from The Utopia of Rules, published last month by Melville House. Graeber is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. His most recent article for Harper’s Magazine, “Army of Altruists,” appeared in the January 2007 issue.

Nobody thinks much about bureaucracy anymore. But in the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the word was everywhere. It dominated works of sociology with grandiose titles like A General Theory of Bureaucracy, popular paperbacks like The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, and novels and films such as Joseph Heller’s Something…