GOVERNMENT WITHOUT EXPERTISE? COMPETENCE, CAPACITY, AND CIVIL-SERVICE PRACTICE IN GAZA, 1917–67

Abstract

The expert is a quintessential figure of modern bureaucratic rule, offering a “protean image of authority and rational knowledge.” Tracing the development of modern rule, Max Weber describes the emergence in European government of a “professional labor force, specialized in expertness through long years of preparatory training…[and] based on the division of labor” as a “gradual development of half a thousand years.” Different fields, Weber suggests, demanded experts at different moments, but in three areas—finance, war, and law—“expert officialdom in the more advanced states was definitely triumphant during the sixteenth century.” For the British civil service, the triumph of the expert has been located in “the nineteenth-century revolution in government” such that the “modern image of the expert, canonised and criticised, was well established by the 1920s.” With this consolidation of the expert's place in modern rule, it has been generally agreed that, whether for good or for ill, “the expert in the civil service is here to stay.”