BUREAUCRACY • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Bureaucracy

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/bjʊrˈɑkrəsi/ Listen

Bureaucracy

noun

Nonelective government officials. Synonym: bureaucratism.

A government that is administered primarily by bureaus that are staffed with nonelective officials.

Any organization in which action is obstructed by insistence on unnecessary procedures and red tape.

See images of 'Bureaucracy'

Etymology of 'Bureaucracy'

Share |

"Bureaucracy" Quotes from Famous Books

... more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy—the plain fruit of all of them is that the Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, ...

— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... class of the free farmers. It had introduced slave labor, against which no freeman could hope to compete. It had turned the cities into beehives inhabited by pauperized and unhealthy mobs of runaway peasants. It had created a large bureaucracy—petty officials who were underpaid and who were forced to take graft in order to buy bread and clothing for their families. Worst of all, it had accustomed people to violence, to blood-shed, to a barbarous pleasure in the pain ...

— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... opposite the castle. In imitation of Martin Luther's burning of the Pope's Bull they consigned a number of their pet aversions to the flames. Thus they burned a soldier's straight-jacket and corporal's cane, as well as a recent pamphlet by one Schmalz written in defense of the old Prussian bureaucracy. Rash words were uttered about the broken faith of princes. They were aimed at King Frederick William of Prussia, who had promised to give his country a constitution, but had failed to keep his word. The Wartburg festival, childish as it was in many of its manifestations, ...

— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

Words linked to "Bureaucracy" : authorities, bureaucratic, officialdom, government, government officials, regime, civil service, pentagon, organisation, organization