Growth of state functions with the expansion of the economy has resulted in the creation of a vast state bureaucratic apparatus.  Heading this bureaucracy are the ministers of state, each with a separate department.  Under the department heads are sub-departments, sub-divided in their turn into bureaus or separate offices.  At each level, functions are assigned and salaries are fixed.  Entrance into this anthill is sometimes by personal favor, sometimes by examination.  Once in, however, barring misbehavior, or some catastrophe like the abolition of a particular bureau, the office holder is in for life with a pension when he is retired for age.

Inside the bureaucracy there is a slow movement determined by seniority.  There is also some skipping, as when new bureaus are formed or when death or retirement offer opportunities for the favored few to move forward or skip upward.  As we read the record, the bureaucracy existed in the days of Egypt’s Amenhotep, or in those of Rome’s Augustus Caesar, as it exists today—­locally in every municipality, province, nation and empire and generally throughout western civilization.

Every civilization known to history has had its priestcraft as well as its statecraft.  Statecraft spawned its bureaucracy.  Priestcraft spawned its theocracy.  Both patterns have inter-penetrated entire civilizations.  Each locality, region and district has had its representatives of state and of church.  In some instances the church took precedence.  In others the state was supreme.  As the civilization matured, using war as the chief instrument of policy, the state in the person of military dictators has tended to predominate.  In every civilization the state has collected its taxes and the church has collected its tithes.

The net result, in every civilization, has been a ruling oligarchy, self-appointed and self-perpetuating, which has shaped policy, planned and directed administration, exercised authority and lived comfortably and at least semi-parasitically on the backs of the underlying urban and rural masses, sharing its sinecure with its middle class handymen.  In some times and in certain localities the oligarchy has maintained a representative front.  Elsewhere it has functioned arbitrarily.  In extreme cases one man has ruled for a brief period.  Generally the oligarchy has held the reins of authority.

Each phase of human society has had its oppositions, its confrontations, its conflicts, proportioned to its magnitude, its specialization and the interdependence of its component parts, its ratio of change to stability and its foresight, plans and preparations for dealing with changes when they occur.  Since civilization, of all known forms of human association, is the largest, most specialized and most interdependent, it is in civilization that we should expect to find the most intensive and extensive contradictions, confrontations and conflicts.

Among the many oppositions of civilized association five are outstanding:  the we-they relationship; rural versus urban life; subsistence versus acquisition and accumulation; hard work versus ease, luxury and parasitism; poverty versus wealth.