d by a combination of motives such as self-interest, or a mixture composed of adherence to tradition and a belief in legality" (Weber, Basic concepts, 1962, p. 83). He believed that history followed cycles, periods of inspirational or charismatic leadership followed by the rationalization and codification in law of change. However, for Weber, who believed in the efficacy of elite rule, "what [some] people thought and believed was decisive" (McCrae, 1974, p. 89). Thompson, Ellis & Wildavsky commented on the apparent contradiction between Weber's belief in the need for hierarchy and his belief in the importance of spiritually inspired individual leaders (1990, p. 96).
Given the complex economic and social conditions of his time, Weber recognized the need for a centrally managed, hierarchically organized and rationally administered state. He called bureaucracy "the most crucial phenomenon of the modern Western state" (Weber, The theory, in Eldridge, 1971, p. 337). He said "the modern economy cannot run in any other way" and that "the decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization" (Weber, Speech, 1917, in Eldridge, 1971, p. 197; Gerth & Mills, 1946, p. 214).
He saw no alternative to "a firmly ordered system of super- and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher ones" (Weber, Bureaucracy, 1911, in Gerth & Mills, 1946, p. 197). Silberman says that Weber recognized "the inevitability of a bureaucratic rationality" and the "urgent need for stable, strict, intensive and careful administration" (1993, p. 412).
In the bureaucratic structures of the leviathan states which emerged in most Western democracies from the centrally planned war economies of 1914-1918, the dominant modus operandi was "the trained orientation of obedient compliance to . . . orders" and in which individual functionarie...