The United States Capitol Building

 


The United States Capitol Building is the center of American Democracy. It is also the center of American bureaucracy; for every elected senator or congressman who makes decisions, there are thirty staffers tasked with preparing, recording, advertising, and implementing those decisions. 


The Capitol is a public building. At any one time, there can be three hundred or more tourists wandering around the rotunda, admiring the paintings on the walls and carvings on the ceiling. It’s not as though the rotunda and other publicly accessible areas aren’t also workspaces for senators and representatives; rather, the best route from most congressional offices to the house and senate floors goes directly through the center of the rotunda. It is not uncommon for famous political figures to have to sidestep tourists while walking to important votes – trailed, as always, by three or four assistants. 


Some of the ancient Greek spirit of intertwining public administration and public life lives on in the United States Capitol. Like the palace at Knossos, the building’s largest central area is a place where people at the highest levels of political power and citizens of the general public interact. Members of the public can freely sit in the House and Senate Galleries to watch votes, as they might have sat in the Athenian assembly as decisions were made. Bureaucracy feels efficient when one’s elected representative has to say “excuse me” while walking past his or her constituents. In the Capitol Building, the United States – a country far larger than any Greek polis – feels like an intimately connected community. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction: Bureaucracy and Administration in Ancient Greece

Image
This exhibition of artifacts, inscriptions, texts, buildings, and diagrams spans approximately 3500 years and features exhibits from the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Classical period, the Hellenistic period, and modernity. The places of origin of the items featured include modern Iran, Crete, the Balkan Peninsula, and the United States of America. Within this exhibition are great buildings, religious items, laws and decrees, military equipment, and evidence of economic transactions. The common thread between them? Each of these exhibits is intended to provide a unique perspective on the administrative and bureaucratic history of Ancient Greece.  “Administration” and “bureaucracy” are somewhat broad terms. As such, it is prudent to define what, exactly, is included within an “administrative and bureaucratic history” of a territory. For the purposes of this exhibition, the administrative and bureaucratic history is the history of systematized, ordered authority in the Ancient Greek ...
Read more

Diagram of the Palace at Knossos

Image
This diagram of the layout of the Minoan/Mycenaean palace at Knossos provides insight into the early inhabitants of Crete’s robust economic bureaucracy: the redistributive economy. In the Knossos redistributive economy, materials were brought to production centers within the palace, where they would be stored and crafted into usable goods before being distributed back to the general population. The palace at Knossos was well-equipped to support a redistributive economy; most of the western wing of the palace is dedicated space for the production of goods. It is also notable that the central component of the palace is not a throne room (which is just to the west of the palace’s center) but rather a common space, which was likely meant for public use.  There is a substantial difference between the palace at Knossos on Crete and mainland Mycenaean palaces of the same era. The palace at Knossos is thought to have had little to no defensive mechanisms, and – thanks to the large central ...
Read more