Bureaucrats

A bureaucrat, in Marsh's spare definition, is anyone whose institutional position lets them impose their will on other people's interactions. The emphasis is on institutional authority: not personal strength or persuasion, but a role within a structure that grants the power to intervene in, permit, block or shape the exchanges of others. This ties bureaucrats directly to her account of will and interaction, where a healthy life freely initiates and conducts its own interactions, and to sublation, the bending of one will beneath another. A bureaucrat is positioned to demand exactly that bending, by virtue of office rather than relationship. Marsh points out the tangible rewards of such positions, citing a finding that the higher a person sits in a bureaucracy, the longer they tend to live, a concrete sign of how institutional authority over others' interactions converts into advantage for the holder.

Ordinarily a bureaucrat is simply an official who administers rules within an organization, a neutral or mildly pejorative term. Marsh sharpens it into a relationship of power: a bureaucrat is defined by holding institutional authority to exert their will over others' interactions, which places the role inside her account of sublation and the unequal exchange of energy.