<P> The term "bureaucracy" is French in origin and combines the French word bureau--desk or office--with the Greek word κράτος (Kratos)--rule or political power . It was coined in the mid-18th century by the French economist Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay and was a satirical pejorative from the outset . Gournay never wrote the term down but was later quoted at length in a letter from a contemporary: </P> <P> The late M. de Gournay...sometimes used to say: "We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania ." Sometimes he used to invent a fourth or fifth form of government under the heading of "bureaucracy ." </P> <P> The first known English - language use dates to 1818 . Here, too, the sense was pejorative, with Irish novelist Lady Morgan referring to "the Bureaucratie, or office tyranny, by which Ireland has so long been governed ." By the mid-19th century, the word was being used in a more neutral sense, referring to a system of public administration in which offices were held by unelected career officials . In this sense "bureaucracy" was seen as a distinct form of management, often subservient to a monarchy . In the 1920s, the definition was expanded by the German sociologist Max Weber to include any system of administration conducted by trained professionals according to fixed rules . Weber saw the bureaucracy as a relatively positive development; however, by 1944 the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises noted that the term bureaucracy was "always applied with an opprobrious connotation," and by 1957 the American sociologist Robert Merton noted that the term "bureaucrat" had become an epithet . </P> <P> Although the term "bureaucracy" was not coined until the mid 18th century, organized and consistent administrative systems are much older . The development of writing (ca . 3500 BC) and the use of documents was critical to the administration of this system, and the first definitive emergence of bureaucracy is in ancient Sumer, where an emergent class of scribes used clay tablets to administer the harvest and allocate its spoils . Ancient Egypt also had a hereditary class of scribes that administered the civil service bureaucracy . </P>

In the theories of political governance in the united states the bureaucratic model