ABSTRACT
While public opinion about government has appeared to wax and wane with the tide of the economy in the past 200 to 250 years, public opinion of bureaucracy at large has been consistently negative. Before the 1750s, the population at large generally viewed government as an oppressive force, a means to extract hard-earned wages through taxes, and the vehicle of elite interests. It has only been since the late nineteenth century that government has come to be associated with the provision of social services beneficial to the masses. Also, until the 1750s the public's discontent was with individual public officials (especially tax collectors), but since the coining of the concept of bureaucracy in the 1760s, public discontent has especially targeted bureaucratic officials at large. Until the second part of the eighteenth century, a distinction between government (or politics for that matter) and bureaucracy did not exist.
