ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the bureaucrats and facts about civil servants. 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. The term 'civil service' in England refers to the upper echelons in the public service. In general, the sociological understanding of bureaucrats dominates in the Anglo-American literature. This is also visible in the Anglo-American emphasis on different types of personnel systems, such as the general civil service, the professional career system, the collective system of unionized employees. Once the concept of bureaucracy was coined in the mid-eighteenth century, public attention and discontent moved from the individual officeholder to the abstraction of the concept.
