Books in Brief: The Institutional Imperative

The Institutional Imperative: How to Understand the United States Government and Other Bulky Objects, by Robert N. Kharasch (Charterhouse, 258 pp., $7.95). Parkinson he isn’t—the satire wants deftness, and much of the serious analysis is audaciously simplistic—but Robert Kharasch knows the Washington bureaucracy, and he knows folly when he sees it, which this book argues spiritedly is the same thing. The iron rule of the Institutional Imperative—“Every action or decision of an institution must be intended to keep the institutional machinery working”— and the whole body of axioms, laws, and corollaries which Kharasch derives therefrom in this not quite straight-faced treatise, are a bit too flip to be called scientific, yet far too true to be laughed off by anyone who has ever tangled with big government, big defense, big business, big foundations, big politics (whether CREEP or COPE), or big righteousness (Naderism, SCLC, Senator Sam’s circus, Archie Cox’s army, et al.). Undeniably, human institutions of all sorts do have an insidious way of running those who think they’re running them, and this admittedly crude attempt to codify the “laws” of that phenomenon is more than just an amusement—I’d venture to call it a public service. Though Kharasch is a liberal at heart, as witness the special fire in his eye on topics like Mylai, Ellsberg, and nuclear testing, he is also a man of intellectual integrity who follows the logic of his insights wherever it leads, sparing no sacred cows, left or right. In all, the book is a first-rate primer and action manual for Americans seeking to defend individual values against the momentum of institutional mass mentality. J. k. ANdrews jr.

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J. K. Andrews Jr.

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The Institutional Imperative: How to Understand the United States Government and Other Bulky Objects, by Robert N. Kharasch (Charterhouse, 258 pp., $7.95). Parkinson he isn’t—the satire wants deftness, and much of the serious analysis is audaciously simplistic—but Robert Kharasch knows the Washington bureaucracy, and he knows folly when he sees it, which this book argues spiritedly is the same thing. The iron rule of the Institutional Imperative—“Every action or decision of an institution must be intended to keep the institutional machinery working”— and the whole body of axioms, laws, and corollaries which Kharasch derives therefrom in this not quite straight-faced treatise, are a bit too flip to be called scientific, yet far too true to be laughed off by anyone who has ever tangled with big government, big defense, big business, big foundations, big politics (whether CREEP or COPE), or big righteousness (Naderism, SCLC, Senator Sam’s circus, Archie Cox’s army, et al.). Undeniably, human institutions of all sorts do have an insidious way of running those who think they’re running them, and this admittedly crude attempt to codify the “laws” of that phenomenon is more than just an amusement—I’d venture to call it a public service. Though Kharasch is a liberal at heart, as witness the special fire in his eye on topics like Mylai, Ellsberg, and nuclear testing, he is also a man of intellectual integrity who follows the logic of his insights wherever it leads, sparing no sacred cows, left or right. In all, the book is a first-rate primer and action manual for Americans seeking to defend individual values against the momentum of institutional mass mentality. J. k. ANdrews jr.