Notions of Office

Before discussing classical and medieval notions, let me acknowledge that the term “office” has a range of connotations, and that it travels with but is not reducible to “officer” and “official.” In his landmark study of the concepts and its coevolution with notions of corruption, the British historian Mark Knights (Reference Knights2021, 48) notes that

Office in the early modern period had a broad set of meanings.

1. (a) divine worship

2. (b) a position or post

3. (c) an abstraction of the latter

4. (d) the duty or service attached to a person’s position or employment

5. (e) a mental or bodily function—and hence also the function of excreting

6. (f) a kindness or service withheld

7. (g) a set of rooms for business, clerical or administrative work and the staff in it

Permit me to ignore the fifth of these connotations—office and orifice—and focus on the fabric linking three conceptual strands: (1) office as relational obligations (to God, to rites of worship or procedure, to the res publica), (2) office as position, then (3) office as organization.

This lecture is not primarily about the office of the presidency nor about legislative office (for thoughtful treatments, see Nelson Reference Nelson2014; Renan Reference Renan2020; Skowronek Reference Skowronek1992). These are indeed offices and worthy of our attention. Yet ministerial office merits attention and scholarship in its own right. This is not least because certain “administrative” positions (understood as magistrates) melded functions that were later considered “executive” or “judicial.”

Office Everywhere and Nowhere

In an address to the American Political Science Association, I begin with American constitutions, not at first the national Constitution of 1787 but the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. The word “office” or “officer” appears 79 times in that document, where judges (chapter IV), legislators (Chapter I), and governors (Chapter II) each hold an “office” and so do subordinate executive officials such as the Secretary of the Commonwealth (Chapter II, Article III) as well as officers of the University at Cambridge, or Harvard (Chapter V). Your lecturer today is an officer of Harvard University. In every place where authority resides in the Massachusetts Constitution there is an office and usually an officer.Footnote ⁷ Each one of those offices required an oath of fealty to the Christian religion and proof that the minimum property requirement has been met by its occupant (Chapter VI, Article I).

Like other constitutions of the period, the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 was preceded by a bill of rights.Footnote ⁸ That bill of rights had two articles that outlined the idea of accountable and temporary office.

The Massachusetts Constitution was antidemocratic in powerful ways, conceived in part as a reaction to what were considered the excesses of the revolutionary moment of 1776 and 1777, when state constitutions emasculated the executive and bestowed vast powers upon legislatures (Wood Reference Wood1969). The federal Constitution of 1787 differed in many ways, not least in the idea that oaths for federal office could not demand adherence to any particular religion. Yet the U.S. Constitution, too, conceives of offices as essential vessels of power. The President “shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years” and no “Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector” in the Electoral College.

The U.S. Constitution, like others, presumes that there will exist a set of administrative offices (and organizations containing them, like departments) that are not defined therein. The best example comes in Article II, Section 2, when the president’s appointment power is defined.

The chicken-and-egg problem here is that no executive departments empowered under this constitution had yet been created when this document was drafted and debated, much less ratified into existence as the Constitution of the United States. The other key citation to administrative offices occurs later in the same section (Article II, Section 2):

Thorny questions abide here. Who qualifies as “an officer of the United States? Who qualifies as an “inferior officer”? Who qualifies as not an officer but an employed occupant of an office?Footnote ⁹

Before moving to statutes, let me note that contemporary democratic republics have constitutions that also employ the term office. The California state constitution uses office to describe its governor, its legislators, and its judges and devotes an entire Article VII to “Public Officers and Employees.” The government of France translates its Constitution for the Fifth Republic into English and therein employs the term “office” 23 times, for legislative, judicial, and executive functions. The idea of accountable office is provided for in later articles, not least Article 68-2:

Statutes, too, center offices and in more than the traditional way. The literature on delegation from legislatures to agencies or executives is massive, beginning with Epstein and O’Halloran’s classic Delegating Powers (Reference Epstein and O’Halloran1999), continuing through Huber and Shipan (Reference Huber and Shipan2002) and Gailmard and Patty (Reference Gailmard and Patty2021). The primary dynamic modeled is that of delegation to “the executive” or “the executive branch” or to “executive agencies,” and in a conceptual and positivist sense this is exactly right. Yet when delegation occurs in congressional statutes, it is not to agencies per se but to “officers” and “offices.”

Let us take the first such case in American national history, the renaming of the first executive department in the first session of the First Congress. In August 1789 Congress passed “An Act to Establish an Executive Department, to be denominated the Department of War,” and it begins as follows:

A month later, President Washington signed “An Act to Establish the Treasury Department.” The stark differences between these enabling acts tell us something about the nature of delegation under the constitution as well as the notions of office and officer embedded within the departments. Treasury’s enabling act, too, began with the creation of officers.

I return to these two statutes below. Their commonalities and differences are telling. Yet for the moment note that the first things that happen in the first legislative delegations in American national history are the naming of officers, to whom powers are given in the ensuing sections of the acts.Footnote ¹²

Now jump to the near present and consider a recent example—namely, the emergency authorization of the messenger RNA vaccine for COVID-19. The politics and procedure surrounding the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) authorization of the first such vaccine have been heavily debated, but the agent who signed off on the authorization, and who had legal authority to do so, was not the FDA Commissioner but the head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Dr. Marion Gruber.Footnote ¹³ As Feinstein and Nou (Reference Feinstein and Nou2023) detail in their comprehensive study, this is an example of subdelegation, a widespread pattern in pharmaceutical regulation.

The original authority upon which this authorization is based goes back to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (see Carpenter Reference Carpenter2010), which vests review and approval authority for new drugs in a Cabinet-level official, “the Secretary.”Footnote ¹⁴

Yet as the statute has evolved, many of the decisions made upon new drugs and biologics are taken below the Secretary and indeed below the agency’s head, the Commissioner. In some cases “the director of the reviewing division” is the relevant office. Such powers are, in modern parlance, “subdelegated” to lower agency officials, who like the CBER director have legal authorization and responsibility for their performance.

Some basic facts emerge from these examples. Congressional statutes delegate not to agencies per se but more to offices. So too, the president does not, in the civilian realm, take executive or administrative decisions. To state an obvious point, the president does not approve drugs. He is rather to “take care” that the laws are executed. In the military realm, the President’s power as commander in chief invokes a different, more direct logic.

Finally, patterns of subdelegation again bestow authority and responsibility upon subordinate offices and officials. As Feinstein and Nou (Reference Feinstein and Nou2023) show, these patterns are remarkably widespread in the federal government.

With office everywhere, it is time to turn to its roots in European thought and practice.

Office Ancient: Plato, Cicero and the Praetor

Our modern notions of office descend from the Latin officium and magistratus and the way these were constructed by the Romans and their medieval successors. Yet the Romans were keenly aware of Greek precedents. The political theorist Melissa Lane (Lane Reference Lane2023) has written a searching exploration of Greek notions of office, centering upon the idea of accountable office in Plato. Greeks of Plato’s time and for centuries after juxtaposed unaccountable kingship with “accountable office” (archē hupeuthunos) (2023, 3). Lane demonstrates accountability in the sense of constraint by other offices (2023, 4) and also by virtue of “a widespread family of procedures (generally termed euthunai) by which those subject to an officeholder’s powers were able to hold that officeholder to account.” These included audits and hearings, both of which were public (Lane Reference Lane2023, 59, chap. 3).

Lane then turns to Plato, who offers a broad theorization of office and rule in his dialogues, especially the Laws. Among the many lessons that Socrates leaves his readers in the Laws is that government by office breaks down under certain kinds of polarization or partisanship (Plato, Laws (Leg. 4.715a8–b2)). When pushed to its extremes, factional government renders accountable office impossible.

The European and modern evolution of office owes more to Roman precedent and Roman law than to Greek. There was, by one esteemed writer’s judgment, no more important part of the Roman regime than that of office. As Han Julius Wolff remarks in his canonical Roman Law: A Historical Introduction (Wolff Reference Wolff1956, 27),

Roman offices included the consuls, the praetors, the censors, the aediles, and a range of other governing positions. As Machiavelli famously argued in his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, the Roman Republic even created an office for exceptional moments: the dictator.

The nature of office and office-holding in Rome has been the subject of vast amounts of research (for helpful summaries consult Lintott 1997 and Lintott Reference Lintott2013). Yet several features are important for this writing. The first is that Roman officials governed in a world that by law and expectation made their decisions and ideas public. The head magistrates in the provinces and in the city, the praetors, took decisions that were in many ways not anticipable, in the sense that they would respond to cases brought before them. Yet on an annual basis they also announced (by edict, edico) plans and “policies” for their time in office. As Eberle (Reference Eberle2024: 239) remarks of praetors, especially the praetor urbanus of Rome itself,

Recent studies and classic writings demonstrate a remarkable system of expectations and activity both strategic and normative structured around these edicts and upon praetorian behavior. When Cicero composed his famous oration Against Verres, he criticized Verres’ edict and the behavior around it as having created a bazaar where the performances of office were sold as if in a marketplace (In Verrem 2.1.104–19). “Pray recall to your memories, gentlemen,” Cicero proclaimed, “the wanton character of Verres’ administration of the law, the lack of uniformity in his decisions, the trafficking that went on” (2.1.120).Footnote ¹⁸

Cicero and his audience were quite familiar with the lobbying of office. As Eberle demonstrates (2024, 251), all sorts of Roman actors were regularly involved in trying to influence the composition of edicts. Not only were their actions and plans publicly stated and posted ex ante, praetors were in some sense also accountable and liable ex post, as Cicero’s arguments at the trial of Verres attest. While some praetors were shamed in public trials, those who were considered a model (exemplum) of good administration were declared as such by the Senate, as with Mucius Scaevola on his return from Asia in the 90s BCE (Eberle Reference Eberle2024, 254), roughly two decades before Cicero’s Verrine orations.

Cicero is better known to scholars of government for his dialogic reflections on the commonwealth (De Re Publica) and duties (De Officis). Cicero’s De Officis puts forth a situational ethics of sorts, discussing duties in relation to a citizen’s station and position. When Cicero turns to public office, he uses a range of terms, including the notion of officium as sphere of authority. It is to Cicero, moreover, that the idea of office as trust comes into view, especially when he inveighed against factionalism and partisanship in government (note the comparison with Plato’s Laws cited above, which Cicero had read carefully).

In the republican and imperial periods of Rome, officium had not yet etymologically become “position.” It was magistratus and a range of particular titles that largely performed that function (Wolff Reference Wolff1956, 27). So too, the set of things entrusted to a magistrate was not defined entirely by the idea of officium. It was rather provincia, as Andrew Lintott (Reference Lintott2013, 22–23) has detailed in his study of imperial administration, that defined “appointment” or “task” in territorial (provincial) affairs. And since the career of many a Roman politician and office holder was defined by service in the territories, these external experiences shaped Romans’ notion of government.

The republican period of Rome bequeathed one other legacy to subsequent generations of government” the idea of elected lower officials. Romans elected not only their consul but also a range of magisterial (judicial and administrative) officials “below” the consuls and external to the assemblies. In the long history of American republicanism, this gestures to an idea that has taken hold more at the state level than at the national level: the idea of the “unbundled executive” (Berry and Gersen Reference Berry and Gersen2008).

Office Medieval: The Bishop

The transformation of office from obligation to position occurs slowly and most of it after the Roman Empire. It is in part a legacy of the Roman Catholic Church and, in particular, of the medieval cotransformation of ecclesiastical office and secular office. Recent scholarship led by Michael Edward Moore (Moore Reference Moore2011)—in A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and the Rise of Frankish Kingship, 300-850—shows that European kings were slow to develop office-like administration after the fall of the Roman Empire. Warring kings, counts, dukes, and other rulers in postimperial Europe relied heavily upon bishops to codify Roman law and to administer much of the realm.Footnote ¹⁹ As Moore and others show, Merovingian and then Carolingian kings took up the codification of statutory law from these canons and also embedded episcopal organization deep within their monarchical states.

The earliest heavily institutionalized offices in western history are not—at least before the Ordonnance de 1445 when Valois France creates the first standing army since imperial Rome in the compagnies d’ordonnance—military positions. And they are not really those of the papacy either. They are bishops.Footnote ²⁰

The idea of the bishop (also from the Greek episcopos) stemmed from Jewish notions of priesthood and rulership, apostolic succession and the Roman provincial system of government. Christian bishops relied heavily upon notions of office and election from Judaism. In Exodus 18:21, Moses’ father-in-law counsels him to provide “rulers (שָׂרֵ֣י) (śārê) of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifty and rulers of ten.” These rulers were not only to judge cases but receive appeals from the people. Apostolic succession consists of the Catholic doctrine that Jesus named Peter as head of His Church on earth and that popes and bishops ruled with a form of apostolic authority, viz., descended from this initial endowment. The spread of the institutional church from the fourth century onward created bishoprics in many of the places that provincial governors and praetors had been (Benson Reference Benson2015, Moore Reference Moore2011).Footnote ²¹ The critical difference is that, from the “classic” periods of liturgical crystallization in the fourth through sixth centuries (Baldovin Reference Baldovin2018), the bishop is supposed to have been “demanded” by the people of his province and the approbation of the worshippers was from the fourth century onward a critical part of the bishop’s ordination (2018, 59).

This notion of popular approbation of a bishop—honored in the breach under practices of simony and regal investiture—is distinctive in Western history. Bishops were surely not elected in competitive ballots as in republican Rome, but two audiences—the people of parish/diocese and a set of comprovincial bishops—were in theory supposed to support a priest before he could become bishop. When Isidore of Seville theorized this notion of election in De officis ecclesiasticus (between 598 and 615), he gave it a meta-historical reading. The episcopate, Isidore wrote, differs from the Jewish high priesthood in that succession is based upon merit, not heredity (as in the lineage of Aaron) (De officis ecclesiasticus II, V; Knoebel Reference Knoebel and Knoebel2008, 72–73).Footnote ²²

The idea that offices had to be bestowed in a certain way was a central theme of medieval debate and thinking. The bishops who ruled during the period form the Merovingian and Carolingian kings onward contended with a world in which secular rulers of monarchies and dynasties inherited their position. A key development in (republican, if not imperial) Roman office and ecclesiastical office in the medieval church is that such offices were not inherited or heritable. Of course they were sold (simony), but this very feature is continually contested (Benson Reference Benson2015) and eventually itself abolished. Decades if not centuries of the evolution of canon law are taken up with this question.

A story of one of those canonists—Ivo of Chartres in what is now France—displays some of the thinking and behavior of the time. Ivo was perhaps the most influential canonist of his time and for centuries thereafter; his codifications were considered authoritative; his letters were read all over Europe (Rolker Reference Rolker2010), and he influenced the writer of the Norman Anonymous and the development of ordination in the English church (Kantorowicz Reference Kantorowicz1957, 44). In the spring of 1092, Ivo refused to attend the marriage of Philip I—who wished to leave his wife Bertha and marry the Countess Bertrade of Anjou—until he went through a legitimate divorce. Sometime before October 1092, Philip later imprisoned Ivo at Puiset, for as much as a year. Ivo later heard that his allies back in Chartres were planning a war against the vice-count of the region and a jail break to free him. Ivo wrote his parishioners and rebuked them.

This idea that office could not be seized is a consistent one in the writings of Ivo and other canonists. It occurs in the midst of a centuries-long debate in the church over simony and investiture. Ivo followed Pope Gregory and other writings in arguing that office had to be bestowed through legitimate procedures. It could not legitimately be bought and could not even legitimately be inherited. One must come to office with some form of legitimacy, and via the choice of others, excluding the previous occupant.

For Ivo, elective appointment ruled out simony, whose defense he saw as a form of heresy. When Bishop Eudes of Normandy asked Ivo in 1094 whether a bishop or priest should be recognized by his fellow clerics after having bought the office, Ivo wrote a long letter summarizing Old and New Testament passages, patristic writings, and canon law, and he again used the language of invasion four times, borrowed partially but not fully from Pope Leo. Although “he can pass as a bishop before a number of the unknowing,” Ivo wrote, “he cannot be considered as such by those who look at him in their conscience as an invader and a heretic. Pope Leo said on this subject in a letter to Rustico, bishop of Narbonne, that: Nothing authorizes us to count among the bishops those who are neither elected by the clerics nor demanded by the people…. These words show us that episcopal honor should never be bestowed upon invaders. They are not even worthy of the clergy.”Footnote ²⁴

The elective reason for this logic, emphasizing both popular and clerical assent, might seem surprising, but it was real. There was nothing democratic or even proto-democratic about the pattern, but through much of western Europe after the fall of Rome, bishops were petitioned for by the people of a diocese and elected by an assembly of clerics and comprovincial bishops (Benson 1957, Moore Reference Moore2011).

Besides Pope Leo, Ivo had at several sources for this judgment two sources for this concern about meriting office and not invading it. The first source was the episcopal councils that had been meeting throughout the early and middle medieval period (Baldovin Reference Baldovin2018; Moore Reference Moore2011). In these councils, as Moore demonstrates, the law of the medieval monarchies was created and refined. The Council of Paris had a particular admonition to this effect, warning of audacity in office. Ivo wrote to Eudes that

Another important source was Pope Gregory the Great, author of the critical text Cura Pastoralis (590), who explicitly refers to the idea of positional office in his writings to the bishops of Gaul in 599.

Isidore of Seville later wrote of the bishop being ordained by the other bishops of the province as a strategy to protect against both heresy and the monopoly of rule by one man, “lest the tyrannical authority of one undertake anything against the faith of the church” (De ecclesiasticus officiis II, V, 12; Knoebel Reference Knoebel and Knoebel2008, 74).Footnote ²⁷

The idea of defining office by demarcating it from what it could not be—possessed by an invader, purchased by a heretic—was a regular strategy of Ivo in his widely read and influential letters. In 1096, he upbraided the bishop Sanctio (Sanche) of Orléans, who had imprisoned a badly behaved cleric of his diocese and then, upon the cleric’s release, had the man humiliated in the town’s public square, reimprisoned, and tortured. Ivo’s rebuke to a comprovincial bishop, one he had ordained, was stinging.

The idea of ministerial (as contrasted with mercenary) office was a stable feature of patristic and episcopal writings in medieval Europe. The ethic had been expressed in a range of treatises on ecclesiastical office by Pope Gregory I and Isidore of Seville and made its way into canon law. (It goes without saying that ministry as ethic was violated widely, not least by Sanctio of Orléans. The ethic and practice could, and did, depart stably from one another.)

Canonists drew upon Jeremiah 23: 1–6, in which the God of Israel chastises his people’s pastors for failing to attend to the welfare of his people, vowing to raise up pastors who would replace them. Besides drawing upon the doctrine of apostolic succession, Christian bishops also drew upon the image of Jesus as shepherd, who proclaimed that he came not to be served but to serve (Matthew 20:28), who laid down his life for his sheep (John 10:11), and was filled with compassion for the lost sheep of his people (Mark 6:30–34). The customary instructions to a new bishop in Gaul recited these scriptural passages, and Ivo often used the term “pastoral office” to describe his position. Combining office with shepherd imagery, he wrote to an abbot about exercising the pastoral office (officium pastorale) in such a way as to provide a remedy for the sick and wandering sheep.Footnote ²⁹

Office Modern: Trust, Corruption, Civil Service

The emergence of the modern state relied heavily upon the development of bureaucratic organization. One reason to note the legacy of the medieval Catholic church in this regard is that it composed a state of sorts and did so before and during the emergence of the exemplars of European nation-states (Grzymała-Busse Reference Grzymała-Busse2023). Yet with the slow differentiation of secular and ecclesiastical powers under European monarchies and empires, concepts of office also evolved in “the state civil” as well as “the state ecclesiastical” (Condren Reference Condren2006, 55).

The conceptual and theoretical development of modern office owes in part to notions of sovereignty (Lee Reference Lee2021; Tuck Reference Tuck2016). Bodin’s idea of office as “a thing borrowed” (from commodatum in Roman law; une chose empruntée in his French versions) begs the question: borrowed from whom? If office is temporarily occupied and not owned, then to whom does it belong? One could imagine office as borrowed from the king, from the emperor, from the people, or from God. Bodin’s answer to this question is that it is the sovereign, whoever that is, that ultimately has possession of the office, and by virtue of this fact, the office holder is not the sovereign.Footnote ³¹

Bodin’s notion of borrowed office was situated in the midst of a European legal debate about the powers of lordship (Lee Reference Lee2013, 2022). Bodin warned against the dangers of seigneurial rule, which functioned through the will of the lord or ruler, and contrasted it with that of public office, in which the tools and authorities of power were entrusted to the occupant of an obligated position but not permanently, and in which the office was in service to a larger entity: the sovereign state, or the modern res publica (Lee Reference Lee2013, 427–28). By arguing that “offices belonged not to a person, but to the respublica,” Bodin designated a collective entity in possession and legitimation of offices. The result was “to detach office entirely from the scope of personal enrichment. It was from the state, not a person, that offices were ‘borrowed’” (2013, 427).Footnote ³²

It is essential to the development of office that there were, then, centuries-long debates about the propriety of selling and inheriting offices. (In early-modern England, one could sell the office itself or the rights to its succession, known as the “reversion.”) My impression of this rich scholarship is that we have come to know far more about intellectual debates about “office” than about the shiny objects—the particular posts—about which Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, and others argued. Aside from the abundant work of military historians and scholars of the fiscal state (Stasavage Reference Stasavage2011), scholars will need more of the work being done by Michel Antoine (Reference Antoine2003), Michael Braddick (Reference Braddick2000) and, more recently, Marion Dotter (Reference Dotter2024).

In all sorts of early modern debates about reimagining institutions, office-as-concept figures centrally in dialogue about what rule should and should not be. Offices, like republics in Benjamin Franklin’s apocryphal quip outside the Philadelphia convention of 1787, were considered nice things to have. Yet the aspirations of their occupants (actual and potential) and the demands of revenue-hungry empires meant that offices were trafficked in, systematically bartered, and bid. And those who held administrative office often stood to gain financially from its exercise by the imposition of fees in the enforcement of laws.

The possibility, nay reality, of corruption shaped our thinking of office. The term “corruption” is tossed about today in economic development studies, political economy monographs, and government accounting circles. Yet as Knights (Reference Knights2021) shows in a remarkable historiographical contribution that is less the study of an intellectual debate and more that of popular-legal dialogue, “corruption” surfaced as a chief concern of writers in seventeenth-century England as they began to worry that the “trust” of office was being violated not only by particular persons but by an entire system of culture and incentives. Our modern notion of office coevolved with that of corruption. In Anglo-American understanding, the two concepts are inseparable.Footnote ³³

Knights documents a world in which a language of the public good evolved alongside, and later in opposition to, a language of interest. Some politicians were, in the late sixteenth century, believed to be “public men” answerable to a larger commons. As fiduciary law developed in early-modern England, the idea of an office as trust emerged (2021, chap 5). Then “over the seventeenth century the idea of a public official accountable to the public took firmer hold” (50). Knights traces the ideas and their linkages through pamphlets and legal cases. By the early nineteenth century, it was a common idea that public officers had obligations facing toward the public that outweighed any potential responsibility to the King (who made appointments to the civil list) or even to Parliament. A 1783 case—Rex v. Bembridge (Knights Reference Knights2021, 54–59)—established that even a private contractor serving as a military paymaster had primary responsibilities to the public, and was legally responsible for “the faithful discharge of his duty.” The prosecutors of Lord Melville declared in 1806 that “the duty of every public officer appointed by the King is a public duty.”

Early modern European rulers learned that two dynamics posed grave risks of systemic corruption in public office. The first was the practice of venality, which became more common, not less, in the early modern period in both England and France (Doyle Reference Doyle1996; Knights Reference Knights2021, chap. 11). Venality exploded along with the revenue needs of the state and as a means for monarchs and lords to purchase favor from one another and from the gentry. As Whigs and American colonial revolutionaries commonly argued in the eighteenth century, its ubiquity undermined the distance of the English Commons from the royalty, rendering a mockery Montesquieu’s putative separation of legislative from executive in the English constitution he admired for that reason. Well after the American Revolution and deep into the nineteenth century, however, venality continued in England. And even after direct sale of offices ended in a series of enactments from an 1809 statute to the 1832 Reform Act, patronage persisted. In a sense, partisan trafficking in office merely replaced personal and seigneurial commerce, and it was this realization that inspired the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854. In France, it was none other than Jean-Baptiste Colbert who tried—successfully, for a time—to rein in the number of offices subject to vénalité (Doyle Reference Doyle1996; Soll Reference Soll2009) as part of state rationalization.

The second concern of English politicians and reformers was fee-based remuneration (Knights Reference Knights2021, 405–8). Those who occupied English administrative offices derived a large part, often most, of their income from means other than their salary (Knights Reference Knights2021, 4–11). Even so venerable an institution as the Exchequer continued allowing its officials to make money by means of fees until 1848. Meanwhile, colonial offices such as those in the East India Company were characterized by low salaries and a range of mechanisms: “fees, perquisites, favours and … permission to engage in trade.” The equilibrium of low-salary and high fees left Lord Cornwallis lamenting a false economy in His Majesty’s civil service, while Edmund Burke would describe the East India Company “a state in disguise of a merchant; it is a great public office in the disguise of a counting-house.” As Nicholas Parrillo has detailed in his careful and innovative study of fee-based governance (2013), these concerns echoed in early American government as well. The more-than-century-long replacement of fees by a salary system marked a critical feature of American state development.

As “corruption” became the concept under which these concerns were united, officials and reformers worried about the degree to which office as “trust” was being abused. The idea of trust as a concept linked to office emerges in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century (Knights Reference Knights2021, 111–19). The idea was especially pronounced in Leveller writings, for whom “Trustee” and “State Officer” became nearly synonymous and exchangeable—the idea of office as trust connotating a responsibility to the public, in whose stead and for whose interest. “All rule is fiduciarie,” declared the parliamentarian lawyer Henry Parker. As the duties of the office were public, critics of venality worried that partiality would be shown to fellow lords and that the possibility of ejectment for poor behavior was limited. And governance by fees induced the holder of office to abuse their powers, drawing officials’ concern away from the public and toward the next opportunity for marginal enrichment.

Parliamentarians and Levellers also conceived of offices as relational and accountable. As Knights relates his writings, the Cromwell critic and Leveller sympathizer John Streater worried in 1653 about “covetousness in a person of great trust” and considered a range of solutions to the problem. The general idea was to make public office “lesse profitable” and to consider making offices elective. Yet two other mechanisms were audits and prohibitions, particularly that (1) “it may be made Criminal for any person in publick trust to receive any Bribes, Fees, of Gifts, that shall have Causes or Petitions depending before them” and (2) that “all persons upon the resigning his or their Office, required to give a publick account; for in private accounts there may be connivance” (Knights Reference Knights2021, 124). Streater’s notion of prohibitions upon fees and emoluments was premised on the relational assumption that offices of all kinds would have “Causes or Petitions” before them.

Conclusion—An Agenda for Scholarship

As a sketch of a problem and a call for further scholarship, my lecture has alighted on many themes, moments, institutions, and concepts that have been studied in far greater depth elsewhere and/or which merit intensive study in the decades ahead. Here are the principal questions I see confronting political scientists, public administration scholars, and social scientists generally about offices and their evolution.