The Physiology of the Employee

If Honoré de Balzac's Treatise on Elegant Living addressed one crucial pillar of modernity--the 'mode' itself, fashion--his Physiology of the Employee examines another equally potent cornerstone to the modern era: bureaucracy, and all of the cogs and wheels of which it is composed. Long before Franz Kafka described the nightmarish metaphysics of office bureaucracy, Balzac had undertaken his own exploration of the dust-laden, stifling environment of the paper-pusher in all of his roles and guises. 'Bureaucracy,' as he defined it: 'a gigantic power set in motion by dwarfs.' In this guidebook, published for mass consumption in 1841, Balzac's classic theme of melodramatic ambition plays itself out within the confined, unbreathable space of the proto-cubicle, filtered through the restricted scale of the pocket handbook. The template for such later novels such as The Bureaucrats, and one of the first significant texts to grapple with the growing role of the bureaucrat, this physiology reads