Doug Thompson

@dithomps.bsky.social

493 Followers 379 Following

Political theorist. Rewriting the global history of political thought from the perspective of bureaucrats, 3000 BCE to the present. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/douglas-i-thompson/home

The abstract for the article titled "The Bureaucratic Origins of Political Theory: Administrative Labor in the 'Other Half' of the History of Political Thought," which reads: The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. In doing so, the article expands political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by calling for a new research agenda that will recover questions of public administration as a major thematic throughline in the 5,000-year global history of human political ideas. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their public administrators and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of enchantment and wonder. Revealing public administration to be an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic rhetorical claims in contemporary democracies that the “administrative state” is a recent alien imposition.
A photo of a green anole (colored brown at the moment) on a laptop keyboard.
A photo of an unexpected green tree frog sitting comfortably on a laptop computer.
A graph from the Financial Times showing a >40% reduction in container orders between China and the US in April 2025
Feckless Democrats holding paddles at the SOTU speech that say “They’re dismantling the constitutional order! … so we brought these little signs.”
A pair of feckless Democrats at Trump’s SOTU speech holding signs that say: “they’re dismantling the constitutional order … so we brought these little signs”
A libertarian haiku composed on a repurposed page of a Tintin book. Three people are pictured walking in the distance through snow with mountains in the background. One says, "What I like out here ... no administrative state ... just national park."
The cover of Sam Bagg’s book, The Dispersion of Power, with an image of Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians.
An image of the cover of Jon Lucien's album, Song For My Lady
A picture of the front page of Shoufu Yin's excellent new APSR article, titled "The Global Network of Liberty: Toward a New Framework for Understanding the History of Political Concepts"
A beautiful black cat.