This is a remarkable book. Based on prodigious research and artfully reported, Nicholas R. Parrillo's Against the Profit Motive recounts an untold story with important implications for political and theoretical issues.

This book provides the first comprehensive examination of a profound shift in how Americans paid their government officials. It starts in the eighteenth century when government officials, with the sanction of law and custom, regularly drew significant income from what today we would call bribes, and when Benjamin Franklin even recommended a constitutional prohibition on salaries for federal officers. The book ends in 1940, when salaries were the only proper way to pay government officials.

It challenges theories of state-building traceable to Max Weber and argues that freeing bureaucrats to pursue the public good creates a more legitimate and effective government.

The book rejects a simple Weberian explanation for the emergence of salaried government officials: that lawmakers aiming to extend the authority of a modernizing state created a stable, hierarchical, and centralized cadre of salaried bureaucrats as soon as the advent of effective tax and disbursement systems allowed them to do it. The book's more complicated and interesting story is twofold: The first component explains the abandonment of facilitative payments—payments to government officials by private parties in exchange for a service the private party desired, like a payment for issuing a permit. The second explains the abandonment of bounties—payments collected by government officials for performing a task the affected party did not want, such as discovering a tax delinquency or convicting an accused.

After a thorough introduction, the first four chapters explain how ideological, institutional, and political developments combined to push facilitative payments aside in favor of salaries. The radical Whig ideology that sparked the American Revolution emphasized that legitimate governmental authority flowed only from the legislature and that citizens had a right to fair and equal treatment from their government. Influenced by those ideas, state and national legislatures sought to legitimate existing facilitative payment systems. They first authorized those systems by statute, and then regulated them. The resulting statutes, however, were too inflexible to be practical. Many people and officials ignored them and their immediate effect was therefore limited. But those regulations did have an important indirect effect. They recharacterized long-established payment systems as illegal and thus corrupt, which ultimately pushed legislatures to ban facilitative payments altogether and replace them with salaries.

Another important push towards salaries came from the growth of mass interest group politics. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, facilitative payments encouraged government officials to develop a customer service ethos. That attitude was not unwelcome among legislators who often wanted to quickly and effectively distribute what they understood to be nearly unlimited public resources. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, this distributive form of politics waned as mass interests groups organized to assert their claims to what were increasingly seen as limited resources. In that new context, the customer service ethos created by facilitative payments appeared dysfunctional. It undermined the state's ability to enforce necessary compromises between rival interests negotiated or imposed by legislators. Salaries, by eliminating the sources of that customer service ethos, were a way to solve the problem.

Parrillo's fourth chapter provides case studies of these political pressures, among them an examination of changes in compensation for the officials who oversaw the distribution of Western lands. In the nineteenth century, federal land distribution was overseen by district land officers who ran land auctions and adjudicated the claims of squatters under settlement laws. These officials collected fees for successful auctions or settlement claims, and those facilitative payments predictably encouraged a liberality that Congress, because of its concern with distributing federal lands, supported. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the supply of Western land no longer seemed limitless. As a result, Congress responded to pressures from conservationists seeking to manage federal lands and ranchers hoping to preserve grazing rights by deploying salaried officials to adjudicate competing property claims. Regulation of requests for naturalization by immigrants and the adjudication of disability claims by Civil War veterans show a similar dynamic.

The last five chapters address rise and decline of bounties. In the nineteenth century, Parrillo argues, bounties appeared to be an effective way to motivate government officials to ignore local opposition and enforce the edicts of the central state. Following that logic, legislatures expanded bounties to support increasingly ambitious goals like stamping out drinking, eliminating gambling, and financing large public projects through new taxes. By the end of the century, however, those same legislatures were eliminating bounties. They had concluded that overzealous bounty-seeking by government officials undermined the public's faith in the fairness and legitimacy of the law, thereby reducing voluntary compliance and ultimately weakening the authority of the government. A clear example of this process is a fascinating chapter on passage of the 1874 Anti-Moiety Act, which eliminated bounties for federal port officials who enforced customs duties. There, Parrillo reveals Congress's concern that those bounties produced an enforcement regime so aggressive that it undermined merchants’ faith in the legitimacy of the duties and thus discouraged the voluntary compliance necessary for effective collection of customs duties. Case studies also underscore the shift from bounties to salaries in state tax collection, criminal prosecution and incarceration, and naval warfare.

As the first comprehensive historical analysis of a change that was crucial to the development of modern American government, this book will not be the final word. The topic is too important to be ignored and too rich to be captured entirely in one book. The interaction of salarization and professionalization, for example, is not considered. But this book is an impressive achievement that will make a lasting contribution to our understanding of the development of the modern state.