The thesis intends to investigate elements of the tension between bureaucracy and democracy, based on the sociology of Max Weber and critical perspectives of contemporary philosophy, as is the case of reflections on the political principle of the Common – which, in the literature of Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, proposes a revisitation of social participation in the organization of public services. It starts, initially, with the perception that, if on the one hand bureaucracy is still understood as an imperative of technique, rationality and impersonality for the state execution of public activities and services, on the other hand, a social and popular alienation is inherent and necessary to its moulding. The state organization in a structurally bureaucratic administrative apparatus, composed mostly of (non-elected) specialists and technicians, distances public affairs from citizens - and, thus, coexists with the permanent risk of political disqualification and dissipation of the democratic legitimacy in the implementation processes of choices related to the management of public interests, utilities and services. Once identified the problem, the research seeks to describe that the main democratic oppositions to the phenomenon of technocratic bureaucratization (whether they are on the liberal/managerial side, defending the diarchic democracy, the watchdog democracy or the managerial reform of the state apparatus; whether they are on the critical/social side, advocating an anarchic self-management system or the mere creation of participatory mechanisms within the state bureaucracy itself) does not present proposals that are sufficiently apt to avoid the challenge described above. In the end, the epistemological framework of the political principle of the Common is defended as an alternative for confronting the dispute between bureaucracy and democracy - which, although also inserted in the genealogy of critical/social thought, establishes more revolutionary and original propositions for the problem of social participation in public services, based, especially, on the instituent praxis and the institution of democratic self-government, as possible arrangements for the radicalization of a decision-making and collective structure out of the state sphere.