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The Origins of Technocracy
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was going through the pains of its industrial transformation. Cities were booming in population, and politics was rife with discord over what would become of American life. New ideas began to circulate over who would helm this path forward. Some were moved by the plight of workers, while others found a cause in battling corruption. But above all, this generation desired reform. They were loosely called the Progressive movement. As one of its leaders, Herbert Croly, argued, now was the time for a “New Nationalism.” Yet few agreed on what the nation’s needs exactly were.
A growing subset of Progressives found their cause within science and technology. Because it had made the Industrial Revolution possible, it was easy to assume its experts should also lead. These Progressives believed society was growing too complex to be left to insular self-interest and politics. Intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl, Louis Brandeis, Charles McCarthy, and Frederic Howe put forward arguments that any future administration of experts needed a clear separation from politics.
This was the seed of what would later become technocratic thinking: the idea of a state of appointed experts. Yet, it was not only politics that was increasingly viewed with suspicion. Businessmen, too, were becoming suspect because of their narrow interests. This argument was most famously made by economist Thorstein Veblen, who was a leading influence on the early technocrats. Although initially more sympathetic to industrial workers, by the 1910s Veblen shifted toward a belief in rule by engineers. A critic of capitalism himself, he viewed business managers as incapable of understanding the system they were handling. They were poorly educated in the “industrial arts,” and distorted what should be industrial society’s priorities. These “ignorant businessmen with an eye single to maximum profits” had to be replaced by a new class of people, the technicians.
By 1919, Veblen began publishing a series of magazine essays that would be compiled in The Engineers and the Price System (1921). A “soviet of technicians” had to be established where engineers, not workers, would take over from the capitalists, he argued. This new philosophy would be given a name that year—“technocracy”—and then give rise to a short-lived organization named the Technical Alliance. Veblen was one of its founding members and its intellectual anchor.
The ideological coordinates of these early days of technocracy were confused. The Technical Alliance brought together a group of very different individuals, united only by the belief that technology now dominated social progress. The alliance worked on research with the radical left-wing union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but many of its members remained non-committed politically. While fellow travelers of left causes, there was no focus on the proletariat, class struggle, or workplace organizing. Their only point of agreement was that capitalism was inefficient and holding back industrial society’s potential.