The technocracy movement was a social movement active in the United States and Canada in the 1930s which favored technocracy as a system of government over representative democracy and concomitant partisan politics. Historians associate the movement with engineer Howard Scott's Technical Alliance and Technocracy Incorporated, prior to the internal factionalism that dissolved the latter organization during the Second World War. Technocracy was ultimately overshadowed by other proposals for dealing with the crisis of the Great Depression. [1] The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy. But the movement did not fully aspire to scientocracy. [2]
The movement was committed to abstaining from all partisan politics and communist revolution. It gained strength in the 1930s but in 1940, due to opposition to the Second World War, was banned in Canada. The ban was lifted in 1943 when it was apparent that 'Technocracy Inc. was committed to the war effort, proposing a program of total conscription.' [3] The movement continued to expand during the remainder of the war and new sections were formed in Ontario and the Maritime Provinces. [4]
The Technocracy movement survives into the present day and, as of 2013 [update] , was continuing to publish a newsletter, maintain a website, and hold member meetings. [5] Smaller groups included the Technical Alliance, The New Machine and the Utopian Society of America.
Technocracy advocates contended that price system-based forms of government and economy are structurally incapable of effective action, and promoted a society headed by technical experts, which they argued would be more rational and productive. [6]
The coming of the Great Depression ushered in radically different ideas of social engineering, [7] culminating in reforms introduced by the New Deal. [6] [7] By late 1932, various groups across the United States were calling themselves technocrats and proposing reforms. [8]
By the mid-1930s, interest in the technocracy movement was declining. Some historians have attributed the decline of the technocracy movement to the rise of Roosevelt's New Deal. [9] [10] Historian William E. Akin rejects the conclusion that Technocracy ideas declined because of the attractiveness of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Instead Akin argues that the movement declined in the mid-1930s as a result of the technocrats' failure to devise a 'viable political theory for achieving change' (p. 111 Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900–1941 by William E. Akin). Akin postulates that many technocrats remained vocal and dissatisfied and often sympathetic to anti-New Deal third party efforts. [11]
One of the most widely circulated images in Technocracy Inc.’s promotional materials, for instance, used the example of a streetcar to argue that design solutions will always succeed where legislation or fines fail. If passengers insist on riding on the car’s dangerous outer platform, leaders need only design cars without platforms. Problem solved. [12]
The technocratic movement has its origins with the progressive engineers of the early twentieth century and the writings of Edward Bellamy, [13] along with some of the later works of Thorstein Veblen such as Engineers And The Price System written in 1921. [14] [15] [16] William H. Smyth, a California engineer, invented the word technocracy in 1919 to describe "the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers", [17] [18] and in the 1920s it was used to describe the works of Thorstein Veblen. [19]
Early technocratic organisations formed after the First World War. These included Henry Gantt’s "The New Machine" and Veblen’s "Soviet of Technicians". These organisations folded after a short time. [19] Writers such as Henry Gantt, Thorstein Veblen, and Howard Scott suggested that businesspeople were incapable of reforming their industries in the public interest and that control of industry should thus be given to engineers. [20]
Howard Scott has been called the "founder of the technocracy movement" [2] and he started the Technical Alliance in New York near the end of 1919. Members of the Alliance were mostly scientists and engineers. The Technical Alliance started an Energy Survey of North America, which aimed to provide a scientific background from which ideas about a new social structure could be developed. [21] However the group broke up in 1921 [22] before the survey was completed. [23]
In 1932, Scott and others interested in the problems of technological growth and economic change began meeting in New York City. Their ideas gained national attention and the "Committee on Technocracy" was formed at Columbia University, by Howard Scott and Walter Rautenstrauch. [24] However, the group was short-lived and in January 1933 [25] splintered into two other groups, the "Continental Committee on Technocracy" (led by Harold Loeb) and "Technocracy Incorporated" (led by Scott). [26] [27] Smaller groups included the Technical Alliance, The New Machine and the Utopian Society of America, though Bellamy had the most success due to his nationalistic stances, and Veblen's rhetoric, removing the current pricing system and his blueprint for a national directorate to reorganize all produced goods and supply, and ultimately to radically increase all industrial output. [28] [29]
At the core of Scott's vision was "an energy theory of value". Since the basic measure common to the production of all goods and services was energy, he reasoned "that the sole scientific foundation for the monetary system was also energy", and that by using an energy metric instead of a monetary metric (energy certificates or 'energy accounting') a more efficient design of society could be made. [30] Technocracy Inc. officials wore a uniform, consisting of a "well-tailored double-breasted suit, gray shirt, and blue necktie, with a monad insignia on the lapel", and its members saluted Scott in public. [6] [31]
Public interest in technocracy peaked in the early 1930s:
Technocracy's heyday lasted only from June 16, 1932, when the New York Times became the first influential press organ to report its activities, until January 13, 1933, when Scott, attempting to silence his critics, delivered what some critics called a confusing, and uninspiring address on a well-publicized nationwide radio hookup. [27]
Following Scott's radio address (Hotel Pierre Address), [32] the condemnation of both him and technocracy in general reached a peak. The press and businesspeople reacted with ridicule and almost unanimous hostility. The American Engineering Council charged the technocrats with "unprofessional activity, questionable data, and drawing unwarranted conclusions". [33]
The technocrats made a believable case for a kind of technological utopia, but their asking price was too high. The idea of political democracy still represented a stronger ideal than technological elitism. In the end, critics believed that the socially desirable goals that technology made possible could be achieved without the sacrifice of existing institutions and values and without incurring the apocalypse that technocracy predicted. [34]
The faction-ridden Continental Committee on Technocracy collapsed in October 1936. [27] [35] However, Technocracy Incorporated continued. [10] [36]
On October 7, 1940, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested members of Technocracy Incorporated, charging them with belonging to an illegal organisation. One of the arrested was Joshua Norman Haldeman, a Regina chiropractor, former director of Technocracy Incorporated, and the grandfather of Elon Musk. [37] [38]
There were some speaking tours of the US and Canada in 1946 and 1947, and a motorcade from Los Angeles to Vancouver: [39]
Hundreds of cars, trucks, and trailers, all regulation grey, from all over the Pacific Northwest, participated. An old school bus, repainted and retrofitted with sleeping and office facilities, a two-way radio, and a public address system, impressed observers. A huge war surplus searchlight mounted on a truck bed was included, and grey-painted motorcycles acted as parade marshals. A small grey aircraft, with a Monad symbol on its wings, flew overhead. All this was recorded by the Technocrats on 16-mm 900-foot colour film. [40]
1948 saw a decline in activity and considerable internal dissent. One central factor contributing to this dissent was that "the Price System had not collapsed, and predictions about the expected demise were becoming more and more vague". [41] Some quite specific predictions about the price system collapse were made during the Great Depression, the first giving 1937 as the date, and the second forecasting the collapse as occurring "prior to 1940". [41]
Membership and activity declined steadily in the years after 1948, but some activity persisted, mostly around Vancouver in Canada and on the West Coast of the United States. Technocracy Incorporated currently maintains a website and distributes a monthly newsletter and holds membership meetings. [42]
An extensive archive of Technocracy's materials is held at the University of Alberta, in Canada. [3]
In a publication from 1938 Technocracy Inc. the main organization made the following statement in defining their proposal.
The Technocratic movement planned to reform the work schedule, to achieve the goal of uninterrupted production, maximizing the efficiency and profitability of resources, transport and entertainment facilities, avoiding the "weekend effect". [44]
According to the movement's calculations, it would be enough that every citizen worked a cycle of four consecutive days, four hours a day, followed by three days off. By "tiling" the days and working hours of seven groups, industry and services could be operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This system would include holiday periods allocated to each citizen. [44]
In Germany before the Second World War, a technocratic movement based on the American model introduced by Technocracy Incorporated existed but ran afoul of the political system there. [45]
There was also a Soviet movement whose early history resembled the North American one during the interwar period. One of its leading members was engineer Peter Palchinsky, technocratic ideology was also promoted by the Engineer's Herald journal. The Soviet technocrats advanced the scientization of the economic development, management as well as industrial and organizational psychology under the slogan "The future belongs to the managing-engineers and the engineering-managers.". Those viewpoints were supported by leading Right Opposition members Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov. The promotion of an alternative view on the country's industrialization and the engineer's role in society incurred Joseph Stalin's wrath. Palchinsky was executed in 1929, a year later leading Soviet engineers were accused of an anti-government conspiracy in the Industrial Party Trial. A large scale persecution of engineers followed, forcing them to focus on narrow technical issues assigned to them by communist party leaders. [46] The concept of Tectology developed by Alexander Bogdanov, perhaps the most important of the non-Leninist Bolsheviks, bears some semblance to technocratic ideas. Both Bogdanov's fiction and his political writings as presented by Zenovia Sochor, [47] imply that he expected a coming revolution against capitalism to lead to a technocratic society. [48]
Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism.
In sociology and in economics, the term conspicuous consumption describes and explains the consumer practice of buying and using goods of a higher quality, price, or in greater quantity than practical. In 1899, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to explain the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury commodities specifically as a public display of economic power—the income and the accumulated wealth—of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer, the public display of discretionary income is an economic means of either attaining or of maintaining a given social status.
A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), by Thorstein Veblen, is a treatise of economics and sociology, and a critique of conspicuous consumption as a function of social class and of consumerism, which are social activities derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labor; the social institutions of the feudal period that have continued to the modern era.
Institutional economics focuses on understanding the role of the evolutionary process and the role of institutions in shaping economic behavior. Its original focus lay in Thorstein Veblen's instinct-oriented dichotomy between technology on the one side and the "ceremonial" sphere of society on the other. Its name and core elements trace back to a 1919 American Economic Review article by Walton H. Hamilton. Institutional economics emphasizes a broader study of institutions and views markets as a result of the complex interaction of these various institutions. The earlier tradition continues today as a leading heterodox approach to economics.
Neosocialism was a political faction that existed in France and Belgium during the 1930s and which included several revisionist tendencies in the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO).
Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. Technocracy follows largely in the tradition of other meritocracy theories and assumes full state control over political and economic issues.
Howard Scott was an American engineer and founder of the Technocracy movement. He formed the Technical Alliance and Technocracy Incorporated.
Wesley Clair Mitchell was an American economist known for his empirical work on business cycles and for guiding the National Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades.
Stuart Chase was an American economist, social theorist, and writer. His writings covered topics as diverse as general semantics and physical economy. His thought was shaped by Henry George (1839-1897), by economic philosopher Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), by Fabian socialism, and briefly by the Communist social and educational experiments in the Soviet Union to around 1930, though Chase was broadly a modern American liberal.
The efficiency movement was a major movement in the United States, Britain and other industrial nations in the early 20th century that sought to identify and eliminate waste in all areas of the economy and society, and to develop and implement best practices. The concept covered mechanical, economic, social, and personal improvement. The quest for efficiency promised effective, dynamic management rewarded by growth.
The Theory of Business Enterprise is an economics book by Thorstein Veblen, published in 1904, that looks at the growing corporate domination of culture and the economy.
Walter Rautenstrauch (1880–1951) was an American mechanical and consulting engineer, and Professor at Columbia University's Department of Industrial Engineering in the 1930s. He coined the term break-even point, and developing the break-even chart together with Charles Edward Knoeppel.
Vaine Wilton Ivie was an American arachnologist, who described hundreds of new species and many new genera of spiders, both under his own name and in collaboration with Ralph Vary Chamberlin. He was employed by the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He also was a supporter of the Technocracy movement.
John Patrick Diggins was an American professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, Princeton University, and the City University of New York Graduate Center.
The Technical Alliance was a group of engineers, scientists, and technicians based in New York City, formed towards the end of 1919 by American engineer Howard Scott. The Alliance started an Energy Survey of North America, aimed at documenting the wastefulness of the capitalist system.
Frederick L. Ackerman (1878–1950) was an architect and housing reformer in the United States. He supported proactive engagement of the federal government to supply quality housing for the working class. He participated in the federal government's earliest housing program with architects Clarence S. Stein and Henry Wright on their projects Sunnyside (1924) and Radburn (1928), and worked for the New York City Housing Authority. While he favored traditional architecture and lower income housing, he also designed modernist buildings, luxury apartment buildings and home designs. Ackerman graduated from Cornell University in 1901 and designed Balch Hall on campus in 1929. He also designed Day Hall, Cornell's main administrative building, in 1947.
The Engineers and the Price System, by Thorstein Veblen, is a compilation of a series of papers originally published in The Dial in 1919, each of which mainly analyzes and criticizes the price system, planned obsolescence, and artificial scarcity. The final chapter outlined a plan for a "soviet of technicians".
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Guido Hugo Marx was an American mechanical engineer who was active in progressive politics, the technocracy movement, and civil liberties. He contributed to helping feed and house hundreds of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake survivors and led the Stanford Academic Council through changes in academic freedom, culminating in founding both the American Association of University Professors and the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Grant Wythoff is a visiting fellow with the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University.