Technocrats: Minds like machines
EVEN before Plato conceived the philosopher-king, people yearned for clever, dispassionate and principled government. When the usual run of rulers proves cowardly, indecisive or discredited, turning to the wisdom and expertise of a technocrat, as both Italy and Greece have done in recent days, is particularly tempting.
Part of the attraction of the term “technocrat”, however, is that the label is so stretchy. Does it mean just any expert in government, or one from outside politics? How many technocrats, and in which positions, justify a government’s “technocratic” label? Does such an administration operate within the political system, or supplant it? For how long? Can a technocrat evolve into a politician and vice versa? The answers are imprecise and shift over time.
Technocracy was once a communist idea: with the proletariat in power, administration could be left to experts. But the appliance of science to politics was popular under capitalism too. A fully fledged Technocratic movement flourished in America in the inter-war period: it believed in an economy based on measuring energy inputs rather than prices, and in what would now be called crowd-sourced solutions to political problems. This paper first used “technocracy” in March 1933, when a book reviewer bemoaned the “lurid prominence” of the term. He derided its proponents as “half-scientist…half-charlatan”, decried their “indefensible” conceptual basis, and ascribed their popularity to “extraordinary” American credulity. Howard Segal, an historian at the University of Maine, says the movement imploded when its leading light, Howard Scott, was unmasked as a failed wax salesman, not the great engineer he claimed to be.