by Daniel Bell
To begin with, the transformation of matter into explosive energy by the creation of an atom bomb in 1945 made the world dramatically aware of the power of science.6 With it came the potentialities of nuclear energy for human use. In 1946, the first digital computer, the ENIAC, was completed at the government proving grounds in Aberdeen, Maryland, and it was soon followed by the MANIAC, the JOHNNIAC, and, within a decade, ten thousand more. Never in the history of invention has a new discovery taken hold so quickly and spread into so many areas of use as the computer. In 1947, Norbert Wiener published his Cybernetics, which spelled out the principles of self-regulating mechanisms and self-adjusting systems. If the atom bomb proved the power of pure physics, the combination of the computer and cybernetics has opened the way to a new “social physics”—a set of techniques, through control and communications theory, to construct a tableau entière for the arrangement of decisions and choices.
In those years, the basic relationships between science and government were laid out with the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Science Foundation. Through these agencies, commitments have led to enormous government spending in research and development, and to the underwriting of large laboratories and research stations through a variety of creative new social forms—university facilities, non-profit corporations, university consortiums, and the like.
If we turn from the dramatic change in science to the prosaic realm of political economy, new techniques and new commitments were forged during those crucial years from 1945 to 1950. The concept of Gross National Product (GNP), the basic tool for all macroscopic economic analysis, was first used in 1945. In 1946, Congress passed a Full Employment Act, which established a Council of Economic Advisers and stated, as a matter of national policy, that each man had a right to a job, and that society had the responsibility of maintaining full employment. By 1950 Wassily Leontief had outlined his input-output tables, which provide a planning grid for the entire economy. Mathematicians and economists at Rand, such as George Dantzig, had worked out the techniques of linear and dynamic programming to give us queuing techniques in production decisions. Technical economics had become inextricably intertwined with public policy, especially through the Council of Economic Advisers.
If one looks beyond the provincial horizon of one’s own country, one also sees in these years the emergence of an entirely new world system, with the creation of the tiers monde and the fateful relationship of former colonial countries to once imperial powers; the self-conscious recognition of the idea of development—economic, political, and social; the beginning awareness that such social-system terms as capitalism and socialism may be part of a more inclusive social process within the rubrics of industrialization and bureaucratization, and even that these societies, as variants of industrial systems, may be converging in the pattern of their economies into some new kind of centralized-decentralized market-planning system.
Finally, there has occurred what is perhaps the most pervasive change in moral temper—a new “future-orientation” on the part of all nations and social systems. Some observers have seen the dawn of a new universal history in the fact that all societies, for the first time, are creating common technological foundations. Of course, economic, political, and cultural diversities among nations are still far too great for us to be able to see a single world society, at least within this next century. And yet common foundations are being laid, particularly in the establishing of international scientific communities, and common aspirations are being voiced. The common thread is the orientation to the future and the recognition that men have the technological and scientific possibility of controlling the changes in their lives consciously, and by social decision. But such conscious control does not mean the “end of history,” the escape, so to speak, from necessity, which Hegel and Marx emphasized in man’s relation to nature, but the beginning of vastly more complicated problems than men have ever faced before.
In all these diverse activities, the fundamental themes are rationality, planning, and foresight—the hallmarks, in short, of the technocratic age. The vision of Saint-Simon seemingly has begun to bear fruit.
The Technocratic Mind-View
In France, where the idea of technocracy has been more widely talked about than in any other country, it has been defined as “a political system in which the determining influence belongs to technicians of the administration and of the economy,” and a technocrat, in turn, is “a man who exercises authority by virtue of his technical competence.” 7
But a technocratic mind-view, one can say with some sense of paradox, is more than just a matter of technique.8 In its emphasis on the logical, practical, problem-solving, instrumental, orderly, and disciplined approach to objectives, in its reliance on a calculus, on precision and measurement and a concept of a system, it is a world-view quite opposed to the traditional and customary religious, esthetic, and intuitive modes. It draws deeply from the Newtonian world-view, and the eighteenth-century writers who inherited Newton’s thought did indeed believe, as Hume has Cleanthes say in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, that the author of Nature must be something of an engineer, since Nature is a machine; and they believed, further, that within a short time the rational method would make all thought amenable to its laws.9 Bernard de Fontenelle, the popularizer of Cartesianism, precipitated a gory conflict with the humanists (reflected in Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books) when he declared: “The geometric spirit is not so bound up with geometry that it cannot be disentangled and carried into other fields. A work of morals, of politics, of criticism, perhaps even of eloquence, will be the finer, other things being equal, if it is written by the hands of a geometer.” 10
The most comprehensive statement of this world-view was made by an unexpected precursor of the technocratic ideology, the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustin Cournot, who is better known for his applications of mathematics to economics than for his writings on history. But as he interpreted the rise of technological civilization, Cournot saw a general movement in history from the vital to the rational. He foresaw an era of mechanization which would be “post-historic,” since universal rationalization would provide a stability to society that resulted from the erosion of instincts and passions and the perfection of administration. In this post-historic era, statistics would more and more be substituted for history as a means of studying human events.11
Man’s progress toward greater rationality was, of course, the theme of Max Weber, but in the parallel with the second law of thermodynamics, Weber also saw a running down of the system. Societies, Weber said, are changed when there is an infusion of charismatic energy which breaks the bounds of old traditional constraints, but in the “routinization of charisma” the stock of energy is consumed until, at the end, there is only a dead mechanism, and, as Weber wrote of the exhaustion of the Protestant ethic and the transformation of capitalism, the administrators of the system become “sensualists without spirit, specialists without heart, a nullity....” 12
It is in this conception of rationality as functional, as rationalization rather than “reason,” that one confronts the overriding crisis of the technocratic mode. The virtue of the belief in History was that some law of reason was operative: History had either a teleology as defined by Revelation, or some powers of emergence or transcendence that were implicit in man’s creativity. In Hegel, the “cunning of reason” was the evolution of man’s self-consciousness—the end of the mystery of “objectification” wherein men made things, idols, gods, societies “outside” of themselves, and often worshipped them as fetishes—so that, finally, he could “recognize himself in a world he has himself made.” Thus the end of history—the overcoming of nature, and the overcoming of the duality of subject and object which divided the “self”—was the beginning of freedom, of impulses of individual and social action that would no longer be subject to any determinism. However metaphorical these sentiments were—though they were quite realistic in their picture of
man’s slavish dependencies in the past—they did posit some ends to the march of rationality.
Things Ride Men
Saint-Simon had a vision of the future society that made him a utopian in the eyes of Marx. Society would be a scientific-industrial association whose good would be the highest productive effort to conquer nature and to achieve the greatest possible benefits for all. Men would become happy in their natural abilities. The ideal industrial society would be by no means classless, for individuals were unequal in ability and in capacity. But social divisions would follow actual abilities, as opposed to the artificial divisions of previous societies, and individuals would find happiness and liberty in working at the job to which they were best suited. With every man in his natural place, each would obey his superior spontaneously, as one obeyed one’s doctor, for a superior was defined by a higher technical capacity. In the industrial society, there would be three major divisions of work, corresponding, in the naive yet almost persuasive psychology of Saint-Simon, to three major psychological types. The majority of men were of the motor-capacity type, and they would become the laborers of the industrial society; within this class, the best would become the production leaders and administrators of society. The second type was the rational one, and men of this capacity would become the scientists, discovering new knowledge and writing the laws that were to guide men. The third type was the sensory, and these men would be the artists and religious leaders. This last class, Saint-Simon believed, would bring a new religion of collective worship to the people and overcome individual egoism. It was in work and in carnival that men would find satisfaction and, in this positivist Utopia, society, in the famous vision of Saint-Simon, would move from the governing of men to the administration of things.
But in the evolution of technocratic thinking, things began to ride men. For Frederick W. Taylor, the founder of scientific management, who was perhaps most responsible for the translation of technocratic modes into the actual practices of industry, any notion of ends other than production and efficiency of output was almost nonexistent. Taylor believed strongly that “status must be based upon superior knowledge rather than nepotism and superior financial power,” and in his idea of functional foremanship he asserted that influence and leadership should be based on technical competence rather than on any other criteria.
Out of Taylor’s reflections (and his own compulsive character) came the idea of scientific time-study and, more broadly, the measurement of work—for it is with the measurement of work and the idea of unit cost, rather than with the introduction of the factory as such, that modern industry gained distinctive meaning as a new way of life. Taylor’s principles were based upon the following: the time it takes to do a specific job; incentives and bonus systems for exceeding norms; differential rates of pay based on job evaluation; the standardization of tools and equipment; the fitting of men to jobs on the basis of physical and mental tests; and the removal of all planning and scheduling from the work floor itself into a new planning and scheduling department, a new superstructure, the responsibility for which was in the hands of the engineer.
By setting “scientific” standards, Taylor felt that he could specify the “one best way” or the “natural laws” of work, and so remove the basic source of antagonism between worker and employer—the question of what is “fair” or “unfair.” 13 But in his view of work, man disappeared, and all that remained was “hands” and “things” arranged on the basis of minute scientific examination along a detailed division of labor wherein the smallest unit of motion and the smallest unit of time became the measure of a man’s contribution to work.
In Marxism, another great source of technocratic thought, the same dissolution of ends and concentration on means alone also appear. Hegel had seen man’s growth as an ideational process in which self-consciousness triumphed over limited dependencies of subjectivity and objectification. Marx naturalized this historic process by seeing man’s growth in material and technical powers, in the growth of his means over nature. But what would this lead to? In his earlier works Marx had envisioned socialism as a state where a man would be a hunter in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon—and perhaps a superior lover at night; in which there would be no distinction between mental and physical work or between town and country. The single image of socialism for Marx, by and large, was the end of the division of labor, which he saw as one of the sources, along with private property, of the alienation of men from society. But in his later writings these naive ideas had vanished, and Marx, in his conception of man as “emergent,” assumed that new powers would be created and new visions of life would be achieved which his own generation, limited by nature and human frailty, could not yet envisage. And so, the ends of history were left ambiguous.
In Lenin, who bears the same relation to Marx that Taylor does to Saint-Simon, the conception of ends disappears almost completely. Lenin was the superb technician of power. The creator of the disciplined party and the cadre, Lenin was able to create a flexible instrument of revolution and subversion which could lash hundreds of thousands, even millions, of persons into action. But once the power had been won, only a fumbling and incoherent vision of the future could be detected. In State and Revolution, written as the first manual of socialism, Lenin assumed that running a society would be as simple as running the post office, and administration would become so simple that any shoemaker could be an executive.
When the power had finally been secured in a war-torn, broken-down country, Lenin’s formula for socialism turned out to be only Soviet power plus electrification.14 The irony is that today in the Soviet Union, as in the other communist countries, the chief demand of individuals is for private cars, individual homes, and other personal possessions. But the nature and conditions of work represent no flowering of socialist humanism as it was envisaged in the past. Work, like all production, has become geared to a consumption society and to turning out larger and greater quantities of goods.
In the technocratic mode, the ends have become simply efficiency and output. The ends have become means and they exist in themselves. The technocratic mode has become established because it is the mode of efficiency—of production, of program, of “getting things done.” For these reasons, the technocratic mode is bound to spread in our society. But whether the technocrats themselves will become a dominant class, and how the technocratic mode might be challenged, are different questions, which we must now consider.
Soldiers Ride Things
It was the root idea of Saint-Simon, August Comte, and Herbert Spencer, the theorists of industrial society, that there was a radical opposition between the industrial spirit and the military spirit. The one emphasized work, production, rationality, the other display, waste, and heroics. Out of technology, economizing, and investment would come productivity as the basis of increasing wealth for all, rather than exploitation and plunder as the means of seizing wealth from others. In ancient society, work was subordinated to war and the warrior ruled; in industrial society, life would become pacific and the producer would rule.
The irony is that although the economizing spirit—the deployment of limited resources to attain maximum results—has indeed spread throughout society as Schumpeter and others have argued, war rather than peace has been in large part responsible for the acceptance of planning and technocratic modes in government. The rise of the mass army, beginning with the Conscription Act passed in 1789 by the French revolutionary government—a system followed by every major power in the nineteenth century except Great Britain and the United States—set forth new modes of organization and supply. War and the mass army have supplied the model, too, for the most curious of social schemata. In 1795, for example, Gracchus Babeuf, the fiery conspiratorial leader of the extreme left-wing of the Jacobin movement, outlined his picture of collective economic planning as follows: All workers would be classified according to the type of work. Society would have exact information on what everyone was doing so that there would be ne
ither underproduction nor overproduction. Society would determine the number of persons to be employed in any particular branch of industry. All would be apportioned to the needs of the present, and to the requirements of the future in the light of probable increases in population. All real needs would be exactly investigated and fully satisfied, thanks to the swift transport of goods to all localities and over all distances. And where was all this drawn from? From the experience of Revolutionary France at war, from the logistical plan for the organization of supplies for an army of 1,200,000 men divided into twelve widely dispersed points.
Instead of peace, every industrial society has a Wehrwirtschaft, a term for which, significantly, there is no adequate English translation, but which we could call, perhaps, a “preparedness economy,” or a mobilized society. A mobilized society is one in which the major resources of the country are concentrated on a few specific objectives defined by the government. In these sectors, private needs are in effect subordinated to the mobilized goals and the role of private decision is reduced almost to nothing. The Soviet Union is a mobilized society par excellence. Most of the “new states,” in their quest for modernization, have become mobilized: The basic resources of the society—capital and trained manpower—are geared to planned economic change.
In recent years, America has taken on the features of a mobilized polity in that one of the crucial scarce resources, that of “research and development”—and more specifically the work of most of the scientists and engineers in research and development—is tied to the requirements of the military and of war preparedness. The United States has not done this by outright commandeering of talents, or by restricting the right of non-governmental units to engage in R & D. But since R & D is always a risk, in that no immediate payoffs or profits are assured, and the costs of R & D have become astronomical, few institutions other than the government can underwrite such expenditures. And the government has been compelled to do so because of the extraordinary revolutions in the art of war that have occurred since 1945.
