by Daniel Bell
20 As one quondam bureaucrat has earnestly argued, “the development of public policy and of the methods of its administration owe less in the long run to processes of conflict among political parties and social or economic pressure groups than to the more objective processes of research and discussion among professional groups.” Don K. Price, Government and Science (New York, 1962)—a statement written little more than ten years after V. O. Key’s and reflecting the differences, perhaps, of the pre-war and post-war experiences of political analysts.
21 See, for example, David Easton, “An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems,” World Politics (April 1957), pp. 383-400, and A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York, 1965). A more mechanical model is presented by William Mitchell, The American Polity (New York, 1962).
22 An extreme version of this, perhaps, would be Gaullist France, where for a period of time almost the entire political system (concentrated in the administrative structure) had become “independent” of the society, initiating the changes (demands,inputs) and making decisions on the basis of technocratic criteria.
23 For the classic statement of the problem, see Emile Durkheim, On the Division of Labor in Society (New York, 1933), book II, chap. 2.
24 These themes are elaborated by Talcott Parsons in several works. See Structure and Process in Modern Societies (Glencoe, III., 1960).
25 Though the changes in culture and social structure derive from a common source, the contrasting demands or impulses in each realm clearly impose an agonizing tension whose consequences, important as I believe they are for locating crucial strains in the society, are beyond the purview of this essay. I discuss this, to some extent, in “The Disjunction of Culture and Social Structure,” in Science and Culture, ed. Gerald Holton (Boston, 1965).
26 The continuous movement of persons into, out of, between, and within labor markets in any one year is one index of such mobility. Thus, in 1964, the average number of persons in the labor force was 74 million, with about 70 million employed and 3.9 million unemployed. But hidden beneath these national averages, one finds that: 87 million people were in the labor force at some time during the year; 85 million different people held jobs; 43 million entered or re-entered the labor force; 42 million left the labor force for temporary periods or permanently; and 14.1 million different persons experienced some period of unemployment. (Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress.)
Between 1955 and 1960, slightly more than half of the population (about 80 million persons) changed residences, about 47 million to different homes in the same county, the remainder to different counties or states. In a single year (1969) about 36 million persons changed homes, about a third of these out ofthe original counties. See the Statistical Abstract ofthe United States (1971), p. 34.
The most recent comprehensive study of social mobility, based on inter-generational moves of occupation, shows a continuing movement of upward class mobility into salaried, technical, and professional employments. See Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan, The American Occupational Structure (New York, 1967).
27 Longevity, it should be pointed out, is a different variable from distance. Coxey, who was born in 1854, ran for President in 1932 on a Farmer-Labor ticket, and died in 1951.
28 See George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” The Psychology of Communication: Seven Essays (New York, 1967), chap. 2.
29 These data are raken from the Historical Statistics of the United States (Chapter R), and the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1971, section 18.
30 The theme of the acceleration of social change has been popularized by Alvin Toffler in his best-seller Future Shock. I think the idea is deceptive. In terms of daily life of individuals, more change was experienced between 1850 and 1940— when railroads, steamships, telegraph, electricity, telephone, automobile, motion picture, radio, and airplanes were introduced—than in the period since when the future is supposed to be accelerating. In fact, other than television, there has not been one major innovation which has affected the daily life of persons to the extent of the items I enumerated.
31 Tocqueville had a penchant, like many great theorists, for seeking such “prime movers.” Thus, he also predicted an eventual clash between the United States and Russia because large land-mass societies with great natural resources would inevitably expand their living space. For a discussion of this, as well as other modes of prediction, see my essay, “Twelve Modes of Prediction,” Daedalus, XCIII (Summer 1964), 845-880.
32 See Robert J. Lampman, The Low Income Population and Economic Growth (Washington, D.C.: Joint Committee on the Economic Report, U.S. Congress, 1961).
33 New York, 1964.
34 A noted British novelist in a recent travel book complained bitterly of the lack of amenities in New York, as evidenced by her inability to get someone to carry her groceries from a supermarket, whereas in Mexico City there were dozens of little boys who, for a few pesos, would be clamoring to help her. By the same logic, it is easier for a person in India, with a smaller income, to hire servants than it is for a person in New York.
35 For an excellent discussion of the problems see John C. Bollens and Henry J. Schmandt, The Metropolis: Its People, Politics, and Economic Life (New York, 1965).
36 These and subsequent figures are taken from Eli Ginzberg, Dale L. Hiestand, and Beatrice G. Reubens, The Pluralistic Economy (New York, 1065).
37 For a comprehensive list of the vast literature on the problem see James G. March, Handbook of Organizations (Chicago, 1065).
38 One can point to other “methodological” problems which limit the use of the GNP as an accounting measure. Professor Fritz Machlup, in The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the U. S. (Princeton, N.J., 1962), writes: “The fact that the production of knowledge of several types is paid for by others than the users of the knowledge and that these types of knowledge have no market prices, raises questions of their valuation for national income accounting as well as for welfare-economic considerations.” The question of what the GNP can measure thus becomes an important one.
In a similar vein, Victor Fuchs of the National Bureau of Economic Research, in writing of the expansion of the service sector of the economy, remarks: “There has been a presumption [among economists] that [the real GNP] becomes more useful as a measure the more highly developed the economy is.... But the trend may be in the other direction because at high levels of GNP per capita a large fraction of productivity effort will be devoted to service Iwhere output is very difficult to measure] and to other activities that are presently not measured at all.” Many government services are not measured today since these cannot be valued at market prices.
39 The section here is taken from the report Technology and the American Economy, U.S. Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress (U.S. Government Printing Office, February 1966). I was the author of that section of the report.
40 Andrew Shonfield, in Modern Capitalism (London, 1965), pp. 227-229, points out that the construction of a new subway line in London was held up for over a decade on the premise that it couldn’t pay its way until someone demonstrated that the secondary benefits ’resulting for people not using the line—in speeding vehicular flow and the like—would result in a true return on investment which was 10 percent over the capital cost of the project.
41 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1942), p. 1,068.
42 See, for example, the chapter “On Predicting the Future,” in Ogburn’s The Social Effects of Aviation (1946).
43 Five volumes appeared, under the editorship of Ogburn, as annual reports, entitled Social Changes in 1928, in 1929, in 19)0, in 1931, in 1932. In addition there was a preparatory volume entitled Recent Social Changes Since the War and Particularly in 1921, and two postludes, Social Change and the New Deal and Social Changes During Depression and Recovery,
all published by the University of Chicago Press. An effort was made to continue the index of social trends for the next three years (1935-1937) in essays in the American Journal of Sociology. A bibliography of Ogburn’s voluminous writings appears in a volume of his selected papers, William F. Ogburn on Culture and Social Change, ed. Otis Dudley Duncan (Chicago, 1964).
44 The Presidential Message to Congress on Domestic Health and Education stated: “To improve our ability to chart our progress, I have asked the Secretary to establish within his office the resources to develop the necessary social statistics and indicators to supplement those prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Council of Economic Advisers. With these yardsticks we can better measure the distance we have come and plan the way ahead.”
1 Max Weber, General Economic History (London, n.d.), p. 354.
2 Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1937), p. 752.
3 The tension between the technocratic and the cultural is equally a major problem for modern society.
4 The episode takes on a somewhat comic air, especially when we read that a number of the Count’s followers established a new religious cult of Saint-Simonianism to canonize his teachings. (In the monastic castle to which the followers of Saint-Simon retreated, garments were buttoned down the back so that, in socialist fashion, each man would require the help of another in dressing. Thus was pedagogy reinforced by ritual.) And yet many of these very followers of Saint-Simon were also the men who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, redrew the industrial map of Europe.
It is not too much to say, Professor F. H. Markham has written, “that the Saint-Simonians were the most important single force behind the great economic expansion of the Second Empire, particularly in the development of banks and railways.” Enfantin, the most bizarre of the Saint-Simonians, formed the society for planning the Suez Canal. Former Saint-Simonians constructed many of the European railways—in Austria, Russia, and Spain. The brothers Emile and Isaac Pereire, who promoted the first French railway from Paris to Saint-Germain, also founded the Crédit Mobilier, the first industrial investment bank in France, as well as the great shipping company the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (the CGT today sails the Flandre and the France), which gave its first ships the names of Saint-Simonian followers, including the Saint-Simon (1987 tons). See F. M. H. Markham, Henri Comte de Saint-Simon: Selected Writings (Oxford, 1952).
5 Paul Valéry, Reflections on the World Today (New York, 1948), p. 16.
6 Contrast the role of science in World War II with that in World War I. In Modern Science and Modern Man, James Bryant Conant, who before becoming a distinguished educator was a prominent chemist, tells the story that when the United States entered World War I, a representative of the American Chemical Society called on Newton D. Baker, then Secretary of War, and offered the services of the chemists to the government. He was thanked and asked to come back the next day, when he was told that the offer was unnecessary since the War Department already had a chemist.
When President Wilson appointed a consulting board to assist the Navy, it was chaired by Thomas Edison, and this appointment was widely hailed for bringing the best brains of science to the solution of naval problems. The solitary physicist on the board owed his appointment to the fact that Edison, in choosing his fellow members, had said to President Wilson: “We might have one mathematical fellow in case we have to calculate something out.” In fact, as R. T. Birge reports (in his study “Physics and Physicists of the Past Fifty Years,” in Physics Today [1956]), during World War 1 there was no classification of physicist; when the armed forces felt the need of one, which was only occasionally, he was hired as a chemist.
7Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française (Paris: Société de nouveau Littre, 1964); and Grand Larousse Encyclopédique (Paris, 1964).
8 The word technocracy itself was first coined in 1919 by William Henry Smyth, an inventor and engineer in Berkeley, California, in three articles published in the Industrial Management of February, March, and May in that year. These were reprinted in a pamphlet, and later included with nine more articles, written for the Berkeley Gazette, in a larger reprint.
The word was taken over by Howard Scott, a one-time research director for the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), and was popularized in 1933-34, when Technocracy flashed briefly as a social movement and a panacea for the depression. The word became associated with Scott, and through him retrospectively with Thorstein Veblen, who, after writing The Engineers and the Price System, was briefly associated with Scott, in an educational venture at the New School for Social Research in 1919-1920. Interestingly, when the word became nationally popular through Scott, it was repudiated by Smyth, who claimed that Scott’s use of the word fused technology and autocrat, “rule by technicians responsible to no one,” whereas his original word implied “the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and technicians.”
For the origin of the term, see William H. Smyth, Technocracy Explained by its Originator (San Francisco, 1933), and J. George Frederick, ed., For and Against Technocracy: A Symposium (New York, 1933). For a discussion of the relations between Veblen and Scott, see my introduction, “Veblen and the New Class,” to the Harbinger edition of The Engineers and the Price System (New York, 1965).
9 It should be pointed out, however, that de la Mettrie, the author of the famous book Man the Machine, died of overeating and gout; he stoked the machine too well.
10 Mindful, perhaps, of some of the hubris of the past, Norbert Wiener, thirteen years after the publication of his Cybernetics, warned his readers not against the in adequacies of the machine but against its possible success. “We have already made very successful machines of the lowest logical type with a rigid policy,” he wrote. “We are beginning to make machines of the second logical type, where the policy itself improves with learning. In the construction of operative machines, there is no foreseeable limit with respect to logical type, nor is it safe to make a pronouncement about the exact level at which the brain is superior to the machine.” But even though a completely “intelligent” machine is still far off in the future, the immediate problem, Wiener said, is that while machines do not transcend man’s intelligence, they do transcend men, in the performance of tasks. “We have seen,” he pointed out, “that one of the chief causes of the disastrous consequences in the use of the learning machine is that man and machine operate on two distinct time scales, so that the machine is much faster than man and the two do not gear together without some serious difficulties. Problems of the same sort arise whenever two control operators on very different time scales act together, irrespective of which system is faster and which system is slower.” (See Norbert Weiner, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” Science [May 1960]).
The point would seem to be that when a machine is constructed to absorb its incoming data at a pace faster than it can be fed, we may not, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, think of turning it off until it is too late.
11 On Cournot, see Georges Friedmann, “Les technocrates et la civilisation technicienne,” in Industrialisation et Technocratic, ed. Georges Gurvitch (Paris, 1949).
12 The most comprehensive discussion of Weber’s “increasing law of rationality” can be found in Talcott Parsons, Structure of Social Action. The phrase at the end of the paragraph is from Weber’s conclusion to The protestant Ethic (London, 1930), p. 182.
13 See The Principles of Scientific Management, by Frederick W. Taylor, p. 10, reprinted in the compendium Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Bros., 1947).
Interestingly enough, Taylor’s condemnation of “waste and confusion” made him seem progressive to many young engineers, and one of Taylor’s chief disciples, Morris L. Cooke, became a link with Veblen.
Cooke was lured by Taylor’s gospel declaration that “the same principles [of scientific management] can be applied with equal force to all social activ
ities: to the management of our homes; the management of our farms; the management of the business of our tradesmen large and small; of our churches, our philanthropic institutions, our universities, and our governmental departments.”
In short, the engineer was to be the hierophant of the new society. Cooke, in 1919, became the head of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and it was the ferment created by Cooke, principally the severing of the ties with business and trade associations and the statement that the first professional obligation of the engineer was to the profession not the employer, which led Veblen to believe, in the memorandum he wrote for The Dial, that the engineers could become the basis of a “soviet of technicians.” After the formation of the CIO, Cooke became an advisor to Philip Murray, the head of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and together with Murray wrote a book, Organized Labor and Production, which laid out a work rationalization for industry.
For Cooke’s relation to Veblen, and the background of events which led Veblen to think that the engineers might be the basis for a revolutionary new class, see my introduction to the Harbinger edition (1965) of Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System. For a biography of Cooke, see Kenneth E. Trombley, The Life and Times of a Happy Liberal (New York, 1954).
14 Lenin, as is well known, was strongly attracted to the ideas of Frederick W. Taylor. In an address in June 1919 on “Scientific Management and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” he stated; “The possibility of socialism will be determined by our success in combining Soviet rule and Soviet organization or management with the latest progressive measures of capitalism. We must introduce in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and its systematic trial and adoption.” See the citation and the discussion in The End of Ideology (Glencoe, III., i960), p. 253. More of this can be gleaned from some newly discovered materials in Lenin’s archives.
