Technocracy

Definition

Technocracy refers to any political–social–economic system that is governed and managed using purportedly objective scientific and technical principles, and in which ultimate power and authority rests with technical and scientific experts. The concept had its initial origins in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution (with antecedents stretching back to the rationalism of ancient Greece and, later, the Enlightenment in the West). Henri Saint-Simon in early 19th century France was the earliest exponent of a technocratic system which involved overall political and economic government by industrialists. Technocracy was formally coined as a term in the early 20th century in the United States in the context of a specific intellectual movement under the same name which laid out a more detailed system of economic and social management by industrialists and scientists that supposedly would guarantee maximum efficiency in production, consumption and distribution without the self-defeating tendencies of political systems of the time, either democratic or authoritarian. Technocracy is currently used to refer to any policy or governmental arrangement that purportedly emphasizes technical criteria above non-technical values in policy, planning and public decision-making, and which gives significant authority to experts. Singapore is often referred to as a leading example of such an approach. Various controversies have arisen around technocracy, especially its potential incompatibility with democracy and social values that are not easily translated into technical terms. There is also debate about how feasible a genuine technocracy actually is in practice.

1. Introduction

In a very general sense, technocracy refers to any political–social–economic system that is governed and managed through the use of purportedly objective scientific and technical principles, and in which the real power and authority rests with technical and scientific experts. The most common, and more narrow, formulation of the term denotes a form of political organisation in which politics, in the sense of contests between interests and values, has been transcended by the dynamics and achievements of technological advance and where scientific and technical experts make and implement major policy decisions [1] (pp. 49–50).

The actual term “technocracy” is said to have been coined in 1919 by a California engineer, William Henry Smyth, to mean “rule by technicians”, and became the label for an American advocacy movement in the 1920s and 1930s that argued for the necessity for such rule because, supposedly, the technical complexity of modern industrial economies could not be left in the hands of non-specialists [2]. Technocracy as a movement was most influential during the Great Depression as a way of explaining that slump as a symptom of inefficient political and economic management.

Technocracy remains in usage, but the meaning has narrowed somewhat to denote governmental administration by experts along purportedly neutral technical lines, either fully or in only specific areas. Singapore is the archetypal example of the former, while central bank management is an example of the latter.

There are a number of important issues and debates around technocracy, both conceptually and practically. Philosophically, technocracy rests on the assumption that important aspects of reality can be reduced to material, mechanistic terms subject to effective and predictable human technical understanding and intervention. Broader social values often sit outside such a model, and its applicability to even many technical spheres can be complex. Politically, technocracy is arguably incompatible with democracy and other forms of government based on the popular will or at least sits uneasily within such frameworks. Reconciling the two is not straightforward. Practically, technocrat elements may be useful, and sometimes even necessary, in the design, planning and oversight of human systems. But how this can be done effectively is an ongoing matter of debate, especially in policy circles. A critical figure in technocracy is the technocrat, and the proper delineation and character of this figure is also contested. This entry reviews all of these issues in more detail, starting with the historical antecedents and origins of the term and moving through its various incarnations and the issues that have arisen from its use and implementation. The primary focus is on presentation and analysis of core conceptual and theoretical definitions and contours, and the issues that arise when theory is put into actual practice.

2. Historical Antecedents and Origins

The idea of “rule by experts” is traced by some to the rationalism of the ancient Greeks, while others begin with the ideas of rational inquiry that flowered during the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. However, these particular origin stories are arguably quite tenuous. Plato’s “philosopher king” ruling over his ideal “Republic” may appear to superficially resemble the technocrat presiding over a technocracy, but his system was based not on technological superiority but on a supposed wisdom of a few superiors to see the true nature of existence and guide inferiors in the ways of that existence, arising from an ethical rather than technical prowess [3] (p. 10). Moreover, both Aristotle and Plato saw the “polis”—the communal political life—not material productivity, as fundamental to the greater good. Plato put forward a utopia that subordinated politics to an enlightened elite, while Aristotle, by contrast, envisioned a polis of actively engaged citizens as central to both human self-governance and an ideal society (though with only the elite allowed to make collective decisions). Both shared the Greek view of “techne” (literally meaning craft or technique) as an ambiguous gift and certainly as too limited a basis for any overarching social-political system, which in the Greek world was largely agrarian and trade-based in any case [4] (p. 394).

Technocracy has more solid roots in the European Enlightenment, with its beliefs in the use of technology and human reason to change human society for the better, a view well expressed in Tomasso Campanella’s utopian tract City of the Sun, written in 1602. Campanella describes a community where leisure is enabled by giving work over to machines which themselves have been brought about by widespread technical education of the population. A fuller expression of technical utopianism comes with Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, published in 1627, which imagines a new social order based on an ever-expanding scientific inquiry and invention as the basis for continual improvement of human society. Such technologically driven historical progress was widely believed in by various Enlightenment thinkers, most notably the French philosophes of the 18th century who put great faith in the ability of human rationality and accumulation of knowledge to derive and apply principles for perfection of human affairs [4] (p. 394).

However, technocracy in its fullest sense really came only with the Industrial Revolution. While the Enlightenment dislodged appeals to hierarchy and tradition as sources of authority, replacing them with the notional power of human reason and invention, industrialisation actually created a society where politics and economics began to merge in a system of production organised along lines of scale, division of labour, and “efficiency” in the sense of maximum material output for minimum material input. Economies became increasingly complex and technologically sophisticated, and expertise of various sorts was increasingly essential to managing them. Economic complexity blurred the lines between affairs of the economy and the polity (that is, nation-states and their civil societies).

The first true philosopher of technocracy, Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), emerged during this time. He envisioned an industrial society where the fundamental task was the “administration of things” which needed to be done with maximum efficiency to ensure all the benefits that industrialisation could deliver [5] (p. 310). Political institutions should, Saint-Simon argued, be replaced by “parliaments” of scientific and technical experts who would arrange things to maximise economic, and hence societal, performance, an idea echoed by his contemporary Auguste Comte, the progenitor of scientific positivism [4] (pp. 394–395).

Saint-Simon posited his arguments by use of a thought experiment in which he first imagined the disappearance of all of France’s current powerful groups at the time (nobles, ministers, clergy, rentiers etc.) and then compared the outcome of that scenario with one where, alternatively, all the leading scientists, engineers, industrialists and technicians were eliminated. He concluded that while the older agrarian France would have not have survived the first hypothetical, the emerging industrial France would not survive the second. From this he concluded that the future laid with the experts [6] (p. 384).

Saint-Simon had divided modern society into those who had contributed to wealth, (expressed in purely material terms), and those who did not. All producers were in the former category, of which the “industriels”, or industrialists, were the most important. The latter class he referred to as “oisifi” (the singular being the “oisif”) and made no distinctions within it. Saint-Simon believed that human progress depended upon investment, production, and distribution, and that science and technology was transforming these in ways that, suitably managed, would benefit both workers and employers, the first group following the latter. The suitable manager, was, of course, the technical expert; but an expert of a particular kind. Although the term “technocrat” was yet to come, Saint-Simon conceived of key expertise encompassing a broad understanding of the workings of the entire system, distinguished from, and managing the activities of, those with more narrow but essential expertise (such as civil engineers or scientists) [7] (pp. 150–152).

Saint-Simon wrote early in the industrial epoch. His followers, the Saint-Simonians, wrote a bit later when industrialisation was more advanced. The political philosophy of Liberalism dominated post-Napoleonic Europe, calling for a relatively laissez-faire government, existing alongside uncontrolled market competition. However, political and social conflict was rife, exemplified by the waves of revolution in 1830 and 1848, with markets being increasingly dominated by ever larger, and monopolistic, private enterprises. The Saint-Simonians saw Liberalism as wasteful, counterproductive and, most importantly, unnecessary. Industrial principles had shown that successful industrialists could transform the economy into a machine of bounty. Thus, this same class, assisted by their specialised technicians, should also be given control of government. Rather than a zero-sum game of winners and losers, a society organised along technical lines run by technical experts would eliminate conflict and provide plenty for all [8] (p. 455).

Such “Simonian” doctrine does draw on both pre-classical economic thought, especially the Physiocrats, who divided society into productive and unproductive sectors, with the former to be encouraged, the latter to be suppressed; and on Adam Smith and the Classical Economists of the late 18th and 19th centuries, who posited that workers and employers had a common interest in maximising the overall product of an enterprise since both could share in that gain [9] (pp. 81–85). Where Saint-Simon and his followers diverged was in believing that social and economic conflict should not be allowed to run free but should be managed by an expert-led state. Private property remained sacrosanct, but would be allocated within a system run along technocratic lines. Interestingly, bankers were seen as key players in enabling capital to flow to the areas of greatest return. While bankers had been seen by many as oisifs in the past, Simonians claimed that a central bank coordinating lesser banks within an overall framework stripped of partisan political conflict would transform financial institutions into efficient means towards efficient ends. This, of course, was not a democratic arrangement but rather a benevolent, meritocratic, dictatorship, certainly authoritarian in its workings [7] (pp. 153–156).

3. The Apotheosis of Technocratic Thought

The thinking of St. Simon and his followers unfolded during what is called the First Industrial Revolution roughly spanning the period of 1750 to 1870. When William Henry Smyth coined the term in 1919, it was at the height of what is generally referred to as the Second Industrial Revolution typically dated between 1870 and 1930 or so. This was a period when science became a formalised, large-scale affair, often sponsored by governments and big business, and intimately tied into industrial innovation. Mass production at tremendous scale became the norm, generating rapidly falling unit costs for products of all sorts. Along with this came monopoly and oligopoly markets dominated by huge multinational companies [9] (pp. 236–241).

Two process innovations were critical to these changes: Taylorism and Fordism. Frederick Taylor had formulated his doctrine of “Scientific Management” in the early 20th century, taking division of labour to an extreme, breaking down factory floor tasks into minute regimentation, managed tightly to achieve maximum material throughput at minimum monetary cost. The unique contribution of “Taylorism” was the application of machine-oriented engineering (impartial, technical, objective, and purportedly above the clash of interests on the factory floor) to labour relations. Management problems were now posited as having optimal solutions that would present themselves once enough facts were collected. “Efficiency”, by enlarging overall output, was put forward as in the common interest of manager and managed alike. That the application of scientific techniques tended to confirm management bias and that Taylor himself sought to squeeze more out of the workforce without sharing all of the gains with it (he believed that wage increases ought be less than proportionate to productivity rises to keep workers ambitious), were aspects conveniently forgotten in a distinctly elitist agenda. It was Taylorism that explicitly developed in detail a move from management of men to administration of things [10] (pp. 30–32).

In the US, Taylorism, which concerned only management of labour, was superseded by Fordism, which reorganised the entire productive process, including deployment of capital. The moniker came from Henry Ford’s automobile assembly lines which brought man and machine together in a highly mechanised (and for the worker, extremely tedious and strenuous) unity that brought factory throughput to new heights and unit costs to new lows. Ford’s Model T car was uniform but extremely cheap, making the car affordable to the masses and making automobile travel pervasive [11] (pp. 490–491). Fordism more generally referred to the application of the assembly line to all production processes whatever the product, which indeed was carried out across a wide range of industries. The resulting material bounty along such lines promised positive social change through large scale capitalism and “rationalisation” [10] (pp. 54–55).

Meanwhile, the experience of World War 1 showed what could be accomplished economy-wide when government partnered with industry for a unified purpose. Output levels and efficiencies soared under centralised planning guided by industrialists—a seeming vindication of Saint-Simon’s ideas about rule by industriels. Much of this planning apparatus was dismantled with the war’s end, but the power of public–private alliances using Fordist and Taylorist techniques was not forgotten. In France, for example, the devastation of the war required massive rebuilding in a country that had suffered vast destruction of structures and people. Resources were scarce and the task of reconstruction required efficiencies in their use that Taylorism and Fordism promised to deliver. Many French architects and town planners adopted mass production and standardisation in housing, construction and design as a way of churning out the structures and land development so urgently needed. The giant of modernist architecture, Le Corbusier, was in the vanguard, seeing mass production and design as vindication of his minimalist design principles, which were especially easy to standardise, and thus a way of building as many of the new designs as possible. French town planners across all political spectra embraced some form of “municipal Taylorism” [12].

During this era, organising enterprise, public or private, along “scientific” principles, was seen as both desirable and natural. “System control” in the engineering sense was absolutely critical for the functioning of the modern economy. It was a short leap to suggest that this was perhaps also true for the total society, employing supposedly predictable mechanical regularities, using specialist managers—the Technocrats—to run everything to ensure optimal equilibrium. Indeed, technocracy was seen as apolitical, with material goals invariant across political or economic systems, namely efficiency in operations and maximum output. Thus, Lenin initially promoted Taylorism as a way of consolidating Soviet power (such methods being well in line with “Scientific Socialism”) while Fascists such as Mussolini (Hitler being an exceptional case in some regards) sought to promote “expertise” above old social classes and conflicts, allying the State with very large businesses. The Western capitalist democracies conducted less wholesale political rearrangements, but still gave industrial activity a central role in policy based on the belief that technocracy offered a positive-sum game in which power disputes could be sublimated under procedures of optimisation [10] (pp. 36, 43, 50–51). In this sense Communism, Capitalism and Fascism all adhered to technocratic ideals, the main differences between them revolving around the ownership of means of production, scope of State authority, degree of private control, and relationship between private and public spheres.

4. The Technocracy Movement in the US

Daughter: Mom, what’s technocracy?

Wife: Ask your father, dear.

Daughter: Pop, what’s technocracy?

Father: Yes, dear, yes, er, eh, will you eat your soup and stop asking silly questions?

(Dialogue from the 1933 film “The Pharmacist”, with WC Fields playing the Father) [13] (p. 133).

This quote from a very popular film starring a very popular comic actor of the time is an indication of how deeply the term technocracy had penetrated into the consciousness of at least the American public by the 1930s, also of how little understood that term was by most people.

Technocracy is not just a general term, but also a label for a very influential movement in the US which began with the economist Thorstein Veblen who put together an informal discussion group at the New School for Social Research in New York about replacing the price system with a more technical exchange economy based on energy units. That group disbanded around 1919 due to Veblen’s ill health, but one of its members, Howard Scott, formed a successor called the Technical Alliance whose ultimate goal was to conduct a thorough survey of American industry energy usage and production with an aim towards identifying existing inefficiencies. Walter Rautenstrauch, chairman of Columbia University’s Department of Industrial Engineering, embarked on a survey of changes in employment, worker productivity, and horsepower use in production across 3000 industries. Meanwhile, Harold Loeb, one of Scott’s associates, laid out a technocratic vision in his 1933 book, Life in a technocracy: What it might be like [14] (p. 293).

The Technocracy movement went through further incarnations but its conception of the main problem with modern society can be seen in the title of a Harper’s magazine article written by Scott in the early 1930s: “Technology smashes the price system.” The Great Depression exposed a stark contradiction between a purportedly hyper-efficient industrial system that could churn out inexorable amounts of wealth, while simultaneously suffering mass unemployment and privation. It was the very price system of “competitive” market supply and demand that had created both conditions and which now needed to be altered to keep pace with technical imperatives [15] (pp. 25–27).

The Technocracy solution was to eliminate money and replace it with energy certificates based on a full and dynamic accounting of energy inputs and outputs of the economic system. These certificates would be denominated in units such as joules with the total amount equal to the net energy budget of the economy, to be distributed equally among all members of that economy. Economic management should not follow national boundaries but energy system contours, e.g., the US and Canada to be combined into a “North American Continental Technate”. Rational, apolitical engineers seeking to attain a thermodynamically balanced load of production and consumption would be in charge, therefore banishing the problems of overproduction, shortages and surpluses, unemployment and inequality, and social strife. The Depression itself was, Technocracy advocates argued, a result of unbalanced energy flows that an inelastic and arbitrary money system and arbitrary political system could not adjust to [15] (pp. 28–30).

The Technocracy movement was, of course, a panacea, and a peculiarly American one that side-stepped many of the most pressing issues of the day. It was Capitalist in that private enterprise, property and exchange were not tampered with. Yet it did contain some of the notional egalitarianism of Communism by proposing a simple division of total value (in net energy terms) and distribution of a portion of that value to each member of the population. It was also explicitly anti-nationalist, organised along a technological universalism, placing it outside the realm of many Fascist systems which generally beat hyper-nationalist drums. The Technocracy movement did, however, have faith in broad technical planning that both Communists and Fascists embraced to varying degrees. The movement thus attempted to be agnostic in choice of political system. Its recommendations implied that liberal democracy and nation-states would be torn down, but didn’t lay out any more than vague outlines of the political arrangements that would replace them.

This unreality is one of a number of reasons that the movement died out, though Scott kept publishing newsletters and other materials into the 1970s. Technocracy’s undemocratic nature in a country which, under the New Deal of the time, was closely identified with “social democracy”, was a particular disadvantage, especially with authoritarian systems rising across the world. One critic referred to movement members as “slide rule Mussolinis”, while another characterised their thinking as an infantile need to be subjected to a non-human authority, similar to the historical laws of Communism, rather than face up to and deal with pressing problems with individual and collective agency [15] (pp. 19–20). The fact that the Depression had started under, and been seen to be inadequately dealt with by, the Presidency of Herbert Hoover, an engineer by training and visible promoter of technical solutions to social problems, nailed the coffin of Technocracy firmly shut [15] (p. 30).

5. Contemporary Concepts and Applications of Technocracy

Yet technocracy as a concept, if not an actual movement, lives on, being used in referring to any domain in which problems are believed to have optimal solutions where both can be put into logical, material terms, and where suitably trained experts can and should be given authority to design efficient policy options and oversee their implementation [16]. This idea relies on the possibility of such expertise and authority being non-ideological and nonpolitical. Normatively instrumental rationales and technical methods are preferred over other non-instrumental ones, with efficiency and effectiveness goals prioritised over other social values [5] (p. 313). The elasticity in specific characterisations revolves mainly around how much authority experts are given, and how much scope is allowed for democratic political procedures and consideration of goals outside technical considerations.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, technocracy still has the greatest influence in economic policy realms, because it was industrialisation in its various forms that brought the economy, and the associated technology and technical optimality, to the fore of social analysis. Neoclassical economics in its purest sense maintains that competitive market economies will deliver maximum social “welfare”, defined as the joint maximisation of material product by producers delivered in a form of most subjective value to those consuming it. Economists and economic policymakers analyse real world deviations from these theoretical conditions and diagnose malfunctions and propose optimal solutions. In extreme formulations, it is the economist who should design and carry these solutions out. The economist Jan Tinbergen has put this idea in its purest form with his notion of an “optimal regime” that consists of “bundles of institutions” that operate so as to maximise social welfare. Normal politics is at best wasteful in this schema because they inevitably cause divergences from resource-reducing optima [17] (p. 889).

One area where such a pure form is actually attempted is in the realm of central bank monetary policy (which, it may be remembered, was seen as a key optimising institution by the followers of Saint-Simon). Although there is arguably more political content in this arena than economists believe, central bank management and money supply operations are still designed and managed along technocratic lines [17] (pp. 890–891).

A much broader area where technocracy and the power of technocrats is still salient is in what used to be called modernisation policy, now called economic development. The former term was much more explicitly normative about the superiority of an economically and politically “liberal” setup over other alternatives (this being in the context of the “contest” of systems during the Cold War) and the belief that there was a clearly definable and uniform teleology of economic progress from lower to higher states [5] (pp. 314–319). Much of the explicitly normative content has been discredited, and hence dropped. But much like Tinbergen’s “optimal regime”, current development theory maintains that “developed” economies have superior measurable social and economic outcomes (such as per capita GDP and life expectancy); and while there are numerous possible paths to these superior outcomes, their achievement ultimately relies on specific sets of institutional and policy features based on coherent and tested theoretical and empirical knowledge. Political objectives outside these outcomes may be pursued but they will almost inevitably come at the cost of deviation from optimality.

Internationally, the formulation and execution of development doctrines are led by the multilateral aid and lending institutions created after the end of World War 2, especially the IBRD (known informally as the World Bank); various regional development banks, such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB); and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These, like most domestic central banks, are the purest examples of institutions run along technocratic lines. These institutions have codified, standardised, diffused and, in many cases, enforced development theory doctrines on many countries. The famous “Berkeley Mafia”, i.e., economists trained largely at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States, was most influential in Indonesia and Singapore, where they served in high technical and government roles largely adhering to the ideas and dictates of multilateral credit and aid organisations. Singapore is the leading example of a “technocratic” government in that it has not only achieved high levels of development and associated outcomes successfully, but has done so by firmly incorporating expertise and experts into its public governance structures, with projects and programs organised along explicit “technical” principles and generally achieving maximum output for minimum input on a timely basis (though its dominant party political system is a significant contributor to making such implementation possible) [18] (pp. 242–245).

But it is not only in the “developing” world where technocracy presides. A leading example of “technocratic” government is the European Union (EU). The intent of this project was to lower trade and administrative barriers in order to increase both economic efficiency and inter-country political accord in a region where brutal internecine war had reigned during the first half of the 20th century. The agreements and institutions to end such discord were transnational and based on economic optimality, not “political” agendas [16]. Within the EU at various periods purportedly “technocratic” regimes have been installed in selected European countries, especially during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), most notably in Greece, to eliminate political instability and carry out financial restructuring imperatives to avoid sovereign debt default. “Technocratic” regimes have since been periodically suggested inside and outside the EU to resolve financial crisis or extreme political conflicts. The overall idea here is that when very polarised politics surround very difficult choices, a technically oriented power base can depoliticise the core areas of difference to potentially find optimal solutions to immediate crises that might otherwise be insoluble [19].

Technocracy has also been incorporated into many contemporary areas of policy making and policy analysis. One leading example is the Evidence-Based Policy Making (EBPM) paradigm, which rests on key assumptions that linear discrete causal relationships in social and political arenas can be uncovered through the collection and analysis of “objective” material evidence, with findings then incorporated into policy processes [20]. The rise of Policy Sciences and Policy Analysis as academic fields after World War 2 were implicitly designed to apply technocracy as an instrument for political decision-makers (with these fields having earlier roots in the professionalisation of civil services around the turn of the 19th century). Similarly, the “behavioural turn” in policymaking, and the rise of Behavioural Economics (BE) and Behavioural Insights (BI), rests on the assumption that authorities can change behaviour by changing the aspects of the environment to modify the “bounded rationality” of human actors, altering the “choice architecture” they face by using evidence-based policy and experimental evaluation to attain “optimal” choices [21]. In all these cases technical problems are assumed to be definable, have identifiable technical solutions, resting on research and design by experts, with most, or at least many, problems of human society issues reducible to technical terms.

6. Critiques—The Inevitability of Politics

Technocracy has been challenged on a number of fronts. The predominance given to material framing of problems and solutions, the assumption that optimal social states exist, and the separation of political domains from technical ones have all been challenged, as has been the explicit reliance on what has been referred to as instrumental rationality. Other objections are based on the experiences of purportedly technocratic arrangements and the various malfunctions and problems these have run into, such as the failure to achieve goals in the first place. It has often been the practical failures that have called into question the presumptions and promises of the underlying concepts.

Politics has been a major contention from the beginning. Saint-Simon himself became disenchanted with the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte who, in many ways, could be said to be the first technocratic ruler. Bonapartism was characterised by the wiping away of old feudal and traditional structures across Europe as French armies took over much of the Continent, replacing them with administrative reforms such as the Napoleonic legal code; these being, however, accompanied by installation of new hand-picked monarchs who were relatives of Napoleon, and the adoption of the ancient personalism of “Empire” [9] (pp. 145–149).

Saint-Simon’s followers were writing under the rise of the Second Empire under Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, who would become Emperor Napoleon III. Louis Napoleon was operating in the transition between the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, adopting, along with many other autocratic, and to a lesser extent democratic, rulers of the time, government policies that reformed administration and governance, instituted systematic collection of national economic data, conducted various policy studies, and generally sought to improve economic growth. In Napoleon the Third’s case, this also involved a major redesign of the French capital, Paris, to “rationalise” its medieval street layout in favour of broad radial boulevards that also happened to be easier to police in the event of trouble. Napoleon III was also an internationalist who was a key mover in making multilateral treaties across the “Great Powers” of Europe and promoting less fettered trade and more rational monetary policy. Many Saint-Simonians thought of him as the model technocratic ruler, without, of course, using that term [9] (pp. 170–174).

The link was not just a notional one. Before becoming Emperor, Louis Napoleon published a treatise, On the extinction of pauperism, a somewhat muddled proposal to eliminate urban unemployment, that proposed a “parliament” of experts to serve as a buffer between employers and employees, an idea directly inspired by Saint-Simon’s ideas and of a close follower, Louis Blanc, the latter whom actually met with Louis before he became Emperor while he was in French prison for a failed coup attempt [22] (pp. 45–48).

But the Second Emperor was also mercurial and authoritarian, and not as effective or as strategically acute as his uncle. In both instances, top-down power brought France to ruin, in Louis Napoleon’s case by ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Moreover, the operations of the Second Empire were not always that clean or motivated by national interest. De Tocqueville had remarked of Napoleon III’s predecessor, King Louise-Phillippe, that his regime was like “a joint-stock company all of whose operations are designed to benefit the shareholders” (quoted in [22] pp. 59–60). While Louis Napoleon had much grander visions than this, it was not always clear where particular interests ended and national interest began since everything was done under the sway of a charismatic leader. In one way this seemed to be a vindication of the Saint-Simonians who could maintain that things would have turned out much better if the industrial class were actually in charge [23]. But then again, to make radical technical changes required political authority that such a class might not have been able to maintain on their own. Which came first—the power or the expertise? And following Lord Acton’s dictum, how much does power corrupt?

These have been questions that have bedeviled technocracy for its entire history in whatever form one is referring to. Consider the “developmental state”, of which the French Second Empire can be said to be a prototype. Its modern incarnation came in post-war East Asia, with Japan and South Korea leading the way in instituting growth-oriented macroeconomic and trade and investment policies, led by strong partnerships between the central government and large private sector companies. These states have been typified by technocratic policy formulation and administration led by experts. Such states have often achieved impressive economic results. Their examples have been followed elsewhere in Asia and beyond [24].

The purportedly apolitical and meritocratic nature of these technocratic states is, however, debatable. Consider again the archetypal technocracy of Singapore. Though not quite a “pure” developmental state because of its emphasis on lightly regulated markets and public–private arrangements, rather than uniform central state planning, Singaporean elites consciously chose to borrow ideas from the premier developmental state of a prior age, namely Japan between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Singapore moved from bureaucratic administration to an explicitly meritocratic leadership and staffing, putting forth explicit selection and performance criteria for admission and progression within the government and its related entities. Systems engineers were the initially favoured professional discipline, this group given control over reform of the education system in the 1970s. But law, medicine, management and economics were also emphasised and later on grew in prominence. The “Administrative Service (AS)” has rigorous and explicit merit-based standards and candidates for higher positions undergo constant testing, training, and assessment on both formal and informal achievements, including “CoCurricular Activities (CCA) [25].

The economic results Singapore has achieved have been impressive, to be sure. But despite the technocratic premise, actual power is based on patronage and connections, especially within the ruling “family” that has dominated Singapore’s ruling class for decades. “Talent” is certainly important, but getting ahead and staying on top requires knowing the right people. Instructive is the example of Singapore’s second premier after the legendary founding personage of Lee Kaun Yew retired: Goh Chok Tong. Goh was a product of the meritocratic system, with all the right achievements and progressions. But Lee was his patron, and he served as a convenient placeholder between the father and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, who would succeed Goh as Singapore’s third prime minister [25].

This is not to single out Singapore. Rather it is to note that even a well-executed technocracy, while definitely elitist, is certainly not politically neutral; and that political power is not solely a product of the optimal application of the best knowledge and skills available. The experience of other Asian countries illustrates this, e.g., Indonesia under Soeharto and the “New Order” where there were parallel tracks of technocracy by economic experts (running macroeconomic policy) and engineers (running many businesses and government enterprises); or the Philippines, where technocrats became one of the “three pillars” of the Marcos regime under martial law. In these two cases, the power of technocrats relied on political power exercised by a strong leader. That they were less consistently successful than Singapore only masks the fact that this dependence is equally true in all three places. Institutional power goes beyond just nation-states: the global economic order itself requires “peripheral” countries to interface with international markets in very prescribed ways, with theories and methods developed by a relatively small elite at global universities and private and public financial institutions [18] (pp. 245–250).

Thus technocracy is not apolitical, but a different philosophy and form of politics, and hence subject to political critique. Some have gone so far as to say that technocracy is a “scienfication of politics”, in which the individual is relegated to the status of a “functional object” [5] (p. 309). This may be an extreme way of putting things. But technocracy can be seen as a manifestation of a general decline in the public civic realm in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond noted by many political theorists, such as Hannah Arendt [4] (p. 408), with the “technicisation” of that realm being both a cause and effect in a shape-shift, though not a elimination, of political discourse and action.

7. Critiques—Incompatibility with Democracy

The technocracies in the examples just noted above were not really democracies at the time of their ascendancy (even if sometimes outwardly democratic procedures, like elections, were employed). Fundamental adoption of technocracy is, indeed, typically associated with nondemocratic regimes, such as Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, and Pinochet’s Chile [25] (p. 29). These regimes were all right-wing but not, in the end, particularly ideological, except for a shared anti-Communism. There are more explicitly ideologically oriented examples, notably the Soviet Union, to name a left-wing case. Thus, technocracy as the “administration of things” certainly is compatible with a wide variety of political philosophies [5] (p. 308). But is it fundamentally compatible with democracy?

Certainly there are numerous examples of technocracy employed within democratic regimes that have also been labeled as technocratic. This was true in many European countries during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), especially in Greece and Italy which were facing extreme debt crunches. Using the authority of the EU these two countries installed nominally nonpartisan ministries to break political deadlocks and implement what were unpopular, but deemed to be necessary, economic austerity programs [19].

However, as these examples indicate, technocracy is elitist in nature, based on relatively inaccessible information and skills held by a small group of experts who are given power on the basis of those advantages [26] (p. 22). In this sense technocracy separates out a “knowledge” elite from the larger group of ordinary citizens [16]. While this arrangement can sometimes sit beside democratic procedures, if one believes that technocracy results in “optimal” solutions one will generally be skeptical about popularly based policies that might interfere with their implementation.

Technocracy takes a monolithic view of society, criticising both partisan parochial interests and values not consonant with maximum efficiency. Political legitimacy is based on “objective” outcomes arrived at through expert knowledge, impartial analysis and scientific reasoning. In this sense technocracy is certainly anti-pluralistic [16]. Even simple majoritarian democracy is based on managing and sorting through pluralism, even more so with subtler forms that take minority views into account. So, it is difficult to see how technocracy can be reconciled with democracy in the fullest sense of that word.

There remain traditions, such as managerialism (originally exposited by the management theorist James Burnham), and the aforementioned neoclassical economics, that hold that technocratic methods can coexist with democracy, separating community political decisions from technocratic analysis. The key is institutional design, in this case getting political institutions “optimised” [4] (pp. 393, 411). “Transparency” is a catchphrase here, denoting a situation where the public can see exactly how and why decisions are made and where resources are flowing. If they do not like what they can see, they can change course and override technocratic recommendations [17] (p. 892).

Thus, one answer to any “democracy deficit” that technocracy might bring is to redesign political institutions to better capture and translate individual political preferences. “Deliberative democracy”, and associated institutions such as “people’s parliaments”, are designed to reduce the coarseness of the procedures of “aggregative democracy” employed by representative legislative and executive bodies. These alternatives increase communication between all groups within a society, and between that collective and the decision-makers themselves, to find more creative common-solutions that are missed by older models, while also providing a counterweight to “rule by experts” [1] (pp. 55–58).

But this sort of framing has a number of flaws. One is that it depends on an implicit reduction in democracy—or indeed, any political system—to a mechanism for discovery and fulfilment of collective bundles of individual preferences. This is straight out of the rational atomistic actor of neoclassical economics and its offshoot of political liberalism, in which markets meet agent material preferences while electoral institutions meet agent political desires (though the latter will be much less “efficient”). Human perspectives are, however, not just preferential and informational, but embodied as well. Hence politics is significantly corporeal as well as conceptual. Inclusive discussion does not guarantee elimination of all differences into a consensus position, or even a multiplicity of mutually possible separate group positions, because, as Pascal put it, “the heart has reasons, that reason knows not.” Physical human embodiment suggests that coherent orderings of preferences within and between groups are not always possible even with the best consultative and translation procedures available [1] (pp. 49–50). In fact, different groups within a society typically operate with different worldviews and conventions that shape their shared understandings of problems and solutions, referred to by one theorist as different “spheres of justice”. Rational discourse cannot always eliminate or reconcile these differences because of their embodied and embedded nature [3] (pp. 10–12). Indeed, the rise of authoritarian populism can be seen in some ways as emerging from the inability of established institutions to address non-rational aspects of collective political process.

Dealing with this inevitable irreconcilability is the main reason that political philosophy emerged in the first place and is also what “decisionistic” political models (liberalism being but one example) are designed to deal with by having politics, imperfect as it is, dominate less communal realms like science [27]. Such a position is implicitly and explicitly rejected in pure technocracy. Indeed, if scientific consensus calls for particular actions, especially in cases where human survival is at stake, many argue that this by definition trumps democracy entirely. This is the basis of an “ecoauthoritarianism” that began to arise within the environmental movement of the 1970s which held that democracy was too slow and too captured by vested interests to be trusted with making environmental policy [1] (p. 48). Existential emergencies of all kinds can evoke this kind of thinking, which seems to make sense on its face. But who declares the emergencies on or off, and who guards the emergency guardians?

8. Critiques—The Nature of Technocratic Rationality

This ties into another long-standing issue which is the nature of rationality within technocracy. The fundamental merit claimed for technocratic rule is its rationality. This sounds compelling since the opposite of rational is irrational; of reasonable, unreasonable.

But technocratic rationality is more complex than common sense understandings of the term. Technocratic rationality refers to coordination of means to achieve chosen ends, which is typically referred to as instrumental rationality [28] (pp. 43–44). The sociologist Max Weber used the term rationalisation to refer to a modern tendency to systematise and institutionalise everything in human affairs in order to achieve larger societal aims. In comparison to older pre-industrial modalities, bureaucratisation and rationalisation were more effective than earlier methods in handling large-scale social problems, especially in an increasingly complex and interdependent material world. Of necessity, this form of rationality was based on functional means-ends efficiency, also seen as an advance over feudal and other traditional authorities. Indeed the effectiveness and power of science was enhanced through bureaucracy and institutional rationality, well beyond the intrinsic usefulness of the superior knowledge offered by the scientific method [26] (pp. 2–3). Rationalisation was efficient but gradually became an autonomous system, increasingly applied to all areas of life, sometimes irrespective of whether it was truly compatible with, or useful to, a particular area or not [4] (p. 395).

Thus, technocratic rationality has moved well apart from the Enlightenment “Age of Reason” notion of an innate faculty of the human individual into a social-institutional complex of which the rational human being is just a part, and an increasingly subordinate part at that. A “scientisation” of technology accompanying a fusion of industry, tech-sector and scientific enterprise, all conducted at massive scale, delivers an increasing and particular form of material abundance which people have become completely dependent upon. Rationality is now redefined in consequentalist terms as any action that keeps this “machine” moving and growing [29] (p. 503). But this is not a necessarily or inexorably “reasonable” process.

9. Critiques—Technocracy as Ideology

The preceding discussion is about the structural dimension of technocracy, i.e., the set of societal and organisational arrangements (such as expert networks and government sponsors) that deliver particular material results. But technocracy also consists of a set of ideas that have now, many claim, crystallised into a form of ideology. Structure and ideology are both drivers of the system’s power, with the latter possibly now more effective than the former [26] (p. 13).

Ideology is a term hard to pin down, but in general refers to a system of thought (rather than just one or two loosely connected ideas) that is taken as self-evident by believers and which, in the extreme, cannot be challenged logically or empirically by those who hold to it. More pungently ideology can be defined as an imaginary account of a real situation, with that account being highly elaborated and interwoven and largely internally consistent on its own terms [26] (p. 14).

One basis for a technocratic ideology is “scientism”, the idea that all important human civilisational problems are technical and therefore human-soluble, putting science into other spheres beyond its own designated one [3] (pp. 13–15) Whatever cannot be reduced to calculations and numbers is dismissed as illusion and “metaphysics” (the latter term having a bad connotation in this context) [28] (p. 45). The notion of “number” implies serial relations between totally discrete elements, with statistical realities between atomised individuals replacing understanding of actual societal relationships. Thus, mathematisation and other highly technical forms of abstraction can, in the extreme, lead to mythical thinking, reifying illusions about the ability to control “nature” based on a false separation of the human being from the “natural” realm [26] (p. 22).

But technocracy in this ideological form is simply a new form of domination and masked social control. A depersonalised science is the ultimate authority, offering no room for appeal [26] (pp. 5–6). Yet decisions made by technocracies are made by imperfect persons and can be irrational from the perspective of reason as a personal human faculty, this aspect overlooked by the use of the criteria of “functional” rationality from the system perspective [26] (p. 22). In some ways this functional perspective has been increased by post-industrialism which has shifted economies from maximising specific input/output relationships on the factory floor in a narrow but measurable “efficiency” process, to a more generalised “getting things done” benchmark in a “knowledge economy” [29] (p. 507).

This dovetails with the “end of ideology” discourse so prominent after the end of the Cold War, based on a claim that industrial societies could solve all problems instrumentally, minimising reliance on other non-technical value systems or societal visions [4] (p. 396). In this way technical systems become severed from the ends originally set for them, reprogramming the environment to suit their special conditions and their special operations rather than the other way around [4] (p. 405). The neo-Marxist Frankfurt school went beyond Weber to say that rationalisation morphed from an efficient way to manage large systems into a new mode of control that was legitimated by an ideology of “technical reason”. Science and technology are presented as the foundations of productivity and growth on which the whole order relies and which has become not just instrumental but a raison d’etre for its existence [4] (p. 406–408).

This development can seen clearly as early as the emergence of Taylorism and Fordism. These were not just process models that transformed organisations, but also rationales justifying and changing organisational missions. To increase output-to-input throughput, new technical systems required not just new machines but changes to employee behaviour, and this involved substantial changes in shared thinking between worker and manager. Technocratic systems increasingly organised people in radically different ways than before, giving primacy to particular machine logics. This did not, however, erase the human power politics which were required to enforce such primacy, with distributive issues evaded. Technocratic ideology developed to purport that re-organisation based around particular technologies was neutral because “technology is neutral” and technology is adopted simply because of its greater efficiencies. To challenge organisation based on machines was to be “irrational” since such organisation was inherently more efficient, implicitly ignoring all other relevant factors. Concomitant with this was a bureaucratic control template based on task specification, hierarchy, promotion up through the ranks, and measurable performance criteria. Impartiality, neutrality, and efficiency concepts buttress control, though in theory offering advancement to the best and brightest. Managerialism is a natural adjunct privileging existing leaders as “best” to rule and adding a charismatic element to a rational/logical frame [30] (pp. 317–318). These structures can be useful, of course. But they are too narrow and rigid to account for complex reality and hence ideological in that sense.

10. Critiques—The Nature of the Technocrat

Finally, there is the linchpin of the system, the Technocrat “himself” (historically almost always male, though the balance has changed more recently). In a “meritocratic” regime where “experts” rule, the “best” experts are at the top of the heap and on their authority the system’s “optimality” rests.

The archetypal Technocrat believes that politics is a matter of technique resting on a rational interpretation of facts to achieve the best results and attaining unanimity across society because the “social good” is maximised. This “good” is defined in “pragmatic” terms in the form of measurable material outcomes. The main interest is in “progress”, with distributive issues put outside the Technocrat’s analytical domain [6] (pp. 385–387). Technocratic “technique” can thus be characterised as a form of pattern recognition, option generation, and agenda placement, emphasising instrumentality [5] (p. 313).

Yet the Technocrat always remains a human being. Can the innate nature of this form be successfully repressed in the name of a uniform rational optimisation? Many doubt it. The Technocrat supposedly sits beyond any nation or culture. But an Italian technocrat working for Mussolini will certainly not be the same as one working for Lee Kuan Yew. Men and women remain products to some degree of their unique personal and societal upbringings. Putting aside issues of morality and ethics (discussed below), there will be differences in perspective and understanding of “optimality” in the contexts within which the technocrat works.

Some have argued that the Technocrat, far from being a “superior” being, is a highly programmed and naive one. Ortega y Gassett went so far as to call “him” a “learned ignoramus” with all the arrogant petulance that such an expert specialist has with respect to things both inside and outside his domain (quoted in [31] (p. 189). Having to maintain the pretence of always being above politics and social dynamics is not just highly naive, but wearing. With time, some argue, technocratic thinking becomes an set of unconscious habits that conceal and mislead as much as they reveal and direct [32]. The Technocrat can become an ideologue, wedded to the personal exercise of power but, unlike regular politicians, completely unaware of personal motivations. Moreover, their hanging around other experts like them, using a specialised language, “translating” it to terms understandable by “laymen”, and thinking of their pursuits as engaged in a “universalist” quest, is by its nature elitist, insular, and conformist [26] (pp. 8, 25). Additionally, in times of crisis, even the most qualified person can “crack” under pressure and make poor decisions without being aware of it. The optimiser is not himself guaranteed to make optimal decisions.

And where is ethics in all this? Technocracy divorces science and technology from moral and ethical considerations, these supposedly being taken care of in a different part of the process. But the history of “Big Science” is cautionary in this regard, with many projects, such as the Atomic Bomb, being enthusiastically taken up by individual scientists, some of whom became appalled at what they wrought after it was too late [33] (pp. 52–60).

This sort of personal professional detachment—the supposedly unbiased search for pure knowledge and ever unfolding progress and an instrumental view of everything, including people, as objects to operate on—is arguably part of the problem. The occasional mea culpas of some leading technocrats employed in pursuit of ignoble causes are not only relatively rare but when offered point to the impossibility of truly being able to exercise power in ways completely separated from all “non-rational” contexts. Robert McNamara, US Defense Secretary prosecuting the American war in Vietnam, later wrote a sort of apology for his role, while, more notoriously, Albert Speer, Armaments Minister under Hitler, took general blame for the crimes of the Nazi regime resulting in his serving a 20-year sentence in Spandau prison handed down by the Nuremberg tribunal (though also arguably saving him from the death penalty which may of his colleagues received). Both men were clearly tortured and sincere in their belated misgivings. But the hedging, denials and rationalisations they offered tarnished their exculpatory offerings personally while offering a cautionary tale about the Technocratic role in general [34].

11. Conclusions

In summary, technocracy is an idea and a system that is highly contested both in practical and in philosophical terms. It appeared as an answer to the unique problems of highly industrialised societies and made some sense in those terms. In narrow domains, such as “pure” regional development or national industrial policy already discussed, and others such as public health, environmental policy, education, and welfare, technocratic models make some sense and sometimes delivers reasonably good results. Singapore’s economic success is an example of a technocratic regime that is fairly well designed and implemented. The concept of technocracy also can be applicable in well-defined areas of analytical pursuit, such as policy analysis. EBPM and BI are examples of technically based tools that can make such analysis and its execution more targeted and effective.

However, the major precepts of technocracy, such as its apolitical nature, its reliance on “superior” rationality, and its unquestionable ability to “optimise” and attain “efficiency”, have been challenged and are not plausible or possible in many contexts. The authoritarian and personalistic nature of Singapore’s governance and the failings of EBPM and BI carried to extremes are counterpoint examples to the completeness of the concept in practice. Meanwhile, the fundamentally instrumental and consequentialist nature of technocracy also makes it incompatible, by definition, with intrinsic values such as justice. These are core issues that render technocracy as a generalised order problematic, and which need to be dealt with fully even in more focused implementations. Perhaps the most succinct assessment is that technocracy is a usefully applicable construct in particular and well-defined domains, but that these domains are very narrow. Even if technocracy is applicable, it will almost certainly be impinged upon by the “messiness” of human affairs at some point or another. Alterations, to both present and possible future technocracies to deal with this messiness, are necessary and fruitful areas of both policy design and future academic research.