A non-conforming technocratic dream: Howard Scott’s technocracy movement

ABSTRACT

This article traces Howard Scott’s technocracy movement in the United States from the 1930s onwards, attempting to rearticulate it as a moment in interwar non-conformism. Conceived in America’s culture of material affluence, the technocracy movement was intellectually based on two fin-de-siècle undercurrents: the scientific management movement and Veblen’s institutional economics. The technocracy movement appropriated and developed their ideas of efficiency and waste, attempting to negotiate a space between industrial capitalism and socialism by offering new ideas of managing society based on maximizing productive efficiency and minimizing waste. While its political disorganization and Scott’s spotty past turned brief success into ultimate failure, the speed and intensity of the popular following for technocracy testifies to the broad appeal of 1930s non-conformism. Further, responding to looming unemployment in the pursuit of efficiency through mechanization, the technocracy presented, if accidentally, an ecological vision manifest in the idea of energy certificates. Yet, the fundamentally productivist premise of the movement ultimately marred its substantive development and made the movement fragmented and functionally appropriated.

KEYWORDS:

• Technocracy
• Howard Scott
• efficiency
• waste
• scientific management
• energy accounting

1. Introduction

In 2015, Jürgen Habermas (2015) published The Lure of Technocracy, calling for European solidarity. Habermas almost prophetically saw the disintegration of the European Union, due to a crisis of political legitimacy, unresponsive economic measures, and the porous borders of Europe’s nation-states (45–52). The only way out for him was a total recasting of politics – a constitutional move toward what he termed ‘Kantian discourse-theoretical model.’ What is of present interest, however, is that he posited his ideal model against a poorly defined model of ‘technocracy.’ Only two times does the word ‘technocracy’ appear in the text, without any reference to textual sources or explanations, as if it were obvious what he meant by that word. Technocracy is a rhetorical specter in his account, only appearing as the Other, constituting a dichotomy with democracy: technical as opposed to deliberative; embedded as opposed to open to change; procedural as opposed to constitutional.

This specter of technocracy is quite an old one. As Charles Maier (1970, 27) notes in his classic essay, it was Antonio Gramsci who first recognized the impact of Americanism in the twentieth century. This Americanism, ‘a whole complex of approaches to industrial production and labor relations,’ clearly pointed to Taylorism and Fordism, which in turn could lead to technocracy. The imperatives of efficiency and ‘rationalization,’ with varying degrees of technocratic institutional reforms, were almost universal in the interwar years, and became politically quite powerful. The idea that specialists with certain types of knowledge and expertise should form a government and thus retain political power was not novel in the beginning of the twentieth century, though different national, political, and structural contexts differentiated technocratic direction. It was Smith (1919), an obscure engineer in California, who coined the term by publishing a 41-page booklet entitled Technocracy. It covered a wide range of issues, like scientific management and industrial democracy, while capturing a certain je-ne-sais-quoi so succinctly that it instantly became a popular concept. With the introduction of this enticing concept, an eclectic movement was also born. Howard Scott, an almost mythic figure, came to symbolize the popularity and the ultimate shortcomings of the movement in the interwar period.

Howard Scott’s technocracy movement was not emblematic of the idea of technocracy as a whole and its impact on modern society. It was rather a small, quixotic episode in the complex history of technocracy. The reputation of the movement has been less than stellar, to the point of academic indifference. For one reason, Scott’s technocracy movement was too disorganized to turn its initial popular support into political influence and quickly disappeared as a movement, degenerating into a pseudo-religion which further hurt the validity of the movement. A more fundamental reason for the disdain was that technocracy as a form of political organization was in general deemed unrealistic and dangerous. Technocratic dominance was believed to lead to ‘a fresh decline of democracy, already weakened and circumscribed when compared with its ideal form’ (Meynaud 1964, 295). This latent fear was further engendered by technocratic tendencies in fascist and socialist regimes, while heavy discursive investment in democracy during the Cold War made technocracy even more suspect. Still, the once wide appeal of the idea of technocracy requires an explanation. Scott’s technocracy movement was built on long-standing heterodox intellectual traditions that are largely forgotten today. Observing how these strands manifest themselves in the technocracy movement offers an interesting foray into interwar intellectual history. Moreover, the fact that socialists, capitalists, union workers, proto-fascists, engineers, academics, artists, and even schemers did rally together around Scott’s seemingly disorganized idea is still interesting. Such popularity was not only because of the movement’s connection to reformist thinking but also because it exposed the weakness of the interwar politico-economic regime and addressed crucial issues with rediscovered resonance.

This article focuses on three issues associated with the technocracy movement. First, it argues that the technocracy movement offered a fundamentally productivist vision, concentrating on the questions of efficiency and waste. Dovetailing Veblen’s institutional economics and scientific management, the technocracy movement attempted to maximize efficiency and minimize waste, even at the cost of total socio-political reorganization. The movement accordingly concentrated on the idea of tabulating the exact amount of waste in order to capitalize on the concept of energy. Their appeal was based on a wide consensus of this productivist agenda across the political spectrum.

Second, this article attempts to situate the technocratic movement in the context of interwar non-conformism in its broadest conception. Usually attributed to French interwar intellectuals, interwar non-conformism encompasses a complex set of ideas, aspiring to find a new solution in the deadlock between liberalism/capitalism and socialism. Recasting a non-conformist perspective over interwar American social movements might seem counterintuitive. Non-conformism did not figure prominently in the discussion of the interwar United States, principally because the New Deal was a subsuming culmination of ideas and sentiments akin to those of non-conformism, but which kept the existing political and economic institutional structure intact. However, what Brick (2006) termed as the social liberal tradition in the United States, and its postcapitalist vision, are both comparable to European non-conformism. The technocracy movement shared with social liberals non-conformist aspirations to escape the bipolar politico-economic ultimatums by drastically redesigning the socio-political structure to be based on experts.

Lastly, this article tries to excavate and rearticulate ideas of the technocracy movement that have been overlooked due to its political failure. Its preoccupation with utmost efficiency led the movement toward an unintentional ecological position. The idea of the energy account rearticulated the political-economic structure of society around the tabulation of energy consumption. While this idea remained underdeveloped, its presence reveals a fundamental contradiction in their productivist pursuit of efficiency.

This article is broken into three parts. The second section deals with the intellectual background of the technocracy movement. The rise of scientific management at the end of the Progressive Era and institutional economics, especially Thorstein Veblen’s, were both intellectually and personally connected to the movement, illuminating the emergence of efficiency and waste as central concerns. The third section follows Howard Scott’s technocracy movement. It examines the connection to scientific management and Veblen, both intellectually and personally, while describing the rise and fall of the movement in the United States. The final section attempts to historically situate Scott’s movement in the context of 1930s non-conformism. It also critically assesses its substantive proposals and articulations, attempting to rediscover its relevance.

2. Affluence, efficiency and waste: scientific management and Veblen

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) was one of the most celebrated books of its generation in the US. A story of the protagonist, Julian West, who wakes up in the year 2000, revolves around revelations of a new society, where all industrial production is nationalized, universal basic income is distributed through ‘credit’ cards, and technological advances make both working and consuming extremely convenient. Popular success followed. The book was outsold only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the nineteenth century and there sprang up more than 160 Bellamyte societies nationally, whose identity was an incoherent mixture of populism, progressivism, and socialism. Bellamy’s book was hardly an exception. There were scores of socialist utopian novels, such as William Howells’ A Travel from Alturia and William Morris’ News from Nowhere. Dystopian novels like Jack London’s The Iron Heel also employed essentially similar tropes of postulating a corrupt capitalist society. What differentiates the Bellamyte vision from others, and hence explains its popularity, was the presence of material affluence and implied technological advances. As Segal (1989) pointed out, Bellamy was very much concerned with the short working hours and consumer convenience made possible by technological advances. Following De Grazia’s (2006) careful analysis, the emphasis on consumption might be construed as a likely output of a peculiarly American commercialism that would come to define the American twentieth century. Technological visions in the novel, on the other hand, suggested a turn to expertism and technocracy on top of being a common science fiction trope. Bellamy offered a distinct utopian vision that blended material affluence with the reorganization of production and consumption furnished by technological advances.

Of course, to take Bellamy’s idea as a cohesive technocratic vision would be unwarranted. Bellamy did not provide any specific social organization that could make such material affluence possible. The lack of concrete technocratic ideas in his book is, however, almost beside the point. More salient to Bellamy’s popularity was that, even in the waning years of labor unions and the end of the Progressive Era, the Bellamyte clubs and societies sprung up because of its new vision of society and that vision was symptomatic of heterodox undercurrents – both ideologically and institutionally. What connects Bellamy’s (1888) underlying critique of capitalism to technocracy was the emphasis on inefficiency and waste.

The wastes which resulted from leaving the conduct of industry to irresponsible individuals, wholly without mutual understanding or concert, were mainly four: first, the waste by mistaken undertakings; second, the waste from the competition and mutual hostility of those engaged in industry; third, the waste by periodical gluts and crises, with the consequent interruptions of industry; fourth, the waste from idle capital and labor, at all times. Any one of these four great leaks, were all the others stopped, would suffice to make the difference between wealth and poverty on the part of a nation.

(229–230)

Here, Bellamy’s critique was directed not so much to the Marxian trope of exploitation as to the inefficiency and waste it generated. This ultimately productivist and commercial vision differentiated him from his continental counterparts. His utopian vision cannot be achieved without great advances in productivity. In Bellamy’s critique, a critique of capitalism and an endorsement of efficiency go hand in hand.

This twofold nature was an embedded characteristic and one limitation of the American reformist thinking at the turn of the century. Balancing a social utopian vision with material affluence – albeit with varying degrees of emphasis on either – created the intellectual backdrop for the call for the efficient management of production, consumption, and economy in general. The most emblematic sign of this tendency was the scientific management movement. Already in 1915, Horace Drury, an institutional economist, proclaimed scientific management as ‘the most important problem from the practical and theoretical point of view now before the industrial world’ (20).

Extrapolating the importance of scientific management is, however, a complicated issue, as its pioneer and founder, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), had a complicated legacy. Taylor’s role as the pioneer of scientific management is well documented by an industry of literature and might not be necessary to reiterate here (Aitken 1985; Haber 1973; Kanigel 1997; Hughes 2004). However, it might be useful to concentrate on the Eastern Rate Case of 1910, a cause célèbre spearheaded by Louis Brandise, where Taylor’s ideas garnered national attention. The trial revolved around whether the efficiency of machine production affected wages, a topic on which Taylor constantly shifted back and forth throughout his career. On the one hand, Taylorism was understood in the context of labor discipline and worksite organization for maximization of productivity, while neglecting the human elements in production and overlooking social distribution entirely. On the other hand, Taylor (1911[1903]) firmly believed that his system would raise the wages of workers through optimization of production and, therefore, help them (95). There was a duality in Taylor, reminiscent of Bellamy, aiming at both the enhancement of productivity and social betterment through the maximization of efficiency.

Taylor and his cohorts like Henry Gantt (1861–1919), Frank Gilbreth (1868–1924), Harrington Emerson (1853–1931), and Carl Barth (1860–1939) together constituted a complex set of principles and methods. This complexity stems not only from their varied focus of research but also from their different levels of concern regarding the dichotomy between efficiency and social justice. For example, Gantt’s work-flow graphic charts that detailed workers’ progress seem tailored to the maximization of profit and efficiency and thus seem most conducive to capitalism in practice, because its major function was to allow supervisors and managers to get a whole picture of production (Nelson and Campbell 1972; Sheldrake 2003). However, Gantt also acknowledged that the utmost pursuit of efficiency was all too often derailed by forces outside of the production process. A political reorganization was just as necessary as the maximization of productivity. In the last four years of his life, he devoted himself to a society of engineers entitled ‘New Machine’ with Charles Ferguson, whose principal influence was British pluralism (Haber 1973, 44–9). New Machine and Gantt’s exact political and social visions are very hard to articulate, because the only source for the organization is Ferguson’s rambling book The Revolution Absolute. It is clear though that Gantt called for ‘an all-correlating moral adventure,’ which included a technocratic overhaul of politics (Ferguson 1918, 301–11). Gantt even criticized harshly the profit system under the principle of ‘production over profit’ and spoke positively of the Soviet’s communitarian productive system.

To a contemporary observer, radicalism in scientific management might seem to be standing on its head. The adherents of scientific management started off aiming for the maximization of productivity, which in turn became an end in itself. The primary goal of whatever radicalism they were professing was to serve the enhancement of productivity rather than social justice. Moreover, their non-conforming radicalism appears only in fragments, not only because it was not articulated into a cohesive whole, but also because their progressive social vision was a derivative of what was ultimately a productivist goal.

Institutional economics, especially Veblen’s in the same period, embodied a more analytical and structural undertaking in delineating the economic consequences of inefficiency and waste vis-à-vis social justice. Though largely understood in the context of heterodox economics, institutional economics was not at all marginal in this period, both socially and academically. The Marginal Revolution of neoclassical economics was not yet broadly recognized in the United States and economics as a discipline there remained under sociological and historical delimitations (Fourcade 2010). While there were diverse directions within institutional economics offered by Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), John Commons (1862–1925), and Wesley Mitchell (1874–1948), there was some common ground among them, an intertwined combination of belief and rejection. For instance, they believed that the market was a product of interlaced interactions of institutions, which in turn led them to reject bourgeoning neoclassical postulates of market and psychological axioms. Mitchell, for instance, had concentrated on a relatively narrow area of the business cycle which was very well within the bounds of neoclassical economics. However, he summarily rejected deductive neoclassical assumptions about consumer behaviors as well as mathematical methods to deal with them (Morgan 1990, 45–56). In a similar fashion, institutional economists as a whole attempted to synthesize the social, cultural, and political dimensions with economic analyzes.

Veblen’s case is the most important here because of his unique intellectual progression to technocracy. His two early works, The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise, have won public acclaim. Veblen ([1912]1989) developed and based his analysis on the dichotomy between technology and institutions (187–9). This dichotomy was predicated on the idea that institutions – historical, cultural and socio-political – determine how technologies are to be deployed (Waller 1982). Greatly influenced by the German historical school’s Gustav von Schmoller, Veblen argued that this dichotomy created an evolutionary economic scheme that would transcend the static neo-classical model (Veblen 1901). Economic activities on both the production and consumption side were based not so much on mechanical, calculable desires as on complex interactions of human emotions. His most famous concepts like ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘Veblen goods’ were products of this understanding.

Also underlying these concepts was a profound objection to ‘conspicuous waste’ and the inevitable social injustice that it produced (Veblen [1899]1912: Chapter 1). If his early writings focused on constructing theoretical schemata to offer exigencies for new economic analyzes in a rather neutral tone, his later, more utopian writings sketched a social vision that originated with his institutionalism. The Engineers and the Price System opens with a careful analysis of the problem of underproduction, i.e., a productive deficiency by choice. According to Veblen (1919), this underproduction, a sort of institutional ‘conspicuous waste,’ was a sociological and organizational problem (25–6). First, the captains of industry moved from being inventors and factory owners to corporate financiers and absentee owners, which created cognitive distance between management and actual production:

Business enterprise may fairly be said to have shifted from the footing of free-swung competitive production to that of a ‘conscientious withholding of efficiency,’ so soon and so far as corporation finance on a sufficiently large scale had come to be the controlling factor in industry … [U]nder the limitations to which all human capacity is subject it follows from this increasingly exacting discipline of business administration that the business men are increasingly out of touch with that manner of thinking and those elements of knowledge that go to make up the logic and the relevant facts of the mechanical technology.

This distance was magnified by a drive ‘to maintain profitable prices by limiting the output.’ Thus, the problem of society was not just ‘conspicuous waste’ in the form of goods and services, but also ‘conscientious withholding’ of the full societal potential (Ibid.: 27).

A technocratic turn for Veblen happens here. Veblen observed ‘technologists’ awakening to the fact that there was gross inefficiency in their industries and started forming a class-consciousness. Taylorists, ‘efficiency engineers,’ and ‘scientific management experts’ tried to address the problem but their practices were marred by commercial incentives offered by financiers, achieving only scattered and marginal improvements in productivity (Ibid.: 48). While Veblen was skeptical of any real chance of revolution and disdained the contemporaneous Bolshevik Revolution, he nonetheless borrowed a Bolshevik concept to construct his own solution, ‘a soviet of technicians’:

[i]t follows that the material welfare of all the advanced industrial peoples rests in the hands of these technicians, if they will only see it that way, take counsel together, constitute themselves the self-directing General Staff of the country’s industry, and dispense with the interference of the lieutenants of the absentee owners. Already they are strategically in a position to take the lead and impose their own terms of leadership, so soon as they, or a decisive number of them, shall reach a common understanding to that effect and agree on a plan of action.

(Ibid.: 83–4)

Though Veblen also noted that there was no practical chance of this soviet forming any time soon, he finished the book with, ‘A Memorandum on a Practicable Soviet of Technicians,’ where he hoped how ‘the incoming directorate’ would organize society in the case of great social unrest (Ibid.: 87). It is then no surprise that Veblen’s brief resurgence of posthumous fame came in the early 1930s, a time of great social unrest. The Engineers and the Price System was reprinted as a blueprint for a new society, though ultimately the New Deal took a very different course from Veblen’s vision.

Linking Veblen and Taylorism is thus natural. Although Veblen did not discern any transformative qualities in the Taylorist approach, he accepted its embedded productivist premise of efficiency. Much like Bellamy’s vision, Veblen’s social justice was inextricable from material affluence that only full economic efficiency could create. Scant political sketches and his abhorrence of the Bolshevik regime leave us in the dark about how exactly Veblen thought that society should be organized. It is clear, however, that the similarities between scientific management and Veblen suggest a common objective for making a society based on rationally organized production and the placement of ‘engineers’ and experts at the center of socio-political nomenclature, which were equally the starting points of the technocracy movement. This also points to their shared non-conformism. Institutional economics was an attempt to navigate between laissez-faire liberalism (which had found new expression in neoclassical economics) and socialist collectivism. This non-conformism, however parched and parceled, would lead to popular support for technocracy in the ensuing decades.

3. The rise and fall of Howard Scott’s technocracy movement

Howard Scott’s story reads like a Victorian novel. A mysterious man appears about the town. His charisma rattles the town. The man turns out to be a fraud. He disappears. Howard Scott ‘suddenly appeared’ in Greenwich Village, New York City, in 1918. Contemporary accounts described him as ‘a mysterious young man’ (Time Magazine, 26 December 1932). There were rumors: a star running-back at Notre Dame, a graduate of the University of Berlin or schools in Europe and British Isles, a family fortune in ‘Constantinople,’ important engineering jobs for German and Canadian chemical companies, and a ‘most unusual combination of practical engineer and master of all physical science’ (Akin 1977). What is confirmed about his life up to his migration to New York, however, is spotty. During World War I, Scott had worked for the Air Nitrates Company and its ill-fated Muscle Shoals chemical plant and hydro-electric dam; he had also run a small business of paints and thinners in New Jersey (Raymond 1933). He settled right into the Greenwich Village postwar bohemian culture.

His rise in the newly-formed technocracy movement was a product of historical contingencies. The wartime rationing and planning experience prepared the stage for engineers and technocratic ideas. As the most celebrated spokesperson for such engineers, Hebert Hoover (1920) called for technocratic management of society and central, nationalized control over essential industries: ‘the time has arrived in our national development when we must have a definite national program in the development of our great engineering problem. Our rail and water supplies for irrigation, our reclamation, the provision of future fuel resources, all cry out for some broad-visioned national guidance’ (318). The total war experiences of rationing, rationalization, and partial nationalization of production not only brought out what Geyer (1989) called ‘the militarization society,’ but also proved the efficiency of such management. The actual wartime experience of engineers also informed them of their own capacity, echoing Veblen’s technocratic vision.

This euphoric utopian atmosphere culminated in the founding of the Technical Alliance in 1919. During the war, Veblen had been one of the economic advisors for the peace settlement and then an administrator at the U.S. Food Administration (Edgell 2001, 26). He moved to New York City in 1918 for the founding of the New School for Social Research, which was when Scott befriended Veblen. Scott became a regular at Veblen’s famous ‘think’ sessions and garnered instant respect from him (Akin 1977, 30–1). A circle of intellectuals around Veblen, including economists Stuart Chase and Leland Olds, architect Frederick Ackerman, electrical engineer Charles Steinmetz, physicist Richard Tomlan and others, also participated in the Technical Alliance.

Through the Alliance, Scott wanted to build a research center that would launch a nationwide quantitative survey to determine the technological standing of industry and energy sources. Veblen agreed on the validity of the project itself because the project aimed at empirically establishing the ideas of sabotage and ‘conspicuous waste’ he had been professing. However, Veblen and his inner circle were not entirely happy with the benign, research-oriented direction of the Alliance, because they wanted ‘a soviet of technicians’ to be a more politically active vehicle for social reforms. A fallout occurred in 1921, when the executive committee, composed of mostly Veblen’s followers, called for Scott’s effective resignation. Scott’s refusal marked the end of the short-lived experiment (Chase 1921: 67–8). Splinter groups were formed by Veblen’s circle, like Chase’s Labor Research Bureau. Scott returned to his bohemian lifestyle.

Scott reemerged, however, in the early 1930s, as his old work site, Muscle Shoals, was about to be transformed by the Tennessee Valley Authority. This reemergence had both historical and personal dimensions. Historically, the Great Depression and the subsequent New Deal led to renewed interest in non-conformist, technocratic thinking. Veblen, who died in 1929 in obscurity, suddenly became ‘the patron saint of the New Deal’ (Ekirch 1969, 67–70; Markowitz 1973, 12). Veblen’s impact on actual New Dealers is a point of contestation, though Henry Wallace, Mordecai Ezekiel, and Rexford Tugwell, three architects of the New Deal agricultural policies at the Department of Agriculture, were certainly Veblenites (Tillman 1988).

More broadly conceived, the New Deal was not a unique event in the global context. The wartime experience had left indelible marks on many nations and reoriented their politico-economic directions. As a result, as Lampland (2001) has convincingly shown, state-directed planning became a global phenomenon, especially with the Great Depression. This global planning tendency sparked a breeding ground for what Brick (2006) succinctly analyzed as an aspiring post-capitalist vision in transatlantic dialogue that encompassed European Marxism, socialism, associationism in the pluralist tradition, institutionalism, and technocracy (cf. Ramírez 2012). A new political, economic, and social vision seemed inevitable. Scott’s technocratic dream was ripe for the picking.

Scott’s personal fortune had improved as well. Since his break with the Veblen circle, Scott approached Marion King Hubbert (1890–1970) and Walter Rautenstrauch (1880–1951), both engineers at Columbia University. Rautenstrauch was an efficiency engineer and a follower of Gantt’s New Machine, who coined the term, ‘break-even point,’ while Hubbert was a respected geologist and an energy expert. Their support translated into institutional support from the Department of Industrial Engineering at Columbia, which enhanced Scott’s finances and reputation. Together they formed the Committee on Technocracy in 1932. Initially Rautenstrauch was enthusiastic about the project, ‘hop[ing] to suggest a design of society in which class struggle is impossible, and to discover those principles upon which public enterprise may be founded’ (Rautenstrauch 1933, 150, reprinted from; Meiksins 2000, 511).

Just like 10 years before at the Technical Alliance, Scott envisioned a great national survey, this time entitled ‘Energy Survey of North America’ with the purpose of charting the national energy consumption. This relatively new take was based on Scott’s ([1933]1936) belief that greatly enhanced productivity had

been made possible by the finding of methods of generating energy other than that of human toil and through the development of a concomitant technology … [B]ut by the application of technology we now have reached the point where more goods are produced by increasing the total amount energy consumed and decreasing the energy per unit produced—the process automatically resulting in a decrease of the amount of human labor required.

(19)

In other words, the increased productivity necessarily created decreased employment and increased energy consumption. Coupled with population growth and the ‘Price System,’ a pecuniary reassessment of the physical units of society were called for. For ‘[m]en of physical science who state in no uncertain terms that bolshevism, communism, fascism and democracy are utterly impotent to deal with the advanced technological situation’ (Ibid.: 27).

Scott’s non-conformist radicalism, on top of his erratic behavior and spotty past, eventually irritated Rautenstrauch. He broke away from the Committee, effectively disbanding it. However, this time, the technocratic movement had already grown too big and popular. Two major splinter organizations were formed: Scott and Hubbert’s Technocracy Inc. and Harold Loeb’s Continental Committee on Technocracy.¹ Technocracy Inc. was still successful in scoring members – Scott claimed half a million members in California alone in 1934, though this claim is unsubstantiated – and media attention was overwhelming. In the New York Times, during the three months spanning from December 1932 to February 1933, more than 100 news articles that dealt with the technocracy movement appeared in some capacity. The technocracy craze also brought about a backlash. Questions about Scott’s unproven past started haunting him and political suspicions about the subversive nature of the movement were raised. When Scott directly spoke to the media on 13 January 1933, in the so-called Hotel Pierre Address, it was nationally broadcasted and widely considered a disaster because of how Scott rambled on and threw out uncorroborated numbers. The American Engineering Council, an influential body of engineers, issued statements condemning the technocracy movement as ‘the cleverest pseudo-scientific hoax yet perpetrated’ and the media decidedly turned against the movement (Times, 23 January 1933).

This setback did not mark the end of the movement. As a popular movement, Technocracy Inc. grew throughout 1930s. The movement shifted westward, making Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and Vancouver active centers of the movement. Political persecution – real or imagined – and media rebukes only made the group hardened and secretive to the point of a pseudo-religion. Gray uniforms were adopted, as well as an official salute to the Chief Engineer, Howard Scott. It also developed its own lexicon and icons, calling its adherents Technates and employing the Monad, a tai-chi like symbol, as the movement’s emblem. These cult-like and even authoritarian trappings further alienated the public. In response to declining membership in the 1940s, Technocracy Inc. pulled one final publicity stunt: a huge motorcade from California to Vancouver, dubbed ‘Operation Columbia,’ on 1 July 1947, which did not have the desired popular reaction. While Technocracy Inc. still operates a website and internet archive to this day, it died as a movement after this media stunt.

4. Technocratic dreams: productivism and its limit

Extracting meaningful historical implications from Howard Scott’s technocracy movement is made difficult by the absurdity of the later phase of the movement. At best, it is understood as a utopian millennialist movement with a misplaced focus and simplistic premises; at worst, it was an obvious power scheme, a pseudo-religion, or even proto-fascism. In this regard, Layton’s ([1971]1986) influential account has been decisive. Layton characterized the overall engineers’ fin-de-siècle movement to redefine and elevate their place in society as ‘the revolt of engineers,’ but reduced Scott’s technocracy movement to ‘a grotesque parody’ (228). Layton’s assessment posited engineers against business interests as a method of interpreting dissident elite engineers. Whether this assessment is unilaterally applicable to the technocracy movement is questionable. As the second section of this article demonstrated, the central issue that continued from institutional economics and scientific management to the technocracy movement was how to combine technical expertise with the reorganization of society beyond the animosity of business interests. While it did share a common social critique with the revolt of engineers, the technocracy movement attempted to shift the battlefront to an overhaul of the social system.

Therefore, even if a parodic nature of the movement were to be admitted, it would be important to identify what exactly it was a parody of. It was not so much an extension of the reformist engineer movement as that of non-conformism in the interwar period. Exactly defining non-conformism is almost impossible, because it took non-conformity rather than substantive, identifiable content as its defining character. However, it would be safe to say that non-conformism and the technocracy movement both tried to navigate between capitalism and socialism. Scott constantly borrowed from Veblen the delimitations of the capitalist ‘Price System,’ denouncing it as ‘that order of non-sense,’ while ‘all philosophic approaches to social phenomena, from Plato to – and including – Marx, must functionally be avoided.’ While the apparent absence of a concrete alternative political program to execute this balancing act was certainly its weakness, the ultimate goal of the movement was to eradicate both politics and the economy as viable spheres of action: ‘no political method of arriving at social decisions is adequate in continental areas under technological control, for the scientific technique of decision arrivation [sic] has no political antecedents’ (Scott [1933]1936, 23, 34, 35).

How to assess the technocracy movement in relation to 1930s non-conformism in general is not a simple question, because it was a transatlantic phenomenon. Many European states, including France, Germany, and Italy experienced some combination of non-conformist politics and technical expertism. France imported Taylorism fairly early in the form of fayolism and developed a strong technocratic movement that remained influential during the Vichy regime and beyond (Amzalak 2011; Dard 1995). Nazi Germany and fascist Italy also exhibited technocratic leanings in their respective early phases, though their political vitalism effectively won out over any technical expertism (Maier 1970; cf.; Herf 1984; Nolan 1994; Guse 2010). This widespread, global technocratic movement was connected to the common political crisis of the era, wrought by the limitations of nineteenth century capitalism/democracy on the one hand and socialism on the other. It also spoke to the almost inevitable permeation of expert knowledge in the political and policy-making process.

However, a simplistic extension of this interpretation of European non-conformism might be detrimental to the understanding of Scott’s technocracy movement. For instance, the interpretation of European non-conformism was heavily influenced by Sternhell (1983)’s study, definitively connecting European non-conformism and, by extension, technocracy, to fascism. Sternhell’s thesis, in addition to being problematically teleological, does not accurately capture the intellectual landscape of Scott’s technocracy movement. As discussed in the second section, American non-conformism as represented by Veblen and scientific management was mediated by the deeply embedded idea of material affluence. While the productivist vision itself was shared across the Atlantic, the particularly American premise of material affluence was not. Therefore, Scott’s technocracy movement became a parody more of 1930s non-conformism than of the progressive engineer movement. It was a parody mainly because its deep-seated premise collided with the possible politico-economic vision of non-conformity. Conversely, this character also hindered the movement from becoming a proto-fascist movement, because its focus on the rational organization of production lacked the political, ethnic, or nationalist fervor required for fascism. Scott’s technocracy movement thus remained a fragmented parody of interwar non-conformism, never fully engaged with the socio-political crisis it was supposedly responding to.

This fragmentation was manifest in the central agenda of the movement as well, especially when the idea of the reorganization of society based on energy tabulation became emphasized in the later phase of the technocracy movement. This reorganization was, Scott argued, necessary because of a double crisis inevitable in the capitalist system: the physical limitation of resources and the saturation of consumption (Scott and Hubbert [1934]1945, 143). According to him, an ‘inevitable inflection point’ of production had already occurred around 1915, while the Great Depression and its ensuing unemployment were symptoms of decreasing consumption (Scott and Hubbert [1934]1945: 118). This double crisis would be detrimental to the maintenance of efficiency and could not be resolved easily. On the one hand, rising unemployment was irreversible, especially in the long term, because ‘as industrial production began to level off with no corresponding slackening in the increase of mechanization, there came a time when jobs were eliminated by labor-saving machinery faster than they were created by expansion of old, or the creation of new industries,’ which resulted in an ‘ever-increasing disparity of income’ (Scott and Hubbert [1934]1945: 147). Therefore, the old regime, based on a capital-labor relationship, would become unsustainable. On the other hand, energy, the ultimate resource of production, was wasted by being improperly deployed by the inefficient organization of society under the ‘Price System,’ hindering production’s ability to reach maximum productivity (Scott and Hubbert [1934]1945: 179).

For Scott, this double crisis required a total reorganization of society. By converting from the ‘Price System,’ based on money, to ‘high-energy social mechanism,’ based on energy tabulation, society might achieve ‘a high physical standard of living’ and ‘a minimum of wastage of non-replaceable resources.’ Scott expanded this idea into a universal basic income in the form of energy, the ‘energy certificate.’ This utopian idea is predicated on the proposition that, when – not if – the increase of productivity through scientific management and social reorganization reached a certain level, scarcity of goods would hardly be a problem, making scarcity of energy the only problem remaining in society. A fixed number of energy certificates would be issued to each person, who in turn could use them as a personal currency for buying goods and services that were also priced in accordance with their energy use (Scott and Hubbert [1934]1945: 238–240). What is noteworthy about Scott’s idea of energy certificates is that the focus was not so much on social welfare benefits as on the exact tabulation of energy flow to enable technocratic intervention. In other words, the focus was not so much on providing basic income but on overhauling the system of production, distribution, and consumption in accordance with true global scarcity, that of energy.

However, this energy-based reorganization of society was ultimately fragmented and contradictory. While the idea called for a careful approach to the nature of economic growth engendered by efficiency, Scott remained a productivist. His principal collaborator, Marion Hubbert, went back to the Shell Corporation as a geologist and a petroleum expert. Continuing the technocratic idea of energy tabulation, he proposed the Hubbert Peak Theory in 1956, which argued that the energy production in a given geographical region would follow a bell shaped-curve (Hubbert 1956). Hubbert’s theory ultimately suggested that there would be the limits to growth based on nonrenewable energy sources. Though the idea of energy tabulation embodied this inherent limit to growth, Scott’s ultimately productivist goal prevented this pioneering insight from developing into full-fledged ecological thinking or a critique of the eternal development myth. Scott’s preoccupation with efficiency – regardless of the accuracy of his understanding – prevented him from questioning the very need for economic growth or the pursuit of efficiency, even though his own analysis implied that a scarcity of energy would hinder development.

Finally, any assessment of the technocracy movement depends on the extent to which its ideas permeated social practices. Many industrial experts who had participated in the technocracy movement entered the ranks of America’s widening technocratic regime before, during, and after the Second World War. For instance, Hubbert was hired as a senior analyst at the Board of Economic Warfare, a principal wartime rationing body, although his connection to Technocracy Inc. partially contributed to his quick dismissal. However, as Layton ([1971]1986) and Meiksins (2000) have observed, it is also true that most established engineers and their organizations did not accept the technocracy movement as part of their social vision. The failure to secure support from the very engineers the movement was supposed to empower eroded its coherence and political impact. As a result, the successive period, characterized by the New Deal, the wartime mobilization, and the Cold War, only selectively appropriated the ideas of technocracy, which, of course, did not exclusively originate with the movement.

Moreover, the nation-state’s broadening sphere of action was often buttressed by financial expansion and fiscal policies, making technical expertise only complementary. Technocrats that became germane to the postwar nation-states were not socially-conscious engineers with broad visions for social reorganization but experts on fragmented parts of production and knowledge. Scott’s technocratic dream was unrealized, fragmented, and appropriated, appearing as only a symptom of or even, the Other, to democracy. In this regard, the technocracy movement ultimately failed, not only because of its shortcomings but also because of its functional fragmentation. In this sense, maintaining productivism as an end rather than as a means to an end was the most fundamental limitation of the movement and of Scott’s thinking. While its preoccupation with efficiency was widely shared, albeit in different incarnations, by the latter half of the twentieth century, the movement itself was not able to survive.

5. Conclusion

Key tenets of the technocracy movement might seem to have survived in fragmented forms. While the complete rule of engineers over all areas of society did not materialize, technocratic expertism has crept into every aspect of national policy and decision-making. The prediction that further mechanization would threaten labor in both quantity and quality is coming true. The idea of energy accounting is also particularly resonant today, since environmental concerns finally raise effective objections to the idea of eternal growth. While crediting the technocracy movement with being the origin of these phenomena would be a wild exaggeration, it retains a certain level of credibility and incites the need for careful re-reading. It must be noted that one big obstacle for further study of the movement is the deficiency of credible sources. While the movement is still technically operating and runs its own internet archive, the credibility of the sources is questionable and the accessible materials are highly selective. Any further study of the movement would require an archival breakthrough.

The survival of their ideas in fragmented forms resulted in the death of the movement as a popular political force. The technocracy movement in its own way captured and synthesized a strand of non-conformism up to the 1930s, when the liberal-authoritarian or capitalist-communist dichotomy, along a neat linear spectrum, was taken for granted. The Cold War constellation of politics and economics made the technocracy movement obsolete, even though some of its ideas were very much internalized. Moreover, as a strand of non-conformism, the technocracy movement had a fatal weakness, besides its poor organizational skills: it never doubted the premise of material affluence attainable by technological advances. In fact, it was predicated on the possibility of such an idea. Even when it accidentally reached the conclusion that there are limits to growth, its productivist goal was never put to question and overrode the seemingly inevitable ecological conclusion. This productivist limitation was the reason for both its marginal success and ultimate failure: this productivist preoccupation was the very premise of political, economic, and social institutions in the postwar period that had internalized the technocratic vision, although this vision cannot be validated by its own logic.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2022S1A5C2A02090776].

Notes on contributors

Kyunghwan Oh

Kyunghwan Oh is a professor in the Department of History at Sungshin University in Seoul, Korea. Trained as a modern European historian specializing in nineteenth and twentieth century France at the University of Chicago, his interests now include broader historiographical questions, transnational history, and intellectual history. He is currently working on the history of development economics and technocracy in a global context.

Notes

1. Harold Loeb was one of the eminent ‘Americans in Paris’ in the 1920s. Himself a writer, Loeb was the publisher and editor of the influential literary magazine, Broom. He met Scott in 1919 in New York and, by his account, was christened in technocratic ideas, which was only strengthened by his return to New York in 1930. His break with Scott is not explained, except for Beverly Burris’ unsatisfying argument that Loeb was more humanistic than Scott. See Loeb (1933); Burris (1993, 28–9).