The technocracy movement was a social movement active in the United States and Canada in the 1930s which favored technocracy as a system of government over representative democracy and partisan politics. Historians associate the movement with engineer Howard Scott's Technical Alliance and Technocracy Incorporated prior to the internal factionalism that dissolved the latter organization during the Second World War. Technocracy was ultimately overshadowed by other proposals for dealing with the crisis of the Great Depression. The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy. The movement did not fully aspire to scientocracy. The movement was committed to abstaining from all partisan politics and communist revolution. It gained strength in the 1930s. In 1940, due to opposition to the Second World War, it was banned in Canada. The ban was lifted in 1943 when it was apparent that "Technocracy Inc. was committed to the war effort, proposing a program of total conscription." The movement continued to expand during the remainder of the war, and new sections were formed in Ontario and the Maritime Provinces. The technocracy movement survived into the 21st century and, as of 2013, was continuing to publish a newsletter, maintain a website, and hold member meetings. The Technocracy, Inc. web site later had a post on it stating that the site was under renovation, under new ownership, announcing a "Transition Plan 2016", and an online meeting in April 2021. Smaller groups included the Technical Alliance, the New Machine, and the Utopian Society of America.
Overview Technocracy advocates contended that price system-based forms of government and economy are structurally incapable of effective action, and promoted a society headed by technical experts, which they argued would be more rational and productive. The coming of the Great Depression ushered in radically different ideas of social engineering, culminating in reforms introduced by the New Deal. By late 1932, various groups across the United States were calling themselves technocrats and proposing reforms. By the mid-1930s, interest in the technocracy movement was declining. Some historians have attributed the decline of the technocracy movement to the rise of Roosevelt's New Deal. Historian William E. Akin rejects that thesis arguing instead that the movement declined in the mid-1930s as a result of the failure of its proponents to devise a 'viable political theory for achieving change' (p. 111 Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900–1941 by William E. Akin), although many technocrats in the United States were sympathetic to the electoral efforts of anti-New Deal third parties.
One of the most widely circulated images in Technocracy Inc.'s promotional materials used the example of a streetcar to argue that engineering solutions will always succeed where legislation or fines fail to adequately deal with social problems. If passengers insist on riding on the car's dangerous outer platform, the solution consists in designing cars without platforms.
Origins The technocratic movement has its origins with the progressive engineers of the early twentieth century and the writings of Edward Bellamy, along with some of the later works of Thorstein Veblen such as The Engineers And The Price System written in 1921. William H. Smyth, a California engineer, invented the word technocracy in 1919 to describe "the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers", and in the 1920s it was used to describe the works of Thorstein Veblen. Early technocratic organizations formed after the First World War. These included Henry Gantt’s "The New Machine" and Veblen's "Soviet of Technicians". These organizations folded after a short time. Writers such as Henry Gantt, Thorstein Veblen, and Howard Scott suggested that businesspeople were incapable of reforming their industries in the public interest and that control of industry should thus be given to engineers.
Europe In Germany before the Second World War, a technocratic movement based on the American model introduced by Technocracy Incorporated existed, but ran afoul of the political system there. There was a Soviet movement, the early history of which resembled the North American one during the interwar period. One of its leading members was engineer Peter Palchinsky. Technocratic ideology was also promoted in the Engineer's Herald journal. The Soviet technocrats advanced the scientization of the economic development, management as well as industrial and organizational psychology under the slogan, "the future belongs to the managing-engineers and the engineering-managers". Those viewpoints were supported by leading Right Opposition members Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov. The promotion of an alternative view on the country's industrialization and the engineer's role in society incurred Joseph Stalin's wrath. Palchinsky was executed in 1929, and a year later leading Soviet engineers were accused of an anti-government conspiracy in the Industrial Party Trial. A large scale persecution of engineers followed, forcing them to focus on narrow technical issues assigned to them by communist party leaders. The concept of Tektology developed by Alexander Bogdanov, perhaps the most important of the non-Leninist Bolsheviks, bears some semblance to technocratic ideas. Both Bogdanov's fiction and his political writings, as presented by Zenovia Sochor, imply that he expected a coming revolution against capitalism to lead to a technocratic society.
United States and Canada
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