Blackwell Reference Online

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The word ‘technocracy’ implies rule or government by technically qualified bureaucrats, administrators or managers based on either the separation between legal ownership and effective control or the claim that no-one has an ascribed right to a civil service position. It is because technocrats oversee and direct younger line and staff personnel with more recent technical training but less experience that their jobs are also highly ‘political’ wherever they are carried out. Technocracy also refers to the short-lived movement in the United States which reached its apogee between 1931 and 1933, based on the thinking of Thorstein Veblen, particularly his influential book of essays The Engineers and the Price System (1919). The word originated earlier in 1919 with W. H. Smyth, a follower of Veblen, after he read some of the essays that were to appear in this book. Smyth defined it as ‘the organization of the social order based on principles established by technical experts’, echoing the long tradition of French positivist thinking that begins with Saint Simon and includes Comte, Enfantin and the Ecole Polytechnique between 1815 and 1860. A major assumption of technocracy as Smyth defined it is that there exists a phenomenon called objective knowledge and that it can be grasped and applied directly to social, political and economic, as well as technical problems. Furthermore, technocrats ... log in or subscribe to read full text