Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism: 1911-1939. - book reviews

Reason, Feb, 1995 by Brink Lindsey

WHATEVER DOES OR DOESN'T happen in the 104th Congress, the American welfare state faces a decidedly bleak future. It suffers a central and seemingly intractable problem: Fewer and fewer people believe in it anymore. Power without legitimacy can't be sustained indefinitely, and the welfare state's legitimacy appears to be in terminal decline. Unless that decline can be reversed, a substantial contraction in the size and scope of government is inevitable.

If you're a skeptic--if you think 1994's election may have been a fluke, if you doubt there has been a generation-long shift in the political culture away from big government--you ought to read John M. Jordan's Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism 1911-1939. This fresh and interesting examination of the origins and development of big government shows just how different things used to be.

Jordan, who teaches at Harvard, tells the story over three decades of the "rational reformers," otherwise known as technocrats or social engineers. Theirs was a particular strain of American liberalism, and a particularly influential one. They shaped the Progressive era in the 1900s and 1910s, the corporatist embrace of the "associative state" in the 1920s, and the New Deal in the 1930s. And while Jordan's narrative leaves off there, he acknowledges that the story continues: "In the indistinct but crucial realm of political culture, the engineering and managerial influence persisted well after World War II, finding its highest expression in the 1950s and 1960s...."

The rationalist visions of any era share certain key features--among them, according to Jordan, "fascination with scientific method, machine process, and large-scale managerial organizations as analogues for government." Equally characteristic is disdain in equal measure for market competition and democratic persuasion, since both are too messy and too unpredictable to fit in the social engineers' blueprints. Sound familiar, Mr. Magaziner?

Jordan traces the roots of this worldview back to the efficiency craze that took hold in the first generation of industrialization: "A discussion of the 'best and the brightest' of the Great Society must begin with what Taylorites called 'the one best way' in the first years of the century."

The preoccupation with efficiency, epitomized by Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management and its time-and-motion studies, produced rhetoric that sounds distinctly odd to contemporary ears. For instance, Louis Brandeis, who helped to popularize the term "scientific management" in his celebrated challenges to railroad rate increases, declared that "efficiency is the hope of democracy." Even more strangely, a 1913 article in System magazine characterized Teddy Roosevelt as "the most efficient human machine of our time."

MECHANISTIC METAPHORS WERE INEScapable in what was widely known as the Machine Age. Born into a technological, urban society, we take industrial culture for granted; for contemporaries, it was breathtakingly novel and disorienting. Unsurprisingly, many took their bearings from the most obvious characteristic of the times: the new mechanical marvels and the engineers who built them. "[The] engineering profession generally rises yearly in dignity and importance as the rest of the word learns more of where the real brains of industrial progress are," Herbert Hoover, known as the "Great Engineer," wrote in 1909. "The time will come when people will ask, not who paid for a thing, but who built it."

It was an easy next step to conclude that engineers and engineering principles were needed to transform not just business, but the whole of society. Charles P. Steinmetz, a well-known engineer with General Electric and an avowed socialist (he kept an autographed photo of Lenin in his G.E. laboratory), summed up the viewpoint in his 1916 book America 'and the New Epoch: "All that is necessary is to extend the methods of economic efficiency from the individual industrial corporation to the national organism as a whole."

This one idea--that the rationality of the factory, of the machine, could be extended to society generally--was the driving impulse of the rational reformers. Though technocrats are still with us, and their instincts are still the same, they are now on the intellectual defensive, and hence vague and evasive. Jordan provides the service of pulling together a wide variety of voices, famous and obscure, from a time when Hayek's fatal conceit was still conceited. Consider the following gems:

* Stuart Chase, journalist and author, writing in Harper's in 1931: "Plato once called for philosopher kings. To-day the greatest need in all the bewildered world is for philosopher engineers."

* George Soule, an editor of The New Republic, writing in that magazine in 1931: "As more and more people--both engineers and others--come to understand the inherent superiority of the engineering approach, the traditional business way of doing things is bound to lose its popularity."