Technocracy

Based on Technocracy

In 1986, eighty-nine percent of the Soviet Politburo—the supreme policy-making body of the world's largest communist state—were engineers. Not politicians who had studied engineering briefly before pivoting to law or public relations, but actual trained engineers who had spent years learning to solve problems with equations, blueprints, and empirical data. This wasn't an accident. It was the logical endpoint of an idea that has tempted reformers for over two centuries: what if we replaced the messy theater of democracy with the clean precision of expertise?

This is technocracy—governance by technical specialists rather than elected representatives or popular mandate. The word itself comes from two Greek roots: tekhne, meaning skill or craft, and kratos, meaning power or rule. Put them together and you get something like "rule by the skilled." A California engineer named William Henry Smyth is usually credited with coining the term in 1919, when he described it as "the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers."

Notice that phrasing carefully. Smyth didn't imagine technocracy as replacing democracy—he saw it as making democracy work better. The scientists and engineers were servants, not masters. But as the twentieth century unfolded, that distinction would blur considerably.

The Dream of Scientific Government

The appeal of technocracy is seductively simple. Politicians, the argument goes, are generalists at best and charlatans at worst. They win elections through charisma, tribal loyalty, or simply promising things they cannot deliver. They make decisions based on what sounds good in a thirty-second campaign advertisement rather than what the evidence actually supports. Surely there must be a better way?

Technocracy offers an answer: put the experts in charge. Let doctors run health policy. Let economists manage the treasury. Let engineers design infrastructure. Let climate scientists direct environmental regulation. Remove the middlemen—the politicians who translate expert recommendations through the distorting lens of electoral incentives—and govern directly through knowledge.

This vision predates the term itself. In the early nineteenth century, the French thinker Henri de Saint-Simon imagined transforming the state from what he called "philosophical rule over men" into "a scientific administration of things." Notice that shift in framing. Under traditional governance, rulers exercise authority over people—commanding, persuading, coercing. Under Saint-Simon's vision, administrators would simply manage systems—organizing, optimizing, directing production processes according to scientific principles.

The sociologist Daniel Bell later summarized Saint-Simon's dream as "a system of planning and rational order in which society would specify its needs and organize the factors of production to achieve them." No ideology. No factions. No endless debates about values. Just clear-eyed analysis of what needs to be done and competent execution of how to do it.

Energy Certificates and the Technocracy Movement

The most ambitious attempt to implement these ideas came during the Great Depression, when an American movement briefly captured the public imagination with a radical proposal: abolish money entirely and replace it with energy certificates.

The movement's leaders, Howard Scott and Marion King Hubbert—the latter would later develop the influential theory of "peak oil"—founded Technocracy Incorporated in 1932. Their diagnosis was stark: the economic catastrophe engulfing America wasn't a temporary downturn but a fundamental failure of the price system itself. Money, they argued, was an irrational unit of measurement for an industrial civilization. What mattered was energy—the actual physical capacity to do work.

Their solution was breathtakingly comprehensive. Replace the dollar with energy certificates denominated in ergs or joules (units measuring work and energy). Calculate the total energy available to North America. Distribute certificates equally among the population. Let "apolitical, rational engineers" manage the economy as a thermodynamic system, balancing production against consumption like a carefully calibrated machine.

For a brief moment in the early 1930s, this vision captured significant attention. Here was a response to the Depression that didn't ask people to choose between capitalism and communism—it promised to transcend that debate entirely through scientific management. But by the mid-1930s, the movement had faded. Historians have debated why. Some point to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which offered a more politically palatable response to the crisis. Others, like the historian William Akin, argue that the technocrats simply failed to develop "a viable political theory for achieving change." They could describe the world they wanted but couldn't explain how to get there without the very political processes they hoped to replace.

Actually Existing Technocracy

While the American technocracy movement collapsed into irrelevance, technocratic governance quietly flourished elsewhere—not as a revolutionary replacement for democracy but as a persistent tendency within existing systems.

Consider China. For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has been dominated by leaders with technical backgrounds, particularly engineering. Surveys of major Chinese cities have found that over eighty percent of government personnel possess technical education. This wasn't mere credentialism. Under successive five-year plans, these technically trained officials oversaw genuinely remarkable infrastructure projects: the National Trunk Highway System, the world's largest high-speed rail network, the Three Gorges Dam. Whatever else one might say about the Chinese system, it has proven capable of executing complex engineering projects at a scale and speed that democratic societies often struggle to match.

The European Union offers a different model. A 2013 briefing from the EU's own library described the European Commission—the executive arm of the Union—as a "technocratic authority" holding a "legislative monopoly." The briefing suggested this arrangement was "originally rooted in the mistrust of the political process in post-war Europe." After the catastrophes of nationalism and ideological extremism, the founders of European integration deliberately insulated certain decisions from popular passions.

Italy has repeatedly turned to technocratic governments during moments of crisis. The most prominent example came in 2011, when economist Mario Monti was appointed to lead a cabinet of unelected professionals after the country's borrowing costs spiked dangerously during the European debt crisis. Greece similarly installed the economist Lucas Papademos as prime minister during its own debt crisis. These weren't coups—they were emergency measures endorsed by elected parliaments. But they revealed something important about the limits of technocratic legitimacy: these governments were treated as temporary, necessary evils rather than superior alternatives to democratic politics.

Singapore: The Model Technocracy?

If you want to see technocracy working—really working, not as an emergency measure but as a governing philosophy—the usual example cited is Singapore.

The city-state at the tip of the Malay Peninsula has been called "perhaps the best advertisement for technocracy." Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has been governed continuously by a single party that has merged political and technical authority more thoroughly than almost anywhere else on Earth. The political and expert components of governance, one observer noted, "seem to have merged completely."

The results speak for themselves, at least by certain metrics. Singapore transformed from a poor, resource-starved island to one of the world's wealthiest societies within a single generation. Its infrastructure is legendarily efficient. Its bureaucracy consistently ranks among the least corrupt in the world. Crime is minimal. The trains run on time.

But Singapore also illustrates the trade-offs technocracy demands. Political opposition is technically legal but practically marginalized. Press freedom is constrained. The government exercises extensive control over public discourse. For technocracy's defenders, these are acceptable costs for effective governance. For its critics, they reveal something troubling about the technocratic vision: the same logic that says "trust the experts on economic policy" can easily extend to "trust the experts to decide what you should be allowed to say."

The Philosopher-King Problem

The tension at the heart of technocracy is actually quite old. Over two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato proposed a solution to the problem of governance: let philosophers rule. His reasoning was straightforward. Most people are governed by their appetites and passions. Only philosophers—those who have devoted their lives to understanding the Good—possess the knowledge necessary to guide society toward genuine flourishing. Why trust important decisions to the ignorant masses when those who truly understand could rule instead?

This is technocracy in its most ancient form. Plato's philosopher-kings differed from modern technocrats in their area of expertise—wisdom about the Good rather than scientific or engineering knowledge—but the underlying logic is identical. Certain people know better. Those people should be in charge.

The problem, which Plato's critics identified immediately, is: who decides who the experts are? And who ensures they use their expertise for the common good rather than their own benefit?

In a democracy, accountability comes from elections. Leaders who fail can be removed by voters. But technocracy, by definition, insulates decision-makers from popular pressure. That's supposed to be the point—freeing experts to make correct decisions without worrying about what ignorant voters think. But it also means removing the primary mechanism by which leaders are held accountable.

The Technocratic Divide

Critics of technocracy have identified what they call a "technocratic divide"—a gap between governing bodies that employ technical expertise and ordinary citizens who want to participate in decisions affecting their lives. This isn't merely about citizens feeling excluded, though that's part of it. It's about a fundamental tension between two different theories of legitimate governance.

One theory says legitimacy comes from knowledge. Decisions are legitimate when they're correct—when they're based on the best available evidence and implemented by people who understand what they're doing. On this view, involving uninformed citizens in complex technical decisions is not democratic virtue but democratic failure, like letting passengers vote on the aircraft's flight path.

The other theory says legitimacy comes from consent. Decisions are legitimate when the people affected have meaningfully participated in making them, even if those decisions turn out to be suboptimal. On this view, excluding citizens from governance—even for their own good—is a form of tyranny, however benevolent.

The political scientist Matthew Cole, writing in 2022, identified two fundamental problems with technocracy. First, it creates "unjust concentrations of power," excluding citizens from policy-making while advantaging elites. Second, the concept itself is poorly defined—we tend to overestimate how much expertise actually helps in governing, because governance involves value judgments that no amount of technical training can resolve.

Consider a seemingly technical question: should we build a new highway? Engineers can tell you the optimal route, the construction costs, the traffic capacity, the environmental impact. But they cannot tell you whether the benefits outweigh the costs, because that depends on how you weigh competing values. Is convenience more important than preservation of a historic neighborhood? Is economic growth more important than carbon emissions? These are not technical questions with technical answers. They are political questions that democracies resolve through deliberation and compromise.

The New Technocrats

In the twenty-first century, the technocracy debate has acquired a new dimension: the rise of technology companies whose influence over daily life rivals that of governments.

In 1982, the political scientist John Gunnell wrote that "politics is increasingly subject to the influence of technological change." He identified three levels at which technology was reshaping governance. First, political power was gravitating toward technological elites. Second, technology itself was becoming "autonomous"—so complex that political structures could barely understand it, let alone control it. Third, technology was emerging as "a new legitimizing ideology," displacing older sources of authority like religion and nationalism.

Forty years later, Gunnell's warnings seem almost quaint in their modesty. Companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple—sometimes collectively called "Big Tech"—now exercise influence that earlier technocrats could only dream of. Facebook alone has more users than any nation has citizens. Its algorithms shape what billions of people see, read, and believe. Its decisions about content moderation—what speech is permitted and what is suppressed—affect public discourse more directly than most government policies.

Some critics see this as technocracy's true form in the modern era: not Soviet engineers managing central plans, but Silicon Valley executives managing information flows. The power isn't exercised through formal government authority but through control of the platforms where political life increasingly takes place. As one analysis put it, this is technocracy manifesting not as "an authoritarian nightmare of oppression and violence" but as an éminence grise—a hidden hand directing events from behind the scenes.

Smart Democracy: An Alternative?

Is there a way to capture technocracy's benefits—competent governance informed by expertise—while avoiding its dangers?

Some theorists have proposed what they call "smart democracy," which attempts to enlist the knowledge of ordinary citizens rather than excluding them from decision-making. The premise is that expertise isn't concentrated solely in credentialed professionals. Citizens possess local knowledge, lived experience, and practical wisdom that formal experts often lack. A transportation engineer might know the optimal road design, but a longtime resident knows which intersections are actually dangerous, which buses are always late, which sidewalks flood in heavy rain.

Smart democracy tries to structure deliberation so that different kinds of knowledge can inform decisions. Expert testimony matters, but so does public input. Technical analysis frames the options, but citizens help weigh the trade-offs. The goal is governance that is both informed and legitimate—not rule by experts but rule informed by expertise.

Whether this synthesis is achievable remains an open question. The technocratic temptation—the belief that if we could just get the right people in charge, politics would give way to administration—is perennial precisely because politics is so frustrating. Democracies are slow, messy, and often produce outcomes that experts find baffling or infuriating. The desire to transcend this messiness through expertise is understandable.

But the messiness may be the point. Democracy's inefficiency isn't a bug to be engineered away—it's a feature that prevents any single vision, however rational, from being imposed without consent. The question isn't whether experts know more than ordinary citizens. Often they do. The question is whether expertise alone confers the right to rule.

The Enduring Appeal

Technocracy keeps returning because the problems it addresses are real. Politicians often are ignorant. Democratic processes often do produce suboptimal outcomes. Complex technical challenges often do require specialized knowledge that voters lack. The fantasy of governance by competent experts solving problems through rational analysis isn't entirely fantasy—sometimes it's exactly what the situation demands.

The challenge is recognizing where technocratic methods are appropriate and where they aren't. Building a bridge requires engineers. Deciding whether to build a bridge requires politics. The first question has a right answer that expertise can identify. The second question involves competing values that no amount of expertise can resolve.

Perhaps the wisest approach is neither to embrace technocracy nor to reject it, but to remain perpetually suspicious of both experts and demagogues. Trust the engineer to design the bridge safely. Trust the economist to explain the trade-offs of different policies. But never forget that the ultimate question—how should we live together?—is one that expertise alone cannot answer.

That question belongs to all of us.