The invention of technocracy

The term technocracy was coined just after the First World War by the mechanical engineer William Henry Smyth. Born in Birkenhead, close to Liverpool, Smyth had emigrated to the United States in 1872 and spent most of his career practising as a consulting engineer in Berkeley, patenting devices such as a steam beer fountain, a racing boat oar and high-speed tractor. Smyth also wrote a number of contributions to the Berkeley Daily Gazette, which were later compiled by the University of California and published under the title Technocracy: First, Second and Third Series (1921). Smyth's basic claim in his founding technocratic manifesto is that the national direction and control of the economy during the recently concluded war had pioneered a new idea in the ancient art of government. Indeed, the management of the nation's productive forces under the ‘period of national stress’ during the war had amounted to a form of government with ‘no precedence in human experience’, due to ‘the fact that we rationally organized our National Industrial Management. We became, for the time being, a real Industrial Nation’ (Smyth, 1921: 13). For this unique experiment in government, Smyth goes on to state, ‘I have coined the term Technocracy’ (1921: 13).

Destructive as the war had been, management of the wartime economy had also led to the creation of various federal agencies in charge of production planning and distribution of munitions, food and fuel, near-complete mobilization of the workforce, new taxes, war bonds, comprehensive propaganda efforts and so on. Most importantly, engineers, inventors and scientists had been systematically involved in the efforts to direct the wartime economy. Building on these experiences, Smyth saw the conclusion of the war as a historical window of opportunity for a ‘revolutionary’ transition to national industrial management with the aid of ‘our scientists, our technologists, our exceptionally skilled; let us commandeer, conscript, enlist, their loyalty, their devotion, their enthusiasm, their intelligence, their interests, their talents, their accomplishments for purposes of Peace and the realization of Noble National Purpose’ (Smyth, 1921: 14).