The Technocratic Image and the Theory of Technocracy

In recent years there has been growing concern about technocracy as a both in modern industrial societies and in developing or Third World countries. However, students have confronted a difficulty in studying technocracy: the analysis of the phenomenon, the definition of the problem, and the prescription of remedies have been both informed and constrained by variations of an image that has a long history in Western thought. There has been not so much a shortage of empirical information as an absence of adequate conceptual connections between the technocratic image and political facts. In general, technocracy has been taken to mean the government (or control) of society by scientists, technicians, or engineers-or at least the exercise of political authority by virtue of technical competence and expertise in the application of knowledge. But the technocratic image has been Janus-faced. Technocracy has often been associated with a utopian social vision, yet it has also been regarded as a political pathology. Since World War II, there has been an increasing tendency to approach the analysis of technocracy from the latter perspective, and it is this view of it as a problem which is the principal concern of this essay. The first section briefly traces the general contours of the technocratic image. The second section offers a typology and critical analysis of recent theories of technocracy, and the third examines the classic political ideal that seems, at least tacitly, to inform most critiques of technocracy. The final section presents two distinct but related theses. First, the philosophy that underlay the founding of the American republic embodied the belief that it was possible to create, through political artifice, an institutional surrogate for the classic ideal. The Founding Fathers expressed a faith in the possibilities of a political technology and the complementarity of technology and popular gov-