A spectre, to butcher a famous sentence, is haunting the world – the spectre of technocracy. It haunts centrists, progressives and populists across much of the world. But even if they throw the label about ever-more liberally, they all disagree about whether our current systems can be described as technocracy – and, indeed, whether we should want them to be.
Even the Pope feels the shiver run down his spine. Invoking a phrase coined by his predecessor Pope Francis, Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas this May worries about the “technocratic paradigm in our globalised world”. But this spectre can also shape-shift. Michael Gove referred to “experts” working for “organisations with acronyms”. Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon is worried about “the administrative state” he wants to “deconstruct”. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, “globalist technocrats” loomed large on placards accusing Bill Gates of conspiring with the World Health Organisation.
We haven’t stopped talking about it since. A Spectator columnist warned her readers that we risked “sliding into” technocracy; the Atlantic, in an obituary for the technocrat-in-chief Alan Greenspan, concluded that “Americans don’t trust experienced technocrats anymore”. Mark Carney is a “technocrat extraordinaire”; Keir Starmer the “last of the technocrats”; while Tony Blair is working with a “council of technocrats” to govern Gaza. Recent elections that delivered defeats for populist parties have likewise brought us “technocratic government” in Romania and Hungary.
Yet the more we talk of technocracy, the murkier it gets. Who are the “technocrats” so easily railed at in political polemic? Depending on who you ask, it’s the civil service, central bankers, United Nations staff, or anyone who fits that common news headlines appellation, “experts say”. Who are the anti-technocrats? Once, it was the anti-World Trade Organisation (WTO) warriors of the Battle of Seattle in 1999; then it was Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Now it’s the right, in the form of populist nativism which supposedly leads the charge against a technocratic globalist elite. Our political mot du jour remains contested and slippery, a term without fixed properties, which can be invoked in tones of approbation, paranoia, analysis or fear.
The term “technocracy” is a relatively recent formulation. Combining the Greek tekhne, for “skill” or “craft”, with kratos, for “rule”, it literally means “rule by the skilled”. After the First World War, the British mechanical engineer William Henry Smyth was the first to use the term to refer to a type of government. In so doing, he tapped into a long lineage of political visions centred on science and technology. From Francis Bacon’s 1626 New Atlantis to Henri de Saint-Simon’s proposal for a “Newtonian council” after the French Revolution, hopes for rule by scientists have surfaced time and again. Saint-Simon’s 19th-century disciples turned to engineers and industrialists as harbingers of a harmonious future beyond politics. One of them, Michel Chevalier, envisioned a “Mediterranean system”: railways from Lyon to Constantinople; a tunnel from Calais to Dover; and an inter-oceanic canal at Suez that would dissolve strife among nations.
These sentiments have not been the preserve of any single political faction but have echoed across the political spectrum. Yet different camps did not endorse the same kind of technocratic politics. After Smyth deployed his new word for this type of rule, we lost an older distinction: between institutionalists and vanguardists. The former includes the founders of the first international organisations, such as the 1874 Universal Postal Union; early socialists like the Fourierists, Owenites and Fabians; and the civil engineers pioneering major infrastructure projects, from the 1825 Erie Canal to the 1882 Gotthard Tunnel. But others were more interested in sidestepping public accountability to empower a vanguard of capitalists. To them, the behemoth of bureaucracy was the great evil in the way of accelerating modernity. To get rid of those obstacles, they proposed rule by another kind of technocrat. This is what Ferdinand de Lesseps, director of the Suez Canal Company, did when he used an 1855 international commission of experts to approve a project that ultimately subjected the Suez peninsula to corporate-colonial company rule.
By the interwar period, the term “technocracy” had effectively blurred the line between these different positions. “Rule by the skilled” could be a synonym for the bureaucratic state – or for empowering the industrial vanguard of society. These are the two sides of the technocratic coin. One might think, as Marc Dunkelman argues in his recent book Why Nothing Works, that this is really about a long-standing struggle between a programme for individual freedom and one for centralised power. But such a framing overlooks an important difference between public and corporate interest – as well as the convergence of both sides in their hope for post-politics.
In the early 1930s, Smyth’s term inspired an American movement that perpetuated the confusion by way of its very name: Technocracy Inc. Its followers called for the creation of the “Technate”. The Technate – to span the Western Hemisphere and, curiously enough, Greenland – would be ruled by engineers and other technical experts. The group had a particular kind of technocracy in mind. Defining the term as “the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism”, they insisted that democracy had to be not improved but replaced by the rule of technicians. In such a post-political state, popular representation was no longer a part of the equation.
The progressive technocrat Thorstein Veblen, best known now for his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), was an intellectual inspiration for the movement. But in his 1921 proposal for a “Soviet of Technicians”, he had stressed that business people had to be excluded from technocratic power: people with “a businesslike view” were far too biased against anything that didn’t adhere to the logic of “commercial profit and loss”. The acolytes of Technocracy Inc (the “Inc” gives it away) didn’t see this as a problem. In the Technate, public contestation would be superfluous.
In the absence of a clear political project, the movement dissipated, while some of its members developed a taste for fascism – including Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman. And an altogether different technocratic project shaped up elsewhere, around the same time. On the other side of the Atlantic, “technocratic internationalists” – including a coordinator of the war effort Jean Monnet and the League of Nations economist Arthur Salter – refracted technocratic ideas through a pacifist and progressive lens to develop plans for what would become the European Union.
Rebuilding Europe after the war required the work of numerous experts, technocrats, bureaucrats and regulators, administrators, civil servants and scientists of all kinds to rebuild Europe’s institutions and infrastructures. This was a time of embracing institutional technocracy, not understood as rule without representation, but representative government with the indispensable support of specialists. State-building after 1945, in Europe but also across much of the newly decolonised world, was an exercise – however imperfect – in technocracy for the sake of democracy.
From the 1980s, this arrangement came under attack – an attack led not by fringe post-truthers, but by government itself. The neoliberal turn reactivated resentment against civil servants and international agencies as symbols of ineffectiveness. In 1988, Margaret Thatcher declared her pride in having “rolled back the frontiers of the state”, but also warned of “a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels”. Her fellow deregulator Ronald Reagan considered government “the problem, not the solution”. He understood the neoliberal project as a popular reaction against “arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind’s problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers’ dollars at them”. (Apparently, throwing private dollars at problems would be able to solve “all of mankind’s problems”.)
Parallel to this was a vibe-shift in world politics: anarchists and other left-wing activists began organising against the technocratic face of globalisation. UN agencies had been built more or less by scaling up the institutions of the modern civil service. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, frustration with their interventions mounted. The 1989 anti-austerity protests in Venezuela, for example, denounced the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s “neoliberal technocracy” in response to President Carlos Andrés Pérez’s shock-therapy policies.
Anti-technocracy remained a powerful force after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Grassroots movements in the early 2000s voiced important grievances: from the Seattle rallies against the WTO to youth riots across southern Europe during the eurozone crisis. “Don’t trust the technocrats,” declared the economist Joseph Stiglitz in 2003. IMF economists, he argued, speak in terms of Pareto efficiency and scientific evidence, but in reality, this merely obscured their ideologically motivated policy choices. This remark was especially powerful – if not without some irony – coming from a former World Bank chief economist.
These were important expressions of public discontentment with technocratic decision-making. But no organised political movement really seized that momentum, largely because no coherent vision animated it. What had united these protests was a dissatisfaction with procedure more than agreement about alternatives. As a kind of anti-institutionalism, it had mostly procedural objectives. And so the 2010s were marked by proposals for new modes of direct democracy: in the so-called post-ideological age, citizen councils and referendums became central.
Resentment never abated. Instead, it found other outlets: a referendum, no less, precisely the kind of grassroots instrument many anti-technocrats on the left had asked for. Brexit inaugurated a major framing shift: Leave’s campaign against unaccountable Brussels technocrats secured the critique of technocracy for the right. Ever since, technocracy has become a right-wing talking point for the likes of Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, Giorgia Meloni and the Trump administration. They blame technocratic globalists for anything from slow growth to the demise of Western civilisation. After 2016, the rhetoric went mainstream: Cummings waged war on the “blob”, Kemi Badenoch vowed to take on the “new bureaucratic class”, and even the European Commission has demanded “a deep regulatory housecleaning”.
By contrast with the anti-austerity movement of the 2000s, however, today’s anti-technocrats resemble the target of their critique. As a mishmash of Thatcherite libertarianism and Silicon Valley tech evangelism, with a side of deep-state conspiracy jargon, the vision advanced by the chainsaw-wielding, fossil-fuelled tech-maxxers of the 2020s is hardly less technocratic than its hated Other. What’s the real difference, then? It’s the nuances that the term “technocracy” obscured when it was first coined: between public institutions harnessing technical expertise; and a vanguard of tech entrepreneurs unburdened by auditing and paperwork.
Of course, Musk’s failed Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) and its emulators bear no resemblance to the US, EU or UN agencies they hate so deeply. But they condemn agencies in which unelected technicians decide the fate of society – more or less exactly what Musk did with Doge. One kind of technocracy is as much characterised by “invisible power” as the other. Only in one of the two does public opinion have a role to play, however.
According to Vivek Ramaswamy – another anti-woke billionaire and one-time would-be Doge doge, and the current nominee for governor of Ohio – the great confrontation today is “between the technocratic managerial class and the everyday citizen”. Ramaswamy is an anti-technocratic radical: he has vowed, for instance, to “gut” the US government’s Food and Drug Administration, dismantle its education department, and abolish the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The real intentions of these policies have little to do with “the everyday citizen”. The new anti-technocrats simply replace Veblen’s institutional technocracy with vanguardist technocracy. Government that’s “small” on the bureaucratic end, but huge on the executive. Government that puts technical solutions first: solutions designed, lobbied for, implemented and owned by Big Tech. Replacing the unaccountable power of the bureaucrat with the unaccountable power of the broligarch.
What these anti-technocrats espouse is not the opposite of technocracy but a variation of the same: a strong executive feeding on its own administration with the help of AI-powered lay-offs; industrial projects governed by tech tycoon patronage rather than public investment; and a privately determined public spending agenda. Call it Big-Tech-nocracy, or the final stage of privatisation.
Given the recent electoral success of this populist right across the world, it’s unsurprising that left-wing attempts are trending. The left critique of globalisation never disappeared entirely, living on in the work of thinkers like Wolfgang Streeck or Stiglitz. But the loudest anti-technocrats to the left of the centre are the so-called abundance liberals: a very American alliance of Big Tech donors, Yimbys and the American journalist Ezra Klein. This agenda, part of a bid for Democratic Party renewal, makes the case for deregulation with good intentions.
As Klein puts it, in words that could belong to Reagan or Thatcher or Blair, “Institutions are not the point of government – delivery is the point of government”. Abundancists (which revives the name of a French movement of technocrats from the 1930s) want to speed things up and lower the bureaucratic barriers that slow down high-speed rail and housing. But, at its most basic level, abundance flirts with unchecked executive power. And just like Doge, it reads like an elaborate expression of subliminal China envy. The same impulse led some to celebrate Singapore during the Covid-19 pandemic, or weigh the merits of authoritarian power for climate governance: the awesome ability to get stuff done.
Still, someone has to decide what stuff we want done. A “good Doge” may seem strategically timely, but it fails to deliver what Democrats and the Labour Party need most: a clear sense of the values to guide political choices. We’re back to square one: the spectre of technocracy haunting the anti-technocrats who mistake procedural reform for lasting political gains. They claim that speeding things up, based on a set of predetermined priorities (clean energy, housing, friendly AI, a colony on Mars), will get us “delivery”. But who determines these priorities in the first place? What counts as delivery? And why is strengthening decision-making power in pursuit of a billionaire-backed “build, baby, build” programme the answer to Maga?
Today’s anti-technocrats want to change how things get done, but also who’s doing them. Proposals for shrinking the administrative state are often accompanied by calls for attracting more private sector talent, as Dominic Cummings suggested just after blaming “Oxbridge English graduates” for all that’s not well with Whitehall. The demand is not overhaul so much as reshuffle: the answer to technocracy not being grassroots democracy, as left critics of technocracy like the late David Graeber insisted, but technocracy done by entrepreneurial “problem-solvers” rather than supposedly woke pencil pushers.
The vanguardist reaction is precisely the wrong impulse to drive a revival of progressive politics. It shies away from the main question: what do we want done more efficiently? Unemployment benefits? The switch to solar? Railways and hospitals? Spaceships? Elitist as they are, the new anti-technocrats downplay or outright antagonise popular support, deliberation and account.
Yes, we have reason to be upset with slow-moving institutions beset by self-preservation incentives, diffused responsibility and mission creep. And yes, the problems with technocratic politics are real and should be taken more seriously. But it’s easier to agree there’s a problem with “technocracy” than to identify what that problem is, exactly. If it’s “invisible power”, then perhaps strongman politics looks attractive. If it’s “centralised power”, then devolution and grassroots democracy may be the answer.
One thing connecting anti-technocrats from the Battle of Seattle to Brexit is a rejection of institutions that don’t respond to public demands and hide behind a technocratic veil of evidence-based problem-solving. But that rejection is no reason to give up on these institutions. Instead, the case for public institutions remains strong, for no matter how much better the “output” it amounts to little if we no longer listen to the “input”. This is what Veblen meant by “public purpose” as the conditio sine qua non of technocratic authority – and it’s where any defence of expertise, evidence-based policy or even repurposed institutional technocracy must drop its anchor.
[Further reading: Alt-right Islamo-fetishism]
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