Chapter 5
A Defence of Politics against Technology

There is a great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price. This idea may seem exceedingly abstract and general, but it is powerful and is the strong and deep root of many simple beliefs and of many elaborate doctrines. So far we have considered types of rule of which there are actual or would-be examples. These have offered, if not desirable alternatives to political rule, at least, in varying degrees, concrete proposals for action. But there is common to all of them, and is found even in free régimes, a set of highly abstract ideas, distinctively modern, seemingly inescapable, which can deeply undermine any belief in the political way of ordering society. Such ideas may be all too obviously in the interest of certain groups – it is their own certainty which they want to impose on others; but they may be pursued with the most elevated disinterestedness, simply because people hold them to be true – ‘they must be true because our whole modern world – is it not? – is built upon science.’

This section could almost as well be called ‘A Defence of Politics Against Science’ or ‘. . . Against Administration’. ‘Science’, ‘Technology’, ‘Administration’, will be understood by most of those actually engaged in such activities to have no necessary antipathy to politics. But to many they appear as related symbols, forming together a style of thought which, they imagine, could rescue mankind from the lack of certainty and the glut of compromises in politics. This belief may often be held in surprising ignorance of what is actually involved in such activities as science, technology, or administration; but it is none the less influential and convincing. Technology, however, is probably the keystone of all these imaginary constructions which seek to rehouse and redevelop mere politics. Technology creates the image of applying scientific knowledge to the administration of society. Many will talk about the benefits of science, when they in fact mean technology; many will talk as if administration should exist apart from politics, because they in fact believe that it is simply a matter of technique. Technology is, of course, simply the activity of applying scientific principles to the production of tools and goods – whether or not these principles are fully understood. But it has also become perverted into a social doctrine. ‘Technology’ holds that all the important problems facing human civilization are technical, and that therefore they are all soluble on the basis of existing knowledge or readily attainable knowledge – if sufficient resources are made available. This doctrine is very widespread. So powerful is it that it must seem to many, in Kharkov as well as Detroit, in Birmingham as well as Hankow, to be self-evident and completely obvious – instead of being something arbitrary, peculiar, and specific.

Now there are, it should be ungraciously admitted, some positions which one hesitates to attack because of the kind of allies attracted. Here is a defence of politics against ‘scientism’, not science; against technology as a doctrine, not as a practical activity. I have no desire to please that parochial British intelligentsia who give the genteel groan of agreement to any attack on science however sweeping and misplaced. Perhaps they take too seriously the claim of some anti-political doctrinaires to be ‘scientific’ (there is, as will be seen later, an element of mutual flattery between the doctrinaire and the traditionalist). The present argument could, in another context, be quite simply a defence of the scientific spirit against the hucksters, the manipulators and the doggedly fashionable who cover other aspirations, some quite proper and ordinary, by using the names of ‘science’ and ‘technology’ as magic incantations.

The rise of industrial technology led to a strengthening of the state – in order to regulate an urban, centralized society; and it led to a strengthening of demands on the state – in order to distribute more equitably the fruits of the technology; but it has also created this wholly new style of thought: ‘technology’ as a doctrine. Everything in society is seen as capable of rational manipulation if the techniques of power and production are understood. Indeed power and production are the same thing. A state maintains its power, argued Marx, so long as production expands. The modern state is simply the governing committee of the bourgeoisie; all power is economics and economics is production. The class that can expand production gains power, and for a class which acts as a restraint upon production, the writing is already on the wall, the foundations of its power have already collapsed. One of the symptoms of a declining social order is that its members have to give most of their time to politics, rather than to the real tasks of economic production, in an attempt to patch up the cracks already appearing from ‘the inner-contradictions’ of such a system. Politics is simply a product of those inner contradictions, or at the best a transitory device on the way to their final resolution. The whole state, then, to the ‘technologist’ is first seen as a factory producing goods for society. It is not seen as the protector of rights or the arbiter of differing interests, but as the producer of happiness – consumer goods. But even this is mild, liberal, and political to the true ‘technologist’ – a kind of Welfare State idea in which the state as servant does something for society as master. The complete concept of ‘technology’ is that of all society itself as one factory of which the state is manager. The factory is supposed to produce for the needs and happiness of the workers, and everyone is a worker (happiness being the superfluity of consumer goods over what is needed merely to survive); but it is known that nothing can be produced without the skill, direction, or permission of the manager. Things worth doing for their own sake, art, love, philosophy, indeed leisure itself as distinct from mere rest (the purpose of which, to Aristotle, was the activity of doing just those things), are irrelevant to production and therefore inefficient – unless propaganda for production controlled by the manager.

All civilizations, and the doctrines of government whose company they keep, create some image of the type of citizen they most need and value. The world of the Greek polis had the hero, the man of arete, the active ‘doer of deeds and speaker of words’ in the public realm; early Christianity had the humble, suffering, other-worldly man, the saint. Medieval Christendom had the knight and the priest, ideally fused as the crusader or the member of an order of knighthood. The English in modern times have been torn between the gentleman and the businessman, just as the Americans have between the common man and the businessman. The Nazis had their Aryan superman, and the Communists have their party man (sub-category, Stakhanovite worker). To those who see all industrial civilization as on the common path of ‘technology’, the typical citizen is the engineer. The engineer is to be the true hero-citizen of our times: he will rescue us from the dilemmas of politics and the pangs of hunger (and envy?) if ‘left alone to get on with his job’ free from, in various circumstances, the intrusions of the politicians, the businessmen, the bureaucrats, the generals, or the priests. The engineer is what every boy will want to be. The engineer is what every father will be ashamed of not being. The engineer is what society will strain itself to produce through the schools and colleges – and he will be trained, by accident or design, in a kind of aristocratic seclusion from, and contempt for, other types of education. The engineer will try to reduce all education to technique and training, and its object will be to produce social engineers to transform society into something radically more efficient and effective. The engineer is not interested in ordinary politics; he thinks in terms of invention and construction, not of maintenance and management. But he will naturally be attracted to doctrines which attack ‘mere politics’ and to régimes which have shown great technological advances and which have all-intrusive ideologies claiming to be scientific.

The vision is now an old one whose history does not concern us here. But its plausibility is enhanced by the fruits of modern technology: the vision that politics can be reduced to a science. By this is usually meant that there are laws of social and historical development which can be discovered and then should be observed, implemented, enforced on society. Such enforcing will be held to be no more than acting naturally at last: ‘freedom is the recognition of necessity’. Human societies have been unstable and full of conflict because, as it were, we have been trying to fly in the face of laws of social gravitation. ‘The only safety for democracy . . .’ wrote an American social scientist, James Shotwell, is to ‘apply scientific methods to the management of society as we have been learning to apply them in the natural world. . . . We are in the political sciences where the natural sciences were two hundred years ago.’ And such a common cry is itself still in the position of Saint-Simon in 1821 – exactly a hundred years before: ‘In the new political order . . . the decisions must be the result of scientific demonstrations totally independent of human will. . . . Under such an order we shall see the disappearance of the three main disadvantages of the present political system, that is, arbitrariness, incapacity, and intrigue.’ Now it will immediately be obvious, to be very simple, that if one fails to observe certain laws of physics, one falls flat on one’s face. But some of the promised laws of society must have been fairly often ‘broken’ – presumably without consequences quite as drastic as a Daedalus trying to fly and falling smashed to earth. What a science of society offers us, then, is not something necessary for society to survive at all, but necessary if there is to be complete ‘safety for democracy’ (or anything else), or no more ‘arbitrariness, incapacity, and intrigue’. Suppose the ‘arbitrariness’ which Saint-Simon hated to be no more than a product of diversity; ‘incapacity’ simply some sense of limitations; ‘intrigue’ no more than the conflict of differing interests in any even moderately free State; and suppose ‘safety’ to be only realizable – as in the world of Hobbes – by the surrender of freedom out of fear – then we have a characterization of politics itself, indeed a rather good one: the ‘scientists’ often at least knew what they were attacking more clearly than the politicians knew what they were defending. At heart what disturbs those hopeful for a science of politics is simply the element of conflict in ordinary politics; what excites them has been the prestige of science, its good reputation for – so it is thought – ‘unity’. Professor Harold Lasswell wrote in the article on ‘Conflict’ in the Chicago Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences of 1930: ‘Social conflict results from the conscious pursuit of exclusive values . . . the philosophy of compromise seems to concede in advance that there is no truly inclusive set of social aims. . . . It may be that the manipulation of collective opinion for the sake of raising the prestige of science will contribute towards this sense of unity of man with man.’ Such a scientifically manipulated unity might indeed get rid of conflict and freedom too.¹

The claim that politics can and should be reduced to a science is not as clear as it seems. To go no further – the ‘and should’ is essential to the claim, although it immediately introduces a moral or a political decision. It could be argued that politics can be made scientific, but then that it should not be; or it could be argued, more unlikely but possible, that it should be made scientific, but then the fact bewailed that it cannot. But, be this as it may, the claim can mean three rather different things. Science can be thought of as a body of laws which enable measurable predictions to be made; or it can be thought of as a common method to be pursued in the discovery of knowledge – irrespective of whether such laws exist in every sphere; or it can be thought of as simply a logic of verification: science is all true knowledge and truth is only what is testable by experiment or direct observation – whether or not there are laws or there is a method. These may seem to be very abstract matters – conceits of the colleges more than concerns of the caucuses. But they do correspond to some ordinary, tenaciously popular viewpoints. The first fulfils a very common desire for certainty about the future of which the many covert believers in astrology are amiable examples, and of which all single-truth men and ideologists, whether of the parlour or parade-ground variety, are less amiable examples. The second represents the pride of the engineers – again, everything is method or technique (and there is, strange view, a scientific method). The third represents the man who suffers from the abstract tyranny of the concrete fact – everything must be demonstrable by ‘the facts’ and always ‘the facts demand’ that some particular policy must be carried out.

This third ‘pseudo-scientist’, while the most abstract and the least original, is perhaps the most dangerous, for he is the follower who gives power to the lonely theorist or to the unequipped technocrat – he is the man who is impressed with the fact that the trains ran on time in Fascist Italy: ‘there’s a fact’ – and who has ‘no doubt at all’ that ‘the facts must show’ that free régimes are less efficient and less able to protect themselves than totalitarian societies. He is the person who is touched by Khruschchev’s recent praise of an ideology which ‘can be understood not only by the head but, so to speak, by the stomach and by one’s whole being to be a more progressive system than capitalism’. The Soviet Union will win, he argued, ‘not only by its possession of the most progressive and scientifically based theory, but also because of the ever-increasing material benefits of the people.’ A contrast so arbitrary and absurd in economic terms, between a capitalist system and a communist system, is what has to be swallowed by the man who is impressed ‘simply by the facts’. It may be a politically effective argument, but the ‘facts’ that are impressive are those of productivity, not of ideology.

Totalitarian ideologies are, in large part, a perversion of science. They could arise only in a scientific age, not because of the techniques of power hitherto lacking, but because the whole concept of remaking society utterly is a derivative from the idea of scientific law – applied to understanding society, and of a scientific method – applied to changing society. Ideology arises when science is thought of as the only type of human knowledge and is then misapplied to government in the name of some general theory of society. ‘For an ideology,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history or the solution for all the “riddles of the universe”.’ Ideologies then are essentially pseudoscientific; they claim to do for history and society what the physicists are doing for our understanding of nature and the engineers for productivity. Indeed an ideology fuses understanding and action completely: an ideology is always a plan for action. The ideologist is the scholar-scientist become the engineer-administrator. The ideologist is very proud that his theory is not based upon ethical considerations, but upon an objective factor. Two ‘objective factors’ alone, as we have said, seem to be proved sufficiently plausible, sufficiently pseudo-scientific to have emerged as offering total explanations in powerful hands: race struggle and class struggle, blood and economics. The claims of Marxism to be scientific are famous and, strangely, even when doubted, are not thought improper, monstrous, or inherently implausible. But the Nazi claim for the scientific status of racialism has seldom been taken as seriously, though it was a genuine pseudo-science, not ‘just’ propaganda. For propaganda is never effective if it does not touch deeply held, even if furtive and illicit, beliefs. Perhaps racialism is not given its pseudoscientific due because, like nationalism, it is a category that fits neither Marxist nor liberal-capitalist ideologies. But men have often acted against their economic interests under the spell of racialism. It was once, even or particularly in Great Britain, an orthodoxy of historical explanation, as well as the operating creed of nearly every agent of imperialism. The memory of its respectability is almost deliberately repressed; it is more comfortable to treat it as simply the politics of the gutter, rather than what one finds when one opens the dust-covered sets of histories of three generations ago. Tocqueville could write to Gobineau that his theories of race ‘are probably wrong and certainly pernicious’. But he did take them seriously as scientific hypothesis; for they were one of the dominant themes of nineteenth-century thought, one obvious and tempting way of linking the two new sciences of biology and sociology, of extending Darwin’s theories to politics.

Let us call such perversions of genuine scientific activity, all attempts to apply science beyond its own sphere, ‘scientism’. Scientism goes hand in hand with ideology in the size of their claims. A scientific law must apply to all instances of the thing treated as the object of generalization. A single contrary instance will refute a scientific theory. Totalitarian ideologies make claims to be the basis of a world order, to offer a comprehensive explanation of everything. They are nothing if they are not cast in uniquely large moulds. If the theory does not fit all circumstances, it is not true for any. The relativism of political theory is precisely what is wrong with it in the eyes of the ideologist. That one set of institutions may work better here than there, and that any form of politics at all may not be possible in all circumstances, these are damning admissions to the totalitarian. He is not interested in this kind of frustrating, piecemeal humility. He is not interested in understanding, but only in explanation. He has the scientific key to history and if he thinks in terms of immediate political issues at all, then they are simply tactics, indeed tactics of history, part of the grand strategy of the advance towards a fully rational world order. He is obsessed with size and with the beauty of universal generalizations. Even in fairly stable political régimes, such as Great Britain and the United States, one finds touches of this psychology among the academics and the young – people who are only interested in large issues. They have not yet embraced a comprehensive ideology, but they are rapidly deserting politics. These large issues are important issues – racial discrimination, the ‘bomb’, the ‘war on want’, ‘the problems (which?) of the underdeveloped areas’, the environment. But to be tackled at all, they must surely be tackled politically, simply because they are so large and call for so much coordination of effort and organization, and because they cannot, perhaps, all be realized at once. Many of the people who try to ride all these large issues at once say that they are bored and disgruntled with ordinary politics – though they have usually had little or no political experience themselves (demonstrations do not count); but whatever is said of politics by its actual practitioners, it is seldom called boring. Some politicians, indeed, are as little ashamed as some marchers of thinking the activity itself enjoyable. But those who lead the life of large issues only are never prepared to enjoy or even tolerate the present; like the ideologists, they attempt to live in the future and so prophecies, or the predictions of pseudo-science, play a great part in their lives. Always some huge catastrophe will occur unless you take my medicine quickly.

Scientism can also exist in free societies in the respectable disguise of academic social science. There are those who have no huge and elaborate programmes for the just society, unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, and who may, as they say, ‘qua citizen’, in their leisure time, non-academic capacity, act like normal political animals, but who none the less teach that a scientific investigation of society will have a kind of therapeutic effect which will eventually remove all serious political tensions. Politics is, to so many social scientists, a kind of disease: society is a patient ridden with tensions and political events are the unreal, neurotic fixations by which it tries to rationalize these contradictions. This is what Professor Lasswell has called ‘the preventive politics of the future’ which will exist in a world-wide ‘techno-scientific culture’. ‘The ideal of a politics of prevention is to obviate conflict by the definite reduction of the tension level of society by effective methods, of which discussion will be but one.’² If the causes of these tensions are exposed and are put before the patient, therapy will result. Here is, as it were, the underlying religion of the empiricists, those who think that each humble fact finds its place in some grand order and that it is possible or desirable to study society purely objectively. But such a ‘politics of prevention’ is not politics at all, it is the elimination of politics; and it is not science, either – it is ideology. Genuine understanding, true scholarship, pure science, the attempt to be as dispassionate and as disinterested as possible in understanding the situation we are all in, inevitably involves political values, the political relationship, however imperfect, with all its uncertainty, diversity, and freedom. The claim for objectivity can be a kind of arrogance which leads men to despise the slowness of improvement and reform by persuasion and discussion. Such scientism of the chair may not be directly dangerous to free societies; but it can indirectly undermine a true education in politics by studying things too small to be relevant, as if they are all examples of a general or total scientific theory of society too large to be plausible.

The debate among academic students of politics about whether or not their study can be made a science is notoriously sterile. The choice is one that need never be made. Political knowledge draws together the findings of many disciplines so as to understand how human purposes are realized in the activity of government. No ‘objective’ study of government is ever so stick-in-the-mud as to avoid, implicitly or explicitly, grinding some political axe (human beings are, thank God, creatures of discontent as well as of curiosity); and no moralist is ever so lofty as not to offer us some evidence that his prescriptions might conceivably work (rewards in heaven are, alas, simply irrelevant to the mundane immediate responsibilities of governments). Both, unavoidably, deal in doctrines. Political doctrines state purposes which stand some chance of convincing people that they can be realized politically; or state generalizations about government worth making for political purposes. Every purported methodology of how to study the activity of government objectively, that is every prefabricated set of rules for the discovery of knowledge in advance of experience, is itself a doctrine – political or antipolitical. This will only disturb those who are disturbed at politics itself. All thinking about government and politics crystallizes into doctrine at some level of experience; and all advocates of doctrines, like the lawyer in court, offer evidence to try to convince those who sit in judgement. The evidence is shaped according to a lawyer’s understanding of his own and his client’s self-interest; he does not throw a packet of facts on the table and invite the judges to sort it out themselves. He, like any politician, attempts to prejudice the issue. But only incompetent advocates and incompetent politicians offer evidence which does not appear relevant and convincing, and which does not stand up to criticism. The student of government should, indeed, attempt to be more dispassionate than the advocate or politician; but he will not succeed in becoming passionless unless he becomes quite irrelevant to the life of a free society. (The student of government in a totalitarian state will not, of course, be allowed even to appear uncommitted.) If he is wise, he will be careful not to speak too often or too stridently on the issues of the day – his business is not the politician’s; but he will not be studying politics at all if he does not find himself speaking on the issues of the age.

The belief that politics can be reduced to a science, both in understanding and action, is not, then, a product of scientific reasoning, is not by its intellectual failure and political ruthlessness anything to discredit science, but is simply ideology using pseudo-science to justify the application of technological thought to society.

Technology is really the master-concept running through Marx’s great attempt to offer a scientific socialism to restore the unity of knowledge, to integrate fully thought and action. In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of ‘reason’ as single sources of authority. The world as revealed through Descartes and Hume, a world in which mathematical truths alone were objective and in which all moral truths seemed subjective or relative, can prove too much for the nerves of not only philosophers, but men of practical affairs as well. Many are disturbed with something like terror, with a neurotic inability to deal with reality, when they come to feel that they have senses whose evidence does not coincide with revealed religion, or with ‘reason’ or even with the mathematical order of the natural world. There has been a kind of panic before dualism – people crying ‘how am I-in-here-so-passionate a part of all-that-out-there-so-remote?’ Kant might speak of his never-ending wonder at two things, ‘the starry heavens above and the moral law within’, but to many this wonder is an awesome terror at the unbridgeable abyss between the two. Then they listen eagerly to any preacher of a single truth, rather than see that this initial separation of a world of science from a world of society, of an ‘I’ from an ‘it’, of the observer from an object, was only a separation for the limited purposes of science – a separation from a total flow of human experience which can be divided or distinguished in many ways which are not mutually incompatible, but which simply exist, for the purpose at hand, at different levels of abstraction. Science and politics, indeed art, history, and philosophy, are different ways of looking at a common reality for different purposes: they only conflict and contradict when the purposes are confused or are each regarded as limitless. No two men will draw the limits of these activities at the same point, but we are here dealing with claims that some particular activities, like science and politics, are the same and are limitless.

It was not really Hegel whom Marx turned upside-down in his quest for a single truth, but Aristotle. Aristotle, we have seen taught that politics was the ‘master-science’ in the sense that it controls and coordinates, without destroying, all other activities which may make a claim on the resources of society. Marx’s scientific-socialism puts a science of sociology on top of a science of politics. Society is no longer viewed as a diversity of interests to which politics alone can give the necessary degree of unity, but as a natural unity which politics divides and disturbs. Scientific socialism makes a double claim: that the sociological dimension of experience is the only dimension of experience, and that science is inevitably technological – thus any understanding is a prelude to action and the laws of evolution show how society is to be changed, environment engineered.

Marxist ‘technology’ is only an explicit case of a claim more often implicit. ‘Technology’ can furnish the theories of the untheoretical. Here are the vast assumptions about what is to be taken for granted held by those ‘purely practical men’ who take so much for granted. They take for granted that all problems are technical and that each advance in scientific knowledge somehow uniquely determines a new and proper sphere of application. This is not merely Lenin’s famous ‘Communism is socialism plus electrification’, or Hitler’s Gleichschaltung, linking all society to one grid, to the same source of electric energy (and how quickly dated does each such technological claim or metaphor become!); but it is also the sober, even a little dull-sounding, claim of many an American social scientist: ‘Many of the problems now besetting the world arise from the fact that physicists and engineers know how to combine theory and fact more efficiently than do political scientists and political policy-makers.’³ This has the same plausibility – both intellectually and politically – as Khrushchev’s stomach as a judge of ideology. Truth is only what works and ‘the system’ which produces and distributes the most consumer goods will ultimately prevail. This is no small claim, and its realization might seem to reconcile perfectly the technocrat with the moralist, the engineer with the politician. As once it was said that ballots are better than bullets, now it is said that butter is better than ballots. But need we really make this latter choice?

There is now need to be a little brave – to risk inevitable misunderstanding – and to insist that however great and pressing are the problems of economic and technical aid for underdeveloped territories, such aid can never be an end in itself. To help other people avoid even the risk of starvation is a good action whatever the motives. To help other people attain some idea of a decent standard of living is a good action whatever the motives. But if making a living at all is a primary biological urge of man, this is very far from levels of civilization which have been and can be attained. The reality or memory of desperate poverty is no excuse for organizing people always to the maximum pitch of economic efficiency if that efficiency involves the suppression of politics, of the canvassing of alternatives, and of free discussion; the killing of all spontaneity, play, and frivolity; and the forbidding of even occasional extravagances. It is terrible nonsense to presume that a richer, or a more productive society is necessarily a happier one for people to live in than a society poorer or less efficient. The price in terms of freedom of the rapid industrialization of an underdeveloped country may be rationally thought worth paying – but why should it be paid for ever? The price is then bound to be too high. Some would argue that totalitarianism simply arises from rapid industrialization – but then why need it be total? ‘The revolution has no time for elections’, Dr Castro was reported as telling a parade of more than a million Cubans on May Day 1961. Perhaps – but the price seems too high when: ‘He asked: “Do you need elections?” and the crowd shouted “No, No”.’ For there is, after all, a difference between knowing that you are paying a price for something, and either not knowing, or thinking that you don’t care at all. The difference is that if you know what you are sacrificing, you may want to return to it when prosperity is greater – if not, later generations may not even know what it means. There is a difference, once again, between denying freedom out of economic necessity and denying it out of principle; between persuading people that a price for progress is worth paying and deceiving them that they get it for free. ‘When I see a Soviet oil-tanker, I think of Lenin. When I see a Soviet tractor, I think of Lenin. Whenever we get anything from the Soviet Union,’ Dr Castro told K. S. Karol, ‘I feel gratitude to Lenin.’⁴ Lenin is thanked, Dr Castro made clear, because Leninism has no connexion with Stalinism. There are many who believe this. Ernesto Guevara, the ‘theoretician’ of the régime, tried to provide them with an extra argument. He reassured Karol that there was ‘no danger we shall . . . slide towards what you call Stalinist totalitarianism’; Stalinism had the ‘necessity to create, by its own unaided efforts, the basic industries required for its economic development’; but, he went on, ‘we do not need to make such sacrifices to industrialize because we can get all we want from the other Socialist countries’. It is hard to tell whether these are the words of a morally stupid man, unable to see the enormity of such an unnecessary ‘necessity’, or of a cunning man trying to extort money

by threats of self-flagellation. There is every excuse, amid oppression and poverty, for the second motivation, but the first would exhibit a quality of reckless blindness which is more frightening for the future of humanity than almost any present oppression or poverty. There are no absolute necessities in politics. The language of necessity spells the death of freedom – and usually of men too. ‘I now realize,’ continued Guevara, ‘that Marxism is not simply a doctrine, it is a science’ – and such a science it is.

Certainly, technological achievement (or possession) is the modern symbol of sovereignty – the prestige of science gives majesty to mere power. Every small country like Cuba demands, at the least, its own basic industries – regardless of economics. And Sputnik did more for Communism than the spectacle, for instance, of a dozen Presidential or general elections can do for free countries. Quite apart from the prestige of technology, people do, after all, prefer a simple idea to a complex one. A man in space is supposed to be so much more tangible than the ability to conduct free elections. But technology threatens not merely politics, but science as well. Science has got to show immediate and spectacular results to bolster the prestige of the régime in power. Science is no longer a disinterested activity but is – as something called ‘Darwinism’ is taught in Soviet schools – the struggle of man against nature led by the party. Everything is to be turned to the manipulation of environment. It is a sad but perhaps a hopeful thought that if technology cannot in fact thrive without pure science, then freedom will stay alive, or re-create itself, out of the sheer administrative need for freedom for scientists – however inefficient, tentative, and extravagant some of their activities may be, like the ‘irresponsible behaviour’ of so many free men. An élite of engineers and managers may find itself blaming the politicians or the party apparat for not being able ‘to produce’ enough pure scientists. This, however, is speculative fantasy. But the growing power of technological thinking in politics is fact.

There is also a type of technological thinking which may have little to do with scientism: those who think that administration can always be clearly separated from politics, and that if this is done, there is really very little, if anything, that politicians can do that administrators cannot do better. This is a very familiar view. It is the view of the servant who would not merely be equal, but who would be master, or of the administrator who feels constantly frustrated in his work by the interventions of politicians whom he will often, oddly, call theorists. He means by this that his experience teaches him better than those who try to tell him what should be done without his experience: speaking without experience is thus theorizing. Government could be so much better carried on by those who do the real work of the state. ‘For forms of government let fools contest, whate’er is best administered is best’ is the hackneyed and subversive slogan of this disliker of politics. So far, this is the familiar view of the expert. There are many such who believe that there is some training to be had which can teach a science of public administration. The civil servant is then as much a technician as the engineer. He may not profess to think that all problems are technical; he may see himself as the ‘means-and-methods’ man of some superior ‘democratic decision-making body’ – the familiar language of the social scientists. But what it amounts to is not that all decisions of government can be implemented ‘scientifically’, or as if by a definite and preconceived technique; but that government should only do those things which can be reduced to such a technique. The Leninist vision of the ‘administration of things and not of men’ will take place only if men are treated as things; ‘the state will become a mere filing cabinet’ when men can be treated simply as the contents of files.

There is also a type of rather well camouflaged technocrat who claims very forcibly to have a great contempt for such ‘expertise’. He may even make a cult of the well-rounded amateur, versatile and wise, setting experience against ‘so called experts’ as well as politicians. He may think himself so anti-technical that he will even oppose any form of special training for higher civil servants.⁵ This viewpoint is really pre-political. He knows the truth that the first duty of a government is to govern – which he may feel, quite rightly, is often insufficiently realized by the reforming politicians. But he stays in this pre-political stage of government without politics. So, of course, in a political society, he should; the civil servant should not get deeply involved in politics; but he must not exaggerate his importance. ‘The essential character of government, and so of the administration by which alone it is effective, is a process of maintaining the unity of a political group,’ writes an English civil servant. How true for government in general but – our whole theme – how inadequate for political rule. The civil servant, we are told, ‘is a man who has been trained to a practical operation’ which is ‘nothing less than the preservation of the state. He is, no less than any soldier, a man who must give his life to the Crown. That is what gives his task a permanent sense amidst the mutations of party politics.’⁶ This is the humble arrogance of the gentleman indeed. The servant of the state is the permanent element amid the mutations of party politics (‘party’ politics is presumably even worse than ordinary politics). What business has an administrator to pledge his life to the Crown when he is quite simply employed by a politically elected government? People rarely offer to sacrifice themselves to a fiction. They seize hold of the fiction to achieve some position which is not political, or politically tenable. It is not administration but government itself which maintains order in any régime; and in a political régime it is the activity of politics itself which provides something permanent amidst the mutations. The administrator blames politicians for the very thing they can do so well – allow diversity and change amidst order.

Why is this view technological? It is technological because its holder thinks he knows best what is wanted because, like the engineer, it is his task to do what is wanted. It does not matter that he may attack technique in the sense of learning how to administer from books or some pseudo-science of public administration; for he is still tempted to believe that, as the fruit of experience, he possesses a unique knowledge which can be applied and can govern without politics. He thinks he has a technique of rule which is not arbitrary and yet which is not political.

Both this Mandarin type and the social scientist can make absurdly unwarranted claims for their own impartiality and for the efficacy of their knowledge. Theirs is another instance of an activity needed within politics claiming to be the whole of politics – which is, as we have seen, in fact to deny politics. Because they sincerely claim to have no doctrine or ideology, but only the efficiency and the permanent interest of the state in mind, they are often trusted more than they deserve. We all deserve to be distrusted in politics. And it is the particular lot of the administrator to be more distrustable than anyone. In quite simple human terms, if a man cannot stand this, he should change his job, not create a mystique of technical indispensability.

‘Technology’, then, confuses the question of the application of resources with their allocation. This application may be a technique, but it can be applied only after authoritative decisions have been made as to both the allocation of the product and of the resources to go into it. People are deceiving themselves if they do not realize that over the months and over the years, even if not for each particular day’s business in front of one on the desk, these decisions are essentially political. It may be thought in some free societies that these decisions are in fact made by ‘the market’ – that economics is a science, telling us what we may not do. But it is a science only in the very simple but important sense that it can calculate the price of any social demand in terms of relinquished alternatives. But it cannot comment on the legitimacy of the various demands – even ones that may be ‘economically restrictive’ or ‘economic nonsense’. The study of economics furnishes us with evidence relevant to any political decision about the allocation of resources, may even be said to furnish evidence necessary to any rational decision; but it cannot predetermine any decision. All resources are not economic, all alternatives are not priceable; freedom, for instance, we may properly say is in the long run beyond price; the desire for knowledge – which can have, God knows, the most unpredictable consequences – is quite unpriceable. People in unfree societies which have abolished or forbidden the institutional means of making political decisions may think that the ideology – Marxian science, for instance – determines these allocations, so that everything remains simply a problem of application. But this, however much believed, is simply an error. It does not describe what in fact happens. What they are in fact doing, faced with all sorts of complicated choices and alternatives as to how to allocate scarce resources, is to make political decisions without the institutions and procedures which register actual social demands honestly – a place for people to speak without fear for themselves or the interests of their group.

So those in political societies who apply the technologist’s style of thought to the business of government have, in fact, taken for granted the political devices by which some things emerge as problems, and some other things are submerged as irrelevancies. Politics defines what the inhabitants of a state think should be the problems to be solved. They may not all be capable of solution. But it is a pity that so many of the experts or technologists who are called in to attempt the solution of some of these problems feel that they know best what order of priority should be attached to these attempts, and feel that politics impedes, rather than clears the way for, their use of their techniques. So many problems are only resolvable politically that the politician has special right to be defended against the pride of the engineer or the arrogance of the technologist. Let the cobbler stick to his last. We have a desperate need of good shoes – but too many bad dreams. And as the French anarchists used to say, ‘only the one who wears the shoe, knows where it pinches.’

¹See the final section, ‘Inconclusions’ of my The American Science of Politics (London 1959).

²Psychopathology and Politics (New York 1930), p. 202.

³William A. Glazer, The Types and Uses of Political Theory, Social Research (Autumn 1955), p. 292.

⁴Reported in the New Statesman, 19 May 1961, p. 778.

⁵See, for instance, C. H. Sisson, The Spirit of British Administrators (London 1959).

⁶Ibid., p. 23.