The Technocracy Movement

By Nekud October 22, 2026 Updated October 23, 2026 24 min read

On the evening of 13 January 1933, in a ballroom high above Fifth Avenue in New York, a man in a well-tailored double-breasted suit stood behind a bank of microphones while several hundred people who had queued down the stairs waited to hear whether the United States was about to be handed over to the engineers. The speaker was Howard Scott, and the occasion was a nationwide radio hookup carried by networks that had never before given such a platform to someone claiming to abolish Congress. Among the crowd was Margaret Mead, then a young anthropologist at Columbia, who had come to take notes. She would remember the evening as a failure, and she would also remember, decades later, that the man at the microphone had never finished the ninth grade.

The Depression and the Opening

The word that Scott’s listeners were hearing had been circulating for years without becoming famous. It is generally dated to 1919, and it is usually attributed to a California engineer named William H. Smyth, who used technocracy as the title of a book published in Berkeley defining it as the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers. The coinage is straightforward enough once parsed: the Greek word for power, kratos, governed by the technicians, the technikoi. For a decade after that, the term was largely a curiosity, a piece of engineering futurism belonging to the same family as Edward Bellamy’s looking-backward socialism and to Henry Gantt’s now-forgotten New Machine. What made the word dangerous, and then briefly famous, was the Depression.

The timing was not incidental. 1932 was an election year, and the country arrived at it with its institutions visibly failing. Hoover had vetoed measures to provide direct relief, the bonus marchers had been dispersed by federal troops, and a succession of bank failures had made the abstraction of credit feel suddenly personal. When the New York Times first reported the technocrats’ activities in June of that year, it was doing so in the middle of a campaign in which no party could credibly claim to be steering. An argument that promised to replace negotiation with calculation was addressing a real vacancy rather than inventing one.

By 1932 roughly a quarter of the American workforce had no work at all. Breadlines had become a permanent feature of the urban landscape. The crash of 1929 had not been an accident of character or luck; it exposed an economy whose machinery had grown elaborate and whose management had grown speculative in a way nobody had measured or permitted. To many observers the political system had failed at the one thing it was supposed to do, because the people implicated in the catastrophe were precisely the people that system had been built to represent. Bankers still sat on the boards of banks. Industrialists still set industrial policy. The slump was not the work of a single bad actor so much as the accumulated result of decisions nobody had chosen, taken by people nobody could easily dismiss.

This produced a specific kind of sentence, repeated in editorials and letters throughout 1932 and 1933: that the country was being run by money rather than by anyone competent. The word technocrat came to mean a person who claims the right to govern not because he has been elected but because he knows something. The claim landed on fertile ground precisely because the old prestige of the businessman had collapsed along with the stock market, while a new prestige was rising around universities, laboratories and engineering schools. That prestige was not new. It had been assembled over two decades through the scientific management movement associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose disciples had spent those years insisting that work was measurable and therefore redesignable. What was new, and radical, was the ambition to lift the same logic off the shop floor and onto the state.

Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign supplied the decisive evidence that expert administration had become respectable in mainstream American politics. Roosevelt assembled an informal group of academic advisers, at the suggestion of his speechwriter Samuel Rosenman, who began recruiting professors in the spring of that year; the press promptly named the group the Brains Trust. Economists who had spent decades being regarded as impractical pedagogues were now summoned to advise a presidential candidate on money and banking. The Brains Trust was not a technocracy. It advised an elected president, held no office, and could be dismissed by him at any time. But it demonstrated something the technocrats needed more than anything else: that America could be persuaded that the men who had studied a problem knew more about it than the men who had been elected to discuss it.

It is worth being precise about what that endorsement did and did not mean. Roosevelt’s advisers were experts employed by a democrat, and their authority was derivative of his. The technocrats proposed something far more radical: not better advice to voters, but the removal of voters from the chain of command entirely. The gap between those two positions is the whole distance that the rest of this history has to cross.

Veblen and the Case for the Specialist

The intellectual engine of the movement was not American popular politics but a structural argument about the direction of industrial society. Thorstein Veblen, the sociologist who had made his name attacking the leisure class, turned in the years after the First World War to a claim about who ought to control the machine process. His argument appeared most directly in The Engineers and the Price System, a short book usually dated 1921, though some bibliographies give 1919 for its appearance in serial form. Scholars differ on the date, and the difference is not material; what matters is the structure of the claim.

Veblen’s observation was that the machine process had already broken the old relation between effort and reward. Skilled industrial work now required long training, and that training was held by a small group whose judgement determined whether a new process was adopted at all. Businessmen who owned the capital, Veblen argued, were constitutionally unequal to this task, because they were trained to think in terms of profit and turnover rather than in terms of the technical feasibility and efficient sequencing of production. The men who actually understood how the industrial system worked were its engineers. And yet those engineers were, in the ordinary sense, employees. They were salaried staff of the people they were supposed to be supervising. Veblen’s diagnosis of the condition was almost fatal: the industrial system was already administered by technical specialists, but it was not in their control.

From that observation he drew a radical conclusion. If the machinery of production is in fact governed by the logic of technical process rather than by the wishes of owners, then ownership is a fiction that ought to be retired. The technically qualified ought to take control, not in addition to property but as a replacement for it. This is the sense in which Veblen can fairly be called the intellectual father of the 1930s movement. What he supplied was not a plan for seizing power but a diagnosis that made the existing distribution of power look illegitimate. The organisations that formed after the war, including a Soviet of Technicians associated with Veblen and Gantt’s New Machine, were short-lived; the argument they were built from was not.

The technical core of the proposal was an energy theory of value. If energy is the common measure of all production, Veblen and his followers argued, then energy is the honest basis on which to calculate the real cost of goods. Scott developed this into what he called energy accounting: a system in which goods and services would carry certificates representing the energy expended on them, and in which money and price would disappear as the basis of allocation. Supporters would receive certificates in proportion to what they had contributed. The certificates could not be sold, and could be spent only at verified vendors, the energy being treated as void once a purchase had been made so that no one accumulated a stock of it. The scheme was, in effect, a rationing system with a thermodynamic metric instead of a price.

Two things followed from this argument, and both are worth separating because later generations tended to fuse them. The first was a theory of industrial organisation: work should be sequenced by engineers who knew how machines behaved. The second was a theory of government: because the first theory was correct, its practitioners should hold authority. Almost every difficulty that would later be attached to technocracy comes from the second step rather than the first, and it is worth being clear that Veblen himself stopped a long way short of it. He diagnosed a misallocation of control; he did not specify the constitution of the order that would replace it.

The political core was functional representation, and this is a term that needs unpacking because it is the part of the plan most often misunderstood. Ordinary democracy represents people by place: a constituency, a district, a nation. Technocrats proposed to represent them by function, meaning by the work they actually do. Society would be sorted into the basic functions of producing and distributing goods, and each function would be administered by the technicians who perform it, with administrators drawn together into councils to coordinate the whole. The appeal was that this arrangement matched reality as the industrialists experienced it. It proposed, in effect, to abandon one representative per district and substitute one body per job, so that decisions about the steel industry would be taken by steel technicians rather than by legislators from districts that happened to contain steel mills. The result has been called functional democracy: rule organised around what society does rather than around where people live. Its appeal was formidable, and for a few years it looked like the most serious intellectual alternative available to both laissez-faire economics and Soviet command planning.

Scott and the Movement

Howard Scott was not, whatever else might be said of him, a university man. Little is known about his early life. He was born in Virginia in 1890 of Scottish-Irish ancestry, claimed to have been educated in Europe, and in fact had no formal higher education of any kind. He worked in construction and later in the sale of industrial chemicals, delivering goods and demonstrating floor polish to customers at a New Jersey business. In the course of these jobs he told colleagues that the machine process arriving in the twentieth century was one he had studied as a boy at school. In 1919, near the end of the war, he formed the Technical Alliance in New York, a group of scientists and engineers which began an energy survey of North America intended as a scientific foundation for redesigning society. The alliance broke up in 1921 before the survey was finished.

In 1932 Scott and Walter Rautenstrauch formed a Committee on Technocracy at Columbia University. In January 1933 it split into two rival bodies: the Continental Committee on Technocracy, led by the writer and editor Harold Loeb, and Technocracy Incorporated, led by Scott. The split was bitter and personal, and it matters for what follows, because it divided the movement at the precise moment of its greatest visibility and left two organisations competing for the same recruits with incompatible methods. Loeb’s faction was more literary, more willing to think about how technocracy might reach power, and more willing to entertain political allies. Scott’s was more disciplined, more sectarian, and more insistent on study before action.

The scale of Scott’s following is hard to state precisely, and the sources themselves are part of the difficulty. Scott’s organisation was guarded about its numbers; in correspondence he later circulated, the by-laws of the body prevented him from disclosing membership figures, on the argument that an exact count would only invite rival organisations to try to match it. What is documented is the reach of the idea rather than the size of any single organisation. Between 16 June 1932, when the New York Times became the first influential press organ to report the movement’s activities, and January 1933, periodicals gave technocracy more featured attention than they gave Roosevelt, and study groups formed spontaneously across the United States and in Canada. Scott later claimed that newspaper advertising alone ran to more than fourteen million printed copies. That figure comes from his own correspondence and should be treated as a claim rather than as an audited circulation; the more defensible statement is that no economic proposal of the period reached the same share of public attention.

The gap between the two competing organisations was also a gap between two literatures. Harold Loeb, who had edited the influential McClure’s magazine in the twenties and turned to technocracy in the early thirties, published Life in a Technocracy in 1933, a readable, book-length argument that tried to make the case to a general reader. Scott’s response was technical literature, a study course, and the training of a cadre. One of these organisations was trying to win an argument. The other was trying to build a discipline.

The movement had a visual and organisational identity as well. Technocracy Incorporated’s officials wore a uniform described as a well-tailored double-breasted suit, grey shirt and blue necktie, with a monad insignia on the lapel, and members saluted Scott in public. Promotion material used a streetcar analogy that contains the entire doctrine in miniature: if passengers persist in riding on the outside platform of a streetcar and are killed or maimed doing so, the solution is not to fine them but to design the car without the outside platform. The social problem is removed by changing the design of the system rather than by persuading people to behave differently. It is an elegant thought and a troubling one, because it locates the remedy entirely in engineering and entirely outside the reach of argument.

This is also where accounts most often part company, and the parting is instructive. Later retellings frequently describe the movement’s climax as a Continental Congress of Technocracy held at Cleveland in late 1936, attended by a great body of delegates. No such congress appears in the movement’s own published record, in the scholarly literature, or in the contemporary press. What did happen in Cleveland that year was the Republican convention, in June, four months before the Continental Committee on Technocracy collapsed amid internal factionalism in October. The likely explanation is a simple one: two genuine events, one a convention in Cleveland and one a technocratic collapse later in the same year, have been fused into an event that would have been convenient for both the movement’s credit and its discredit. Scott did speak in Cleveland, repeatedly and at length, but on his lecture tours in 1937 and after, rather than at any gathering of delegates in 1936.

A better-attested gathering exists, and it carries its own irony. A Continental Convention on Technocracy met at the Hotel Morrison in Chicago in the last days of June 1933, drawing together more than twenty separate technocratic organisations, among them a duly incorporated political party in Illinois. Scott was not its organiser, and said so. In the pamphlet History and Purpose of Technocracy, published the following year and largely composed of an exchange of private letters, he insisted that neither he nor Technocracy Incorporated had anything to do with the Chicago gathering, which he attributed instead to the All American Technological Society, a body he described as having no relationship to technocracy whatsoever. He also corrected the date, and disclosed that the proceedings had been stenographically recorded in full. It is worth sitting with that exchange, because it contains the movement’s central problem in miniature. Technocracy Incorporated’s leader is unwilling to be associated with a congress claiming to speak for technocracy, and learns from a newspaper stenographic transcript that the congress has already spoken for technocracy anyway. By 1933 the word had escaped the people who thought they owned it, which is what happens to a term once it stops being a doctrine and becomes a mood.

Why It Collapsed

The movement failed for four distinct reasons, and it is worth separating them because they operate at different levels.

The first is that it had no route to power. This is the plainest fact about technocracy and the one its proponents appear to have found hardest to face. Technocracy Incorporated was formally committed to abstaining from all partisan politics. It could not field candidates, endorse programmes, or win seats, because any such act would have violated the principle that experts rather than voters should decide. Yet a movement that refuses to seek office has no mechanism for arriving at it, and no amount of popular enthusiasm converts into authority without one. The movement’s own constitution thus guaranteed its exclusion from the only route by which authority is transferred in a constitutional democracy.

The second is that the New Deal absorbed the hunger that had produced it. This is the traditional explanation and it has real force. By 1935 the federal government was insuring bank deposits, guaranteeing pensions, subsidising electricity, regulating securities markets, publishing statistics and employing economists by the thousand. An American who wanted a government that took expertise seriously could get one, with votes attached, at the ballot box. The technocratic instinct survived intact inside the agencies, and in one sense it won outright: the regional planning boards, the public works machinery, the securities regulator and the reconstructed central bank were staffed substantially by people who would have recognised Scott’s diagnosis without embarrassment. What it lost was the argument. The claim that only an unelected elite could govern had been quietly conceded by a government that won every election it contested, and a position that is satisfied by the existing system cannot be the position that replaces it.

Historians have generally attributed the movement’s decline to Roosevelt’s programme. The scholar William E. Akin, whose study remains the standard account, rejects that explanation, arguing instead that the movement withered because its proponents never devised a viable political theory for achieving change. His judgement is the more interesting one and is difficult to dispute. The New Deal answered the question technocracy had raised; technocracy, however, had not needed an answer so much as a method, and it never had one.

The third is organisational, and it is the least discussed and probably the most decisive. The split of January 1933 between the Loeb and Scott organisations wasted the movement’s single best year on internecine conflict at the exact moment when public attention was at its height. Scott’s response to the collapse of public patience was a turn towards secrecy and study, with the continental chapters instructed to work through a detailed study course before taking action on anything. The reasoning was coherent: an elite that had not yet been properly educated should not presume to govern. But an organisation that cannot report its own strength to itself is poorly placed to demonstrate public strength to anyone else, and one that calls a halt to action in the middle of a political opening has chosen the worst possible year to be thorough.

The internal culture pointed the same way. Technocracy Incorporated outlived its moment by decades, continuing to publish, maintain chapters and hold meetings into the twenty-first century, and in doing so preserved almost everything except influence. In Canada the movement’s opposition to the Second World War proved fatal to it; members were arrested in October 1940 on charges of belonging to an illegal organisation, and the ban against them was lifted only in 1943, when it had become clear that the organisation was prepared to support the war effort through a programme of total conscription. Survival was real, and it was irrelevant.

The fourth is the 1936 election. Roosevelt’s reelection that year was a landslide of a kind that eliminates alternatives rather than merely outpolling them. No third party came close anywhere. For a movement whose entire strategy assumed that a technical elite would be adopted once the public recognised the competence of its proposals, the result was unambiguous: the public had chosen, and what it had chosen was not this. The argument did not lose a vote so much as fail to appear on the ballot in any meaningful sense. None of these four causes is fatal on its own. Together they explain an organisation that reached peak public attention within seven months of its first national press notice and then spent the following decade disintegrating.

The Unanswered Question

Every durable version of this argument runs into the same wall, and it is worth stating the problem without rushing to a verdict, because the strongest version of each side deserves to be put fairly.

The strongest form of the technocratic case is an argument about scale and about the limits of consent. Modern industrial society is technically interdependent to a degree that makes many questions answerable only by specialists: the design of a power grid, the safety of a drug, the stability of a bank, the adequacy of a bridge. Democratic legislatures are demonstrably capable of great things, but they are also slow, clientelist, and structurally vulnerable to capture by organised money. The record of the past century is not flattering. The bodies that regulate, standardise, forecast and audit have, on the whole, outperformed the electoral bodies meant to supervise them, and this is a recurrent finding rather than a partisan one. On this view, insisting that the selection of decision-makers be settled by popularity is a species of conservatism: it guarantees that the most consequential decisions of an industrial civilisation are made by people selected for their skill at persuading voters.

The strongest form of the objection is that expertise answers questions of means and is silent on ends. A grid engineer can tell you reliably which arrangement of transmission lines will carry power at acceptable loss. No grid engineer can tell you what the loss is for, whether the communities upstream should bear it, or what to do about households that flood because the network was optimised for efficiency. Those are questions of ends, and ends are settled by people through argument, negotiation and consent. Worse, the technical frame itself is never innocent: the question an engineer is asked already contains decisions made by somebody else. The prediction on which technocratic confidence rests does not hold either. Experts in good faith disagree, permanently and often irreducibly, about things that matter enormously, and a rule that resolves such disagreement by the seniority of the most qualified person has not eliminated the political question. It has concealed it in the one place where it will not be noticed or contested.

Three further difficulties follow from that. First, the problem of selection: no programme in this tradition specified how technicians would be identified, advanced, or disciplined, and the workable definitions that emerged were all proxies for power rather than measures of competence. Second, the problem of audit: an elite that audits itself has no accountability mechanism, and the movement offered no substitute for elections, courts, or a free press. Third, the problem of exit: there was no provision for the removal of officials who were technically excellent and administratively disastrous, nor for the consideration of those whose expertise the political community found intolerable.

The same question is being answered by ordinary institutional design today, which is why the movement has not gone away. An independent regulator is appointed rather than elected, is expected to exercise technical judgement rather than represent anyone, and is insulated from short-term political pressure precisely so that it can. Almost every such body accepts the technocratic premise that some decisions should be removed from electoral control, and almost every such body answers the objection that Scott’s programme never answered, by attaching a mandate, a reporting duty and a review mechanism to the expertise. That is not a proof that the question can be solved. It is proof that it is not ignored. The technocrats of 1933 did not offer anything comparable; they offered competence, and expected the rest to follow.

The historical record is not neutral here. In the Soviet Union, engineers who argued that industrial development should be guided by technical judgement rather than by party direction were destroyed for it. Peter Palchinsky was executed in 1929, and the Industrial Party Trial that followed silenced a generation of engineers, who thereafter confined themselves to the narrow technical problems assigned to them and left the large decisions to others. In Germany before the Second World War a technocratic movement modelled directly on the American one ran into the simple fact that the German political system would not accommodate it. These are cases of experts subordinated to a state, and the uncomfortable conclusion is that a technocratic elite is reliably neutral only with respect to ends it is already committed to.

And there is a point that is easy to miss precisely because it is biographical. Scott was the movement’s supreme authority on industrial organisation, and according to the account of Margaret Mead, who knew him well, he had completed only the ninth grade, and his lack of mastery of the intermediate steps was one of his great handicaps. Whatever else follows, it is not a comfortable foundation for a doctrine about governance by qualified specialists. The movement’s most confident voice had no professional standing whatever in the field it claimed to master, and the reason he nonetheless commanded an audience was personal magnetism and conviction rather than any credential, examination or peer judgement.

The Afterlife

The movement did not die so much as get absorbed and renamed. Historians who have examined it closely have tended to treat it as a phenomenon of intellectual history rather than of political history, and the reasons are visible in its own documents. In the popular imagination it was eventually displaced not by a rival theory but by a type: William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, published in 1956 while he was writing for Fortune and sold in very large numbers, described the American professional who took his standards from his corporation rather than from a vocation or from himself. The engineer who wished to run the economy had been replaced in ordinary speech by the salaried man who surrendered his judgement to a hierarchy. It is often said that Whyte later repudiated the book. What the record consulted here supports is a slightly different and more interesting story: Whyte did not so much recant as move on, leaving corporate sociology behind for the study of urban public life and publishing on suburban flight and on city centres in the decades afterwards, while later scholarship has treated the very concept of the organization man as having lost its specificity under repeated use and has criticised its central claim as flawed. Whatever the author’s second thoughts, the book’s intellectual function was to make conformity look like a character type rather than a political argument, and that function outlived the debate.

Meanwhile the underlying institutional ambition was quietly realised by a different route. The organisation now known as the Association of Information Technology Professionals began in Chicago in 1949 as the National Machine Accountants Association, was granted a charter by the State of Illinois on 26 December 1951, and elected Harvey W. Protzel, a systems manager, as its first international president at its first annual convention in Minneapolis in 1952. In 1962 it widened its charter, adopting the name Data Processing Management Association, and held the first Certificate in Data Processing examination in New York City that same year. It added a further examination in 1970, helped establish the body that now administers these credentials in 1974, and in 1969 gave its annual award to Grace Hopper. The dates trace exactly what happened to technocratic ambition when it met American practice: the experts did not take over the state. They formed a professional association, invented a credential, published a journal, and institutionalised themselves as a profession. Rule by credential is rule by expertise with elections attached.

Technocratic states followed along their own lines. Planning ministries, central banks, standardising bodies and independent regulators are the technocratic proposal with democratic decoration retained, and their defenders can argue with some force that they are the only institutions capable of governing an interdependent economy. Technocratic corporations completed the picture: the modern firm allocates capital across divisions on the advice of specialists whom no shareholder elects and no employee can question. Neither development would have surprised Veblen, who would have counted both as victories of the technician over the owner, and neither would have satisfied Scott, who wanted the same victory transferred to the state.

The argument has returned most recently in debates about artificial intelligence, where the claim that consequential decisions about medicine, employment, credit and warfare should be made by systems that no one elected is made with a vocabulary and a confidence that would have been entirely recognisable in 1933. The parallel is closer than it first appears. Both eras face an authority that is genuinely expert, genuinely consequential, and genuinely unaccountable; both are told that the question of who selects the experts is a technical detail.

The movement was right about more than its critics allowed. It was right that the machine process had made industrial society interdependent in ways that ordinary electoral arithmetic could not express. It was right that unqualified ownership had produced a succession of catastrophes. It was right that professional expertise is a real and valuable thing, and that the machinery of production is in fact administered by people who understand it, which means that any serious account of modern governance must take those people seriously rather than pretend they are absent.

What it could never answer was where the experts come from, and who counts them. That question is not a technical problem with a technical solution. It is the question that electoral politics exists to ask, and the movement’s refusal to ask it is what turned a serious argument into a cult. Ninety years later, the argument is still being made, still with the same conviction and the same omission, and the interesting question is no longer whether we can be governed by experts. It is whether we can survive being governed by them.