Machine Politics

Brink Lindsey from the February 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

The idea of social engineering permeated the political culture in the early 20th century. It attracted prominent intellectuals, among them John Dewey, Charles Beard, Herbert Croly, and Walter Lippmann (some of whom later became disillusioned). It inspired the establishment of such institutions as The New Republic (1914), the Institute for Governmental Research (later the Brookings Institution) (1916), the New School for Social Research (1919), and the National Bureau for Economic Research (1920).

The idea attracted doers as well as thinkers. It infused the corporate liberalism of organizations like the National Civic Foundation. And most fatefully, it lent powerful momentum to politicians--from the Progressive era, through wartime mobilization, to Hoover's dry-run New Deal and FDR's real thing--bent on a dramatic expansion of government's responsibilities and powers.

Jordan's book focuses much more on the thinkers than on the doers. Politicians, other than Hoover, are given scant attention, and business leaders who embraced social engineering are almost completely ignored. The latter omission is particularly unfortunate; more discussion of such people as George Perkins of New York Life, Elbert Gary of U.S. Steel, Gerard Swope of General Electric, and Henry Harriman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would have underscored the extent to which belief in central planning (and rejection of market competition) spanned the conventional political spectrum.

Nevertheless, Jordan's book does an excellent job of recreating a lost world of ideas. Moreover, he points out that there were dissidents, however lonely: He includes discussions of Frank Knight's views on the limitations of social science, Walter Lippmann's renunciation of central planning in his The Good Society, and Friedrich Hayek's unflinching defense of competition.

Admittedly, there is more to the history of American statism than technocratic folly. There have been populists who clashed with the social engineers' anti-democratic and centralizing tendencies. And of course the contemporary left has been much more concerned with social and cultural issues than with economic concerns. That said, the misplaced faith in centralized expert control was surely central to big government's rise, just as disenchantment with that control is central to the current political environment.

At bottom, the belief in social engineering grew out of a profound misunderstanding of industrialization. Confronted by the technological breakthroughs of the new age, contemporaries saw not the creative power of the free market, but rather the benefits of top-down bureaucracies and central planning. Dazzled by the role of the engineer in industry, they ignored the less obvious, but still fundamental, contribution of the entrepreneur. They did not grasp that without entrepreneurship, without decentralized and competitive investment, engineering brilliance leads not to prosperity, but to pyramid building.

The misunderstanding was total. Not only did the social engineers fail to grasp the unplanned and unpredictable process by which all the new machines were being created, they saw society itself as a giant mechanism, running according to deterministic laws which they would be able to discern and manipulate. The law they didn't count on, the one that has haunted and mocked their every attempt to control society from above, is the law of unintended consequences--which is just another way of saying that people with minds of their own make very poor machine cogs. It is a law that, at long last, we may be learning to live with.

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