‘Technocrats?’ said my husband, turning his face from the television and the latest news from Italy, looking at me for a change, and putting his whisky glass down in puzzlement. ‘Aren’t those the chaps who helped Franco out?’
‘I don’t think they can be exactly the same people still, darling,’ I replied soothingly. But he had a point. It seems strange that we should think politicians more capable simply because they rejoice in the name technocrats, as the men put in to run Greece, Italy and are called. And a technocrat as a caretaker prime minister for Egypt seemed to be just the bone to throw the crowds in Tahrir Square. The techno- part derives from an ancient Greek word meaning ‘a carpenter’, but we have all come across carpenters who make tables that wobble no matter how many times they saw a bit off a leg.
My husband was right that technocrats had been held responsible for economic growth before, if in circumstances very different from today’s. Under Franco, from the 1950s, a new collection of ministers and public officials were put in power who did not necessarily have any ideological commitment to the Falange. At the same time, the ideological underpinning of the Falange, such as it was, made large state enterprises possible. After all, the word Falange was short for the Spanish Traditionalist Phalanx of the Assemblies of the National Syndicalist Offensive. Spain, the unlikely breeding ground early last century for anarcho-syndicalism, was expected after the Civil War to thrive through a very archo- kind of syndicalism. This led to, or at least preceded, industrialisation. The dwindling agricultural population was not entirely forgotten, for something called the National Institute of Colonisation and Rural Development settled families in new little towns such as Guadiana del Caudillo (population 2,536) or Villafranco (population 1,520). Hence, eventually, all those Little Gem lettuces in our supermarkets.
Through the help of the technocrats, the so-called ‘Spanish miracle’ was pulled off, with high growth year after year (admittedly from a starvation base in the 1940s). Spain had only four cars per 1,000 people in 1954, but 20 years after the success of the Volkswagen in Germany, the state-owned Seat car factories began to provide transport for newly urbanised Spanish families, with more than 794,000 cars being made between 1957 and 1973. The technocrats were really motoring.
A lot has happened since the death of Franco, but I do not find it at all comforting that hopes for the future economic security of Europe are pinned upon technocrats. After all, to attribute superior skill to exponents of technocracy is to fall into an etymological fallacy, like thinking that aristocracy is best simply because the word means ‘rule by the best’. Thomas Hobbes was thinking only theoretically when he wrote: ‘Aristocracy is that wherein the highest magistrate is chosen out of those that have had the best education.’
Contrariwise democracy was a system by no means transparently visible as superior before the 20th century. Queen Victoria was not being singular in habitually putting democracy and the overthrow of constitutional monarchy in the same box. In her day Trollope consistently lumped together democracy, demagoguery and demonstrations as manifestations of the radical unreliability of the demos, the shifting people or mobile vulgus. Similarly, in the present day there is gratitude among some commentators that technocrats are free from the obligation to meet the demands of the ballot box.
In any case, technocracy, even outside Spain, has had its own peculiar, not to say bananas, political heyday — the year 1932-33 in the United States, when the Technocracy movement attracted support for its idea of abandoning money and adopting a social system in which energy is the measure of an economy. The symbol of Technocracy became the Monad, a yin and yang design in red and silver. Just as quickly the movement slumped. When its followers took to wearing uniforms, they were even banned for a time in Canada.
But I find that the organisation Technocracy Incorporated still exists, promising ‘Functional Governance for North America’. The looniness quotient of Technocracy Inc is high. It thinks that from ‘Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Lord Kelvin, Willard Gibbs, to Howard Scott, science has been one grand historic march of discovery and progress’. Howard Scott, in case you were wondering, was the prophet of Technocracy.
Yet the ideas of Technocracy Inc have found fertile ground recently. Even Ambridge has made an effort to adopt a transition culture which embraces energy efficiency and eschews money. With the rise of the climate change lark, Technocracy is seeing a resurgence. Perhaps Chris Huhne could one day be our first Technocracy Inc prime minister.