Unknown

"Ownership has been "denatured" by the course of events; so that it no longer carries its earlier duties and responsibilities. It used to be true that personally responsible discretion in all details was the chief and abiding power conferred by ownership; but wherever it has to do with the machine industry and large-scale organization, ownership now has virtually lost this essential part of its ordinary functions."

"To come to an understanding of the source and origin of this margin of disposable revenue that goes to the earnings of corporate capital, it is necessary to come to an understanding of the industrial system out of which the disposable margin of revenue arises. Productive industry yields a margin of net product over cost, counting cost in terms of man power and material resources; and under the established rule of self-help and free bargaining as it works out in corporation finance, this margin of net product has come to rest upon productive industry as an overhead charge payable to anonymous outsiders who own the corporation securities."

"Men at work turn out a net product because they know how and are interested in doing it; and their output is limited by the industrial methods which they have the use of. But the output is limited in such a way that it always exceeds the cost by more or less, barring accident. By and large, throughout past time the industrial arts have been gaining in efficiency, and the ordinary margin of net product over cost has consequently gone on widening. This is much of the meaning of "an advance in the industrial arts.""

"So inordinately productive is this familiar new order of industry that in ordinary times it is forever in danger of running into excesses and turning out an output in excess of what the market -- that is to say the business situation -- will tolerate. There is constant danger of "overproduction," So that here is commonly a large volume of man power unemployed and an appreciable proportion of the industrial plant lying idle or half idle."

"And, finally, there should be some gain of serenity in realizing how singularly consistent has been the run of economic law through the ages, and recalling, once more the reflection which John Stuart Mill arrived at some half-a-century ago, that, "Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.""

"Under the new order of things the mechanical equipment – the "industrial plant" -- takes the initiative, sets the pace, and turns the workman to account in the carrying-on of those standardized processes of production that embody this mechanistic state of the industrial arts; very much as the individual craftsman in his time held the initiative in industry, set the pace, and made use of his tools according to his own discretion in the exercise of his personal skill, dexterity and judgment, under that now obsolescent industrial order which underlies the eighteenth-century modern point of view, and which still colors the aspirations of Liberal statesmen and economists, as well as the standard economic theories."

"Under the new order the going concern in production is the plant or shop, the works, not the individual workman."

"... the new order of industrial ways and means has been progressively going out of touch with the essential requirements of this established scheme of individual self-help and personal initiative, on the realization and maintenance of which the best endeavors of the Liberals have habitually been spent."

"The workman has become subsidiary to the mechanical equipment, and productive industry has become subservient to business, in all those countries which have come in for the latter-day state of the industrial arts, and which so have fallen under the domination of the price system."

"So also Adam Smith knows and denounces the use of protective tariffs for private gain. That means of pilfering was familiar enough in his time. But he spends little indignation on the equally nefarious use of the national establishment for safe-guarding and augmenting the profits of traders, concessionaires, investors and creditors in foreign parts at the cost of the home community. That method of taxing the common man for the benefit of the vested interests has also grown to more formidable proportions since his time. The constituent principles of the modern point of view, as accepted advisedly or by oversight by Adam Smith and his generation, supply all the legitimation required for this larcenous use of the national establishment; but the means of communication were still too scant, and the larger use of credit was too nearly untried, as contrasted with what has at a later date gone to make the commercial ground and incentive of imperialist politics. Therefore the imperialist policies of public enterprise for private gain also do not come greatly within the range of Adam Smith's vision of the future, nor does the "obvious and simple system" on which he and his generation of thoughtful men take their stand comprise anything like explicit declarations for or against this later-matured chicane of the gentlemen-investors who have been managing the affairs of the civilized nations."

"It is especially the latter-day system of transport and communication as it works out under the new order highly mechanical and exactingly scheduled for time, date and place -- that so controls and standardizes the ordinary life of the common man on mechanical lines."

"This eighteenth-century order of nature, in the magic name of which Adam Smith was in the habit of speaking, was conceived on lines of personal initiative and activity. It is an order of things in which men were conceived to be effectually equal in all those respects that are of any decided consequence, -- in intelligence, working capacity, initiative, opportunity, and personal worth; in which the creative factor engaged in industry was the workman, with his personal skill, dexterity and judgment; in which, it was believed, the employer ("master") served his own ends and sought his own gain by consistently serving the needs of creative labor, and thereby serving the common good; in which the traders ("middle-men") made an honest living by supplying goods to consumers at a price determined by labor cost, and so serving the common good."

"Since the underlying principles of the established order are of this make-believe character, that is to say, since they are built up out of the range of conceptions that have habitually been doing duty as the substance of knowledge and belief in the past, it follows in the nature of the case that any reconstruction of institutions will be made only tardily, reluctantly, and sparingly; inasmuch as settled habits of thought are given up tardily, reluctantly and sparingly. And this will particularly be true when the reconstruction of unseasonable institutions runs counter to a settled and honorable code of ancient principles and a stubborn array of vested interests, as in this instance. Such is the promise of the present situation, and such is also the record of the shift that was once before made from medieval to modern times. It should be a case of break or bend."

"Therefore the economic situation which so underlay and conditioned this modern point of view at the period when it was given its stable form becomes the necessary point of departure for any argument bearing on the changes that have been going forward since then, or on any prospective reconstruction that may be due to follow from these changed conditions in the calculable future. At this head, the students of history are in a singularly fortunate position. The whole case is set forth in the works of Adam Smith, with a comprehension and lucidity which no longer calls for praise. Beyond all other men Adam Smith is the approved and faithful spokesman of this modern point of view in all that concerns the economic situation which it assumes as its material ground; and his description of the state of civilized society, trade and industry, as he saw it in his time and as he wished it to stand over into the future, is to be taken without abatement as a competent exposition of those material conditions which were then conceived to underlie civilized society and to dictate the only sound reconstruction of civil and economic institutions according to the modern plan."

"Yet the Industrial Revolution does not lie within Adam Smith's "historical present," nor does his system of economic doctrines make provision for any of its peculiar issues. What he has to say on the mechanics of industry is conceived in terms derived from an older order of things than that machine industry which was beginning to get under way in his own life-time; and all his illustrative instances and arguments on trade and industry are also such as would apply to the state of things that was passing, but they are not drawn with any view to that new order which was then coming on in the world of business enterprise."

"At the other hand the guiding principles in the case at certain other points have undergone a certain refinement of interpretation with a view to greater ease and security for trade and investment; and there has, in effect, been some slight abridgement of the freedom of combination and concerted action at any point where an unguarded exercise of such freedom would hamper trade or curtail the profits of business, -- for the modern era has turned out to be an era of business enterprise, dominated by the paramount claims of trade and investment. In point of formal requirements, these restrictions imposed on concerted action "in restraint of trade" fall in equal measure on the vested interests engaged in business and on the working population engaged in industry. So that the measures taken to safeguard the natural rights of ownership apply with equal force to those who own and those who do not. "The majestic equality of the law forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges or to beg on the street corners." But it has turned out on trial that the vested interests of business are not seriously hampered by these restrictions; inasmuch as any formal restriction on any concerted action between the owners of such vested interests can always be got around by a formal coalition of ownership in the shape of a corporation. The extensive resort to corporate combination of ownership, which is so marked a feature of the nineteenth century, was not foreseen and was not taken into account in the eighteenth century, when the constituent principles of the modern point of view found their way into the common law."

"The economic situation contemplated by Adam Smith as the natural (and ultimate) state of industry and trade in any enlightened society, conducted on sane and sound lines according to the natural order of human relations, was of a simple structure and may be drawn in few lines, -- neglecting such minor extensions and exceptions as would properly be taken account of in any exhaustive description. Industry is conceived to be of the nature of handicraft; not of the nature of mechanical engineering, such as it has in effect and progressively come to be since his time. It is described as a matter of workmanlike labor, "and of the skill, dexterity and judgment with which it is commonly applied." It is a question of the skilled workman and his use of tools. Mechanical inventions are "labor-saving devices," which "facilitate and abridge labor." The material equipment is the ways and means by manipulation of which the workman gets his work done. "Capital stock" is spoken of as savings parsimoniously accumulated out of the past industry of its owner, or out of the industry of those persons from whom he has legally acquired it by inheritance or in exchange for the products of his own labor. Business is of the nature of "petty trade" and the business man is a "middle man" who is employed for a livelihood in the distribution of goods to the consumers. Trade is subsidiary to industry, and money is a vehicle designed to be used for the distribution of goods. Credit is an expedient of the needy; a dubious expedient. Profits (including interest) are justified as a reasonable remuneration for productive work done, and for the labor-saving use of property derived from the owner's past labor. The efforts of masters and workmen alike are conceived to be bent on turning out the largest and most serviceable output of goods; and prices are competitively determined by the labor-cost of the goods. Like other men Adam Smith did not see into the future beyond what was calculable on the data given by his own historical present; and in his time that later and greater era of investment and financial enterprise which has made industry subsidiary to business was only beginning to get under way and only obscurely so."

"The facts, particularly the facts of industry and science, have outrun these provisions of law and custom; and so the scheme of things has got out of joint by that much, through no inherent weakness in the underlying principles of law and custom. The ancient and honorable principles of self-help are as sound as ever; it is only that the facts have quite unwarrantably not remained the same."

"The training enforced by this mechanical standardization, therefore, is of much the same order throughout the community as it is within the mechanical industries proper, and it drives to the same outcome, -- submergence of the personal equation. So that the workday information and the reasoning by use of which all men carry on their daily life under the new order is of the same general character as that information and reasoning which guides the mechanical engineers; and the unremitting habituation to its scope and method, its principles of knowledge and belief, leads headlong to a mechanistic conception of things, ways, means, ends, and values, whether it is called by that name or not. The resulting frame of mind is often spoken of as Materialism."

"To this "natural" plan of free workmanship and free trade all restraint or retardation by collusion among business men was wholly obnoxious, and all collusive control of industry or of the market was accordingly execrated as unnatural and subversive. It is true, there were even then some appreciable beginnings of coercion and retardation -- lowering of wages and limitation of output -- by collusion between owners and employers who should by nature have been competitive producers of an unrestrained output of goods and services according to the principles of that modern point of view which animated Adam Smith and his generation; but coercion and unearned gain by a combination of ownership, of the now familiar corporate type, was virtually unknown in his time. So Adam Smith saw and denounced the dangers of unfair combination between "masters" for the exploitation of their workmen, but the modern use of credit and corporation finance for the collective control of the labor market and the goods market of course does not come within his horizon and does not engage his attention."

"Such, in effect, has been the view habitually spoken for by many thoughtful persons of a conservative turn, who take an interest in concerting measures for holding fast that which once was good, in the face of distasteful facts. The vested right of ownership in all kinds of property has the sanction of the time-honored principles of individual self-direction, equal opportunity, free contract, security of earnings and belongings, self-help, in the simple and honest meaning of the word. It would be quite bootless to find fault with these reasonable principles of tolerance and security. Their definitive acceptance and stabilization in the eighteenth century are among the illustrious achievements of Western civilization; and their roots lie deep in the native wisdom of mankind. They are obvious corollaries under the rule of Live and let live, -- an Accidental version of the Golden Rule. Yet in practical effect those vested rights which rest blamelessly on these reasonable canons of tolerance and good faith have today become the focus of vexation and misery in the life of the civilized peoples. Circumstances have changed to such effect that provisions which were once framed to uphold a system of neighborly good-will have now begun to run counter to one another and are working mischief to the common good."

"The intellectual life of modern Europe and its cultural dependencies differs notably from what has gone before. There is all about it an air of matter-of-fact both in its technology and in its science; which culminates in a "mechanistic conception" of all those things with which scientific inquiry is concerned and in the light of which many of the dread realities of the Middle Ages look like superfluous make-believe."

"By and large, this eighteenth-century stabilized modern point of view has governed men's dealings within this era, and its constituent principles of right and honest living must therefore, presumptively, be held answerable for the disastrous event of it all, -- at least to the extent that they have permissively countenanced the growth of those sinister conditions which have now ripened into a state of world-wide shame and confusion."

"Any established system of law and order will remain securely stable only on condition that it be kept in line or brought into line to conform with those canons of validity that have the vogue for the time being; and the vogue is a matter of habits of thought ingrained by everyday experience. And the moral is that any established system of law and custom is due to undergo a revision of its constituent principles so soon as a new order of economic life has had time materially to affect the community's habits of thought. But all the while the changeless native proclivities of the race will assert themselves in some measure in any eventual revision of the received institutional system; and always they will stand ready eventually to break the ordered scheme of things into a paralytic mass of confusion if it cannot be bent into some passable degree of congruity with the paramount native needs of life."

"it has been a period of unexampled change, -- swift, varied, profound and extensive beyond example. And it follows of necessity that the principles of conduct which were approved and stabilized in the eighteenth century, under the driving exigencies of that age, have not altogether escaped the complications of changing circumstances. They have at least come in for some shrewd interpretation in the course of the nineteenth century. There have been refinements of definition, extensions of application, scrutiny and exposition of implications, as new exigencies have arisen and the established canons have been required to cover unforeseen contingencies; but it has all been done with the explicit reservation that no material innovation shall be allowed to touch the legacy of modern principles handed down from the eighteenth century, and that the vital system of Natural Rights installed in the eighteenth century must not be deranged at any point or at any cost."

"When a Nation - exercising its freedom of choice - discards Autocracy and selects Democracy as its social principle it cannot successfully retain the working elements of the discarded social organization. If it is to survive, it must adopt ways and means and methods of life in consonance with its chosen principle."

"It is scarcely necessary to describe this modern system of principles that still continues to govern human intercourse among the civilized peoples, or to attempt an exposition of its constituent articles. It is all to be had in exemplary form, ably incorporated in such familiar documents as the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the American Constitution; and it is all to be found set forth with all the circumstance of philosophical and juristic scholarship in the best work of such writers as John Locke. Montesquieu. Adam Smith, or Blackstone."

"As industrial processes involve specialized skill and expert technical training, made effective by intelligent co-ordination, it is clear that a humanly efficient Industrial Democracy necessitates leadership by those who possess the requisite knowledge, skill, and technical training."

"Technocracy originated in the winter of 1918-19 when Howard Scott formed a group of scientists, engineers, and economists that became known as the --a research organization. Howard Scott was chief engineer of this group. The Alliance lasted about fourteen years. Its membership embraced many of America's top scientists and engineers, including such personalities as: Frederick Ackerman, architect; , statistician; Thorstein Veblen, economist; L. K. Comstock, electrical engineer, and Charles Steinmetz. It conducted what became known as the famous 'Energy Survey of North America.' Out of the survey, and under the guiding genius of Howard Scott, there emerged a completely new way of looking at life and human affairs. The social assets and liabilities (in a physical sense) of North America were laid bare for the first time. The social trends and tendencies were analyzed scientifically and for the first time in history a continental area (North America) had a glimpse of its future, or at least of the broad alternatives."

"When we turn to the regime of international trade law, as it has emerged in the post–Second World War era, we find an intellectual or conceptual foundation that, to be sure, assumes and assimilates the classic insights about the gains to wealth and welfare from free trade but is fundamentally concerned with the interdependency of different states’ trade and other economic policies—i.e., managing or constraining the external costs that states impose on other states by virtue of their policies. A paramount goal is the avoidance of a protectionist summum malum—the situation where domestic social or economic pressures lead some states to increase or reinstate barriers to trade, thus triggering a competitive reaction in kind by other states, and eventually a “race to the bottom” that is disastrous for the global economy. This sort of behavior was widely perceived by the founders of the Bretton Woods system to have led eventually to perilous instability in the interstate system and economic catastrophe in the interwar years—which phenomena were seen as having contributed to the climate that made fascism, and the Second World War itself, possible."

"The term "technocracy" has a different popular connotation in France than in the United States largely because of contrasting past experiences. Our view is strongly marked by the fanciful scheme popularized by the eccentric intellectual, Howard Scott, during the depression. Although the French imported the term "technocracy" from Scott's movement, they grafted it on to an older and more respected tradition of thought and practice. Modern technocratic doctrine in France dates back to the Comte de Saint-Simon, the early prophet of industrialism."

"More broadly, technocracy may be understood as ‘a theory of governmental decision making designed to promote technical solutions to political problems’ (Fischer, 1990, p. 18). The models and practices of engineering, honed and refined in the manipulation of the material world, are promised as the tools to produce progress and harmony in the social world (Akin, 1977; Segal, 1985)."

"This book describes the role of technological experts and expertise in a democratic society. It places decision-making strategies - studied in organization theory and policy studies - into a political context. Fischer brings theory to bear on the practical technocratic concerns of these disciplines and hopes to facilitate the development of nontechnocratic discourse within these fields. The book adopts a critical perspective and addresses the restructuring of the policy sciences."

"As Antonio Gramsci recognized in his prison reflections from the end of the 1920s, the impact of United States technology offered a valuable key for understanding recent European development:'The European reaction to Americanism... must be examined attentively. Analysis of it will provide more than one element necessary for understanding the present situation of a series of states of the old continent and the political events of the post-war period."

"There are two main counts included in this modern -- eighteenth-century -- plan, which appear unremittingly to make for discomfort and dissension under the conditions offered by the New Order of things: -- National Ambition, and the Vested Rights of ownership. Neither of the two need be condemned as being intrinsically mischievous. Indeed, it may be true, as has often been argued, that both have served a good purpose in their due time and place; at least there is no need of arguing the contrary. Both belong in the settled order of civilized life; and both alike are countenanced by those principles of truth, equity and validity that go to make up the modern point of view. It is only that now, as things have been turning during the later one hundred years, both of these immemorially modern rights of man have come to yield a net return of hardship and ill-will for all those peoples who have bound up their fortunes with that kind of enterprise."

"But it is also to be admitted that the typical owner-employer of the earlier modern time, such as he stood in the mind's eye of the eighteenth-century doctrinaires, -- this traditional owner-employer has also come through the period of the mutation in a scarcely better state of preservation. At the period of this stabilization of principles in the eighteenth century, he could still truthfully be spoken of as a "master," a foreman of the shop, and he was then still invested with a large reminiscence of the master-craftsman, as known in the time of the craft-gilds. He stood forth in the eighteenth-century argument on the Natural Order of things as the wise and workmanlike designer and guide of his workmen's handiwork, and he was then still presumed to be living in workday contact and communion with them and to deal with them on an equitable footing of personal interest."

"[Technocracy is] a system of governance in which technically trained experts rule by virtue of their specialized knowledge and position in dominant political and economic institutions."

"Genuine alternatives to existing social organizations seldom appear viable except in times of rapid cultural transformation or crisis. The Great Depression was such a crisis. The valley and the shadow of the depression sorely tempted the country to reject its beliefs and principles. The faith that the twenties had placed in big business and the free marketplace seemed an illusion. At least until the New Deal, representative politics offered little constructive help to those victimized by economic events beyond their control. Traditional culture, with its emphasis on the individual, the local community, and Protestant virtues, had been found wanting previously. Americans might be nostalgic about the cultural values of the past, but reversion to them was hardly likely. The crisis demanded new ways of viewing and organizing society, a new set of values."

"The original technocrats offered a seemingly scientific explanation of explanation of Americas ills and increasingly moved toward proposing radical solutions. At the center of their view of America was the paradox of a society victimized by abundance and by technology. The march of science, invention, engineering, and their offspring — the machine and modern technology — possessed the potential for a material utopia. Instead, the workings of the machine operating within the traditional economic framework had brought the depression."

"So also it is plain that national pretensions in the field of foreign trade and investment, and all the diversified expedients for furthering and protecting the profitable enterprise of the vested interests in foreign parts, run consistently at cross-purposes with the keeping of the peace."

"The employer of labor in the staple industries of that time was, in his own person, commonly also the owner of the establishment in which his hired workmen were employed; and also -- again in passable accord with the facts -- he was presumed personally to come to terms with his workmen about wages and conditions of work. Employment was considered to be a relation of man to man."

"Although the label "technocrat" has come to be generally applied to the economy's technical elite, the technocracy movement was a short-lived episode of the thirties. It had little direct influence on the politics of the New Deal years. Nor has it influenced subsequent American thought to any lasting extent."

"Modern man lacks a unified conception of the world. He lives in a dual world: in his environment, which is naturally given to him, and, at the same time, in the world which since the beginning of the modern era has been created for him by sciences founded upon the principle that the laws of nature are, in essence, mathematical. The non-unity which has thus come to penetrate our entire life is the true source of the spiritual crisis we are going through today."

"Institutional theories of organization provide a rich, complex view of organizations. In these theories, organizations are influenced by normative pressures, sometimes arising from external sources such as the state, other times arising from within the organization itself. Under some conditions, these pressures lead the organization to be guided by legitimated elements, from standard operating procedures to professional certification and state requirement, which often have the effect of directing attention away from task performance... Institutional theories of organization have spread rapidly, a testimony to the power of the imaginative ideas developed in theoretical and empirical work."

"Homological algebra, conceived as a general tool reaching beyond all special cases, was invented by Cartan and Eilenberg (their book “Homological Algebra” appeared in 1956). This book is a very precise exposition, but limited to the theory of modules over rings and the associated functors “Ext” and “Tor”."

"Why did I feed these animals against all advice? Because we live in the same place, because they were individuals, because they had relatives, experience, a past, and desires, because they were cold and hungry, because they hadn't found enough to eat in the fall, because each had just one life."

"What happens in wildlife is indeed of moral concern, according to utilitarianism. When there is famine among the antelopes, the utilitarian sees a problem. It is as bad when wild animals suffer from natural causes, as it is when they are treated badly in the food industry. To the moral rights theorist ... it is not a moral problem when the wolf kills the lamb. It is a problem from the point of view of utilitarianism, however. If there is anything one can do about it, one should not hesitate to do it."

"If we humans could 'civilize' wildlife, and provide better living and dying conditions to non-human animals, then we ought to do so. We ought to side with the lamb against the wolf."

"Is there anything we can do about animal suffering in wildlife? There was a time when many said that nothing should be done to obviate human suffering, since attempts to establish a welfare state would either be in vain, jeopardise what kind of welfare there happens to exist, or produce perverse (even worse) results. We rarely meet with that reaction any more. However, many seem to be ready to argue that wildlife constitutes such a complex system of ecological balances that any attempt to interfere must produce no good results, put into jeopardy whatever ecological 'balances' there happen to exist, or perversely make the situation even worse. This is not the place to settle whether they are right or not, but, certainly, there must exist some measures we could take, if we bothered to do so, rendering wildlife at least slightly less terrible. If this were so, we should do so, according to utilitarianism."

"Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and flesh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another. [I]t seems to me that the horror I experienced on that dark night in the woods was a veridical insight. What I experienced was a brief and terrifying glimpse into the ultimately evil dimension of a godless world."