APRIL 27, 2020
“COVID-19 REPRESENTS A NEW FORM of economic shock that cannot be tackled using the textbooks of the past.” So recently observed Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank (ECB). That emergencies throw orthodoxies in the air seems clear; fresh problems demand fresh thinking. But her words also hint at how technocrats define themselves in a crisis. As much as these are the conditions in which expertise is challenged, they are also times of opportunity. Officials can recast themselves as practical, flexible, and independentminded- possessors of the deeper insight that lies in knowing when to set aside yesterday’s formulas. Crisis encourages the transformation of technocracy-and with it, the relation to politics.
Twentieth-century history shows how turbulent times can produce calls for expert-led government. Movements for technocracy emerged in the United States and Europe in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression, taking inspiration from the rationalism attributed to wartime planning. The kind of expertise they prized was marked by the experience of crisis. Practical in spirit, it was about knowing what works, and how to fix things when they break. Many consciously celebrated the figure of the engineer. In the United States, the writings of Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott, and Walter Rautenstrauch likened society to a machine, calling for government as “social engineering.”