Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism: 1911-1939.

• Author: Lindsey, Brink

WHATEVER DOES OR DOESN'T happen in the 104th Congress, the American welfare state faces a decidedly bleak future. It suffers a central and seemingly intractable problem: Fewer and fewer people believe in it anymore. Power without legitimacy can't be sustained indefinitely, and the welfare state's legitimacy appears to be in terminal decline. Unless that decline can be reversed, a substantial contraction in the size and scope of government is inevitable.

If you're a skeptic--if you think 1994's election may have been a fluke, if you doubt there has been a generation-long shift in the political culture away from big government--you ought to read John M. Jordan's Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism 1911-1939. This fresh and interesting examination of the origins and development of big government shows just how different things used to be.

Jordan, who teaches at Harvard, tells the story over three decades of the "rational reformers," otherwise known as technocrats or social engineers. Theirs was a particular strain of American liberalism, and a particularly influential one. They shaped the Progressive era in the 1900s and 1910s, the corporatist embrace of the "associative state" in the 1920s, and the New Deal in the 1930s. And while Jordan's narrative leaves off there, he acknowledges that the story continues: "In the indistinct but crucial realm of political culture, the engineering and managerial influence persisted well after World War II, finding its highest expression in the 1950s and 1960s...."

The rationalist visions of any era share certain key features--among them, according to Jordan, "fascination with scientific method, machine process, and large-scale managerial organizations as analogues for government." Equally characteristic is disdain in equal measure for market competition and democratic persuasion, since both are too messy and too unpredictable to fit in the social engineers' blueprints. Sound familiar, Mr. Magaziner?

Jordan traces the roots of this worldview back to the efficiency craze that took hold in the first generation of industrialization: "A discussion of the 'best and the brightest' of the Great Society must begin with what Taylorites called 'the one best way' in the first years of the century."

The preoccupation with efficiency, epitomized by Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management and its time-and-motion studies, produced rhetoric that sounds distinctly odd to contemporary...