The art of government

The institutionalization of technocratic rule has always been associated with the creation of governing bodies such as councils, committees, directorates and cabinets bestowing supreme power on scientists, engineers and other experts appointed on the basis of strict meritocracy rather than popular election. In this respect, there is a direct line from the proposed substitution of the American presidential system with government by executive cabinet or committee, as proposed in Khanna's manifesto for the new technocracy, to Smyth's National Council of Managing Scientists, Veblen's Soviet of Technicians and Saint-Simon's model of government. These visions of technocratic rule are, of course, mostly utopian: the complete transferral of executive power to technocratic bodies of government remains a largely unrealized blueprint. Fully technocratic governments may approximate the blueprint, but so far they remain short-lived exceptions within polities that do not otherwise conform to technocratic visions. The expert councils and committees that have become an integral part of government practically all over the globe may function as platforms for scientific and technical influence on public policy, at least part of the time, but they are not supreme bodies wielding executive power in the manner proposed by grander technocratic utopias.

Nevertheless, technocratic institutions do exist, sometimes extensively so, in modern government. More importantly, however, the preoccupation with councils, committees and cabinets also narrows down the search for technocratic regimes to a form of government in the institutional or even constitutional sense of the term, focused on the formal distribution and exercise of power, the role and nature of the executive, the number of decision-making bodies, checks and balances, delegation to subordinate institutions, oversight, transparency and so on. These are, of course, important dimensions of a political regime, but they are also limited to the domain of formal and quasiformal political institutions. In a broader sense, a political regime can interpreted as distinct form of governmental rationality and practice, or an ‘art of government’ embodying a more general ‘principle and method for the rationalization of the exercise of government’ (Foucault, 2008: 318).