Download or read book Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth Century Brazil written by Eve E. Buckley and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eve E. Buckley’s study of twentieth-century Brazil examines the nation’s hard social realities through the history of science, focusing on the use of technology and engineering as vexed instruments of reform and economic development. Nowhere was the tension between technocratic optimism and entrenched inequality more evident than in the drought-ridden Northeast sertão, plagued by chronic poverty, recurrent famine, and mass migrations. Buckley reveals how the physicians, engineers, agronomists, and mid-level technocrats working for federal agencies to combat drought were pressured by politicians to seek out a technological magic bullet that would both end poverty and obviate the need for land redistribution to redress long-standing injustices.
Download or read book Technopopulism written by Christopher J. Bickerton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about a contemporary transformation in democratic politics: the rise of a new political field, techno-populism.
Download or read book Taking on Technocracy written by Dolores L. Augustine and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-09-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German abandonment of nuclear power represents one of the most successful popular revolts against technocratic thinking in modern times—the triumph of a dynamic social movement, encompassing a broad swath of West Germans as well as East German dissident circles, over political, economic, and scientific elites. Taking on Technocracy gives a brisk account of this dramatic historical moment, showing how the popularization of scientific knowledge fostered new understandings of technological risk. Combining analyses of social history, popular culture, social movement theory, and histories of science and technology, it offers a compelling narrative of a key episode in the recent history of popular resistance.
Download or read book The New Technocracy written by Esmark, Anders and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of populist parties and movements across the Western hemisphere and their contempt for ‘experts’ has shocked the establishment. This book examines how the ‘post-industrial’ technocratic regime of the 1980’s – of managerialism, depoliticisation and the politics of expertise – sowed the seeds for the backlash against the political elites that is visible today. Populism, Esmark augues, is a sign that the technocratic bluff has finally been called and that technocracy posing as democracy will only serve to exasperate existing problems. This book sets a new benchmark for studies of technocracy, showing that a solution to the challenge of populism will depend as much on a technocratic retreat as democratic innovation.
Download or read book Scientism and Technocracy in the Twentieth Century written by Richard G. Olson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-16 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientism, or the application of methods, attitudes, and concepts drawn from the natural sciences to human activities and social policy formation, is a pervasive feature of modern life, and it is one which has immense impact upon virtually all aspects of our private and public lives. This work explores the impact of Scientific Management, a movement initiated at the beginning of the twentieth century by the mechanical engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, in spreading scientistic attitudes through its appropriation by technical experts (technocrats) who have played a central and growing role in formulating public policies, not just in the United States, but throughout the world. It explores the movement of Scientific Management out of its initial American industrial context into progressive politics in the United States, into the policies of the Third Reich, those of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, into Cold War policy formation in both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R , and into those of contemporary China and the European Union, with short but important excursions into France, Sweden, Japan, and the developing world. Moreover it also explores some of the aesthetic dimensions of scientism and technocracy, especially as they have been reflected in modernist architecture and literature, and it examines current trends in education and the structure of advisory organizations such as RAND Corporation which are shaping the character and impact of scientistic and technocratic attitudes. Overall the approach is ambivalent toward scientism, acknowledging some of its great strengths in promoting economic growth and providing advice on security related issues, but offering criticisms of its narrow emphasis on efficiency, its insensitivity to qualitative considerations and the experience of those with specialized local knowledge, and its long term tendency to ignore distributive justice and promote income concentration.
Download or read book From Autocracy to Democracy to Technocracy written by Victor N. Shaw and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores human polity with respect to its nature, context, and evolution. Specifically, it examines how individual wills translate into political ideologies, investigates what social forces converge to shape governmental operations, and probes whether human polity progresses in focus from individual wills to group interests to social integrations. The book entertains five hypotheses. The first is commonsensical: where there are people there is politics. The second is analogous: humans govern themselves socially in a way that is comparable to how a body regulates itself physically. The third is rational: humans set rules, organize activities, and establish institutions upon facts, following reasons, for the purpose of effectiveness and efficiency. The fourth is random: human affairs take place haphazardly under specific circumstances while they overall exhibit general patterns and trends. The final hypothesis is inevitable: human governance evolves from autocracy to democracy to technocracy. The book presents systematic information about human polity, its form, content, operation, impact, and evolution. It sheds light on multivariate interactions among human wills, rights, and obligations, political thoughts, actions, and mechanisms, and social structures, processes, and order maintenances. Pragmatically, it offers invaluable insights into individuals as agents, groupings as agencies, and polity as structuration across the human sphere.
Download or read book The Lure of Technocracy written by Jürgen Habermas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-06-04 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past 25 years, Jürgen Habermas has presented whatis arguably the most coherent and wide-ranging defence of theproject of European unification and of parallel developmentstowards a politically integrated world society. In developing hiskey concepts of the transnationalisation of democracy and theconstitutionalisation of international law, Habermas offers themain players in the struggles over the fate of the European Union(the politicians, the political parties and the publics of themember states) a way out of the current economic and politicalcrisis, should they choose to follow it. In the title essay Habermas addresses the challenges and threatsposed by the current banking and public debt crisis in the Eurozonefor European unification. He is harshly critical of theincrementalist, technocratic policies advocated by the Germangovernment in particular, which are being imposed at the expense ofthe populations of the economically weaker, crisis-strickencountries and are undermining solidarity between the member states.He argues that only if the technocratic approach is replaced by adeeper democratization of the European institutions can theEuropean Union fulfil its promise as a model for how rampant marketcapitalism can once again be brought under political control at thesupranational level. This volume reflects the impressive scope of Habermas?s recentwritings on European themes, including theoretical treatments ofthe complex legal and political issues at stake, interventions oncurrent affairs, and reflections on the lives and works of majorEuropean philosophers and intellectuals. Together the essaysprovide eloquent testimony to the enduring relevance of the work ofone of the most influential and far-sighted public intellectuals inthe world today, and are essential reading for all philosophers,legal scholars and social scientists interested in European andglobal issues.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Experts written by William Easterly and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this "bracingly iconoclastic” book (New York Times Book Review), a renowned economics scholar breaks down the fight to end global poverty and the rights that poor individuals have had taken away for generations. In The Tyranny of Experts, renowned economist William Easterly examines our failing efforts to fight global poverty, and argues that the "expert approved" top-down approach to development has not only made little lasting progress, but has proven a convenient rationale for decades of human rights violations perpetrated by colonialists, postcolonial dictators, and US and UK foreign policymakers seeking autocratic allies. Demonstrating how our traditional antipoverty tactics have both trampled the freedom of the world's poor and suppressed a vital debate about alternative approaches to solving poverty, Easterly presents a devastating critique of the blighted record of authoritarian development. In this masterful work, Easterly reveals the fundamental errors inherent in our traditional approach and offers new principles for Western agencies and developing countries alike: principles that, because they are predicated on respect for the rights of poor people, have the power to end global poverty once and for all.
Download or read book The Technocratic Challenge to Democracy written by Eri Bertsou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-09 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first comprehensive study of how technocracy currently challenges representative democracy and asks how technocratic politics undermines democratic legitimacy. How strong is its challenge to democratic institutions? The book offers a solid theory and conceptualization of technocratic politics and the technocratic challenge is analyzed empirically at all levels of the national and supra-national institutions and actors, such as cabinets, parties, the EU, independent bodies, central banks and direct democratic campaigns in a comparative and policy perspective. It takes an in-depth analysis addressing elitism, meritocracy, de-politicization, efficiency, neutrality, reliance on science and distrust toward party politics and ideologies, and their impact when pitched against democratic responsiveness, accountability, citizens' input and pluralist competition. In the current crisis of democracy, this book assesses the effects of the technocratic critique against representative institutions, which are perceived to be unable to deal with complex and global problems. It analyzes demands for competent and responsible policy making in combination with the simultaneous populist resistance to experts. The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, political theory, policy analysis, multi-level governance as well as practitioners working in bureaucracies, media, think-tanks and policy making.
Download or read book The Lost History of Liberalism written by Helena Rosenblatt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry - and a term of derision - in today's increasingly divided public square. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words "liberal" and "liberalism," revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights. It was only during the Cold War and America's growing world hegemony that liberalism was refashioned into an American ideology focused so strongly on individual freedoms."--
Download or read book Technocracy written by Patrick M. Wood and published by . This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book identifies the birth, evolution, and intrusive nature of the exploitation of science and technology by a group, accurately and adequately identified as technocrats.
Download or read book Against Democracy written by Jason Brennan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bracingly provocative challenge to one of our most cherished ideas and institutions Most people believe democracy is a uniquely just form of government. They believe people have the right to an equal share of political power. And they believe that political participation is good for us—it empowers us, helps us get what we want, and tends to make us smarter, more virtuous, and more caring for one another. These are some of our most cherished ideas about democracy. But Jason Brennan says they are all wrong. In this trenchant book, Brennan argues that democracy should be judged by its results—and the results are not good enough. Just as defendants have a right to a fair trial, citizens have a right to competent government. But democracy is the rule of the ignorant and the irrational, and it all too often falls short. Furthermore, no one has a fundamental right to any share of political power, and exercising political power does most of us little good. On the contrary, a wide range of social science research shows that political participation and democratic deliberation actually tend to make people worse—more irrational, biased, and mean. Given this grim picture, Brennan argues that a new system of government—epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable—may be better than democracy, and that it's time to experiment and find out. A challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable, Against Democracy is essential reading for scholars and students of politics across the disciplines. Featuring a new preface that situates the book within the current political climate and discusses other alternatives beyond epistocracy, Against Democracy is a challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable.
Download or read book Power Without Knowledge written by Jeffrey Friedman and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do leading social-scientific experts, or technocrats, know what they are doing? In Power without Knowledge, Jeffrey Friedman maintains that they do not. Friedman shows that people are too heterogeneous to act as predictably as technocracy requires of them. Technocratic reason, then, entails a drastically oversimplified understanding of human decision making in modern society.
Download or read book Searching for Scientific Womanpower written by Laura Micheletti Puaca and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling history of what Laura Micheletti Puaca terms "technocratic feminism" traces contemporary feminist interest in science to the World War II and early Cold War years. During a period when anxiety about America's supply of scientific personnel ran high and when open support for women's rights generated suspicion, feminist reformers routinely invoked national security rhetoric and scientific "manpower" concerns in their efforts to advance women's education and employment. Despite the limitations of this strategy, it laid the groundwork for later feminist reforms in both science and society. The past and present manifestations of technocratic feminism also offer new evidence of what has become increasingly recognized as a "long women's movement." Drawing on an impressive array of archival collections and primary sources, Puaca brings to light the untold story of an important but largely overlooked strand of feminist activism. This book reveals much about the history of American feminism, the politics of national security, and the complicated relationship between the two.
Download or read book Zed written by Joanna Kavenna and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[An] insightful, unsettling look at how technology impacts our lives. . .Kavenna has skillfully made our present feel like dystopian fiction.” USA TODAY Named a Best Book of 2020 by USA TODAY From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writing comes a blistering, satirical novel about life under a global media and tech corporation that knows exactly what we think, what we want, and what we do—before we do. One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm . . . now what to do with all these messy people? Lionel Bigman is dead. Murdered by a robot. Guy Matthias, the philandering founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Beetle, insists it was human error. But was it? Either the predictive algorithms of Beetle's supposedly omniscient 'lifechain' don't work, or, they've been hacked. Both scenarios are impossible to imagine and signal the end of Beetle's technotopia and life as we know it. Dazzlingly original and darkly comic, Zed asks profound questions about who we are, what we owe to one another, and what makes us human. It describes our moment—the ugliness and the beauty—perfectly. Kavenna is a prophet who has seen deeply into the present—and thrown back her head and laughed.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Merit written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Times Literary Supplement’s Book of the Year 2020 A New Statesman's Best Book of 2020 A Bloomberg's Best Book of 2020 A Guardian Best Book About Ideas of 2020 The world-renowned philosopher and author of the bestselling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good? These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that "you can make it if you try". The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time. World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good.
Download or read book Technocracy Rising written by Patrick M. Wood and published by . This book was released on 2014-12-29 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dark horse of the New World Order is not Communism, Socialism or Fascism. It is Technocracy. With meticulous detail and an abundance of original research, Patrick M. Wood uses "Technocracy Rising" to connect the dots of modern globalization in a way that has never been seen before so that the reader can clearly understand the globalization plan, its perpetrators and its intended endgame. In the heat of the Great Depression during the 1930s, prominent scientists and engineers proposed a utopian energy-based economic system called Technocracy that would be run by those same scientists and engineers instead of elected politicians. Although this radical movement lost momentum by 1940, it regained status when it was conceptually adopted by the elitist Trilateral Commission (co-founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller) in 1973 to be become its so-called ""New International Economic Order."" In the ensuing 41 years, the modern expression of Technocracy and the New International Economic Order is clearly seen in global programs such as Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Councils of Governments, Smart Growth, Smart Grid, Total Awareness surveillance initiatives and more. Wood contends that the only logical outcome of Technocracy is Scientific Dictatorship, as already seen in dystopian literature such as "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley (1932) and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell (1948), both of whom looked straight into the face of Technocracy when it was still in its infancy. With over 250 footnotes, an extensive bibliography and clarity of writing style, Wood challenges the reader to new levels of insight and understanding into the clear and present danger of Technocracy, and how Americans might be able to reject it once again.
