Roads to Economization: Valuing Life, Limb, and Leisure in the Social Democratic State

This article reinterprets contemporary forms of economization in UK government by recovering their emergence in the early nationalized transport industry. I show that two prominent practices of present-day governing-the rule of efficiency in allocative decision-making, and the monetization of non-marketed goods by way of consumer observation-were first developed in the UK between 1948-1959 by a public research institution called the Road Research Laboratory. The Laboratory sought to design an appropriate basis on which to make decisions about the post-war development of motorways 'on behalf of the public', within the broader frame of a planned economy. Through a landmark appraisal of the M1 investment, it reached the proposition that government should generally select the transport projects with the greatest 'social return on capital', a figure which included the monetized value of saved lives and leisure time. Reconstructing the Laboratory's arrival at this destination, I argue for seeing it as the product of social democratic aspirations for statecraft. I conclude that British public officials developed a 'social democratic governmentality' in the mid-twentieth century, challenging arguments that such a phenomenon was either marginal or non-existent. Economization was integral to it, however, of the kind that historians have commonly characterized as neoliberal.