Paradigm of Plenty: The Global Technocratic Moment

Although it has loosely come to mean government by experts, ‘technocracy’ entered the vernacular through its association with a specific movement of the 1930s. In the context of the Great Depression, Technocrats offered a technological explanation for unemployment, arguing that a new post-capitalist form of societal organization was needed to reap the benefits of the power age. Most English-language scholarship on Technocracy has centred around the US movement, echoing the American exceptionalism of its leader Howard Scott. This article expands the study beyond these parameters, utilizing the previously neglected archive of British socialist Fred Henderson and the writings of other transatlantic Technocrats. It demonstrates how such thinkers formed part of the transnational impulse to invent a new abundancist economic paradigm. Abundancism decentred the problem of production, purported to have been solved by advances in technology, and sought a new distributive system which broke with the capitalist breadwinning model. This abundancist discourse was at times coopted by the shorter workweek campaign, which reached into global policymaking circles. However, debates at the International Labour Organization are used to show how the Technocratic focus on leisure ran up against competing alternatives to laissez-faire, drawing on, in particular, the burgeoning historiography of fascist internationalism.