In this interdisciplinary work, John Jordan traces the significant
influence on American politics of a most unlikely hero: the professional
engineer. Jordan shows how technical triumphs--bridges, radio
broadcasting, airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers, and electrical
power--inspired social and political reformers to borrow the language
and logic of engineering in the early twentieth century, bringing terms
like efficiency, technocracy, and social engineering into the
political lexicon. Demonstrating that the cultural impact of technology
spread far beyond the factory and laboratory, Jordan shows how a panoply
of reformers embraced the language of machinery and engineering as
metaphors for modern statecraft and social progress. President Herbert
Hoover, himself an engineer, became the most powerful of the
technocratic progressives. Elsewhere, this vision of social engineering
was debated by academics, philanthropists, and commentators of the
day--including John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Lewis Mumford, Walter
Lippmann, and Charles Beard. The result, Jordan argues, was a new way of
talking about the state.
Originally published in 1994.
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