After 1989, Western elites congratulated themselves on entering a “post-ideological” age. With the great twentieth century battles between fascism, communism, and liberal-democratic capitalism over and the latter ascendant, politics would be confined to debating pragmatic solutions to technical problems. We are hearing rather less of this kind of commentary today. Over the past decade, the rise of populism on the right and radical identity politics on the left has signalled the return of a more openly ideological political style.
What this narrative leaves out is that the embattled consensus of the Western establishment is also underpinned by a powerful ideology—albeit one that denies its ideological character, hiding behind claims to be merely implementing the rules. Despite the restless political contortions of the past decade, it remains the default mode of state institutions and other large organizations.
This ideology is technocratic managerialism. Despite the populist revolt that has swept across the West, it remains deeply embedded in organizations governed by bureaucratic-managerial principles, whether corporations, government agencies, or international bodies. Because these organizations are still the primary units around which contemporary society is structured, their governing ideology remains deeply entrenched. Moreover, digital technologies and, increasingly, artificial intelligence, further reinforce its power. As social interaction and economic activity become dependent on digital platforms and applications, adherence to the rules of these platforms becomes the sine qua non of social participation. Those who design them are therefore in a position to engineer our shared reality, and they are doing so along managerial lines.
Managerialism is not just a set of techniques. It is underpinned by a set of beliefs about what human beings are and how social life should be arranged. Its baseline assumption is that all social phenomena are the outcome of measurable material processes. Social life is treated as analyzable and quantifiable, capable of being taken apart and put together again so that it works better. If something hasn’t been figured out yet, it will be in the future: We just need more data, more computing power, and more sophisticated modelling. The optimization of any social situation or process is simply a matter of finding and applying the correct technique.
“Managerialism is not just a set of techniques.”
“Experts think in terms of institutional goals rather than individual rights.”
Neither liberal democracy nor free-market capitalism would be conceivable without the belief that our individuality precedes our roles as members of social groups or subjects of states, and that as individuals we have inalienable rights and a capacity for rational deliberation and free choice. This liberal anthropology was not a neutral description, but an ideal of the good life. Thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith were not blind to the fact that our freedom is always constrained by social arrangements and our rationality imperfect. But the maximization of human freedom and rational deliberation—whether through democratic politics and an open public sphere, or the extension of free markets—was an ideal that shaped the modern world.
The underlying anthropology of managerialism marks a break from these assumptions. It regards people as inherently untrustworthy and unpredictable, cognitively limited, hampered by cognitive biases and habitual patterns, lacking in self-awareness, ignorant of both “the science” and their own best interests. At the same time, it views them as malleable and capable of being “nudged” and programmed. Accordingly, managers and experts think in terms of institutional goals rather than individual rights; rules and regulations rather than individual freedom; and the following of prescribed procedures rather than rational deliberation. The older liberal anthropology of the rationally choosing individual is replaced by an image of the irrational individual whose choosing needs to be directed, through deliberate engineering of the “choice architecture” in which it takes place.
A crucial role in this has been played by both genetics and computer science. Both contribute to a view of humans as essentially programmable, and consequently as beings without any real essence or personhood. According to the bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari, a darling of Silicon Valley the World Economic Forum, “The basic insight which unites the biological with the electronic is that bodies and brains are also algorithms.” From this perspective, there is nothing uniquely dignified about human individuals. Liberalism charged the individual with a kind of sacred aura—owing much to the inheritance of Christianity. The algorithmic view of humanity, inherent in genetics and computer science, strips this away.
Our immersion in a digital realm that is algorithmically curated only increases the salience of this way of thinking. As a streamlined and digitally remastered reality is substituted for the messiness and complexity of the physical world, humans are refashioned according to its logic. On the platforms that are now the locus of economic activity and social interaction, we are not free citizens or rational agents, but data points to be manipulated, controlled and nudged by the platform architecture and the algorithms which determine what information we are exposed to. Print-era modes of argumentation and debate are being displaced by methods of persuasion better adapted to a digital environment. Rather than being argued into an opinion, we are memed into it.
These developments will accelerate as people become more dependent on AI, integrating it into their work and their personal lives, sharing personal information and their most intimate thoughts with “agents,” even giving them free access to devices and accounts in order to delegate everyday tasks. If humans are to become partners of machines, this requires us to become more machinelike, adapting our ways of behaving and thinking to the affordances of platforms and applications.
The incorporation of AI into all aspects of our lives gives immense power to those who program and control the machines. But this is not primarily personal power to be used for individual advantage, so much as institutional power vested in the organizations which control and deploy the applications. Every acceleration of digitalization reinforces technocracy because it expands the reach of the surveillance, manipulation, assessment, regulation and control exercised by large-scale organizations, whether corporations or government agencies.
This concentration of institutional power is not accidental, but reflects the underlying ethos of the organizations developing these systems. Silicon Valley firms and tech entrepreneurs tend to approach social and political problems as engineering challenges, to be solved through process optimization, data extraction, and system design rather than democratic deliberation or moral reasoning. The answer to any challenge is to gather more data and develop more refined models. In this sense, the tech elite exemplifies a distinctively technocratic mentality: one that treats human behaviour as a set of variables to be modelled and managed, and assumes that sufficiently advanced computational systems can render messy social realities legible, predictable, and controllable.
The older liberal anthropology is open to criticism on many points: It denies the inherently social character of human beings, as well as the contribution of older social traditions and bonds, including the values of Christianity, to the functioning of liberal societies. However, it endowed the individual with an inherent sense of their own dignity and agency and thereby supported broad-based participation in both market economies and the political process.
Managerial anthropology, on the other hand, subverts individual agency and undermines the basis for a political order based on democratic participation. If people are basically ignorant and irrational, they can hardly be trusted with self-government. But it does not offer any alternative vision of the social good, any telos for social action beyond the refinement of technique. In the absence of substantive values, managerialism engages in the fetishization of process. Managerial regulation and procedure, alongside constant reform, restructuring and change, become ends in themselves.
Managerial technocracy is therefore fundamentally hostile to democracy, which rests on a faith in the inherent dignity and self-governing capacity of the individual as well as a sense that there are social goods which can be achieved through collective political action. Neither of these has a place in the moral universe of managerialism.
Yet even as it erodes democracy, technocracy expands the remit of the state. Due to its distrust of individual capacities and prioritization of process optimization, it is continuously tempted to use policy to regulate, manage, nudge and otherwise shape ever more dimensions of individual conduct. What guides this expanded administrative state however is not the popular will, nor the interests of a nation or class, but technocratic imperatives. Many of the crises and conflicts of our time have their roots in this process, and the consequent alienation of organizations from the populations they were originally established to represent or serve.
The paradox of technocracy is that it presents itself as a set of neutral procedures, while quietly redefining what it means to be human and undermining the basis of a shared citizenship. Technocracy displaces democratic decision-making while preserving its forms, allowing a managerial elite to govern without appearing to rule. It persists across electoral and ideological shifts because it is embedded in institutional form rather than party politics and underpinned by a set of managerial assumptions that are uncritically accepted as “common sense.” Ironically, the most powerful ideology of our time is the one which insists it is no ideology at all.
Paul O’Connor is an associate professor of sociology at United Arab Emirates University and author of Technocracy: Knowledge and Power in the Information Age.
There's a case to be made that the rise of a technocratic managerial class in Yugoslavia, from late 60s onwards, essentially spelled out the doom for self-managed socialism and federalism. As the "old guard" died off, newly trained managerial class was the driving force that hacked away at the socialist policies and entrenched the regional federal bureaucracies (contrary to the Republican institutions), pawing the way for a civil war that was to come.
Almost all leaders of the 90s, both "conservative" (Milošević, Tuđman… etc.) and "progressive" (Marković) were born out of, or widely supported by, the professional managerial class that ossified in the upper echelons during the 80s.
I'm not saying one historical example necessitates that managerialism is functionally a collective suicide cult, but I'm personally inclined to say it's a suicide cult.
except the bourgeois are agaisnt a rationally managed government, otherwise literally every country on earth would be a social democracy, which is the most rational and efficient way to organise capitalisn. theyd rather cannibalise the nation to make a few quick bucks.