Minimum Feasible Participation: The Politics of ‘Rationality’

In early twentieth century America many thinkers perceived and reacted to a shift towards judgement by experts, an apparent realisation of an influential tradition in political thought that has conceived of political judgement as a technical skill. Some, like Walter Lippmann[1], championed “dependence on those who know”[2] as a necessary adaptation to the complexity of modernity. In the “epoch of technology” who better to judge than technicians?[3] Others were fearful that increases in the authority of technical experts came at the expense of democratic accountability. But fears, and enthusiasms, about “the expert… replacing the politician”[4] were exaggerated. Social scientists at this time tended to see themselves as “service intellectuals” – “on tap, not on top”[5] – and lacked the power to usurp traditional political and business elites.

But if experts did not seize decisionmaking control from traditional elites, ‘expertise’ and ‘rationality’ did become important justifications for innovations in the process of political decisionmaking the effect of which was to further marginalise the public. Experts did not ultimately hold power, but the “citadel of expertise”[6] often functioned to advance the interests of and provide cover for those who did. Claiming specialist knowledge to add authority to interested judgement was not a new tactic.[7] But following WWII, there arose in America something quite different: an attempt to change the structures of decisionmaking itself – the processes by which political judgement was formed – along ‘rational’ lines. This conceptualized political judgement not as a product of democratic deliberation, the exercise of human reason, or gut intuition, but as a “machine product”.[8]

This article will trace the rise of these decision technologies to their adoption by the U.S. federal government. It will argue that attempts to reorganise decisionmaking processes, ostensibly to achieve ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ political judgement, depoliticized controversial issues by disguising them as mere technical problems, and will focus in particular on their role in reinforcing hierarchy. In short, it will examine ‘rational political judgement’ as an antidemocratic managerial device. It will conclude with an attempt to draw, from this case study, some necessarily tentative general conclusions about the problems of conceptualizing political judgement as a ‘skill’ or a ‘science’.

Rational decision technologies were forged in the closed world of computer simulations and operations research developed during WWII and expanded during the Cold War. They were principally developed at RAND, the military think-tank and “quintessential Cold War institution”.[9] Technologies it pioneered in the context of military strategy developed into rational choice theory, a new ‘science of choice’ that used a few basic axioms to deductively predict behaviour. Rational choice theory was a deeply ideological project. If RANDites saw themselves as defenders of Western democracy against “a totalitarian threat”,[10] Amadae shows that the ‘democracy’ they were defending was redefined as “individualistic competition that resembles market interactions predicated on self-interest”.[11] The effect was to re-ground capitalist democracy “in a scientific, [apparently] nonnormative fashion”, in opposition to both “communism” and “ideal democracy”.[12] Amadae is correct to situate the rational choice project in the context of a Cold War understood as an “internal U.S. struggle” over “the manufacture of the ‘Cold War’ itself” – that is, as a construction that functioned to legitimise claims to authority and undermine political claims by the population.[13] But then why frame it as a rationalisation for capitalist democracy? This confusion aside, Amadae’s analysis of the ideological function of rational choice theory is useful for analysing RAND’s other major contribution to the praxis of decisionmaking in America: systems analysis.

Institutionalising ‘Scientific’ Political Judgement

Systems analysis was RAND’s signature product, the technology on which it based its “mystique”.[14] A “merger of quantitative methods and rules of thumb”[15], it was designed to enable planners to achieve greater precision when making decisions in conditions of uncertainty. Systems analysis possessed an aura of scientific objectivity, assiduously cultivated, which allowed RAND to portray itself as a “neutral and objective body” that “produced expert policy advice” and obviated the need for “political factions” in policymaking.[16]

The application of systems analysis to political decisionmaking was a natural one – like military planners, politicians must make judgements in situations of great uncertainty. But systems analysis was not simply about providing data to politicians. A key characteristic of systems analysis was that “the objectives are either not known or are subject to change”.[17] Systems analysis in the form that was actually implemented in the federal government – called ‘planning-programming-budgeting’ (PPB) – represented a major change in the processes of decisionmaking. It attempted to “break out” of the “confines” of traditional policy formation[18], with its emphasis on compromise between competing interest groups, purportedly in the service of “rational”, “objective” policy judgement.

These two main arguments for the application of PPB to political decisionmaking – that it was rational, and that it was objective – tended to go together. There was a strong aesthetic quality to these claims[19]: where politics was grubby and “sloppy”[20], PPB was clean, sharp and decisive, concerned only with maximising utility. Unlike politicians and representatives of special interests, PPB was “a neutral tool”[21] and technical experts were “value free”.[22] “Actual data” and “scientific” rationality would replace “seat-of-pants judgement” and “political intuition”.[23] Rational management meant an end to “ideology” and a triumph of rationality over the “disease of politics”.[24]

Systems analysis itself had no fixed definition, and it was even, as E.S. Quade, the author of RAND’s lectures on the topic, conceded, “difficult to decide which studies should be called good.”[25] Critics like Aaron Wildavsky and Ida Hoos observed that it used greatly simplified models and worked from assumptions that were themselves “shot through with political and social value choices”.[26] For example, ‘efficiency’ is itself far from “ethics-free”[27], and nor is the decision to place its attainment above other goals. Some defence intellectuals and systems analysts acknowledged as much, and were realistic about rational decision technology’s role an aid to political judgement.[28] But as systems analysis and PPB became increasingly influential, caution gave way to hubris.[29]

The Political Economy of ‘Objectivity’

But for all its self-proclaimed rationality and single-minded focus on efficient results, the extraordinary rise of PPB cannot be explained by its record of practical success. The major early systems studies at RAND were failures.[30] Even as the technology developed RAND systems studies were “highly problematic”, with analysts forced to make “simplifying assumptions” that “seemed ridiculous to those who had actually fought a war”.[31] The results of PPB and systems analysis in the Department of Defense were “dubious at best”, leading to an overreliance on “simplified models” that “were lent illusory precision by their quantitative bases”.[32] Despite this, and despite the fact that no attempts were made to analyse the efficacy of either PPB or systems analysis for making good judgements, systems analysts continued to enjoy “profound” influence in the Johnson administration[33], which in 1965 rolled PPB out across the federal government. Even then, notwithstanding the fact that “applications of military innovations and expertise to urban problems rarely served as sources of solutions”[34], they were subsequently exported to the international stage via the World Bank.[35] If systems analysis and PPB did not have stellar records of practical success, what explains their influence?

To answer this, it is worth recalling Otto Mayr’s observation that where a technological innovation “matches and reinforces the prevailing conception of order” it will be “received more warmly, regardless of its technical merits”.[36] The rise of systems analysis and PPB did reflect their success – not in improving political judgement, but in furthering the interests of powerful sectors of American society and securing elite control against popular participation. The first federal department to adopt PPB was the Department of Defense. It is worth briefly looking at how that came to be, for it illustrates how, for all its claims to ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’, rational decision technology became influential by collaborating with powerful interests.

PPB was imported into the Pentagon on the back of organised misrepresentation and political opportunism. A 1951 RAND study, considered “the prototypical systems analysis study”, argued that the U.S. had to possess enough nuclear weapons to withstand a surprise USSR strike on all U.S. bases simultaneously and still be able to inflict equal damage in response.[37] President Eisenhower dismissed the proposal on the grounds that the likelihood of such an attack was almost nil, but defence intellectuals were persistent. In 1957 a committee chaired by H.R. Gaither, chairman of the board for both RAND and the Ford Foundation, authored a report identifying a potentially fatal “missile gap” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The report used “wildly speculative” estimates of Soviet capability to call for a massive increase in defence spending and a “radical re-organisation” of the Pentagon along rational decision management lines.[38] There was no ‘missile gap’, but it was a useful fiction, keeping RAND relevant in a time of decreased international tension and justifying huge government subsidies to high-technology industry.[39] The Gaither Report was backed by the Committee for Economic Development, a group of over a hundred of America’s largest corporations that had significant “overlap of membership” with the Gaither Committee. It claimed to provide “objective, expert advice” on policy.[40] The Report was also championed by the Democratic Party – Kennedy used the ‘missile gap’ as a weapon to attack Eisenhower, and this played a significant role in his election triumph.[41] Kennedy’s victory was shared by defence intellectuals, who found themselves occupying important roles in the Department of Defense under Robert McNamara. In power, despite readily conceding that the ‘missile gap’ had been a fiction, they presided over an “unprecedented arms buildup” and a doubling of the defence budget.[42]

Amadae takes this, and the subsequent rationalisation of decisionmaking in the Pentagon through the implementation of PPB, as evidence of a “shift in the principle grounding legitimate authority” to one “anchored in claims of scientific rigor and objective calculations.” Gaither, who had authored a report for the Ford Foundation in 1948 outlining his technocratic vision for policymaking, had partially realised his goals: in the Pentagon, at least, “difficult questions of policy” were now to be decided “objectively” by “a professional elite”.[43] But the evidence Amadae adduces suggests that rational management’s rise to the Pentagon illustrates not Gaither’s vision but Otto Mayr’s dictum. That defence intellectuals were able to don the mantle of objectivity did lend their conclusions credibility, and within the Pentagon the appeal to quantitative data and the ‘scientific’ character of rational decisionmaking did afford McNamara an “epistemic edge”[44] in his battles with military brass. But if defence intellectuals had instead used systems analysis to call for a dismantling of the military-industrial complex – if, that is, rational decisionmaking had not “[matched] and [reinforced] the prevailing conception of order” – then it would have surely remained a marginal phenomenon. One cannot imagine that political and business elites were so committed to the principle of scientific objectivity that they would have willingly undermined their own interests simply on that basis. Look, after all, at what happens when business interests and the conclusions of the natural sciences collide.[45] Rather, what rational decision technology offered powerful interests was ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ cover, and thus increased legitimacy, for the pursuit of their objectives.[46]

On careful examination, then, the rise of systems analysis reveals not a triumph of ‘objective’ technologies of political judgement, but the political utility of ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as rhetorical and managerial devices to further traditional political and economic interests. This function can also be seen in the implications systems analysis and PPB had for democratic practice, for rational decision technologies were “inseparable from the politics of control”.[47]

Rationalising Hierarchy

PPB had an inherent tendency towards the centralization of control.[48] It reorganised categories of decisionmaking so that each category corresponded to a final ‘outcome’ or ‘goal’. These categories inevitably cut across the sub-units of government organisation, and as such program budgeting could only be implemented by a top executive. This was justified on rationalist grounds: centralization would reduce duplication and increase efficiency. Politically, as one influential critic of PPB noted, “[a] more useful tool for increasing” the power of the executive “would be hard to find.”[49] PPB enabled McNamara, “a rationalizer of resources and a centralizer of decision-making”[50], to “impose his will”[51] on the Department of Defense. In the Pentagon, as elsewhere, “rational management and absolute control went hand in hand.”[52] Program budgeting similarly had the effect of “centralizing decisions” when Johnson applied it in the Bureau of the Budget.[53] As Charles Zwick, a RAND analyst who became budget director in 1968, explained, the “grand strategy” of PPB & systems analysis was “getting more control higher up in the system.”[54] This also meant removing budgetary control from the sphere of democratic accountability, so that “instead of Congress determining how much national security the nation could afford”, defence intellectuals would determine defence allocations based on “presumptively objective and thus incontrovertible cost-effectiveness studies.”[55] During the Vietnam War PPB helped insulate the politics of the defence budget from the “usual political processes”, and may thereby have contributed towards prolonging the war.[56]

The democratic implications of this “extreme centralizing bias”[57] were far greater when ‘command-and-control’ rational decision technologies were transferred into the civil realm. We saw above that rational choice theory was hostile not just to communism but also to participatory democracy. Program budgeting, with its emphasis on hierarchy and rational management, was similarly oriented. Thus, some advocates of PPB resented the fact that budgetary decisions were subject to legislative review on the grounds that this introduced “elements of ‘politics’ to what would otherwise be a ‘rational process’ of decision-making.”[58] The political scientist Frederick Mosher, a PPB pioneer, observed that nearly all proponents of program budgeting had “contempt for… democratic values and processes” and viewed “the President and Congress… as enemies of rationality.” He condemned the PPB literature’s “technocratic and authoritarian language” as redolent of “the technocrats of the thirties”; “its aim”, he concluded, “seems to be to eliminate politics from decisionmaking.”[59]

All of this was embedded in a broader political context. The increasing influence and implementation of PPB and systems analysis at the federal and local government level coincided with a backlash in mainstream political science against the increased popular political participation of the 1960s, or the “crisis of democracy” as it was called.[60] Ithiel de Sola Pool, a prominent defence intellectual and participant in debates about domestic reform, argued that social stability depended on “compelling newly mobilized strata to return to a measure of passivity and defeatism from which they have recently been aroused by the process of modernization.”[61] Prominent liberal political scientist Samuel Huntington agreed, adding that often “the claims of expertise, experience, and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority”.[62]

This elitism was characteristic of liberal reformers, who tended to agree with Keynes that “public affairs should and could be managed by an elite of clever and disinterested public servants”.[63] The defence intellectuals-turned-urban reformers’ concern for the poor was quite genuine and their self-proclaimed ‘disinterestedness’ was, if delusional, often sincerely so. It could be sustained because they saw themselves as working only on the narrowly technical aspects of policy implementation, detached from any broader political project. In the Pentagon, defence intellectuals saw themselves as hard-headed realists, free of ideology, but if their approach was realism, it was of the “crackpot” variety.[64] The “peculiar congeniality” between war and the technical intelligentsia identified in 1917 by Randolph Bourne persisted, as did the accuracy of his diagnosis – focused on the “technical side of the war” and “trained up in the pragmatic dispensation”, the new mandarins made themselves “efficient instruments” of power.[65]

It was against this political background that program budgeting technology was imported into urban planning, as a “direct response to urban unrest”.[66] As social disorder peaked in the mid-1960s, “Cold War decision technologies that had been developed and harnessed to fight an external adversary were turned inwards, as the real threat to democracy was seen to be discontented citizens.”[67] Or more precisely, discontented and politically active citizens. It was in this context that, through President Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, the institutionalisation of political judgement as ‘rational science’ functioned, in collaboration with powerful political and economic interests, to undermine prospects for democratic participation and control.

War on Participation

As liberal reformers turned their attention to urban problems in the early ‘60s, the ‘community action’ approach to reform became increasingly influential. This “sought to develop an ideal of social policy as a collective, democratic process, responsive to knowledge and expertise.”[68] That is to say, it sought to marry social scientific expertise with increased involvement on the part of affected communities. Reformers tended to adopt liberal rationalist or cybernetic perspectives that viewed ghetto poverty and alienation as a problem of mismanagement, or of obstructed communication, rather than as a manifestation of fundamental conflicts of interest. It was a problem of “social engineering” best attacked through the application of “expert knowledge”. Thus they “worked as far as possible through established institutions”, aiming to make them more effective through rationalisation and more responsible to community needs through increased participation. An alternative explanation for bureaucratic failure – that institutions were ineffective in reducing poverty not because of poor management but because they were instruments of the dominant social classes – would have suggested an alternative course of action, namely “an assertion of the interests of the poor, backed by moral and political sanctions powerful enough to force concessions, and establish a new order of priorities.”[69] But none of the projects were this militant, and those who took steps in this direction were quickly restrained or destroyed by the powerful interests on which they depended.[70]

These Community Action Projects (CAPs) received a boost in 1964 when President Johnson declared a ‘War on Poverty’. Drawing on the experience of the community projects of the early ‘60s he insisted that any attack on poverty must be comprehensive and “[a]bove all” must involve “the poor people of the community whose first opportunity must be the opportunity to help themselves”.[71] The Johnson administration supported CAPs through the newly created Office for Economic Opportunity (OEO) which was mandated to strive for “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. Yet since 1959 urban reformers had increasingly made use of rational decision technology, and in 1965 Johnson urged that all federal agencies adopt PPB. Initially the use of these rational managerial practices to advance ‘community action’ might appear to represent a counterexample to the centralizing tendencies of PPB and systems analysis described above. A closer look reveals that under the guise of ‘rationally guided’ community action PPB served to undermine genuine community control.

For all its trumpeting of community action the administration’s attitude towards popular participation was similar to that which underpinned later ‘democracy promotion’ efforts abroad, in which the U.S., we are soberly informed, “did not want to control” other states but equally “did not want to allow developments to get out of control.[72] President Johnson had “never intended the [community action] program to mobilize the poor”[73], but rather to increase their identification, and thus their compliance, with programs directed from the top. This approach to citizen participation was inspired by counterinsurgency theory applied in Vietnam. Development theorists were increasingly of the view that successful social engineering depended in part on the “populations whose development was being engineered” taking “an active interest in the process”. This was also the thrust of ‘decentralization’ theory, increasingly popular in the late-‘60s and early-‘70s, which advocated “administrative decentralization” to give poor citizens a “sense… of control over their lives”. Again, the emphasis was on ‘sense’ – administrative decentralization “differed from community control” in that it “brought government closer to the people but did not hand over fundamental power.”[74]

This is the context in which the importation of rational defence management to the urban sphere must be understood. Defence intellectuals and the Johnson administration understood “power to the people” within “a framework of national security planning” that was “by no means incompatible with… their interest in control.” Their “rhetoric about promoting citizen participation” obscured their primary concern with “maintaining urban security”. As in Vietnam, what they envisaged was “a limited role for community participation” that “served the larger goals of controlled modernization and civil defence.” If the ‘War on Poverty’ was effectively a “pacification program” for the American ghetto, rational decision technologies were a key weapon in the counterinsurgency.[75] As Adam Yarmolinsky, the administration’s choice to lead the OEO, explained, the poor are a constituency, and “[a] constituency, after all, need not be involved in the kind of direct democracy practiced at faculty meetings… [W]e would have the last word.”[76]

But Yarmolinsky didn’t end up chairing the OEO – his appointment was vetoed by southern Democrats concerned about his ‘liberal’ civil rights record. In an example of the law of unintended consequences, this cleared the way for more radical antipoverty reformers to take the helm. They interpreted Johnson’s call for “maximum feasible participation” more literally, arguing for real participation by the poor in social planning and even encouraging the poor to express dissent.[77] “[U]nder pressure from Negro communities” and the civil rights movement the OEO began to actively mobilize the poor through “traditional democratic approaches” like “group forums and discussions, nominations, and balloting.”[78] This “threatened to introduce real democracy to federal social welfare policy-making” and, even worse, “to undermine existing social and institutional structures”.[79] The backlash was swift, and the part played in it by systems analysts and PPB is revealing.

The defence intellectuals in the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) were appalled by the radicalisation of community action, which looked to local, decentralised and diverse solutions to urban problems and tended to defer to the experience and judgement of the poor. This was anathema to the model of “detached, rational analysis” idealised by systems analysts, who became immediately hostile to the “OEO radicals”.[80] The BOB informed the OEO of its preference for “less emphasis on policy-making by the poor in planning community projects”, insisting that ‘maximum feasible participation’ meant “using the poor to carry out the programme, not to design it”. The pressure for this policy originated, the New York Times reported, mainly from Democratic Mayors who saw “a threat to their patterns of governing and to their political security if the poor develop into articulate, militant lobbies at city hall.”[81] President Johnson himself was furious at the “kooks and sociologists” directing the CAPs.[82] One of the more radical projects, Mobilization for Youth, was “all but destroyed” by powerful interests, which launched a sustained investigation of financial irregularities and suspect Communist sympathies (largely spurious).[83] To reign in the rest, the administration turned to the rational decisionmaking technologies that had been so effective in consolidating McNamara’s control in the Pentagon.

Observing that centralization of decisionmaking authority was “the most fundamental innovation of the Hitch-McNamara era”, the BOB pushed for the OEO to undergo a similar transformation.[84] Appalled by the “unsystematic and chaotic and anarchic” CAP approach, it, with Johnson’s approval and the aid of defence intellectual and RAND alumnus Henry Rowen, launched a concerted effort to regain control over the OEO by subjecting it to PPB. In late 1965 Johnson rolled out PPB across the federal government so that “[we can] control our programs and our budgets rather than having them control us.”[85] As in the Pentagon these ‘command and control’ technologies emphasised “a top-down approach to planning and management”, which is precisely why they were adopted – the intention was to “centralize… decision making”.[86] In line with ‘pacification’ theory PPB offered defence intellectuals and political elites an “appropriate structure to organize increased community participation while maintaining some” – in fact, decisive – “hierarchical control”.[87]

The loss of political support for the OEO and community action was a result of its perceived role as “a stimulator of participation”. By providing funds for “groups challenging established politicians” it “mobilized” a “powerful enem[y]” – the population.[88] Federal expenditure began to be channelled instead to “less controversial” poverty-related research along PPB and systems analysis lines, establishing a “civilian RAND” and “virtually creat[ing]” the discipline of ‘policy analysis’.[89] As before, the success of rational decision technologies in actually improving political judgement was minimal.[90] They did, however, effectively rationalise antidemocratic reaction as merely the institutionalisation of “objective” and “value free” political judgement.[91] The new “top-down, technocratic allocation of resources created by systems analysis and program budgeting was profoundly undemocratic”, illustrating well the point made by prominent PPB critic Ida Hoos: “[t]he techniques of systems analysis can, if used astutely, remove highly charged political issues from the arena of public debate by relegating them to ‘scientific’ appraisal.”[92]

Technocratic ‘rationality’ as legitimating ideology

This article began with a conception of political judgement as ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’. It then examined how attempts to reorganise decisionmaking structures on the basis of this conception, both in the Pentagon and the ‘War on Poverty’, functioned to centralize control and reinforce hierarchy, in the latter case at the expense of democratic control, and to advance the interests of power by endowing their pursuit with an aura of ‘scientific’ legitimacy. From this, we end with two more general, and so more tentative, conclusions. First, whatever its theoretical merit, in practice the conception of political judgement as an ‘objective’ technical skill fails, descriptively, as an account of how political judgement in fact operates and has functioned, normatively, to legitimise antidemocratic managerial practices and the self-interests of the powerful. The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School were right to identify in technocratic ‘rationality’ a “legitimating ideology” that masks “social domination”[93] – a fact no less true in the workplace than in the political sphere. Second, the question ‘what is political judgement’ is inextricable from the issue of who gets to judge. The answer must itself be political, concerned as it is with the proper distribution of power. It may be the case – though their record of success suggests otherwise – that rational decision technologies produced more ‘rational’ or even more ‘objective’ judgement. But it would only follow from this that decisionmaking ought to be organised along PPB lines if one were to value ‘efficiency’ or ‘rationality’ or ‘objectivity’ over democratic control. Despite the arguments of the defence intellectuals, this is inherently a value judgement, not a scientific one.

Jamie Stern-Weiner studies politics at King’s College, Cambridge. He is co-editor of New Left Project and a contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique. He tweets at @jamiesw

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[1] See his ‘Public Opinion’ (1922) and ‘Drift and Mastery’ (1914).

[2] John C. Merriam, cit. Hollinger, David A. Science, Jews and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996):89.

[3] Gen. de Gaulle, cit. Hecht, Gabrielle. “Planning a Technological Nation: Systems Theory and the Politics of National Identity in Postwar France.” Systems, Experts, and Computers: the Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and after. Ed. Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas Parke Hughes (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000):142. Regrettably de Gaulle did not elaborate on the differences between his “epoch of technology” and the “Age of Machinery” proclaimed by Thomas Carlyle more than a century earlier. (cit. Agar, Jon. The Government Machine: a Revolutionary History of the Computer (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003):37) .

[4] writer Andre Siegfried, cit. Hecht:136.

[5] Charles Merriam, cit. Smith, Mark C. Social Science in the Crucible: American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918-41 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994):27.

[6] cit. Fischer, Frank. Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990):11.

[7] Hont, Istvan. Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2005):55.

[8] Unspecified U.S. senator, cit. Amadae, S. M. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: the Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003):68.

[9] Amadae:11.

[10] Hounshell, David A. “The Medium Is the Message, or How Context Matters.” Systems, Experts, and Computers: the Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and after. Ed. Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000):258.

[11] Amadae:22.

[12] Amadae:159.

[13] For analysis of the Cold War as a device for domestic “population control” cf. Chomsky, Noam. World Orders, Old and New (London: Pluto, 1997); Cumings, Bruce. “The Wicked Witch of the West Is Dead. Long Live the Wicked Witch of the East.” The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications. Ed. Michael J. Hogan. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1992); Steel, Ronald. “The End and the Beginning.” In ibid. Amadae glosses increased popular participation as a “serious internal threat” (22) posed by “Marxism” (a “threat” to who, she doesn’t specify).

[14] Hounshell:255.

[15] Wildavsky, Aaron. “The Political Economy of Efficiency: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Systems Analysis, and Program Budgeting.” Public Administration Review 26.4 (1996):301.

[16] Amadae:39.

[17] cit. Wildavsky:299.

[18] Wildavsky:302.

[19] Wildavsky:308.

[20] Jardini, David R. “Out of the Blue Yonder: The Transfer of Systems Thinking from the Pentagon to the Great Society.” Systems, Experts, and Computers: the Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and after. Ed. Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P.. Hughes. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000):311.

[21] Prominent RANDite and defence intellectual Melvin Anshen, cit. Wildavsky:308.

[22] Hughes, Agatha C., and Thomas C. Hughes. Introduction. Systems, Experts, and Computers: the Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and after. Ed. Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000):9.

[23] Robert Wood, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, cit. Light, Jennifer S. From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003):52.

[24] cit. Hecht:139, 140.

[25] cit. Wildavsky:298.

[26] Wildavsky:294.

[27] Aldred, Jonathan. The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics (London: Earthscan, 2009):5.

[28] John Raser, cit. Light:44.

[29] Light:45, 66.

[30] Amadae:41.

[31] Hounshell:255.

[32] Amadae:342.

[33] Bornet, Vaughn D. The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas, 1983):135.

[34] Light:8.

[35] Amadae:75.

[36] cit. Agar:21.

[37] Amadae:44.

[38] Amadae:48.

[39] In 1949, following the Soviet atomic detonation, the assistant director of RAND privately averred that the “world situation” was such that it may require “some deception by us of our own population” – adding that “the inventive aspects of how to go about this are rather fascinating.” (cit. Jardini:311) An observation rendered more striking by his institution’s later role in pushing the ‘missile gap’ myth.

[40] Amadae:55-6; cf. Merewitz, Leonard, and Stephen H. Sosnick. The Budget’s New Clothes: A Critique of Planning-Programming-Budgeting and Benefit-Cost Analysis (Chicago: Markham Pub., 1971):9.

[41] This is the background to Eisenhower’s famous warning against the rise of a “military-industrial complex” and domination by a “scientific technological elite”. (cit. Amadae:57)

[42] Amadae:58-9.

[43] Amadae:59-60.

[44] Amadae:64.

[45] Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010); Beder, Sharon. Global Spin: the Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (Devon, UK: Green, 2002).

[46] It is therefore unsurprising that the new ‘rational’ civilian management in the Pentagon turned out to be “tied more closely to the business community’s interests than to military imperatives.” (Amadae:62)

[47] Amadae:61.

[48] Merewitz & Sosnick:5.

[49] Wildavsky:305; cf. Jardini:319-27.

[50] Palmer, Gregory. The McNamara Strategy and the Vietnam War: Program Budgeting in the Pentagon, 1960-1968 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978):57.

[51] Wildavsky:307.

[52] Amadae:59.

[53] Wildavsky:305.

[54] cit. Jardini:342.

[55] Amadae:63.

[56] Palmer:129.

[57] Wildavsky:305.

[58] Sen. Henry Jackson, cit. Amadae:69.

[59] cit. ibid.

[60] Crozier, Michel, Samuel P. Huntington, and Jōji Watanuki. The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York UP, 1975).

[61] cit. Light:183. Huntington likewise argued that political stability required a “moderation of democracy”, as opposed to the “democratic distemper” and “excess of democracy” of the 1960s. (Crozier et al.:102, 113)

[62] cit. Hind, Dan. The Return of the Public (London: Verso, 2010):82.

[63] Robert Skidelsky, cit. Hind:53.

[64] Mills, C. Wright. The Causes of World War Three (London: Secker & Warburg, 1959):89.

[65] Bourne, Randolph S. “Twilight of Idols.” Web. 20 Jan. 2011 [1917].