The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer

by Jon Agar, William Aspray (Editor)

An examination of technology and politics in the evolution of the British "government machine." In The Government Machine, Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control over state action—a revolutionary move. Agar shows how mechanization followed the popular depiction of government as machine-like, with British civil servants cast as components of a general purpose "government machine"; indeed, he argues that today's general purpose computer is the apotheosis of the civil servant. Over the course of two centuries, government has become the major repository and user of information; the Civil Service itself can be seen as an information-processing entity. Agar argues that the changing capacities of government have depended on the implementation of new technologies, and that the adoption of new technologies has depended on a vision of government and a fundamental model of organization. Thus, to study the history of technology is to study the state, and vice versa.

Genres: Technology, Nonfiction, History, British Literature, Computers

564 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 2003

About the author

Jon Agar is Professor in Science and Technology Studies at University College London. Agar earned his BA in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1990 and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from the University fo Kent in 1994. From 1994 to 2001 he directed the UK National Archive for the History of Computing.

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's much here to like. I was drawn to Agar's plainspoken yet scholarly precision, his tendency to historicize details of theoretical value, and his investigation of metaphor's relationship with material. Is the government a machine; is the civil service a machine? These have been asserted often through history, and Agar follows up on their relevance and veracity. A good read, albeit with limitations.