Hayek, by contrast, offers a thoroughgoing criticism of the technocratic approach. He places Keynesian economists and progressive social scientists into the collectivist camp. By his way of thinking, the scientific planner—the “social technologist,” to use Popper’s term—is perhaps worse than the old-fashioned autocrat, for in traditional, pre-modern societies those in power lacked the technical means to control individuals. Today, however, there is a real danger that planners will use social science to design a top-to-bottom mechanism to govern society on supposedly rational principles.
