Prophets of Order Quotes

“The point was made many times that scientific management benefitted workers not at all, perhaps most clearly by a short statement by John P. Frey, editor of the International Molders Journal and participant in a bipartisan survey of the claims of scientific management,

'If generally applied the craftsmen would pass out of existence, and the workers would become dependent for their existence upon the scanty and insignificant industrial knowledge and experience afforded them by their limited opportunities, regulated by those who in addition to their ownership of machinery, had also acquired possession of craft knowledge and the skilled workers’ methods.”
― Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“…science knows no boundary for those to whom it will serve.”
― Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“Finally, the legitimization of the corporate holding company [1890] established a business structure that lessened the threat of competition by allowing for the elimination of competitors. The merger movement followed and horizontal combinations of productive capability reorganized industry into large blocks of corporate power.”
― Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“One way to understand ”socialism” as a social goal is in terms of central planning coupled to a socialization of property. This interpretation of socialism is so in tune with the elaboration of coordinator interests and ideology into a position of power in society, the coordinators became society’s planners and managers that we may discover that …we may, in fact, want to equate “central planning” with a coordinator or technocratic rather than a socialist form of economic organization. We would then wish to employ the label socialism only to refer to forms of organization guaranteeing self-management to workers themselves.”
― Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“The smooth coordination of cooperative labor requires managers to “command in the name of capitalists” Here we find a form of wage labor, but of a special kind”
― Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“Of course, the word machine here is being used in its broadest definition, i.e., as the systematic organization of designs for the transmission of power. And since power can be social as well as mechanical it is important to remember that machines can be institutional in addition to being material. For this reason, we speak of political machines as well as the mechanics of government as comfortably as we discuss how many speakers our stereo contains or how many words per minute we can type. But when the persons who design, implement, and repair these machines, social and mechanical, are thought of as social types, this broader definition of machine often vanishes. Somehow the common usage of the word machine in its many modes does not extend into a consideration of the humans behind the machines. Instead, these persons are sequestered into diverse occupational categories: engineer, economist, radiologist, technician or political scientist. Yet, historically there is a sense in which a segment of this diverse collection of experts attained a uniformity of thought and action sufficient to justify a more unified categorization. And, indeed, it is the intention of this work to demonstrate that there were experts who had in common, from the beginning of the American machine age, the desire to sell society on their expertise by providing plans for systematically organized devices for the transmission of power in production and in politics.”
― Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“And so experts have been the missing link in our understanding of the special interpenetration of man and machine that has made the American Century, peculiarly American. We all know something about machines, but experts know everything—if not about machines, at least about a particular machine. We are thus weighted down by a heavy reliance of experts, with much of our time spent in search of the right expert in whom to place confidence for the repair of our mechanical problems”
― Donald Stabile , Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“Yet the machines we encounter remain symbols of a vast human confusion and uneasiness that often skulks through the dim corridors of our thoughts about our life conditions. We know very well how to operate the machines on which our futures depend yet we rarely know how they operate—our knowledge of the internal workings of the machines is almost mystical.”
― Donald stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“We know very well how to operate the machines on which our futures depend yet we rarely know how they operate—our knowledge of the internal workings of the machines is almost mystical.”
― Donald stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America