The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer (review)

This is an impressive, scholarly study of one of the hitherto unacknowledged features of the development of the modern British state, from the eighteenth century to the present. Adopting the metaphor of government "as a machine," the author traces the development of the British state's decision-making procedures in terms of the progressive adoption of systematic administrative structures, "state-of-the-art" statistical methods, and more recently the deployment of computers. In all of these respects, Jon Agar's study provides an important counterpoint to existing analyses of government bureaucracies that have emphasized the growth-retarding impact of an ultraconservative Whitehall civil service.

The key works emphasizing the phenomenon of "institutional sclerosis" include Mansur Olsen's The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982), Martin Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981), Sidney Pollard's The Wasting of the British Economy (1981), and Scott Newton and Dilwyn Porter's Modernisation Frustrated (1988). All of these works (Wiener apart), published since 1980, have given rise to a virtually unchallenged orthodoxy that argues that one of the critical growth-retarding influences in Britain has been the "conservative mind" of government-appointed administrators up to the highest level.

In challenging this orthodoxy, Agar has amassed considerable primary evidence to emphasize a number of factors. First, the development of the "government machine" in the modern period was dependent upon the adoption of new technologies orchestrated by the "technocratic movement of experts." Second, the public sector's adoption of office machinery was at least as rapid as in the private sector following the importation of American technology from the late 1880s onward. In fact, the state provided a model of administrative organization in terms of "order," "framework," "structure," and "machine" that was to cast a long shadow on the formation of the modern concept of the "state" and "government" itself. In this context, Agar is concerned not only to challenge the thesis of "institutional sclerosis" but also to encourage the interest of historians of science and technology in studying the state as a force for modernization, especially in relation to the adoption of modern computer technology.

In sustaining his thesis, Agar emphasizes that the growth of the modern state in terms of the development of regulatory functions, social services, public enterprise, and the post-1945 creation of the welfare state entailed the amassing of unprecedented amounts of statistical information independent of the creation after 1914 and 1939 of fully mobilized war economies. Thus, from the later nineteenth century onward, there was a continuing "information revolution" from clerks' desks and punch-card machinery to the arrival of digital and electronic computers. Although Agar is skeptical of the notion of "revolution" (preferring to emphasize "continuity"), he is at pains to acknowledge the exponential growth in the post-1900 "government machine." In this light, his main theme is the need to modify the tone and content of historical commentaries on the role and functions of the British civil service, in particular the Treasury.

In the existing historiography, the nineteenth-century inheritance of the classically educated "generalist" looms large insofar as it has been viewed as hostile to specialists, quantification, and modern mechanization. It is sufficient to say that Agar's study provides chapter and verse on the positive, modernizing influence of the "Second Division" "middle ranks" of the Whitehall civil service, whose technocratic vision enthused both the "First Division" "generalists" and the considerable army of supplementary clerks.

This is a book that can be read with considerable intellectual profit by all historians of modern Britain. It provides a well-founded and thought-provoking challenge to an existing historiography that has emphasized that institutional conservatism underpinned relative economic decline. The fact remains that at the beginning of the twenty-first century the British economy, defined in terms of gross national product, is the fourth largest in the world. In this light, a historic emphasis on growth-retarding...