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

Agar has written a substantial history of "the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom, with a focus on the changing capacities of government" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (2–3). Agar's goal is to bridge the scholarly histories of science and technology and of public policy and public administration, thus integrating the history of the machines used in government with the history of the civil service. Central to his task is to employ and critically analyze the metaphor of the "government as a machine" (15).

The British government worker before 1800 was a "well-connected gentleman . . . who regarded his job . . . as a sinecure" (46). Agar tells the story of the explosion in the number of government positions (from under 20,000 in the late eighteenth century to 40,000 early in the nineteenth century and to more than 500,000 at the end of the twentieth century). He describes the transformation of these positions as the civil service was restructured into a complex "mechanical" hierarchy. Some positions were professional and required university education, whereas others were routine and required rationalization of the division of labor. He also traces the changes in the work of particular branches of the government, including the statistical offices, the Treasury, and the war agencies of World Wars I and II and identifies the main theorists who debated the proper organization of government work—Walter Bagehot, Charles Edward Trevelyan, Sir Stafford Northcote, Lord Haldane, and I. James Pitman. Some of the "machines" that flourished in particular offices were, among many others, the typewriter, which, Agar shows, allowed women "typists" to replace the male clerical position of copyist; the Hollerith tabulator used on the census; radar and air-traffic control; and the "electronic stored-program computer" (264).

This wide-ranging book is more intent on examining episodes that illustrate Agar's arguments than on providing a systematic history of civil service, computerization, military organization, and government. Agar's detailed chronicle of administrative and technological development runs the gamut from nineteenth-century copyist rooms in Whitehall, to census processing, to proposals for population registration, to the code breaking of Bletchley Park, to the "organization and methods" innovations of the mid-twentieth century. He explores the challenges to the legitimacy and propriety of new methods and structures, such as the emergence of concerns about "privacy as a political issue" in the 1960s, and the attack on government itself—what he calls the "hollowed-out state" (367).

The book is full of suggestive insights and proposals for new conceptualizations. Agar notes, for example, that in the United States, the word "machine" in connection with government refers to political parties, not the civil service. He coins the phrase, "discreet modernism," to signify the movement within the civil service from World War I to the 1960s, which espoused "technocratic government and . . . a society deferential to the expert" (427). Throughout, he engages larger literatures about state making, governmentality, technological development, and modernization. His insights and arguments sometimes tumble onto the page with overwhelming rapidity and detail. Agar admits that his treatment is not sufficient to serve as a "comprehensive story" or coherent synthesis of the issues involved (3). Nevertheless, it should inspire additional work on these matters in both the history of technology and the history of the state.