The entrepreneurs, thinkers, and revolutionaries of the early industrial period were captivated by technology. All forms of technology captivated them; steam engines, clocks, gears, and pistons. In their day, men like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were not only political revolutionaries but gadget guys too. They were amateur scientists and inventors committed to the technology of their time.
America’s Founders were influenced by the scientific and intellectual advancements of the enlightenment. Isaac Newton investigated the heavens and considered it as a giant mechanical clock operating with exact mechanical predictability. Adam Smith later offered the same for economics. He thought in terms of the machinery of economics, reasoning the economy is a system and that systems "in many respects resemble machines."
James Madison, in describing the debates leading up to the United States Constitution addressed the need to “remodel” the “system,” to change the “structure” of constitutional authority and to choose officials through “successive filtrations”, almost like a machine. Just think about how the Constitution itself is full of “checks and balances” like the interior of a machine. Thomas Jefferson even spoke of the “machinery of government.”
American political thinking was a perfect match with the early industrial revolution. The mechanical gears and flywheels resonated with the rise of political machines too. America’s first political machine known as the Albany Regency is credited to Martin Van Buren. However, soon came other political machines like the New York City, Tweed machine, and Tennessee Crump machine. This system continued throughout the 20th century, with the infamous Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago and his political machine.1 For generations, American politicians in all parties, to our present day, made political blueprints and engineered elections, bulldozed bills through Congress and state legislatures.
This mechanical mentality was not just a phenomenon of capitalism. Lenin and his cronies also latched on to industrial vocabularies to define the state as “nothing more than a machine used by the capitalists to suppress the workers.” Trotsky spoke of “all the wheels and screws of the bourgeois social mechanism.” In the Soviet Union, the government was an apparatus with Communist party members apparatchiks and higher-level officials were the nomenklatura, for nomenclature of the system.2
Alvin Toffler called our Industrial Age, the Second Wave of civilization.3 He correctly examined how people became caught up in the mechanical thinking of the era. Infused with blind devotion to the power and productivity of machines, the revolutionaries, and Founders of Second Wave societies, be they capitalist or Marxist, not surprisingly conceived political institutions with common characteristics of early industrial machines.
For those of us living in the Information Age or Third Wave society, we need to consider this out-of-date system. We need to consider how our thinking about information becomes actualized in political systems and society. What does the Third Wave hold in store for us? What lessons can we learn from the Founders' blind devotion to the power of machines? Should we hold the same blind devotion to information technology as did the Second Wave Founders to industrialism?
References:
Royko, Mike. Boss, Richard J. Daley of Chicago. (E.P. Dutton, New York, 1971)
Laird, Roy, and Betty. A Soviet Lexicon. (Heath, Massachusetts, 1988)
Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. (Bantam Books. New York. 1981)
Web Links:
http://www.hetsa.org.au/hetsa2011/conference_papers/hetsa%202011%20-%20paperpdf%20-%20aspromourgos%20-%20machine%20in%20adam%20smith.PDF
https://www.dhaugh.com/2019/07/30/a-true-republic-is-not-a-democracy/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23154073
https://ci-ic.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Lenin_The_State.pdf
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/profiles/paulsinger.htm